Volume 14, Number 3
May, 2004 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.
Saul Newman
Department of Political Science
University of Western Australia
snewman@cyllene.uwa.edu.au
I am grateful to Caleb Smith for his response to my essay “Stirner and Foucault: Towards a Post-Kantian Freedom,” and I particularly like the way he links my discussion of a post-Kantian freedom to strategies of resistance against contemporary forms of incarceration. Already, back in the early 1970s, in response to a series of prison revolts in France, Michel Foucault was talking about the emergence of a “carceral archipelago”–a network of punitive institutions, discourses, and practices that had been progressively spreading throughout the social fabric since the late eighteenth century (297). It was as if the prison had become a metaphor for society as a whole–with the same techniques of surveillance and coercion appearing in schools, hospitals, factories, and psychiatric institutions. Today, unprecedented technological developments have made possible an intensification of social control to levels beyond what even Foucault could have imagined–the proliferation, for instance, of surveillance cameras in public spaces indicates a blurring of the distinction between the institution and life outside. Indeed, in light of the new forms of incarceration that are appearing today–the extra-legal detention facilities in Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, for example–perhaps we should take note of Giorgio Agamben’s disturbing insight that what is paradigmatic of modern life is not the prison, as Foucault believed, but rather the camp(20). The slogan posted above the detention camp at Guantanamo Bay–“Honor Bound to Defend Freedom”–is chillingly and ironically reminiscent of another infamous slogan, the one posted above Auschwitz: “Arbeit Macht Frei” (“Work Makes One Free”).
Given this proliferation today of spaces of incarceration and detention–which are, at the same time, becoming virtually indistinguishable from everyday life–questions of freedom and emancipation, always central to political discourse, are perhaps more crucial now than ever before. It is here that Smith raises some very interesting questions about how Stirner’s and Foucault’s emancipatory strategies might be useful today in challenging contemporary institutions, and practices of incarceration, particularly solitary confinement. As Smith shows, solitary confinement has been employed as a punitive tool since the inception of the modern prison in the early nineteenth century, and is now undergoing a massive resurgence in prisons in the U.S. It was originally believed that if prisoners were isolated within their own individual cells, not only could they be more easily controlled and supervised, but their very “souls” could be redeemed through a process of self-reflection. Solitary confinement thus served as a sort of moral experiment upon the subjectivity of the individual inmate–an experiment in which the criminal’s soul was constructed as a discursive object to be corrected and reformed. A similar approach can be seen in contemporary practices of solitary confinement in detention camps, where the psyches of inmates are carefully monitored in an effort to unlock their “secrets.” Smith is right in suggesting, moreover, that this has become a “postmodern” form of punishment–one that relies on sophisticated and subtle techniques of psychological manipulation, rather than clumsy physical coercion (though of course, as we have been amply reminded by events in Iraq, the latter has by no means been expunged from contemporary carceral practice).
However, the question remains as to what sort of strategies of freedom are effective in resisting these new postmodern regimes of punishment? Smith suggests that the post-Kantian or “postmodern” notion of freedom that I have theorized in my paper–one that is derived from the interventions of Foucault and Stirner–is not only somewhat limited in resisting “concrete” practices of incarceration, but, because it is based largely on a notion of individual autonomy that may be achieved even within oppressive conditions, may actually sustain these very practices. There are three separate, yet related, points that Smith is making here: firstly, that, despite my emphasis on concreteness and particularity as opposed to abstract universals, I have to some extent ignored concrete practices or institutions–like the prison–and have thus remained within the very abstract world I am attacking; secondly, that my attempt to theorize a notion of freedom and individual autonomy–“ownness”–that can be realized even in conditions of oppression is of limited use against the practice of solitary confinement, and may even sustain it; and thirdly, that this notion of individual autonomy, developed from Stirner and Foucault, has ignored a very important dimension of their thinking that supports the idea of collective insurgency–one that would be more relevant to the question of prison revolt. I think Smith raises some very interesting points here, and in answering his criticisms my aim is not simply to defend my own argument but rather to expand the terms of the discussion so that it may develop in new theoretical directions. In this sense, I shall approach Smith’s intervention in the spirit of agonism, rather than antagonism–that is, as a theoretical challenge that opens up new ways of thinking, new “lines of flight.”
“Lines of flight” are exactly what we want here, after all. How to construct new lines of flight, new strategies that will liberate people from institutions like the prison, and, more broadly, from the carceral/bio-political society we are living in today? Concrete practices and institutions of coercion and surveillance are all around us–not just in the prison, but, as I have suggested, at all levels of the social network. Why, then, resurrect Max Stirner, the thinker who was obsessed with ghosts, “spooks,” and ideological apparitions, and who claimed that we can be dominated and oppressed as much by an abstract idea as we can by a “real” institution or social relation? How useful is Stirner’s critique of the abstract world of universal ideals–the spectres of humanity, rationality, and morality–in combating very real practices and institutions of domination? How is Stirner’s diagnosis of a spectral world relevant to a world that seems ever more frighteningly real?
Many people, including, most famously, Marx, have suggested that because the target of Stirner’s critique is the abstract world of idealism, he neglects the “real” material world of concrete relations and institutions. Indeed, Marx and Engels devoted the largest part of The German Ideology to attacking Stirner, accusing him of the worst kind of naïvety and idealism. They repeatedly parody Stirner as “Saint Max” or “Saint Sancho”–as one who mistakes illusions for reality. Stirner, Marx and Engels argue, attempts to overcome religious alienation by condemning the dominance of abstract “fixed ideas” but, in doing so, overestimates the importance of these ideas in the real world, thus falling into the idealist trap himself. In other words, Stirner, in focusing on the way that abstract ideas dominate our lives, sees these ideas as all-determining, thus neglecting their basis in real material and social conditions. Stirner is therefore characterized as an ideologist par excellence–one who ignores the concrete material world and conjures up instead a word of illusions and apparitions.
This idealist illusion is most apparent, Marx and Engels argue, in Stirner’s understanding of the State. Stirner sees the State as itself an ideological abstraction, much like God–it only exists because we allow it to exist, because we abdicate to it our own authority, in the same way that we create God by abdicating our authority and placing it outside ourselves. What is more important than the institution of the State is the “ruling principle”–it is the idea of the State, in other words, that dominates us (Stirner 200). The State’s unity and dominance exist mostly in the minds of its subjects. The State’s power is really based on our power, according to Stirner. It is only because the individual has not recognized this power, because he humbles himself before authority, that the State continues to exist. As Stirner correctly surmised, the State cannot function only through top-down repression and coercion, as this would expose its power in all its nakedness, brutality, and illegitimacy. Rather, the State relies on our allowing it to dominate us. Stirner wants to show that ideological apparatuses are not only concerned with economic or political questions–they are also rooted in psychological needs. The dominance of the State, Stirner suggests, depends on our willingness to let it dominate us, on our complicit desire for our own subordination. Therefore, the State must first be overcome as an idea before it can be overcome in reality–or more precisely, they are two sides of the same coin. According to Marx and Engels, however, this ignores the economic and class relations that form the material basis of the state: Stirner’s “idealism” would absurdly allow the state to be dismissed by an act of “wishful thinking” (374).
Now this critique of Stirner’s “idealist” approach to the State goes to the heart of the debate between me and Smith. Indeed, Smith’s suggestion that I, in my critique (via Stirner) of abstract universal ideals, fail fully to acknowledge or account for the concreteness of institutions like the prison, uncannily resembles Marx and Engels’s attack on Stirner for not recognizing the concreteness of institutions like the State. As with the critique of Stirner, it is objected that my thinking in effect proposes the existence of “abstract” prisons from which there can only be “abstract” forms of escape. Like the unfortunate Saint Max, who stumbles foggily through the world of illusions, I am said to be gesturing toward the concrete world “as if toward something half-real.” Now my response to this is as follows: Smith’s objection, which so closely parallels Marx and Engels’s materialist critique of Stirner, is itself based on a sort of illusory separation between discourse and reality, in which “reality” is privileged as “concrete” and as having an immediacy that ideas and theoretical concepts do not. However, I would suggest here not only that “concrete” objects and practices are meaningless outside discourse (that is, the linguistic, symbolic, and ideological networks within which they are constituted) but, more precisely, that these institutions and practices themselves have a sort of spectral ideological dimension that gives them consistency. In the same way, for instance, that Stirner argues that the State cannot be understood, let alone resisted, without an understanding of the abstract ideological systems that legitimize it, I am suggesting that “concrete” institutions and practices cannot be separated from the spectral ideological and symbolic systems that give them meaning–and that, in order to resist these institutions and practices, we have first to attack their spectral underside. For instance, Foucault shows that the “abstract” concept of the soul–which Smith himself has drawn upon–has very real material effects, allowing a sort of discursive cage to be constructed for the prisoner: as he expresses it in his famous inversion of the traditional formula, “the soul is the prison of the body” (30).
What I am suggesting here is that, paradoxically, in order for us to perceive what is concrete we must go through the abstract, or at least the symbolic. That is to say, we can only grasp institutions and practices in their concrete materiality through an “abstract” symbolic and ideological framework which constitutes their meaning. They cannot be seen as somehow outside or separate from this. As Slavoj Zizek argues, there is nothing more ideological than the belief that we can somehow step outside ideological systems and see things for the “way they really are” (60). The world of abstract ideas and ideological systems does not somehow stand apart from and opposed to the world of concrete, material practices and institutions, as Smith seems to suggest; but rather, each can only be articulated through the other. While it is true that I have not referred in my paper directly to “concrete” institutions and practices, my contention is that they can only be grasped through their spectral, abstract, “half-real” dimension–and it is this dimension that I have focused on in discussing Stirner’s critique. It is a mistake to believe that Stirner’s critique of abstract universals implies that they can be simply dismissed, and that a new world of reality and concreteness will be revealed to us–it is more sophisticated than this. Just because this world is spectral and ideological does not mean that it is not, at the same time, very real–on the contrary, ideology is all around us, materially present and deeply entrenched in our psyches. And what Stirner is interested in unmasking is the way that these abstract ideals, such as morality, rationality, and human essence, find their logical expression in concrete practices of domination–for instance, in punishment, which Stirner sees as a form of moral hygiene (213). It is precisely the abstract notions of morality and humanity that make this new system of punishment intelligible–that form the ideological and discursive apparatus that gives it meaning. That is why the State, for Stirner, is as much ideological and spectral as it is “real.” Indeed, it is constituted in its materiality precisely through this abstract, ideological dimension. This is what Marx and Engels did not understand–and it could be argued here that in neglecting the State’s ideological dimension, and by reducing it to the “materiality” of economic relations, they have themselves failed to grasp its reality–that is, its political specificity and autonomy. To suggest, as Smith seems to, that my focus on abstract structures of idealism has obscured or neglected the real, material world, is simply to repeat Marx’s and Engel’s error.
The second point that Smith makes is that Stirner’s idea of “ownness” as a form of radical freedom that is possible even in oppressive conditions may actually contribute to the practice of solitary confinement. This is because solitary confinement is based on the notion of a “cellular soul” that can be self-correcting, and Stirner’s notion of ownness, though it seeks to throw off repressive moral constraints, nevertheless sustains the idea of a soul that can be redeemed–this time in egoism rather than morality. Smith raises an interesting point–that because the egoist, for Stirner, creates his own forms of freedom, he can maintain a Buddhist-like spiritual detachment from the real conditions of restraint and coercion that he is subjected to, and that this may actually sustain, or at any rate allow to be sustained, the practice of incarceration in solitary confinement. In other words, the implications of Stirner’s theory of ownness would seem to be that the egoist can be free even in a prison cell. It is certainly the case that ownness is largely based on the individual seizing for himself a radical autonomy through the rejection of universal essences and fixed ideas. Moreover, Stirner does indeed say that this form of autonomy can be experienced even in the most oppressive conditions: “under the dominion of a cruel master my body is not ‘free’ from torments and lashes; but it is my bones that moan under the torture, my fibres that quiver under the blows […]” (143). What Stirner is suggesting here is that even in conditions of abject slavery, in which the concept of freedom as an ideal becomes meaningless, there is nevertheless a more immediate form of autonomy or “self-ownership” available to the subject. Moreover, this internal autonomy is something upon which the concrete act of resistance and liberation can be based: the egoist, Stirner says, bides his time while submitting to punishment, and “as I keep my eye on myself and my selfishness, I take by the forelock the first good opportunity to trample the slaveholder into the dust” (143). So what Stirner is trying to develop here is similar to the notion of positive freedom–a form of internal freedom or autonomy that goes beyond simple freedom from external constraint. While it is usually the case that positive freedom presupposes a basic negative freedom, in the case of incarceration or slavery, there is no possibility of this prior condition of negative freedom. Positive internal freedom must therefore form the a priori condition for any act of resistance. An example of this strategy of ownness in action might be found in the film Cool Hand Luke. “Cool Hand” Luke, played by Paul Newman, is a convict on a chain gang. In one scene the prisoners are building a road with picks and shovels, and they are working at a slow, monotonous pace that is regulated, not only by the enforced generalized boredom of the task, but also by the watchful gaze of the guards. The prisoners are languidly dreaming of their freedom, of life on the “outside.” Luke suddenly urges his fellow prisoners to intensify the pace of the digging, saying all time “Go hard! Beat the Man!” The building of the road becomes a frenetic collective activity that causes profound consternation amongst the prison guards. Here we see the convicts taking a kind of self-ownership over their activity, an activity from which they were hitherto alienated because it was seen as something that had to be done for the authorities, for “the Man.” By the convicts owning their own labor, by making it theirs, it becomes an act of resistance.
Stirner is also making another, more subtle point here: as well as the act of resistance being based on a radical internal freedom, the reverse of this is that practices and institutions of domination actually rely on an internalized oppression, whereby the subject is not only externally coerced and incarcerated but is also tied, in more profound ways, to this very identity of oppression. That is, institutions do not only oppress and coerce the subject from the outside–they also dominate the subject inwardly. In other words, they rely on an active self-domination–the subject is tied psychologically to the very institution that dominates him, and this might continue even after the institution itself has disappeared. The subject is tied to a kind of spectral shadow of the institution, precisely through an internalization of the moral and rational norms upon which the institution is based. This spectral shadow is precisely the hidden “authoritarian obverse” that I have referred to. The State, for instance, relies on certain forms of subjectification, so that the individual comes to willingly submit himself to its authority–so that, in the words of Stirner, “its permanence is to be sacred to me” (161). So, for Stirner, any concrete liberation from the institution must begin with a sort of self-liberation–a liberation of the self from the forms of subjectivity that are tied to the institution. This is what Stirner means by “ownness.” My point is, therefore, that Stirner’s theory of ownness–although it would seem to mirror, as Smith suggests, a fantasy of “corrective solitude”–can actually be interpreted in another, much more radical way. It can be seen as a way of overcoming the forms of self-domination and servitude upon which practices of incarceration are ultimately based.
Although any act of liberation must begin with a personal individual liberation, it will ultimately be ineffective unless it incorporates a collective dimension–and it is here that I am inclined to agree with Smith in his emphasis on collective insurgency. I believe that notions of collective action and identity are very much implicit in both Stirner’s and Foucault’s politics, despite the way that they are usually perceived as valorizing only individual acts of resistance. Elsewhere I have insisted on a collective dimension in their thought, drawing on Stirner’s important notion of the “union of egoists,” as well as Foucault’s writings on the Iranian Revolution (Newman). As Smith points out, Stirner himself talks about the way that the prison system, although designed to isolate individuals, actually creates the conditions for a new kind of collective intercourse and identity–one that constitutes a significant threat to the prison system. So while in my article I have focused on the individual–both in terms of the effect of abstract ideals and ideological systems on the individual, as well as on different forms of individual autonomy and resistance–there is no doubt that, for Stirner at least, this can form the basis for a collective insurgency. There is certainly nothing in either what I have said, or what Stirner and Foucault have said, that rules this out. How else can we hope to challenge the systems of power, surveillance, and domination in which we are all increasingly being inscribed?
Caleb Smith
Department of English
Duke University
cjs5@duke.edu
In a recent essay on “Stirner and Foucault,” Saul Newman brings these “two thinkers not often examined together” into a conversation about freedom, coercion, and individual subjectivity. Newman uses Stirner and Foucault to explore a discourse of freedom formulated by Kant and dominant since the Enlightenment, a discourse based on universal moral abstractions that subtly coerce the mind even as they promise to liberate it. The aim of Newman’s interrogation, as I understand it, is finally to dismantle these abstractions, and to imagine an individual freedom that would not have an “authoritarian obverse,” an oppressive shadow–a new freedom not chained to universal norms, but grounded in the world of power and practice, in “concrete and contingent strategies of the self.” My own research into the modern prison and its cultural consequences has also approached Stirner and Foucault, also on the themes of freedom, coercion, and the shape of the mind, and I’m glad to discover Newman’s work. This essay is my effort to answer its provocations.
Max Stirner’s major text, The Ego and His Own, is long, strange, and fitful–and the same can be said of its afterlife.1 Why revive Stirner now? The answer must be, at least partly, strategic. The “egoist,” Stirner writes, “never takes trouble about a thing for the sake of the thing, but for his sake: the thing must serve him” (221). Similarly, The Ego and His Own is awakened when it becomes useful, when it helps critics to oppose some oppressive structure in their own time. Newman writes with this urgency; Kant is a bogey-man in his critique because Kant’s theory of freedom seems to Newman to be shaping contemporary discourse, dispensing an “illusory” freedom, a disguised oppression, in our own present tense. But where Newman wishes to reveal the hidden constraints in a theory of freedom–a theory that, he intimates, has endured the modernist and postmodernist ruptures and affects the present–I would measure Stirner’s worth against a form of coercion that is partly hidden but not simply theoretical: the modern prison built for solitary confinement. The Stirner-Foucault connection becomes strongest and most material here, in relation to an oppressive form developed in Stirner’s time and given its definitive theoretical treatment by Foucault, a form that is being reborn and expanded right now in the United States, in “super-max” prisons and in the cells for suspected “enemy combatants” on Guantanamo Bay. If Stirner is going to be roused and put to use again, it might be against these very “concrete and contingent” institutions of solitude and unfreedom.
Concreteness, contingency, “this world”–material institutions and practices suggest themselves everywhere in Newman’s essay, but he gestures toward them as if toward something half-real. The opposite of abstract universals never quite takes a shape of its own. How might a contingent liberation be achieved by real people? How might concrete freedom feel? The trouble may be that escape from an abstract prison can only be, itself, abstract. A metaphoric jailbreak–where can we hide from such guards, except in another metaphor? But the prison is not only an idea. It is first of all a concrete coercive institution. It is an architecture, a practice and a policy with a specific history, and its history is not over. Today the United States is involved in the reconstruction of solitary confinement on a massive scale, the largest experiment in coercive isolation since the middle nineteenth century. The modern institution whose genesis was witnessed by Stirner and carefully traced by Foucault is coming back in a postmodern form. It is this return that gives the Stirner-Foucault connection its urgency now.
I don’t wish to quarrel with Saul Newman. I’ll grasp and develop some of his ideas and depart from others, but this is a correspondence, not an attempt at correction. My thoughts are offered in a spirit of collaboration.
The modern prison takes shape in the American northeast between 1815 and 1840. Two rival “systems,” “Auburn” and “Philadelphia,” emerge, but their competition masks an underlying unity: both accept the crucial idea of solitary confinement (Beaumont and Tocqueville 54-55; Foucault 237-39). The main line of cultural criticism since Foucault has developed his formulations around the processes of surveillance and social control, but just as important to the modern prison and to the Stirner-Foucault connection is the architecture of solitude and, with it, the architectural figure of the criminal soul conceived by reformers.
Prison reform, the discursive and political movement that transforms institutions, is itself transformed by them. To break up conspiracies and riots, to quarantine disease and contain sex, the architecture of solitude is designed. Once established, the new architecture, in turn, changes the meaning of solitude.2 From the engagement of reform discourse and cellular architecture a new image of the criminal is conceived–a cellular soul. This soul has its own internal architecture; it is divided and binds itself, struggling to correct itself through “reflection” into a redeemed and reunified entity. The spiritual “cell” is the convict’s guilt, the flaw that corrupts him; working to repair this flaw is his repentance, a corrective agency within that masters guilt and reshapes the soul.
A crucial fiction of reform in the golden age of solitude is that the prisoner’s suffering is mainly spiritual. The real struggle of inmates against the forces that hold them is sublimated, obscured, into the image of a divided and self-binding soul struggling toward redemption. According to reformers, it is not the granite walls, the guards and wardens, but the convict’s private guilt that, in solitude, “will come to assail him.” Self-correction, in the discourse of reform, happens through a process of “reflection”: “thrown into solitude [the convict] reflects. Placed alone, in view of his crime, he learns to hate it” (Beaumont and Tocqueville 55). Again, a tactical reform is ennobled with spiritual imagery. Prisoners prove resourceful and inventive in the use of objects as weapons, so any potential weapon is removed from their reach. Cells are stripped of furniture, accessories, any adornment not biologically necessary and that cannot be bolted to the floor. In the imagination of prison reform, this necessary redesign becomes an aid to redemption: the bare walls become a “reflective” surface where the convict sees not a wall but the image of his guilt–what the English reformer Jonas Hanway calls “the true resemblance of [the prisoner’s] mind” (65). The convict burns to repair this reflection, as if his spiritual correction would liberate him from the torments of confinement.
Foucault traces the subtle consequences of reform’s alchemy:
solitude assures a sort of self-regulation of the penalty and makes possible a spontaneous individualization of the punishment: the more a convict is capable of reflectingo , the more capable he was of committing his crime; but, also, the more lively his remorse, the more painful his solitude; on the other hand, when he has profoundly repented and made amends without the least dissimulation, solitude will no longer weigh upon him. (237)
The startling last turn is central to the mythology of reform. The corrected criminal, though still confined to his cell and awaiting the end of his sentence like any other, waits without suffering, without experiencing his confinement as a punishment. He sits in the tranquility of his redemption, liberated from guilt. His soul is of a piece, no longer its own cell. Despite his shackles, his forced labor, his bodily exposure to the various tortures wielded by guards, the prisoner is already “free.”
The modern prison, then, depends upon a cellular figure of the soul. Stirner’s The Ego and His Own grasps precisely this figure, and subverts it. Stirner’s contention is that the deviant, criminalized dimension of the soul is really its better half, its true calling, while the spirit of “repentance” is an oppressive social force, conformity and obedience internalized. Stirner protests solitary confinement, in other words, by a reversal, by turning its figure of the cellular soul inside-out: “turn to yourselves,” he preaches, “rather than to your gods or idols. Bring out from yourselves what is in you, bring it to the light, bring yourselves to revelation” (211).
But Stirner’s protest, because it accepts a cellular architecture of the soul, remains deeply bound to the fantasy of corrective solitude. Despite a certain structural rearrangement, an inversion of values like a switching of magnetic poles, the soul stays cellular, provoked to correct itself by an authority (Stirner) promising a new redemption (“ownness”). Freedom is a spiritual matter; as a consequence, the institutions that coerce people in the material world disappear. Like the jailers he attacks, Stirner obscures the violent struggle between inmates and their keepers.
Stirner’s critique of modern confinement would appear, in this light, locked in an irresolvable conflict with the prison’s cellular figure of the soul. The terms of redemption are reversed, but the soul remains its own cell, still isolated and charged with the task of correcting itself: imprisonment remains an individual matter, and freedom a state of mind. What saves The Ego and His Own from this stalemate is nothing but the work’s fitfulness, the shifty self-disruption of Stirner’s prose and of his line of thought. Just as the circle seems ready to close, as the prison is about to complete its horizon around Stirner’s protest, there is an interruption, a heave, and another possibility breaks open. Explicitly considering the modern prison and the “saintly” reformers who wish to introduce solitary confinement, Stirner perceives an insurgent collectivity, a collaborative uprising by inmates as the menace that these architects are trying to exterminate. With this insight into origins, Stirner intimates that the same possibility continues to hold a liberating promise. Not individual redemption but riotous, collective “intercourse” now appears as the opposite of solitary confinement:
That we jointly execute a job, run a machine, effectuate anything in general,--for this a prison will indeed provide; but that I forget that I am a prisoner, and engage in intercourse with you who likewise disregard it, brings danger to the prison, and not only cannot be caused by it, but must not even be permitted. For this reason the saintly and moral-minded French chamber decides to introduce solitary confinement, and other saints will do the like in order to cut off "demoralizing intercourse." Imprisonment is the established and--sacred condition, to injure which no attempt must be made. The slightest push of that kind is punishable, as is every uprising against a sacred thing by which man is to be charmed and chained. (287)
Stirner’s brief but important treatment of insurgent collectivity suggests an absence in his own design, and in Newman’s. Between the isolated, oppressed individual and the oppressive “society” or “authority” lies a contested middle ground, where individuals might commune and move together toward resistance: “every union in the prison bears within it the dangerous seed of a ‘plot,’ which under favorable circumstances might spring up and bear fruit” (287). I would develop Newman’s account by restoring not just the material institutions of oppression, but also the possibility of collective uprising. Toward the material world, toward insurgent collectivity–critics of Stirner and Foucault have not generally seen these two movements in their work3; Newman tries to make do without them, but his undertaking will be incomplete, I believe, until they are restored.
Stirner, when he considers the prison explicitly, becomes unusually conscious of the material processes of coercion. The material “space,” the concrete “building” of the prison, he writes, is what “gives a common stamp to those who are gathered in it” and “determines the manner of life of the prison society” (286). Similarly, Stirner and Foucault, faced with the material prison, suggest that liberation might be achieved not by a solitary turn inward, which the prison is built to enforce, but by communion and riot. Edward Said, interrogating Foucault’s theory of power, insists that “in human history there is always something beyond the reach of dominating systems, no matter how deeply they saturate society, and this is obviously what makes change possible, limits power in Foucault’s sense, and hobbles the theory of that power” (216). Apparently against Foucault, Said holds to “some modest […] belief in noncoercive human community” (217). But what Said misses is that the idea of insurgent collectivity, prisoners and the dominated communing and moving against their confinement, is in Foucault’s own vision of the prison, just as it is in Stirner’s. “In this central and centralized humanity,” Foucault writes, “the effect and instrument of complex power relations, bodies and forces subjected by multiple mechanisms of ‘incarceration,’ […] we must hear the distant roar of battle” (308).
Newman’s essay announces itself as more than an exercise in intellectual history or a theoretical comparison; its Stirner-Foucault connections work against oppressive, illusory models of freedom that “continue to dominate” in the present. Stirner and Foucault matter because they are useful to us now in our efforts to imagine and realize freedom. I would follow Newman here, and submit that the history of solitary confinement has a new urgency in this postmodern moment. “While society in the United States gives the example of the most extended liberty,” wrote Beaumont and Tocqueville in 1833, “the prisons of the same country offer the spectacle of the most complete despotism” (79). Today, as the United States declares itself the worldwide defender of freedom, it incarcerates a higher percentage of its own subjects than any other country, over two million in all (Shane).4 I make these connections not for the satisfaction of “exposing” some hypocrisy, but as a point of departure, a way of establishing what is at stake in the relation between freedom and incarceration today. At the entrance to the prison camp on Guantanamo Bay is a posted slogan: “Honor Bound to Defend Freedom” (Conover 42).
We have in the United States a whole new generation of prisons built for solitary confinement. The line connecting them to the penitentiaries of the early-middle nineteenth century is not at all continuous–the last thirty years have seen not so much an evolution as a rebirth and redefinition of the modern prison.5 The super-max prisons and the isolation facility at Guantanamo represent the largest experiment in solitude since the nineteenth century. Long discredited as a form of torture that actually ravages the minds it pretends to correct, displaced for a century and a half by less expensive practices, solitude is suddenly a major part of corrections again. And the criminal soul that lay dormant for so long is reappearing with the cell, though both have been transformed by technology and new power structures.
Built by Halliburton and operated by the U.S. military, the Guantanamo Bay prison takes an acute interest in the psychic lives of its inmates. The prisoner’s mind is to be carefully managed in an effort to extract its secrets. Lt. Col. Barry Johnson describes the balance: “This is not a coercive effort,” he says, “because as you coerce people, they will tell you exactly what they want you to hear–and that does us no good. We have to have accuracy and facts, and people need to be willing to give you that. It takes motivation, not coercion.” On the difference between motivation and coercion, Johnson is evasive, except to offer the cryptic remark that “fear is very different than pain” (Conover 45). The high-tech solitary chambers in super-max prisons also hold inmates for a complicated range of reasons, some of them clearly political–Ray Luc Levasseur, convicted of bombing a Union Carbide facility, was transferred to a solitary cell in Colorado’s ADX super-max when he refused to work in a prison factory because the coaxial cable produced there was for U.S. military use. According to official policy, Levasseur had refused to perform labor necessary to his “rehabilitation” (Franzen 219-20). The old criminal soul may not have expired as a disciplinary tactic, after all.
The sophisticated architecture and functioning of the new solitary prisons raises more questions than I can hope to answer here, but these seem to me the crucial questions for the contemporary value of Stirner and Foucault, writers who engage and resist the solitary cell at its modern genesis. The point is not to reveal some supposedly hidden mechanism, or to speak with pious outrage, the usual tone of prison reform itself, which produced the cell in the first place. But neither will these troubling questions be quieted by Newman’s “affirmation of the possibilities of individual autonomy within power” (my emphasis). What kind of insurgent collectivity might develop inside a super-max unit? How do its technologies of deprivation and computerized video-surveillance connect to the old barren reflective surfaces and panoptic supervision? Finally, can theory shift from the bound figure of the cellular soul, as Stirner and Foucault do, to a vision of practical communion and collaborative resistance? My sense, only half-formed, is that we might move toward a collective critical practice whose proper adversary is not so much Immanuel Kant as the modern prison and its postmodern reincarnations.
1. Conceived in a revolutionary moment, in the European 1840s, the book attacks, by turns sneering and raging, the authorities of religion and government and, as Newman shows, a version of Enlightenment humanism. A few years later, Stirner himself becomes an authority under attack in Marx’s The German Ideology, where Marx’s emergent materialism in philosophy and revolutionary politics defines itself against the idealism of “Saint Max” and his generation. In the late nineteenth century, Stirner enters and helps to form Nietzsche’s writing, but he remains fairly obscure outside Germany until about 1907. In the decade just before the Great War, a group of Anglo-American anarchists takes a new interest in Stirner as a source of insight and energy. The American radicals Steven Byington and Benjamin Tucker produce a translation, and Stirner’s work moves to the center of the early modernism developing in Dora Marsden’s London journal, The Egoist. A Stirnerite anarcho-individualist cultural politics has been traced through Marsden’s journal to the works of its contributors, among them Ezra Pound, T.S. Eliot, James Joyce, Rebecca West, Richard Aldington, H.D., Ford Madox Ford, Marianne Moore, D.H. Lawrence, and other experimental writers. With the genesis of English modernism, Stirner is invoked as the spokesman of a radical politics against the liberal state and against socialism, whose forms seemed, to Marsden, sentimental and ineffectual. See Levenson and Clarke.
2. On the architecture of solitary confinement in modern prisons, see Evans and Johnston.
3. I refer specifically to Marx’s treatment of Stirner as a deluded idealist in The German Ideology and to a series of responses to Foucault’s Discipline and Punish that includes Frederic Jameson and Edward Said. Jameson, introducing his own periodizing thesis in Postmodernism, describes a “winner loses” paradox in Foucault:
the more powerful the vision of some increasingly total system or logic--the Foucault of the prisons book is the obvious example--the more powerless the reader comes to feel. Insofar as the theorist wins, therefore, by constructing an increasingly closed and terrifying machine, to that very degree he loses, since the critical capacity of his work is thereby paralyzed, and the impulses of negation and revolt, not to speak of those of social transformation, are increasingly perceived as vain and trivial in the face of the model itself. (5-6)
4. On these themes in general, and on the particular relation between Tocqueville’s study of the American penitentiary and his study of Democracy in America, see Dumm.
5. The modern solitary prison had its golden age in the U.S. between 1820 and the Civil War. Even during these years, solitude was never an established fact of life for most American prisoners; rather, 1820-1860 marks the period when a faith in the corrective function of solitude and reflection dominated the discourse of prison reform. This is the golden age of an institutional fantasy, the desire to rebuild American discipline around solitude, the expressed belief that such a rebuilding was socially practical and that it would, if achieved, produce a better society. With the Civil War, the dream of a solitary confinement regime encountered vast new problems–in particular, vast new populations to incarnate. Captives taken in battle, emancipated slaves, new waves of immigrants: these criminalized populations were far too large for the existing reformed prisons, and authorities could not afford to build enough cells for them all. See Rotman, especially pages 169-176.
Still, isolation persisted in prisons, no longer as the standard confinement for all convicts but as a special punishment for the unruly–or, more recently, as a technique of “segregation” to protect vulnerable inmates from the general population, or the vulnerable general population from the “worst of the worst.” In the last quarter century, the days of the War on Drugs and the War on Terror, American prison populations have doubled and then doubled again, yet solitary confinement has made a surprising return.
A curious reversal: solitary confinement falls from dominance during a period of exploding convict populations; now, in another period of exploding numbers, it comes back. The trick, the difference, may lie in the new economic structure of postmodern discipline. Many of the new solitary prisons are built and operated by private contractors, paid by states and by the federal government but working for profit. These businesses–the two largest are the Corrections Corporation of America (CCA) and Wackenhut–in turn, contribute to the campaigns of “tough on crime” candidates, fund research into their own effectiveness, and lobby for longer, more standardized sentencing rules like California’s “three strikes” law. Solitary confinement may be coming under private contracting for the same reason it faded from its golden age: because it is expensive. (A note to my Australian correspondent: Wackenhut runs prisons there, too.)
If the aim of privately contracted discipline is to increase construction of new prisons, to incarcerate more people for longer periods of time because more prisoners now mean more business, more profits, higher stock prices, then the postmodern turn would seem to be away from the interior life of the convict. Containment, an industry in itself, has less and less interest in producing repentant souls, and mandatory sentencing rules appear to signal a shift away from “individualized and individuating” corrections. This characterization may well fit the majority of our prisons–but the solitary lockdowns, I submit, are an exception, a special circumstance.
On the continuities and mutations in the history of American solitary confinement, see Dayan’s compelling and haunting essay, “Held in the Body of the State.” On contemporary prison trends and the new solitary facilities, see Parenti’s major study, Lockdown America, and Herivel and Wright’s new edited collection, Prison Nation. Franzen’s essay, “Control Units” in How to Be Alone, is an elegant introduction. Studies of the new Guantanamo Bay prison are harder to find, the circulation around it monitored and controlled, but its mechanics and economics are interrogated in Ted Conover’s “In the Land of Guantanamo.”
David Alvarez
Department of English
Grand Valley State University
alvarezd@gvsu.edu
Review of: Ben Highmore, ed., The Everyday Life Reader.London: Routledge, 2002.
Perhaps it is one of the symptoms of our theory-saturated, post-everything moment that everyday life has recently become not just an object of cultural analysis, but a crucial interpretive category in its own right. Actually existing theory (by which I mean those forms of theorizing that reduce reality to textuality) is now adjudged by some commentators to be languishing not merely in a state of crisis, but of impending extinction. In a recent tract, one such critic, Terry Eagleton, advocates abandoning hitherto hegemonic theoretical excavations in favor of grounding cultural analysis in the deep soils of morality and metaphysics, among others. For his part, in a posthumously published polemic, the late Edward Said attempts to reclaim a beachhead of neo-humanistic terra firma from the murkily indeterminate waters of post-humanist theory, as well as from the slough of stagnant humanisms of the Samuel Huntington persuasion.
This search for socially relevant significance in theory’s aftermath is one of the contexts in which Ben Highmore–Senior Lecturer in Cultural and Media Studies at the University of the West of England–situates the revival of academic interest in everyday life that his Reader both heralds and enhances. Toward the end of the engaging essay that introduces his tome, Highmore notes that the emergence of what he dubs “everyday life studies” can be regarded as a response to the remorseless textualization of lived experience by apolitical strains of poststructuralism, as well as to the depthless exaltation of the present that characterizes the giddier celebrations of postmodernism (31). As Highmore has it, theory’s frequently self-enclosed spurning of sensuous life seems to have led to a reassertion of the bracingly real. What better way, perhaps, to dispel the mustiness of the House of Theory’s rooms than by opening up its windows and letting the limpid light of everyday life illuminate the dust motes?
But what is it precisely that the study of everyday life can shed light on? Whose everyday life are we talking about? Where can everyday life be located? How can it be accessed? Indeed, what exactly is meant by the terms “everyday life,” “the everyday,” “the daily,” and their many cognates? Before broaching these matters, it is well to point out that in the Anglophone academy, signs of the arrival of “everyday life studies” abound: among them, special issues of sundry learned journals devoted to the quotidian as problematic, numerous studies foregrounding a focus on the everyday in contexts as seemingly unrelated as Stalin’s Russia or London’s supermarkets, and the long-overdue translation into English of pioneering disquisitions on daily experience by the French polymath Henri Lefebvre. Further, the publication of a reader on the subject also marks its official academic acceptance, as Highmore himself almost ruefully observes (xiii).
But as the contributions by conceptual artists, avant-garde filmmakers, and amateur ethnographers collected here make clear, “everyday life studies” is not purely the purview of academics and scholars. Moreover, as befits an arena of study as vast as daily life, the Reader covers a correspondingly wide-ranging array of orientations and preoccupations. Thus, in addition to such talismanic meditations on the quotidian as Raymond Williams’s “Culture is Ordinary” and Erving Goffman’s discussion of “front and back regions” in the performance of daily self-representation, we find here newer material on topics such as the significance of everyday objects and practices like bags or cooking, as well as older but lesser known work on daily life, such as the auto-ethnographic reports of the Mass Observation project that briefly bloomed in 1930s and ’40s Britain. Despite the anxiety of representativity that Highmore confesses to have felt in assembling the book, he has succeeded in bringing together between its covers an intertextually suggestive sample of extracts (xii). More importantly, the Reader announces the discovery of a connected cluster of cognitive energies whose reach and density betoken the existence of a hitherto concealed sector of the intellectual cosmos. Like a constellation of distant stars, the elements of this newly sighted portion of the heavens have been emitting photons for a long time, but their collective light-rays are only now reaching our retinas.
Pursuing this cosmological metaphor, we can say that the general introduction to the Reader serves as a kind of Hubble telescope with which to acquire a sense of the dense diachronic and synchronic dimensions of this universe of discourse, while the terse introductions to the book’s five sections and its thirty-eight chapters serve as precision prisms with which to scan the many bodies that constitute it, as well as the spaces that lie between them. In explaining the realities that these lenses espy, Highmore often avails himself of a neutral-sounding verb, “to register,” and its cognates. This move often makes it seem as if the approximations to the study of everyday life that Highmore proffers perform in a manner akin to that of a primitive camera. That is, Highmore’s use of “to register” may seem to suggest that the diverse approaches on display in the Reader passively record the assorted phenomena that make up the stuff of daily life, and that his own commentary on these approaches fulfills a similar function.
But just as a photograph is more than the impression of light particles on contact paper, so of course is every act of registration an interpretative performance, whether consciously or no. Thus, Highmore does more than merely “register” the different approaches to everyday life that he makes available in the Reader. For one thing, through the five categories into which he organizes the various modalities of attending to the daily and through which he frames the field (“Situating the everyday,” “Everyday life and ‘national’ culture,” “Ethnography near and far,” “Reclamation work,” and “Everyday things”), Highmore implicitly foregrounds a certain set of emphases while eclipsing others, such as, for instance, the relationship between everyday life and political revolution. For another, in his own commentary Highmore also explicitly interprets the diverse origins and trajectories of these approaches, as well as their nature, usefulness, and potential. For instance, he is careful to note that portrayals of daily life do not provide a direct, unmediated, transparent picture of reality. In part this is so because day-to-day life is almost impossibly heterogeneous and heteroglossic. What is more, our methods of accessing the everyday are provisional and awkward, when not inadequate and opaque. Highmore repeatedly dwells on the diverse ways in which meditations on everydayness are couched, and he rightly notes that a focus on finding appropriate representational forms underlies the wide assortment of attempts to depict the quiddity of the quotidian.
I now wish to enter a caveat: a brief review of a book as wide-ranging as The Everyday Life Reader can in no wise do justice to the smorgasbord of ideas, styles, and subjects that the book summons. Thus, instead of engaging in a Sisyphean struggle to describe the book’s entire contents, in what follows I stress the significance of one tendency within everyday life studies that is represented in it: belief in the left-oppositional political value of focusing on day-to-day experience. In emphasizing this tendency, I am going against the grain of Highmore’s endorsement of Michel de Certeau’s view that any declaration of a politics of the everyday is as yet “simply premature” (13). At the same time, however, the remainder of my review takes advantage of the politically pluralist spirit that animates Highmore’s editorial endeavor.
Having said that, I should note another point of slippage between my review and one feature of its object. In a crucial sense, the cosmological figure with which I have represented the Reader as intellectual construct is not altogether apt. One of the understandings that underlie such disparate delvings into the daily as George Simmel’s scrutiny of the fragment and Dorothy Smith’s feminist sociology of subject-hood (see Chapters 29 and 27 respectively) is that the study of everyday life remits us not to the starry heavens, but to the teeming terrain of the social. Indeed, one way in which critical analysis of everyday life differs markedly from the more socially detached strains of sundry post-isms is in its rather old-fashioned faith that however culturally constructed or codified it may be, “the real” really exists and is neither a ragbag of mystifications nor a never-endingly deferred relay of textual effects. However, to accept this understanding of everyday life does not entail a reversion either to militant pre- or anti-theoretical fundamentalism, or to a naïvely reflectionist faith in one or another convention of realism. Rather, among other things, it entails an eye for the traces of social meaning in everyday phenomena and their forms, as well as an ear for the harmony that underpins the din of daily life and its representations. An awareness of poststructuralism’s lessons about the ways in which regimes of representation operate can clearly be of assistance in this enterprise, as can a Marxist-inflected appreciation of contradiction. In this volume, Stuart Hall’s essay on photographic representations of West Indian immigrants to Britain evinces a particularly telling instance of how the study of everyday life can effectively integrate textual and materialist analyses of people and their representations.
Hall’s merger of analytic modes is echoed in another text reproduced here, the introduction to a Yale French Studies special issue on everyday life. Editors Alice Kaplan and Kristin Ross aver that everyday life analysis can offer an alternative to the subject/object opposition that lies at the core of much European thought and is exemplified by such contrasting intellectual currents as phenomenology on one side of the divide and structuralism on the other. They further assert that, as against the subjectivist ascription of pure intentionality to social agents on the one hand and the dour designation of discursive determinism to structures and systems on the other, everyday life insists on the centrality of in-betweenness, on the irreducible liminality of lived experience, and on the mediational and strange-making mettle of many attempts at representing its character. Furthermore, they suggest that to read everyday life is as much an act of poeisis (understood as creative or transformational act), as it is of the realist representations of mimesis: “everyday life harbors the texture of social change; to perceive it at all is to recognize the necessity of its conscious transformation” (79).
Questions of consciousness, creativity, and perception loom large in the work of one of the twentieth century’s most influential and productive advocates of attending to the everyday, Sigmund Freud. Indeed, as Highmore notes, the notion of Everyday Life is analogous to the core Freudian concept of the Unconscious (6). Both are often understood in spatial terms, inasmuch as they designate a reality that hovers behind or below or above or aslant the seeming self-evidence of the senses, and both are only partly accessible to rational inquiry. As with the Unconscious, there is something at once searchingly intimate and stubbornly ungraspable about everyday life (and as Highmore suggests, about “every-night” life as well). Yet just as Freud ascribed preternatural powers to the Unconscious in his explanations of the well-springs of human action and emotion, so too do some of everyday life’s most distinguished students accord the latter an originary primacy, in intellectual life as well as in our daily, non-specialized being-in-the-world. Indeed, for figures such as Agnes Heller (who is not featured here), everyday life is the ultimate source and horizon of knowledge, critique, and action. Moreover, the meanings of the real may reside not only at the official addresses to which its study has traditionally referred us, but also in such unsuspected locations as those zones of experience we habitually designate as being drearily devoid of significance–among them, anomie, ennui, and reverie. Furthermore, according to a prominent strain of everyday life studies to which I have already alluded, it is also in the realm of the seemingly superficial that indirect forms of resistance to dominant and oppressive socio-political and economic structures may be found. Thus, for instance, in certain contexts critical readings of clothing styles may yield as much politically relevant meaning as sober analyses of state-forms.
At this point in my exposition of the Reader, it is perhaps pertinent to question the extent to which its content brings us genuine news. After all, to insist nowadays on the political significance of scrutinizing soap operas or on the celebration of style as subversion is to court a languid yawn of unsurprised assent in response. However, Highmore is quite alert to the fact that the everyday has been the object of scrutiny for decades across a range of disciplines and departments in the Humanities and Social Sciences, as well as in cultural practices such as literary writing and photography. In literature, Joyce’s Ulysses stands as an early example of the critical privileging of the quotidian, even earlier instances of which may be found in Baudelaire’s poems about Paris or in the photographs of daily Parisian scenes taken by his contemporary, Charles Negre. As for theoretical reflections on everyday life, the Reader reproduces work from the 1920s by Walter Benjamin and Siegfried Krackauer on topics as stolidly quotidian as repetitive labor and boredom. Thus, the insistence on the significance of the everyday is hardly novel. What is new, by contrast, is that hitherto disparate and diverse disciplinary and interdisciplinary approximations to the quotidian have within the past two decades begun to coalesce into a more or less coherent academic-artistic-intellectual formation, one that has established itself “in contradistinction to other tendencies within the human sciences” (31).
In the English-speaking academy, this formation’s most immediate institutional precursor was cultural studies. Highmore is particularly cognizant of the parallels between the work of cultural studies and the labor of bestowing significance upon quotidian life, and he notes the many points at which the modus operandi of both projects intersect. Indeed, Highmore’s announced agenda is to develop a cultural studies approach to everyday life. What might such an approach entail? Highmore advances several methods as being particularly apposite in attacking the tangled underbrush of the everyday, among them, thick description in the ethnographic and sociological mode, and defamiliarization in the writing of history and literary criticism. In making the ordinary extraordinary, and the familiar unfamiliar, Highmore observes, artists and others can detach the dull veneer of everydayness that clings to daily life and masks the latter’s manifold meanings (25).
Again, at this juncture one might reasonably ask whether we have not been here before. Yes and no, Highmore seems to be saying. Yes, inasmuch as anthropological and sociological ethnographies, for instance, have been querying the quotidian for many a decade. No, insofar as they have not done so from the standpoint of the self-aware and pluralistic ingathering of intersecting perspectives that Highmore convenes under the rubrics of “everyday life theory” or “everyday life studies,” both of which stand athwart conventional circumscriptions of knowledge production. Apropos this point, Highmore notes that academic engagement with the everyday constitutes itself not so much into a field tout court, as into a “para-” or “meta-” field, one that is often interstitial in aim and idiom. Furthermore, the sometimes surplus or supplementary status of everyday theorizing, he ventures, is consonant (or as he puts it, “contiguous”) with the vague and vast nature of its problematic referent, which is by definition abundant in content and amorphous in shape.
But neither the blurredness of everyday life’s boundaries or its holdings, nor the imprecise ways in which we register its meanings, ought to result in resignation or self-recrimination, Highmore insists. Rather, to acknowledge the messiness of construction-work at the site of the everyday is to breathe the heady air that animates the building of a new conceptual edifice. Furthermore, this work is, or can be, at once the turf of skilled builder and bricoleur alike. What, then, is the purview of everyday life studies? How do its transdisciplinary modes of knowing clash or coalesce? In addressing the second of these questions, Highmore sketches out a vector of tendencies that typify the study of everyday life. In his view, such tendencies can be provisionally grouped into a series of dyads: particular/general, agency/structure, experiences/institutions, feelings/discourses, and resistance/power. In turn, these dyads are linked to the methodological operations of micro- and macro-analysis (5). Those aspects of daily life that are often approached through these conceptual and methodological rubrics also seem to lend themselves to binary enumeration: the street and the home, the private and the public, prescribed rites and spontaneous moments, among others. But these pairs are by no means to be regarded as fixed. Rather, to return to a point made earlier, they are to be understood relationally: it is in the state of flux between–or sparked by–such pairs that many everyday-life theories seek to find meaning.
There is of course a tension between the desire to wrest concrete sense out of a phenomenon as enormous as everyday life and the shape shifting and hard-to-apprehend quality of its character. Highmore poses the question as to whether rigor and systemic analysis–an orientation and a practice beloved of social scientists in general and Marxists in particular–can be adequate to the task of reckoning with everyday life. Can the filigreed and fugitive meanings often associated with the realm of quotidian experience be properly captured by the freeze-framing operations of rigorous analysis? Conversely, how can the study of social minutiae transcend the mere cataloguing of heterogeneous data? In his own commentary, Highmore leaves these questions open, and collectively the texts assembled in the Reader provide us with no hard and fast answers either. Jacques Rancière–historian of proletarian dreams and desires–captures the tentative and exploratory nature of much everyday life theorizing: “those who venture into this labyrinth must be honestly forewarned that no answers will be supplied” (250).
A need for cut-and-dried answers can sometimes give evidence of anxiety. Among leftists (such as this reviewer), such anxiety may derive from deep-rooted doubts about the political efficacy or desirability of researching or representing everyday life. If, as a Communist commentator whose work is presented here once observed, “life is conservative,” and if, as he also noted, “art, by nature, is conservative; it is removed from life,” then what for left-wingers would be the point of studying the one or practicing the other (86, 87)? The identity of that commentator supplies us with one possible answer. Leon Trotsky, Commander-in-Chief of the Red Army and theorist of permanent revolution, strongly advocated the study of everyday life, precisely because he thought that therein lay both the seeds of Russia’s revolutionary transformation and the obstacles to the latter’s realization. In fact, the Marxist canon provides contemporary leftist approaches to the study of quotidian experience with an ample archive of usable ideas and attitudes. After all, Das Kapital famously begins with an empirico-philosophical discussion of the ubiquitous presence and power of the commodity form in modern capitalist life. Commodities, as Marx taught us, lead a peculiar dual existence, and do so in at least two ways: first, by virtue of their Janus-faced identity as use- and exchange-values; second, by presenting a pristine face to consumers that often occludes their sullied origins at the point of production. As Highmore suggests, this classic Marxian insight is being rediscovered by a new generation of radicals who are denouncing the extensive structures of everyday neo-imperial exploitation that are typically obscured by the branding of such ostensibly banal objects as sneakers and bananas (18).
Such commodities are often produced or assembled by young women who constitute a large component of the new supra-national proletariat that has emerged in the so-called Free-Trade Zones implanted by Northern financial institutions, governments, and corporations in Southern nations, in collusion with local comprador capital and neo-liberal regimes. Subjected to harsh working conditions and paid a pittance for their arduously repetitive labor, such women have also been at the forefront of efforts to organize against these and other forms of everyday exploitation. Kaplan and Ross note that everyday life “has always lain heavily on the shoulders of women” (78). It is no accident, therefore, that much of the most productive work on daily experience has been undertaken by women engaged in struggles for their emancipation from patriarchal paradigms and practices, such as the British feminist social historian Carolyn Steedman, whose writings on gendered narration and remembering are excerpted in Chapter 26. Often, such work has frowned upon the social remoteness of much theoretical discourse, even that of an avowedly feminist stripe. In “Notes toward a Politics of Location,” the poet Adrienne Rich articulated an emblematic questioning of the priorities and protocols of certain strains within critical theory:
theory--the seeing of patterns, showing the forest as well as the trees--theory can be a dew that rises from the earth and collects in the rain cloud and returns to earth over and over. But if it doesn't smell of the earth, it isn't good for the earth. (213-14)
In her essay, Rich also laments the distorting effects of material, “racial,” and national privilege on the outlook of white North American feminists such as herself. Responding to stories about, and reflections by, working women the world over, she asks why their ideas and inclinations are rarely allowed admittance to the rather rarefied regions of First World theorizing.
In 2004, twenty years after the first publication of Rich’s essay, thousands of students at U.S. universities are involved in extracurricular efforts to reclaim the Commons by making common cause with workers in the archipelago of apparel-producing sweatshops scattered across the global South.1 By so doing, these students are puncturing the bubble of their insulated privilege and effectively heeding Rich’s appeal for the de-centering of Euro-American critical theories. Moreover, in supporting the struggles for justice waged by the producers of such everyday student garb as collegiate caps, anti-sweatshop activists take as their point of departure what their international allies themselves regard as just wages and working conditions. Simultaneously, they seek to educate university administrators, fellow students, and brand-shoppers about the troubled trajectory of the commodities that they purchase and endorse. Recently, the movement has moved a step further by paying attention to exploitative everyday economic relations on their own campuses. In its multi-pronged and knowledge-rich activism, the U.S. student-labor solidarity movement–and its counterparts abroad–evinces a profound practical and theoretical understanding of several motifs that mark the landscape of everyday life studies, among them the idea that alienated everyday life contains the seeds of its own de-alienation and the notion that heterogeneous regional and national responses to everyday modernity make manifest both the discontinuity of global capitalism’s reach and the unitary nature of its expansion.
How global in origin or identity is the study of everyday life? Highmore notes that, thus far, everyday life studies seems to be a resolutely Euro-American enterprise, and he worries that this might result in an unwelcome if unwitting ethnocentrism (xiii). A cursory scan of the table of contents indeed confirms that most of the excerpted texts are by British, French, German, and North American authors, and that those contributors whose national origins lie outside the Euro-American belt either labor within it or have their books published there. Nonetheless, perhaps Highmore is worrying unduly. For one thing, in these interconnected times, clear-cut divisions between North and South are as dated as unblurred genres. (Rural revolutionaries ensconced in the remote highlands of Mexico’s Southeast have made this point evident by networking via border-crossing email with Northern urban internautas.) For another, the critical study of everyday life and its representation in cultural artifacts is already quite global in scope and has been for some time. In support of this claim, one could cite texts such as the short stories of the Argentinean writer, Julio Cortázar, with their quixotic explorations of the infra-ordinary world of quotidian existence, or the work by critical South African anthropologists on everyday forms of resistance to apartheid. Moreover, a new generation of anti-neo-liberal activists in the South–from Buenos Aires to Cochabamba to Delhi and beyond–is engaged in crafting novel political practices that are based on the need to satisfy with dignity the multiple daily demands of social reproduction. One such group, Johannesburg’s Electricity Crisis Committee–whose “struggle electricians” illegally (and freely) reconnect to the grid indigent consumers who have been disconnected by newly privatized utility companies–exemplifies the everyday-focused ruses and strategies that have emerged in the counter-capitals of modernity. Thus while the fear that the study of everyday life can degenerate into self-regarding ethnocentric superficiality is not entirely baseless, an awareness of the daily work of border-crossing social movements makes it clear that things need not be so.
Nonetheless, it remains the case that the study of everyday life does not in itself necessarily entail either an internationalist or a progressive outlook. The contrasting attitudes to everyday modernity evidenced by George Simmel (Chapter 29) and his student Walter Benjamin (Chapter 2) make this clear. In scrutinizing sundry signs and objects for their social significance, Benjamin was motivated by the stubborn optimism of one who believed that modernity’s edifice could be rebuilt from the bricks strewn amid its rubble. Benjamin’s onetime teacher Simmel also rummaged amid modernity’s debris, but where his famous pupil espied evidence of salvation, Simmel drew repeated attention to the sharp shocks sustained by the human sensorium in the hurly burly of modern life. Still others, such as Guy Debord (Chapter 23), have spoken starkly about the all-embracing alienation that enervates daily experience while counterintuitively celebrating the utopian undercurrents that inhere in dailiness. Yet all three thinkers–along with myriad others–insist doggedly upon the importance of understanding the everydayness of everyday life. Moreover, while thus reiterating the significance of registering the quotidian, many such figures have resisted or rejected the will to conceptual coherence that often accompanies the championing of a paradigm. Whatever the reasons for this dual doggedness and demureness may be, and they are surely multiple, it is at least clear that any attempt to capture the totality of everyday life studies must perforce fall short of its aim. It is perhaps for this reason that many of those who attend to the everyday frequently express themselves metaphorically. Debord, for instance, denounced everyday life as “a sort of reservation for good natives who keep modern society running without understanding it” (240). But not all is opaque in the study of la vie quotidienne. Debord, after all, could also declare with lapidary limpidity that “everyday life is the measure of all things: of the fulfillment or rather the nonfulfillment of human relations; of the use of lived time; of artistic experimentation; of revolutionary politics” (239). Doubtless, the steering of a passage from social unreadability to readability (or from invisibility to visibility) is one of the governing tropes and operations among the panoply of perspectives represented in the Reader.
At any rate, the Reader provides proof, if proof were still needed, of why everyday matters matter a great deal. (Newcomers to everyday life studies can complement their exploration of the Reader with a perusal of its companion volume, Highmore’s Everyday Life and Cultural Theory: An Introduction.) Located at the fountainhead of some of the most influential paradigms and procedures of knowledge production of the twentieth century–and now newly re-emergent in the first decade of the twenty-first–the concept of everyday life is enormously consequential for the study of human thought and action. That much, surely, is by now beyond doubt. What is still up for grabs, is how best to approach and assess its protean personality. With its wide-ranging selections and its thought-provoking framings, Highmore’s Everyday Life Reader provides us with multiple points of entry into the study of that complex congeries of times, spaces, technologies, practices, institutions, ideologies, material conditions, emotional states, thoughts, sensations, signs, and symbols in the midst of whose force-field we all live.
1. For an overview of the movement’s origins, activities, and goals, see Featherstone.
Andy Weaver
Department of English
University of Alberta
aweaver@ualberta.ca
Review of: David W. Bernstein and Christopher Hatch, eds., Writings through John Cage’s Music, Poetry, and Art.Chicago: U of Chicago P, 2001.
Agree or disagree with his aesthetics, his ideas, or his politics, no one seriously engaged in studying the arts of the twentieth century can afford to ignore John Cage or his wide-ranging body of work. His influence on experimental forms of music is well documented, but his achievements and influence in the fields of literature, visual arts, and film are also significant and worthy of more discussion. Writings through John Cage’s Music, Poetry, and Art, edited by David W. Bernstein and Christopher Hatch, is an attempt, as Bernstein states in his introduction, to “give readers a sense of the importance of Cage’s creative activities in a variety of fields and an understanding of how much research has yet to be done” (6). It is both the book’s greatest achievement and most significant failure that it accomplishes both of these aims.
The book is an extension of the “Here Comes Everybody: The Music, Poetry, and Art of John Cage” conference, which took place at Mills College in Oakland, California in the autumn of 1995, and so “was the first international assemblage of scholars and creative artists to examine Cage’s work after his death on August 12, 1992” (1); indeed, the idea for the conference developed less than a year after Cage’s death (ix). This link between Cage’s death and the conference is carried over in the essays included in Writings, as almost all of the authors implicitly focus on the absence of John Cage, the man, either through intricately describing his working practices, relating personal anecdotes about Cage, describing what Cage meant to them and their work, or, sometimes, by mixing all three of these perspectives. For this reason, the book becomes a celebration of John Cage’s life and his art. Perhaps due to the short time that passed between Cage’s death and the germination of this project, the book is, for the most part, more of a wake for a great man than a critical examination of Cage’s works.
This is not to say that there isn’t useful information in the book; each essay offers interesting facts about Cage’s creative process, the performance of his work, and the scoring of his work. The problem is that there is often a lack of critical examination of many of these facts. The result is that the essays in the book could be divided into two distinct types: those offering ideological critiques of Cage’s work and those documenting Cage’s formal procedures. The former engage intellectually with Cage’s aesthetics, his beliefs, and his politics and seek to open up ways to engage Cage’s work critically; they offer important insights into how Cage’s personal beliefs, such as his devotion to Zen, chance, and political and social anarchy, both affected his work and offer insights into the works themselves. The second type of essays, those documenting Cage’s creative process, generally avoids issues of ideology in an attempt to describe objectively how Cage created his works. These essays, it seems to me, are less valuable, precisely because they refuse to deal with the issues that Cage found so important in life and art; they focus on Cage, not on his works, and so they fail to open up avenues of investigation into Cage’s music, visual art, or literary texts.
The book starts quite strongly. The first essay, by David W. Bernstein, examines Cage’s music in relation to the large umbrella terms “avant-garde,” “modernism,” and “postmodernism.” Bernstein offers a nuanced investigation of Cage’s art and his politics in order to highlight both the experimental as well as the traditional aspects of Cage’s music. Bernstein argues against the unexamined conflation of experimentation with postmodernism and tradition with modernism, instead showing how Cage exemplified aspects of both those terms. By drawing on the influence that the early avant-garde, especially dadaism but also futurism, had on Cage, Bernstein argues persuasively that Cage’s chance-based musical works do indeed have a distinct political agenda:
when considering Cage's compositional methods, one finds that the postmodern and the modern coexist without contradiction. The same is true of Cage's political and social agenda. Through his redefinition of musical form Cage created works modeling desirable political and social structures. He was able to renew the modernist project dedicated to political and social change through art using postmodernist artistic techniques. As we assess Cage's role within the development of twentieth-century thought and musical style and intensify the critical evaluation of his creative output, it is crucial that we consider both the traditional and the radical aspects of his aesthetics and compositional style. This formidable task may very well occupy scholars for many years to come. (40)
The essay refuses to categorize Cage within the unproductive binaries that Cage himself constantly railed against; the result is an appreciation of the complex balancing job Cage performed as a political artist who avoided politics in his art and as a man who respected earlier traditions at the same time that he worked to dismantle their influences. Bernstein addresses the interplay between Cage’s political anarchy and his use of chance operations, and, more importantly, he historicizes Cage within a continuum. Cage, Bernstein argues, openly borrowed from earlier avant-garde movements while he also updated their methods; he remained committed to the modernist avant-garde’s belief in social improvement through art, but refocused artistic practice around an anarchistic refusal to engage in oppositional politics.
Jonathan D. Katz, in the essay that follows Bernstein’s, expands on Cage’s political beliefs and strategies while refocusing the area of investigation onto and through Cage’s closeted homosexuality. Katz proposes that Cage’s silence over his own sexuality strengthened his interest both in the use of silence in music and in Eastern philosophies such as Zen, which stress the positive aspects of silence. Biographical criticism is a dangerous method to use when dealing with an artist like Cage, who attempted to remove as much of his personality from his work as he could, but Katz offers a convincing argument as to why he believes this approach is appropriate: “there is a substantial difference between saying that the work is not about the life (antiexpressionism) and saying that the life has nothing to do with the work. There are, after all, modes of revelation of self that have nothing to do with expressionism” (47). Here Katz distinguishes between conventional biographical criticism, which uses the artist’s life to explain the meaning of a work of art, and a criticism that acknowledges the importance of biography to the interests and predispositions from which an artist will draw when producing art. Katz deftly uses Cage’s homosexuality, or more specifically his refusal to acknowledge his homosexuality, as the primary reason for Cage’s use of silence in his works. From this starting point, Cage became increasingly interested in Zen’s belief that silence was necessary to inner harmony, since “Zen repositioned the closet, not as a source of repression or anxiety, but as a means to achieve healing; it was in not talking about–and hence not reifying–one’s troubles that healing began” (45). Katz also points out the revolutionary nature of Cage’s use of silence, considering that the use of silence was developed during the height of public popularity for abstract expressionism, an art movement that concentrated on creating grand Romantic myths about artists such as Jackson Pollock and Robert Motherwell. But perhaps most importantly, Katz draws a parallel between Cage’s silence and his political beliefs. Like Bernstein, Katz argues that Cage’s art was implicitly political; for Katz, silence provided Cage with a way to critique society’s values without engaging in oppositional politics, something that Cage believed only perpetuated what was supposedly being argued against:
silence was much more than conventionally unmusical; it provided a route toward an active challenge of the assumptions and prejudices that gave rise to homophobic oppression in the first place. For Cage, silence was an ideal form of resistance, carefully attuned to the requirements of the cold war consensus, at least in its originary social-historical context. There are both surrender and resistance in these silences, in relation not of either/or but of both/and[...]. That Cage's self-silencing was in keeping with the requirements of the infamously homophobic McCarthy era should not obscure the fact that it was also internally and ideologically consistent with his larger aesthetic politics. (53-4)
While Katz’s essay does not deal with all of the political aspects of Cage’s work (for example, an analysis of Cage’s commitment to political anarchism would have been interesting in this context), Katz effectively brings to the forefront the often-overlooked political aspects of Cage’s work.
Austin Clarkson’s essay, “The Intent of the Musical Moment: Cage and the Transpersonal,” offers interesting insights into how Cage’s music was presentational, not representational. Presentational arts, Clarkson argues, create their own codes of meaning as they are expressed, while representational arts rely on a prior understanding of the codes by both the artist and the recipients. For this reason, Clarkson argues that Cage was not avant-garde; the avant-gardists still believed their art to be representational, since they “took their works to be fully realized creations and not experiments in the sense of trials or tests” (66). Clarkson’s emphasis on the creative role of the audience in the presentational arts, a belief that Cage held, is an important point, and it might allow Clarkson to draw connections between Cage’s music and other contemporary fields that share this belief, such as L=A=N=G=U=A=G=Epoetry (or even Cage’s own poetry). However, Clarkson does not draw these connections and remains somewhat narrowly focused on the world of music. Moreover, Clarkson’s assertion that Cage was purely an experimental artist and not an avant-gardist reinforces the strict and rather unhelpful divisions between aesthetic camps, divisions that all of Cage’s mature work attempted to undercut. Unlike Bernstein and Katz, who work to show how these boundaries are far more fluid than critics would admit, Clarkson mans the barricades. For example, Clarkson does not address the fact that the conflation between art and life that he states lies at the heart of presentational art also forms the core of the historical avant-garde movements.1 Moreover, he also overlooks the connection between Cage’s political and social anarchy and his desire to make the audience part of the creative element of the work. Still, despite these drawbacks, Clarkson’s focus on the creative relationship called for by presentational art is an important point, especially since he stresses that both the audience and the artist must learn to adapt to these new roles.
Bernstein’s, Katz’s, and Clarkson’s essays are particularly illuminating because they demonstrate that an awareness of Cage’s aesthetic and political beliefs adds to the levels of possible meaning in all of Cage’s post-1950 work. These writers focus on explaining and expanding possible nuances in the works through a knowledge of Cage’s personal beliefs. However, most of the remaining essays abandon this practice of theorizing levels of meaning in Cage’s oeuvre in favor of merely describing Cage’s compositional processes. The result is that, while useful facts are offered, there are very few moments of true critical insight into Cage’s aesthetics or his works in the bulk of the book.
In the essay “Cage as Performer,” Gordon Mumma offers an interesting but standard brief biography of Cage as a performer. Deborah Campana, in “As Time Passes,” discusses how time remained central to Cage’s compositional strategies throughout his different musical periods, but she offers no ideas about why this was so or what light it might shed on his work. In “David Tudor and the Solo for Piano,” John Holzapfel discusses Tudor’s active role in interpreting Cage’s music, stressing the collaborative nature of their relationship but offers no thoughts on how this affects Cage’s music. Jackson Mac Low offers a necessarily brief and admittedly limited discussion of Cage’s writings in “Cage’s Writings up to the Late 1980s.” Mac Low argues that Cage never sought to expunge personal decisions from his writings, but the broad overview that Mac Low offers doesn’t allow for in-depth analysis.
The collection also includes the transcripts from two panel discussions at the “Here Comes Everybody” conference. The panel on “Cage’s Influence” was composed of Gordon Mumma (chair), Allan Kaprow, James Tenney, Christian Wolff, Alvin Curram, and Maryanne Amasher. More so than most of the pieces included, this discussion is openly laudatory of Cage; it offers few insights and serves more as a chance for those involved to thank Cage publicly for opening avenues of investigation that allowed them to form their careers. In fact, they all agree that Cage’s influence was more indirect, through his role as a trailblazer, than direct. The second panel discussion, “Cage and the Computer,” offers more insight, but in terms of detailing Cage’s compositional practices rather than advancing any theoretical insights into the importance of the computer to Cage. Composed of James Pritchett (chair), James Tenney, Frances White, and Andrew Culver (Cage’s long-serving computer assistant), the panel describes how early work with computers developed, but mostly this piece is interesting for Culver’s anecdotes about how Cage worked with the computer: he didn’t. Culver did all of the computer work himself, finding out what Cage wanted and then making it happen.
Henning Lohner’s discussion of “The Making of Cage’s One” closes the book. It is an interesting blend of interview, personal anecdote, documentation, and critical discussion on the topic of Lohner’s collaboration with Cage on the experimental film One (Cage’s last major work). The piece serves as a biography of the collaboration, an elegy (Cage died after the film was completed but before it was premiered), and as a witness to Cage’s compositional strategies. Moreover, it is a fractured piece of writing, paratactically juxtaposing interviews with Cage, documentation surrounding the film, anecdotes of working with Cage, and thoughts on the medium of film. As such, it is the only non-linear piece of writing in the book (Clarkson does attempt something different in his essay, where he includes a series of quotes from Cage after his essay, but that essay is straightforward in terms of structure). This point leads me to one of the major drawbacks of this collection: there is too much similarity and consensus among the writers and essays included.
Considering the short time-span between Cage’s death and the germination of the conference from which this book sprang, it is hardly surprising that the essayists came together to praise Cage, not to bury him. However, considering Cage’s incessant search for experimentation in all of his artistic endeavors, it seems a poor tribute to him to ignore the practices and aesthetics that he worked so hard to establish. Cage, for example, was a noted anarchist (a fact rarely addressed or even acknowledged in most of the essays); part of his desire to do away with the conventional structures of music, language, and the visual arts sprang directly from his belief that these structures upheld conventional opinions about society, opinions that Cage certainly did not share. For example, Cage often stated his preference for “nonsyntaxed” language: “Due to N. O. Brown’s remark that syntax is the arrangement of the army, and Thoreau’s that when he heard a sentence he heard feet marching, I became devoted to nonsytactical ‘demilitarized’ language” (Introduction). The connection between doing away with the accepted codes of language and critiquing the status quo is obvious in Cage’s statement; for the authors in the book to undertake such standard investigations of Cage and his work is to turn away from his implicit critiques of logical communication and stifle these critiques under the weight of convention. Moreover, Cage constantly and often proudly contradicted himself; this was not merely an attempt to be difficult or inscrutable (both ideas were tied in Cage’s mind with the Romantic myth of the artist, and were to be avoided at all cost).2 Cage’s contradictions came from his distrust of consensus (a point which only Bernstein and Katz make), a distrust that arose partly from his belief in anarchy (which holds that reifications of any type, even personal characteristics, should be avoided in favor of openness to circumstances), and partly from his interest in Zen (which states that logic is not the only way, or indeed the best way to understand the world). It would be a far greater tribute to Cage and his work if his critics here openly debated the ideas, importance, and merit of Cage’s work. As he so often stated, Cage was not interested in creating art, which in his mind was dead and reified; however, the consistently laudatory tone of the essays implicitly moves Cage’s works toward that category, toward installing him as another Great Artist within the canon.3
Perhaps the greatest drawback to the collection, though, can be illustrated in relation to the two essays not yet discusssed: Constance Lewallen’s “Cage and the Structure of Chance” and Ray Kass’s “Diary: Cage’s Mountain Lake Workshop, April 8-15, 1990.” Coincidentally, both of these essays address Cage’s visual works; this, however, isn’t the problem. Both Lewallen and Kass attempt to detail Cage’s creative process, and it is this attempt that leads to the problem: both essays focus on Cage, the man as artist, and, as such, both essays undercut Cage’s attempt to divorce his own ego from his work. Indeed, neither Lewallen nor Kass deal critically with Cage’s works at all. Instead, they focus on Cage’s creative process in minute detail, cataloging his every decision. The result is that, although Cage does appear to be rather idiosyncratic, he is once again reshaped in the critics’ minds as a Great Artist. For example, note the laudatory tone and the emphasis on Cage the Artist (not on the works that Cage happened to produce) in the following:
Cage managed to challenge just about all of Western culture's received ideas about what art is. If, from the Renaissance on, art has been regarded as a means of communication, Cage instead defined art as self-alteration, a means to "sober the mind." If art has served to give form to the chaos of life's experiences, he created an art that as nearly as possible combines with, rather than gives shape to, life. If art has been regarded as a giver of truths through the "self-expressed individuality of artist," Cage saw it rather as an exploration of how nature itself functions as a means to open the mind and spirit to the beauty of life with a minimum of artistic expression or interpenetration. Finally, if art has traditionally expressed meaning through symbol or metaphor, he preferred that viewers provide their own meaning according to their individual personality and experience. (Lewallen 242-3)
One can’t help but feel that no matter what “art has been regarded as,” for Lewallen, Cage would have heroically challenged it. I don’t mean to downplay Cage’s sense of experimentation, but the Romantic myth of the artist is strikingly apparent in both Lewallen’s and Kass’s pieces (and runs implicitly through most of the other essays). Lewallen refuses to contextualize Cage, and thus there is no sense of how Cage learned from others (Suzuki, Fuller, Thoreau, Kropotkin, etc.) the challenges that he put into place. This decontextualization fuels the transformation of Cage from experimenter in the arts into one of the reified, understandable Artists of the Canon by writing the narrative of Cage’s life and artistic achievements within the frame of the grand, solitary, creative genius. Not only does this transformation violate Cage’s beliefs, but it also serves to tame his challenges, which become recuperated within the framework of Art (Peter Bürger and Paul Mann, for example, both describe how the art world recuperated the challenges against the institution of art made by the avant-garde movements by first claiming these challenges as art). Furthermore, Cage’s works are themselves overlooked in an attempt to install him firmly within the tradition of artistic revolution, a type of artistic anti-tradition that in every way deeply depends on what it supposedly is trying to undermine.
In the end, what a book like Writings through John Cage’s Music, Poetry, and Art does is to display the conservatism of most criticism of experimental art. Despite the constant challenges offered by artists in all of the different media–challenges which Cage in many ways helped to nurture and perpetuate–critics refuse to adapt either the form or the content of their discussions. As such, the critics play a front-line role in recuperating experimental art and artists such as John Cage. Having said that, I’m not entirely sure how to avoid playing this role; however, we might learn from the example of the experimental artists themselves and break down the conventions of academic criticism. If Cage taught us nothing else, it is that there are ways outside of conventional logic to understand the world and all things in it; perhaps, then, it is time for critics at least to gesture toward the idea that conventional logic is not necessarily the most appropriate nor the only way to engage with experimental art.
Writings through John Cage’s Music, Poetry, and Art could serve as a useful introduction to John Cage’s work, especially in the field of music. It contains many useful facts about his working process; however, this raw data is not examined effectively by the essayists included in this book. Aside from the first three essays and a few of the later ones, there is little here that will significantly expand the way readers might encounter John Cage’s works. What the book points to is the divide in Cage studies between those critics offering ideological critiques of his works, critiques which actively engage with the ideas and beliefs that Cage brought to his works, and those who focus on Cage himself. In the end, Writings shows that the focus must shift from the latter to the former if studies of Cage are going to increase the critical appreciation of John Cage’s music, poetry, and art.
1. Peter Bürger, for example, sees the conflation of art and life as one of the fundamental tenets of the early avant-garde. In Theory of the Avant-Garde, he states that “the European avant-garde movements can be defined as an attack on the status of art in bourgeois society. What is negated is not an earlier form of art (a style) but art as an institution that is unassociated with the life praxis of men” (49).
2. Take, for example, this exchange between Richard Kostelanetz and Cage in Kostelanetz’s Conversing With Cage:
[Kostelanetz] Once someone asked you a very dull question, trying to show that you had been inconsistent in a line of reasoning, and I remember that with that marvelous laugh of yours you said, 'Well, you won't find me consistent.' [Cage] Emerson felt this way about consistency, you know; but our education leads us to think that it's wrong to be inconsistent. All consistency is, really, is getting one idea and not deviating from it, even if the circumstances change so radically that one ought to deviate [...]. (45)
3. Cage made it clear that he did not want to create art, which, like the dadaists, he saw as cut-off from life:
I RATHER THINK THAT CONTEMPORARY MUSIC WOULD BE THERE IN THE DARK TOO, BUMPING INTO THINGS, KNOCKING OTHERS OVER AND IN GENERAL ADDING TO THE DISORDER THAT CHARACTERIZES LIFE (IF IT IS OPPOSED TO ART) RATHER THAN ADDING TO THE ORDER AND STABILIZED TRUTH BEAUTY AND POWER THAT CHARACTERIZE A MASTERPIECE (IF IT IS OPPOSED TO LIFE). AND IS IT? YES IT IS. (Silence 46)
Michael S. Martin
English Department
Temple University
msmartin@temple.edu
Review of: Emory Elliott, Louis Fretas Caton, and Jeffrey Rhyne, eds., Aesthetics in a Multicultural Age.New York and Oxford: Oxford UP, 2002.
“Let us, for example, credit it to the honor of Kant that he should expatiate on the peculiar properties of the sense of touch with the naïveté of a country parson!”
–Nietzsche, 3rd Essay, Section 6, in The Genealogy of Morals
If we are to believe the arguments made by the contributors to Aesthetics in a Multicultural Age, aesthetics has been much maligned in twentieth-century literary theory, film studies, and art history. As an instance of this critical tendency, Winfried Fluck, whose essay “Aesthetics and Cultural Studies” foregrounds many of the central dilemmas inherent to any aesthetic judgment, invokes the contemporary German critic Urlich Schödlbauer when the latter writes, “whoever deals with aesthetics nowadays, dissects a corpse” (80). While the death of aesthetics is perhaps overstated here, the contributors to this volume all make separate, and mostly compelling, cases for the revitalization of the aesthetic in textual and extra-textual cultural productions. The formative problem in determining aesthetic judgment is perhaps best stated by Emory Elliott in the introduction when he writes that, because of multiculturalism and changes in canon formation, “many of the prior aesthetic criteria need to be re-examined and certainly the traditional hierarchies of merit need to be challenged” (5). Instead of being a methodology that discounts the aesthetic, he argues, multiculturalism makes it possible “to formulate new terminologies, categories, and processes of assessment” and is thus firmly grounded in the act of judgment (6).
The essays in Aesthetics in a Multicultural Age were collected from a major conference held by the Center for Ideas and Society at the University of California, Riverside, in 1998. The conference attracted over 600 attendees, received substantial coverage in the Los Angeles Times, and was featured in a cover story for the 6 December 1998 edition of the Chronicle of Higher Education. In an attempt to add continuity and cohesion to the sometimes disparately themed essays, the editors have divided the book into three rubrics: “Challenges to Aesthetics of Diversity,” “Redefining Categories of Value and Difference,” and “Aesthetic Judgment and the Public Sphere.” Coeditor Elliott, an English professor at Riverside, has assembled a diverse field for this collection, including scholars in film studies, art history, African-American literature, and women’s studies. By and large, however, the majority of the theorists in this volume are well-known names from American Studies, predominantly nineteenth-century American literary critics, and most of them can be aligned with a neopragmatist school of thought, borrowing from the works of John Dewey and William James. Dewey provides a recurring point of reference for Fluck, Giles Gunn, and Heinz Ickstadt, all of whom consider Dewey’s Art as Experience (1934) as a model for a contingent, experiential basis for aesthetic interpretation. The other text most frequently referenced here is, not surprisingly, Immanuel Kant’s Critique of Judgment (1790). But whereas Dewey is generally enlisted on the side of a new and reoriented aesthetic project, Kant is usually associated with a threatened and possibly unworkable paradigm, his notion of disinterested beauty running counter to the contemporary emphasis on the political and social investments that must inevitably inform aesthetic judgment. Still, the best essays in the volume resist any tendency simply to pronounce aesthetic distinctions contingent or relative and leave it at that; they undertake to advance a new aesthetics in which something of Kant’s enlightenment project persists.
Under the rubric of “Challenges to an Aesthetics of Diversity,” the first essay in the volume is perhaps also the finest: Satya P. Mohanty’s “Can Our Values Be Objective? On Ethics, Aesthetics, and Progressive Politics” is an extended criticism of the postmodern tendency to devalue any form of critical judgment. In response to the postmodern vantage, which is wary of universal normative values and claims and lacks grounding in the empirical method, Mohanty proffers a nuanced, fluid conception of objectivity. For Mohanty, Michel Foucault represents an ideological holism, or skepticism, while Noam Chomsky, with his theory of human betterment, provides an applicable model for a new version of objectivity that can indeed make a claim for that which is just, beautiful, and good. Mohanty supports a position that he terms “post-positivist” realism, though he recognizes that human beings are inevitably shaped by ideology and thus can never proceed with “theoretical innocence” (33). Instead, Mohanty posits a new version of objectivity, one that affirms the role of social and ideological error in any human inquiry, recognizes the primacy of empiricism (or referentiality) in any evaluation, and establishes a cross-cultural conception of knowledge.
Giles Gunn, editor of the collection Early American Writing (1994), is also concerned with heuristic potential and the importance of culture in shaping human experience, yet his essay “The Pragmatics of the Aesthetic” argues more overtly for the virtues of specifically aesthetic texts. Gunn writes of the primacy of the imagination in such an experience, stating that “the imagination provides the motive for all those symbolic stratagems by which a culture’s wisdom or ignorance is refracted and transmitted” (64). The benefit of such an interpretation of cultural symbols is that both expression and human interaction have an ethical dimension, and this quality is linked with an imperative to understand aesthetic tastes and judgments within a specifically public sphere. Gunn’s argument centers on a suppositional structure that guides experience with an original premise, but aesthetic modes of thinking are central to organizing the work of the imagination with that of “practical exploration”; therefore, the aesthetic is never really severed from the pragmatic (73).
An equally comprehensive and forceful essay, Fluck’s “Aesthetics and Cultural Studies” has a similar leitmotif: aesthetic practice is never separate from the referential dimension, and an aesthetic moment, or “attitude” as Fluck calls it, has a potentially transformative value. Fluck’s approach is a genealogical one, as he outlines how aesthetics have been categorized because of normative models of what defines the aesthetic, and this includes the modernist turn toward New Critical protocols that create a separate ontological category for understanding the intrinsic worth of a text. The aesthetic, however, is never merely a function to be encountered objectively and is instead one of many functions, including the political and the subjective, that become manifest when interacting with a work, whether it is of “high” culture or “low” culture, a distinction cultural studies seeks to efface. Fluck’s example of a subway map is appropriate; that is, a subway map has its referential dimension always intact–it is used for finding directions–yet one cannot access its aesthetic function (perhaps its correlation to Egyptian hieroglyphics), Fluck conjectures, without first touching upon its direct rapport with the objective realm. By illustrating how cultural studies always must work with some movement toward the aesthetic, whether in matters of beauty or judgment, Fluck articulates the strongest critique of cultural studies in this volume. Along with Gunn and Mohanty, he attempts to fulfill the underlying ambition of this volume, that is, to re-envision aesthetic judgment in a way that situates praxis within a multicultural framework rather than simply accepting the death of aesthetics at the hands of postmodern theory and cultural studies. The force of these authors’ arguments is never quite counterbalanced by essays such as John Carlos Rowe’s, which offers effusive praise for and defense of cultural studies methodologies.
Rowe (editor of Culture and the Problem of the Disciplines, reviewed in the May 2000 issue of Postmodern Culture) provides the most systematic argument in the collection in his defense of the methodologies of cultural studies, “The Resistance to Cultural Studies,” the final essay in the “Challenges to an Aesthetics of Diversity” section. For Rowe and most of the contributors to this volume, the promotion of cultural studies to the forefront of literary criticism does not diminish the role of aesthetics, but Rowe’s argument is almost purely focused on the benefits of cultural studies, both as a hermeneutic operation and as a dehierarchizing force vis-à-vis traditional, ahistorical criticism. For example, one of the several critiques of cultural studies that Rowe argues against is the notion that the topics cultural studies critics teach “are easy and superficially relevant” (109). Instead, cultural studies, with its emphasis on popular and “low” cultural texts, presents a new hermeneutic implication for the interpreter: the text in question, whether films such as Rambo or Titanic, or “indisputable” literary classics such as Henry James’s Portrait of a Lady or Wings of the Dove, requires a new mode of theoretical and practical inquiry. Rowe combines the theoretical complexity of de Man and Lyotard with this form of inquiry, noting the postmodern implications within cultural studies methodology, and he argues that in the social relevance, cultural pertinence, and historical grounding of cultural studies, there is a pragmatic goal: “What will this interpretation do?” (107). What the interpretation does is contingent because cultural studies, like postmodernism, does not affirm a “governing narrative” from which the critic can step outside her particular, historically grounded interpretive situation.
The first essay in the “Redefining Categories of Value and Difference” section is Shelley Fisher Fishkin’s study of white and black American authors being rewritten or forgotten in literary history because of prescribed ideas on how each should write. In “Desegregating American Literary Studies,” Fishkin uses a variety of examples of nontraditional racial texts and their subsequent critical reception to argue that black authors’ literary reputations are diminished by their use of white characters, just as white authors, such as Sinclair Lewis, are marginalized when they write about African-American experience. Fishkin ends her essay with a call to revise current notions of canonicity and exclusiveness in American literary studies: “American literary studies will not be segregated until […] books by both groups of writers [African American and white authors] are featured in publishers’ African American Studies and American literature catalogs,” as well as taught in both American literature and African-American literature courses (131). This essay is arguably one of the more important critical works on American Studies in recent years, though its narrowly literary-historical emphasis on reception and canonicity makes it a slightly disconcerting inclusion in this largely theory-and-praxis-oriented volume.
Fishkin’s essay, however, is a fitting preamble to the subsequent piece by Robyn Wiegman, whose “Difference and Disciplinarity” considers how identity politics are reinscribed within the academic institution. Wiegman presents perhaps the most complex argument in Aesthetics in a Multicultural Age, and her consideration of national and transnational identities–as well as her resistance to forcing identities into binary systems–is also explored in other essays in the volume, including Gunn’s contribution. Wiegman argues that feminist studies has been co-opted by two positions: the category of “women” is often equated by African-American and postcolonial critics to some universalizing white norm, while poststructuralist critics consider any reference to identity to be essentializing and thus reductive (137-38). One essay on which she centers her argument is Susan Gubar’s “What Ails Feminist Criticism?,” a piece that begins by recalling the various stages in feminist criticism and outlines some reasons for the schism between generations of feminist scholars. Wiegman’s answer for how institutions contribute to and reify identity politics and formations of national identities is a method that she terms “the metacritics of difference”; this method can be understood as a genealogical approach to feminist studies that uncovers how feminism is produced as an object of knowledge, what Wiegman calls “the problematic of identitarian social forms and formations” (147). Wiegman calls forcefully for replacing the aesthetic with a consideration of difference, but her essay would have contributed more centrally to this volume if she had attempted to elaborate some definition of an aesthetic judgment of difference.
Americanist Donald E. Pease, in an essay critiquing the traditional aesthetic criteria that were levied at C.L.R. James, focuses on individual, rather than social, empowerment and on its relation to the modern liberal state rather than the academic institution. “Doing Justice to C.L.R. James’s Mariners, Renegades, and Castaways [1953],” included in the section “Redefining Categories of Value and Difference,” is, on one hand, Pease’s individual argument for the importance to literary scholarship of James’s book of Melville criticism precisely because James challenges Moby-Dick (1851) in his act of writing an interested interpretation, reimagining the canonical work with a political imperative in mind and substituting the narration of the crew over that of Ahab. On the other hand, Pease is making the case that the criticism (or deliberate ignoring) of James is rooted in his book’s call for an aesthetic categorization outside of “the norms and assumptions […] of which the field was organized” (159). The aesthetic sphere, here represented by James’s book, became a site of free subjectivity and utopian resistance, as James was writing his book while he was a prisoner of the state at Ellis Island, hovering between the rights and dignities afforded to a person of citizenship and the lack of these rights and dignities of a subject with noncitizenship. In response, Pease argues, James “disidentif[ies] with the categories through which he would also practice U.S. citizenship” and also makes the case for an unstated metanarrative within Moby-Dick, one that, in the spirit of equality, moves the locus of power in the novel from Ahab to that of the crew (170).
The next essay in this section is Johnella E. Butler’s “Mumbo Jumbo, Theory, and the Aesthetics of Wholeness,” which argues that Western forms of evaluation, particularly the unifying idea of logos, do not provoke a communitarian standard of judgment. Butler’s piece is one of the most complex, yet rewarding, contributions to this volume, and though her argument emphasizes the reconceptualization of African-American theory in order to “reveal the full significance of the complexities of that literature’s aesthetics,” she makes the case for a larger aesthetic reconstitution (177). In dividing Western consciousness under the rubric of “Logos/Dialogics,” Butler establishes her case for another form of understanding African-American double-consciousness (and, presumably, aesthetic consciousness): through the dialectic of “Nommo/Dianommic.” In contrast to the forced dialectic of Logos, which disaffirms interconnectedness, the Nommo emphasizes the sacredness of the written word (“the life force that comes from the divine”), the dominance of multiplicity over fragmentation, and the confluence of past, present, and future to inform decisions (183). Butler’s argument is compelling and provocative, but I wonder whether her faith in the sacredness of the written text, which is understood via the tropes of ancestral spirituality in texts such as Mumbo Jumbo, does not in fact reify some of the same metaphysical problems of destructive fragmentation and isolation that she successfully exposes as inherent in the Logos/Dialogics tradition.
Butler is followed by one of the most prominent voices in revealing the ideological stakes in the canon formation of nineteenth-century American literature, Paul Lauter. Lauter analyzes the aesthetics of tradition, audience, and discourse in his essay “Aesthetics Again?: The Pleasures and the Dangers,” the first essay in the section “Aesthetic Judgment and the Public Sphere.” To do this aesthetic analysis, Lauter supplements his essay with photographs of Native American artworks that were recently displayed in both museum and art exhibits across the United States. The inherent problem in assimilating these new artistic forms, he argues, is that Western culture does not have aesthetic principles from which to understand the discourse of these art objects. Questions of “audience, function, and conventions” inform our judgments, and these forms of discourse are not readily apparent or transferable to an unaccustomed Western audience (210). The Native American artworks that Lauter chooses to accompany his essay are stunning and, to his credit, do indeed implore the reader to embrace the contradictions in applying Western criteria of art evaluation to works that defy such application. In comparison to the other theorists’ work represented in this volume, however, Lauter’s argument is too abbreviated to be completely effective, and his central thesis–that is, we should adjust our aesthetic understanding when encountering new and unconventional artistic forms–is somewhat naïve when considered next to the multilayered, expansive theories of judgment from other theorists (McHugh, Ickstadt) in this section.
In a similar vein, Amelia Jones challenges a prominent critical position, this one proffered by art historian David Hickey, that emphasizes the exclusivity of art appreciation and the self-evident beauty of a cultural production. Jones argues in “Beauty Discourse and the Logic of Aesthetics” that Hickey, whose book The Invisible Dragon (1993) won the most distinguished art criticism prize, invokes Ruskin-esque qualitative, universal judgments about art and has “occlud[ed] the contingency of meaning and value and the role of the interpreter” (216). The aesthetic is then used for purposes of naturalized, institutional normative values, values that, while unstated, attempt to distance the art object from identity and cultural politics. Referring once again to Kant, Jones makes the argument that interest, or a “stench of ideology,” is inevitably involved in any judgment of beauty, and she incorporates such classical and contemporary figures as Francois Boucher and Robert Mapplethorpe to substantiate her claim (220). I find Jones’s criticism of Hickey’s aesthetic values particularly convincing, but her gendered critique of Denis Diderot’s Kantian aesthetic of disinterestedness is not as thorough as it needs to be. Her forthright final admission in the essay, that she wants “to be” Renee Cox–Cox is represented in one of her own photographs–lends a degree of trust to her preceding argument, as she acknowledges her own interest in the project she has just covered.
The next essay in the collection is by Kathleen McHugh, and her argument is a fluid, connective one for understanding aesthetic criticism through trauma theory. In “The Aesthetics of Wounding: Trauma, Self-Representation, and the Critical Voice,” McHugh correlates a Kantian understanding of the imagination, which must reconstitute itself after encountering something beyond its scope of understanding, with traumatic experiences in the human psyche; the subject cannot have access to the event itself and is thus disconnected from history and also from what is “unrepresentable.” McHugh makes her argument more concrete by referring to a 1995 article in the New Yorker by art critic Arlene Croce, who dismisses an AIDS-themed art exhibit without actually seeing it. Croce’s case, as McHugh describes it, is Neo-Kantian in its elevation of a particular aesthetic standard to that of a universal norm, and Croce enacts the psychological trait of “resistance response” because she self-consciously refers to her understanding of the artwork as beyond her comprehension (245). Roland Barthes’s autobiographical writings provide McHugh with a model for an aesthetics of wounding: Barthes disassociates his interest in specific photographs from any concept of beauty and instead, McHugh contends, “identifies photography ‘as a wound,’ the field in which he considers its meaning and effects is his affect, not that of the objective meaning of photography” (247). McHugh’s interest in visual culture helps establish a structural mapping of her central theses throughout this essay, and I consider her consequent theory of autobiography–a genre that she argues can “provide a way to apprehend more fully” the “ineffable and mysteries remainder” outside of the subject during the aesthetic moment–to be particularly useful for teaching this literary genre (250).
The next essay under “Aesthetic Judgment and the Public Sphere” comes from the field of film studies, Chan A. Noriega’s “Beautiful Identities: When History Turns State’s Evidence.” As with Butler’s article, Noriega’s piece has far-reaching implications, this time with the formation of the aesthetic within the realm of the political. Earlier in the volume, Fluck concludes his essay “Aesthetics and Cultural Studies” with an acknowledgment of the reintegration of the aesthetic into political forms, as political forms naturally invoke an aesthetic attitude (93). Noriega perceives the two forms, the aesthetic and the political, as necessarily interwoven functions and specifically refers to the case of the Federal Trade Commission establishing what Noriega terms a “beautiful identity” for Chicano literature to prove such a plurality of genres (257). For Noriega, historiography comes before history, and the FTC helped establish Chicano cinema in order to recognize the emerging Chicano cultural identity. The state thus acted as an intermediary agent between “the mass media and disenfranchised groups,” and the historiographical project was the state’s creation of an identity, or community, of the disenfranchised before such a group was distinctively formed and empowered on a social level (257).
The final essay in this collection, Heinz Ickstadt’s “Toward a Pluralist Aesthetics,” implicitly integrates many of the theories presented by Noriega, Butler, Fluck, Gunn, and Mohanty. (He does so, however, without directly referring to them or their work–sharing, in this respect, the rather too discreet or isolated character of all the essays in the volume.) This shared stance favors a contingent, inconclusive, historically grounded aesthetic model that would recognize “practical, moral, and aesthetic functions as mutually dependent” (267). Such a model would be conversant with “changing social and cultural conditions” (267), Ickstadt argues, and would not eliminate one of the central questions raised in this volume: do universal standards of judgment exist, or can there be a plurality of possible answers to such standards? Ickstadt is careful to distinguish between aesthetic value and aesthetic practice, yet if we are to incorporate his functional, experiential imperative toward cultural productions, then the question of what constitutes an agreed-upon criterion for judgment will still inevitably come into play.
The contemplation of such questions should not be restricted to individual disciplines and categories of experience, and for this reason the volume is pertinent to the whole range of literary and theoretical discussion beyond the field of American Studies, its most immediate object of study. To take a tentative stance toward a plurality of aesthetics provides a model to address what Elliott calls in his introduction “a system […] aligned with current theories and cultural conditions,” and such a system is necessary if we are to continue to work outside of disciplinary boundaries and across cultural identities in our respective fields of study (18). Even if aesthetics is not quite so seriously imperiled as this volume suggests, the book remains valuable for detailing its continued relevance and even necessity for contemporary cultural study.
Stuart Kendall
Review of: Clayton Eshleman, Juniper Fuse: Upper Paleolithic Imagination and the Construction of the Underworld.Middleton, CT: Wesleyan UP, 2003.
Section five of Nietzsche’s The Birth of Tragedy ends with a curious figure, a “weird image from a fairy tale which can turn its eyes at will and behold itself […] at once subject and object, at once poet, actor, and spectator” (52). The figure weds Dionysus and Apollo as Nietzsche conceives them. The Dionysian musician surrenders his subjectivity by sinking into identification with the primal unity of the world in all its pain and contradiction. But the Apollonian dream conjures images–symbols, metaphors–from this identification: “Then the Dionysian-musical enchantment of the sleeper seems to emit image sparks, lyrical poems” (50). Nietzsche distinguishes the lyric poet from the epic poet, who is nevertheless related to him, with the fact that while the epic poet loses him or herself in the pure contemplation of images, as in the relentless unfurling of poetic language, the lyric poet loses him or herself in the pain and contradiction of the world; lyric images, charged with meaning, burst with the brevity of sparks. Through the “mirror of illusion” that is poetic language, the epic poet is “protected from becoming one and fused with his figures. In contrast to this, the images of the lyrist are nothing but his very self and, as it were, only different projections of himself, so he, as the moving center of this world, may say ‘I’” (50). Unprotected, the lyric poet becomes fused with the world and with his or her images. The hybrid figure of Nietzsche’s imagining–at once poet, actor, and spectator–is such a lyrist: a poet in the world, a performer of flesh and blood, and an observer, conscious of himself in his turns.
In Juniper Fuse: Upper Paleolithic Imagination and the Construction of the Underworld, Clayton Eshleman cuts just such a figure. Three distinct, but intersecting and overlapping, areas of interest animate the text. The book is at once a book of poetry, a poet’s autobiography, a memoir of his life in and life reflected in prehistoric painted caves, and an extended scholarly engagement with the anthropology of prehistory. At its best, and most complex, Eshleman challenges academic anthropology with the test of his own experience and the imagination of a visionary poet. “Instead of solely employing rational documentation (as have the archeologists), it struck me that this ‘inseparable mix’ might be approached using poetic imagination as well as through fieldwork and research” (xv). Eshleman’s method, then, is not one but many. It is a gesture of what he calls disciplinary pluralism (xii). In this way, significantly and occasionally disastrously, among its other pleasures, Juniper Fuse offers a test case for reflections on interdisciplinarity as well as for the limits and uses of each of the disciplines involved. Readers are challenged to follow him, and this is no easy task.
Eshleman’s subject is not cave painting per se but rather the imagination that is recorded in cave wall imagery (xi). Because he tracks this “Paleolithic imagination” primarily through the roots of his own experience and sensibility, his subject is also his subjectivity. The underworld of Eshleman’s title is first and foremost the human unconscious, an unconscious which he believes can be made conscious through the symbolic consciousness expressed in poetry. (Here Eshleman owes these ideas to James Hillman’s essay “The Dream and the Underworld” and Norman O. Brown’s argument from “Fulfillment,” chapter eight of Love’s Body.) The underworld is secondly all that has been repressed or rejected from human psychology, experience, and history: unacceptable acts and urges, animal instincts, the extinction of species and potential extinction of the human race through ecological disaster. The underworld, then, is the Hell of man. It is the bottom rung of consciousness and what lies beneath. It is the back wall of human history. His guiding assumption is succinctly stated: “Consciousness […] seems to be the upswing of a ‘fall’ from the seamless animal web, in which a certain amount of sexual energy was transformed into fantasy energy, and the loss partially and hauntingly compensated for by dreaming and imagining–processes not directly related to survival” (30). What Eshleman elsewhere terms the “autonomous imagination,” the ability to think and speak in symbolic terms, in metaphors and images, is born of a moment of loss, when early humanity began to conceive of itself as distinct from the world it inhabited. Already in this passage one observes the extent to which Eshleman borrows his terms from William Blake and from psychoanalysis more so than from the staid, responsible, objective terms of prehistoric anthropology. (Significantly, David Lewis-Williams, one of the foremost living prehistorians, argues in his book The Mind in the Cave that symbolic consciousness is in fact essential to the success and survival of our species: it participates in and permits social organization and the division of labor in a more effective, because hierarchical, way than was previously possible.)
Eshleman and his wife Caryl began visiting the caves of the Dordogne in 1974. Resonating with themes and images long established in Eshleman’s work, the galvanizing experience occasioned a shift in the tone and topic of the poet’s corpus: where his previous major collections of verse (Indiana, Altars) focused with often ferocious, even embarrassing, psychological honesty on the poet’s own life, his WASP upbringing, and his education, his writing after the encounter with the caves, while retaining its rootedness in the poet’s inner life, turned more resolutely outward. Juniper Fuse took shape across the volumes of poetry and prose Eshleman published since the late 1970s: Hades in Manganese (1981), Fracture (1983), The Name Encanyoned River (1986), Hotel Cro-Magnon (1989), Antiphonal Swing (1989), Under World Arrest (1994), and From Scratch (1998). Juniper Fuse then is an anthology. It gathers perhaps a third of Eshleman’s poetry and prose on its topic, undeniably the most significant third. The first two parts of Juniper Fuse represent selections from Hades in Manganese and Fracture. The latter parts more radically commingle materials from the later books.
But to say that much of Juniper Fuse has previously appeared in print is misleading on at least four counts. First, Eshleman’s collections of verse are in fact often anthologies of previously published materials. His poems first appear in journals, as broadsides or in chapbooks, before finding their way into larger, more widely distributed collections. “A Cosmogonic Collage” and The Aranea Constellation are two sections of Juniper Fuse that before now have only appeared in minor or small-circulation formats.
Second, each republication occasions a subtle shift in the meaning of a poem or prose piece through its new context. In From Scratch, Eshleman compares and contrasts his process to that of Robert Duncan in Duncan’s “Passages” series (From Scratch 182). For Duncan, the “Passages” poems, published in sections within separate volumes, stood apart from the books in which they appeared. For Eshleman, the writings which comprise Juniper Fuse fit into the books where they made their first appearance and the larger project as well. In this way, the earlier collections each include poems specifically concerned with questions of the Paleolithic imagination as well as other poems which may or may not take up these questions. Each of these collections presents a narrative, however loose, of the author’s life, among other things, in the years of its composition. Juniper Fuse, however, while still charting such a narrative, presents itself as tightly focused on the Paleolithic imagination. Furthermore, Juniper Fuse presents itself as an anthology of both prose and poetry: here, prose pieces that once served to preface or annotate collections of poetry mingle with the poems they once prefaced in an entirely different constellation.
Third, each republication often includes revisions: changes of words or phrases, of lineation, occasionally massive reordering, additions to or subtractions from the text. Some of these revisions are minor; others, obviously, are not. In “Silence Raving,” the first poem in Juniper Fuse, originally published in Hades in Manganese, Eshleman changes, among other things, the phrase “the power/ the Cro-Magnons bequeathed to me, to make an altar of my throat” to “the power/ the Cro-Magnons bequeathed to us: / to make an altar of our throats” (Juniper Fuse 3). In poems concerned with the nature of subjectivity, such shifts from the personal to the universal are enormously significant. (In this particular case, they damage the poem by coming too easily.)
Fourth, Eshleman’s previous collections, generally published through Black Sparrow Press, were rarely and sparingly illustrated. Juniper Fuse, however, is illustrated and the book benefits from it. “Indeterminate, Open” constitutes a poem in the form of notes on a set of photographs and drawings by Monique and Claude Archambeau. The poem in From Scratch did not include the drawings and it reads like a series of captions to absent images. By including the images, Juniper Fuse permits the piece to serve as a demonstration of the primary gesture of the text as a whole: the intermingling of word and image, image and word.
Though Eshleman’s writing has long incorporated prose prefaces and annotations, he regards “Notes on a Visit to Le Tuc d’Audoubert,” originally published in Fracture (1983), as inaugurating a definitive stylistic shift to a pluralistic or hybrid textual “anatomy.” Ostensibly notes taken on a visit to the cave, the mosaic includes photographs and sketches, roughly descriptive and allusive notes, and passages of dense poetic meditation. Eshleman borrows the word “anatomy” from Northrop Frye, who used it to describe William Blake’s “The Marriage of Heaven and Hell,” another collection of poems and prose, of fables, epigrams, and images. For Eshleman, the “term also evokes the writing that Artaud did beginning in 1945: a fusion of genres incorporating letters, poetry, prose, and glossolalia” (254). An anatomy is a text incarnate: a body of many organs and members. Eshleman’s anatomy includes poetry, prose poetry, essays, lectures, notes, dreams, and black-and-white and color images. Forty of the book’s three hundred pages consist of notes and commentary. Like “The Waste Land,” Juniper Fuse is a poem including footnotes, but Eshleman pushes this notion farther, in keeping with Charles Olson’s dictum that one should “leave the roots attached” (Olson 106). Juniper Fuse is a collection of poems but it is also a notebook on the composition of those poems.
Juniper Fuse is a self-proclaimed poet’s book, written to “reclaim the caves […] for poets as geo-mythical sites in which early intimations of what we call ‘muse’ may have been experienced” (xii). The Vézère valley in the Dordogne–where many of these caves are to be found–is a region of France, but it is also a moment in time–the Upper Paleolithic–and a mythic space–Paradise, for Eshleman–all of which can be reclaimed by the poets (see “Cemeteries of Paradise” 101). Eshleman’s travels through and observations of the region form part of his autobiography. His appreciation of the period in time reflects his study of and contributions to prehistoric anthropology. His appeal to myth recalls his vocation as a poet. Paradise, for Eshleman, is a designation for the place first offered by Henry Miller, but it is also a religious sphere of primary concern to William Blake. The poetic tradition informs not only the language but the agenda of Juniper Fuse, a book that marshals the resources of poetic language in its investigation of the Paleolithic imagination and the hidden depths of the human mind. Poetic language, literature, according to Ezra Pound, is “language charged with meaning” or “news that STAYS news” (28, 29). The charge of Eshleman’s poetic language follows from its dense imbrication with complex meanings and associations.
The “fuse” of the title, for example, is first and foremost historical, factual: it refers to the juniper wicks used in Paleolithic lamps found in the caves. The juniper fuse is the wick that provided the light by which prehistoric man painted the caves. Now, for us, the book casts a similar light on the paintings; not the light of creation, but that of a particularly active and engaged mode of interpretation. Eshleman’s primary question is why “such imagery sparked when and where it did” (xi, emphasis added). The spark of the image ignites the fuse. “Image sparks” is Nietzsche’s phrase for lyric poetry in section five of The Birth of Tragedy. The fuse is also the fuse of fusion: the fusion of man and cave wall in the process of engraving and image making; the fusion of poet and cave image casting image sparks, lyric poems. The fuse is also the fuse of a bomb (xi). The fuse is the fuse of fission, of atomic disaster, which haunts these pages: the images cast by the atomic blast at Hiroshima. “When such words fuse,/ they thirst in us, thus do not fuse,/ because we are fission incarnate” (112).
Fusion is the fusion of language in puns. Here again Eshleman borrows his terms from Brown’s Love’s Body. Brown writes: “In puns, ‘two words get on top of each other and become sexual’; in metaphor, two become one” (252). Puns are the essence of symbolic consciousness, and symbolic consciousness is Dionysian consciousness; the erotic sense of reality; the fusion of subject and object via symbolism. This is not to say clarity.
If there must be clarity,
let it be opaque, let the word be
convexcavatious, deep
with distance, a clear
and dense mosaic, desiring
undermining.(Eshleman 19)
Eshleman’s poetry is often a poetics in poetry: a meditation on and demonstration of the workings of the poem as they are at work. His poetic language is often, and often best, a language of puns, of slang, and of neologisms. It is a poetics of force and fracture: a contorted speech of words twisted and turned as Eshleman sifts the “etymological compost” of language (51). In “Winding Windows,” the word “convexcavatious” recalls Sandor Ferenzci’s exaggerated and visionary psychoanalysis wherein every convex surface is a phallus and every concavity a vagina. But it mingles the convex with its opposite through the notion of excavation, and thereby discovers the great theme of the book as a whole: the figure of the “hole that becomes a pole”; the vulva that seems to produce the phallus which Eshleman posits as the “core gesture” and “generator of image-making” (235):
The hole that grows [...] may be one of the most fundamental versions of the logos or story. [...] Increasing in height or depth as the gods or shamanic familiars ascend or dive, the soul's end, or purpose is always beyond our own, a tunnel generating its own light--or crown of flame. It is a hole grounded in both absence and appearance, a convexcavatious abyss. (235-36)
This poetics of force and fracture affiliates Eshleman’s poetic practice with that of a formidable if “minor” strain of twentieth-century writing whose exemplars include Raymond Roussel, the Joyce of Finnegans Wake, Antonin Artaud, Paul Celan, John Cage, Pierre Guyotat, Valère Novarina: writers who, in Novarina’s phrase, chew their words; they crush language, ruminate on its syntactic building blocks, and reveal its hidden histories and futures.
Crawling through Le Tuc d’Audoubert, Eshleman “is stimulated to desire to enter cavities within [him]self where dead men can be heard talking” (72). “I feel,” he writes, “the extent to which I am storied” (92). Juniper Fuse begins, in epigram, with a poem by Paul Celan (in Cid Corman’s translation). Thereafter it borrows its terms and agenda from William Blake, Charles Olson, Hart Crane, César Vallejo, Antonin Artaud, and Aimée Césaire, among others. As a poem including history it must be read in the tradition of Pound, Williams, and Olson.
But the poet here is also among prehistorians: the Abbés Breuil and Glory, Annette Laming, André Leroi-Gourhan, Siegfried Giedion, Max Raphael, Paolo Graziosi, Alexander Marshack, Jean Clottes, Margaret W. Conkey, Paul Bahn, David Lewis Williams, and Richard Leakey (xv). Eshleman’s dialogue with the discipline of prehistory is conducted more overtly than is his often-implicit continuance of the poetic tradition. This dialogue too is odd for its adherence to Blake’s maxim that opposition is the truest form of friendship. Eshleman argues with André Leroi-Gourhan, in particular, over and over again in Juniper Fuse. He writes as a perpetual outsider, even after twenty-five years of research and exploration in the caves; he refuses full participation in the dominant and dominating anthropological discourse on the caves.
Another degree of disciplinary pluralism: the poet among psychologists and cultural theorists. Eshleman supplements the archeologists and anthropologists with reference to C. G. Jung, Sandor Ferenzci, Geza Róheim, Erich Neumann, Mikhail Bakhtin, Weston La Barre, Charles Olson’s Call Me Ishmael, Norman O. Brown, Kenneth Grant, James Hillman, Hans Peter Duerr and Maxine Sheets-Johnstone (xv). Here too is a tradition, this time in cultural theory. It is the countercultural tradition in cultural theory.
Finally, though most importantly perhaps, the poet is among people. Jacques Marsal (1925-1988), for example, was among the children who tumbled into Lascaux in 1940: he never really left. He stayed nearby, leading tours and attending to the cave for the rest of his life. Eshleman celebrates him in “Like Violets, He Said,” a short text of prose and poetry accompanied by the famous photo which documents, in its way, the cave’s discovery. “I’m overwhelmed,” Eshleman observes, “by the difference one person can make in the personality of a place, not via declaration or sheer information, but by being folded in, obliquely, wearing Lascaux, allowing its grace to loom, allowing us, hardly aware of his movements, our own reading through his light” (98). The title of the piece comes from Charles Olson’s line, quoted in Eshleman’s poem: “Men spring up like violets when needed.” Paul Blackburn also appears. The piece is elegiac, moving. For Eshleman, the spirit of a place includes the spirits of those who have passed through it. The piece is metatextual, the stories layered in dense mosaic: Olson and Blackburn taught Eshleman to perceive such spirits, and Marsal became one of them just as Eshleman himself has now, for us.
Juniper Fuse, far more so than the writings of the prehistorians, courses with reference, with story. The central contrast of the text is that between Eshleman’s subjectivity and the layers of reference–to poets, prehistorians, psychologists, and those others who have peopled his experience–through which he experiences not only the caves but the world. The motion of the text is characterized by Eshleman’s attempt to excavate, to get beneath these layers of meaning, reference, or explanation, to sift beneath these presences to what he only experiences as absence, loss, the zero, the hole (26, 235). “Pure loss pours through. I’m home” (100).
Eshleman’s subjectivity, often present in rough physical terms, in-the-minute descriptions of the physical experiences of the caves, grounds the book. His response to the writings of the prehistorians is always to test their maps, their drawings, or their descriptions, finally their theories, against his own experience of the caves. If he corrects any given theory or explanation, as he often does, it is based on personal observation. He offers a careful description of crawling through caves, or of standing in a space that lacks sufficient oxygen, or of his eyes adjusting to the light of the dark. Such observations are denied us by the disciplinary responsibility of the anthropologists, the objective necessity of science. Juniper Fuse offers a phenomenology of the painted caves.
The subject of the book, then, is decidedly Clayton Eshleman. But Eshleman both is and is not alone. A self-proclaimed and perennial amateur before the culturally legitimated authorities–the scientists, the anthropologists–Eshleman nevertheless speaks from the ground of a different authority. Awed and annihilated by the cave imagery that is his concern, he rediscovers himself in the animals and hybrid humanoids pictured therein. “If the figure of the interior leper took me backward, it was also a comment on the present: the rediscovery of my own monstrosity while studying the grotesqueness of hybrid cave image” (48).
For Eshleman, “a single smoking road leads from Indianapolis [where he grew up] to Lascaux” (91). It runs via Auschwitz and Hiroshima. The history of man is a history of horrors.
Faced with so much story, I release my grip
from Whitman's hand, "agonies are one of my changes of
garments"--in the face of Auschwitz?(93)
In tracing the roots of symbolic consciousness, Eshleman has written a book of the dead, an incantation for absent beasts and beings. Odysseus stands in Hades as his tutelary figure (67).
We are thus, in the late twentieth century, witness to the following phantasmagorical and physical spectacle: The animal images in the Ice Age caves are also the ghosts of species wiped out at the beginning of our Holocene epoch; today they "stand in" for the species we are daily eliminating. [...] Such images are primogeneous to the extinction of possibly all animal life. (248)
Eshleman’s postmodernism is that of Charles Olson. In response to the totalizing, exclusionary, hierarchical trend in modernity, he speaks for those who cannot. In Juniper Fuse, he gives voice to the animals and humans, prehistoric or present, who haunt the caves. His celebrated corpus in translation–of César Vallejo, of Aimée Césaire, of Antonin Artaud and others–is but another form of this same project.
Gillian B. Pierce
Department of Foreign Languages
Ashland University
gpierce@ashland.edu
Review of: Jean-François Lyotard, Soundproof Room: Malraux’s Anti-Aesthetics. Trans. David Harvey. Stanford, CA: Stanford UP, 2001. (Originally published in French under the title Chambre Sourde: L’Antiesthétique de Malraux.Paris: Editions Galilée, 1998.)
Soundproof Room, the final completed work by the cultural philosopher Jean-François Lyotard, reads like a crystallization of the essential elements of his 1996 biography of André Malraux, entitled Signed, Malraux (and also translated into English by David Harvey). Soundproof Room is rich in references to that text, but abandons the “junkyard writing” of the earlier work–a style that purportedly “apes” Malraux’s own writing–to return to the dense, poetic style more familiar to Lyotard’s readers.1 Although Signed, Malraux is a narrative of Malraux’s work and the life that is indistinguishable from it (and this from one who famously declared himself suspicious of “grand narratives”), Lyotard creates a new genre he calls “hypobiography,” declaring in effect that postmodern biography will be scenic, much as Malraux’s own work has often been called cinematic for its syncopated rhythms evocative of physical sensations. In Soundproof Room, subtitled “Malraux’s Anti-Aesthetics,” Lyotard clearly strives to elucidate the relationships between Malraux, politics, aesthetics, and Lyotard’s own body of work. The biographical concerns of Signed, Malraux are further condensed into moments or scenes of ontological questioning that beautifully, if stridently, illustrate the central concerns of periodization in art and the fragile status of the individual political or aesthetic gesture that have animated all of Lyotard’s work.
Robert Harvey’s facing-page translation makes it convenient to consult the original French, which is useful for a text that rests so heavily on Lyotard’s previous work on Malraux, and on his own prior writings on aesthetics, notably in The Inhuman. For in positing the work of art as a soundproof room, as an “empty trachea […] in which silence might stir,” Lyotard further develops his fascination for the inhuman in art, for the way in which the work of art bears witness to the unpresentable, the “it happens” of the sublime developed throughout his oeuvre. Malraux as historical individual is subsumed; voice and ego are eclipsed, having gone over to the side of the third person, and out of this death comes an account of the renewal of the rise of the work of art. As Lyotard writes, “man is only that which exceeds the inhuman of artwork” (38).
Malraux is not the first thinker Lyotard has adopted from an earlier period in the service of postmodernism: He is indebted to Kant (in The Differend and Lessons in the Analytic of the Sublime), Freud (in The Libidinal Economy), Diderot, Newmann, Duchamp, and even Rabelais–and yet it would be wrong to accuse him, as some have, of “modernist” tendencies. Postmodernism is a non-periodizing concept for Lyotard, one that arises out of a differend or irreducible heterogeneity, and must be viewed as a critical stance. Language is insufficient to convey an incommunicable content, and the postmodern arises out of this incommensurability. Malraux, in his life and work, repeatedly comes up against precisely this kind of a differend in which death (Lyotard’s La Redite, which Harvey renders as “the Redundant One”) appears as the only possible outlet. Lyotard has always interpreted postmodern politics and thought in terms of this sort of aesthetic formulation, and in Soundproof Room he reduces the biography of Malraux to its aesthetic heart: the quest for the limits of experience and the eclipse of the first person of biography by the annihilating, redundant force of death.
Why should one talk about “anti-aesthetics” in Malraux? Aesthetics refers to the analysis of things perceived by the senses, to material forms, and has further come to connote a response to the beautiful in art or in nature, “taste” deriving from the Kantian sensus communis. But for Lyotard, as for Malraux, art evokes the sublime. There is no community of feeling or of like-minded connoisseurs, no recourse to reassuring forms. In The Inhuman, Lyotard writes, “we find sublime those spectacles which exceed any real presentation of a form” and “these works appear to the public of taste to be ‘monsters, ‘formless’ objects, purely ‘negative’ entities,” deliberately using the Kantian terms for the occasions that provoke the sublime sentiment (113, 125). An anti-aesthetics, then, would refer to the negative presentation of the sublime; that is, one can present merely that there is an immaterial absolute that can be thought beyond material representation. Throughout Soundproof Room, Lyotard will use the term “stridency” to refer to this monstrous apparition beyond the harmony of accepted forms, and he sees throughout Malraux’s life and work (as the two become indistinguishable, one “signing” the other) the attempt to bear witness to this unpresentable content.
Soundproof Room follows no linear argument and develops instead according to the elaboration of a concept or theme in each chapter–for example, “Lost Voice,” “Scene,” “War,” “Stridency,” and “Throat”–just as Malraux himself rejected chronology in favor of the development of “scenes” in his writing. The first chapter, “To End, To Begin,” addresses precisely this question of linear development. Ending for Lyotard always implies continuation; the “break” of the end always presupposes the thinking of an “after,” a “post” (leading him to state that “modernity is constitutionally and ceaselessly pregnant with its postmodernity” [Inhuman 25]). In this proposition of the “post” Lyotard sees two heterogeneous levels: “the one on which things take place, and the one on which they are recounted” (4). In the words of Malraux’s Lazarus, “one has no biography except for others” (42). The modern, with its impulsion to exceed itself, upsets the principle of this gap to privilege the present, and for this precarious present moment Lyotard introduces the idea of “voice,” thereby summarizing the history of twentieth-century politics:
The voice is incarnated and promises ultimate fulfillment through redemption from the pain of enduring. Such is the Christic mystery elaborated by Saul of Tarsus and Augustine and propagated by the West across two millennia of Western thought and practice. The diverse modernities that follow this initial move repeat the incredible gesture: Here is my body, says the voice, here and now. [...] In the American and French Declarations, the same ostentation: Here we are, free peoples. And in the Bolshevik Revolution: Power to the Worker's Councils (Soviets), right away and here. (6)
Against the immediacy of the voice, Lyotard (with Malraux) locates the redundant and inexorable motion of history that dooms each of these narratives (or meta-narratives) to the pourrisoir or “rotting pit” of history. The voice is extinguished repeatedly and becomes inaudible, as “the West is condemned to this obscenity of repeating the gesture of beginning” (10).
Lyotard situates Malraux’s work within the tradition of “writing at the limit of writing” (10) that includes Céline, Bataille, Artaud, and Camus:
To append Malraux's oeuvre to this group is what I intend to do here. Despite some compositional shortcomings, a tendency toward the epic, a public speaker's eloquence--all of which caused it to be underrated--his work plunged no less than the others into the ontological nausea, was no less anxious to understand and to show how the miracle of artworks can arise. (10-12)
In Signed, Malraux Lyotard fully demonstrates the theme of decay in Malraux’s life and work, in which death is not an end, but an endless recurrence of the same (l’éternelle redite). For in that work Lyotard concludes that the relationship between the living body (the bios) and the writing (the graph) are intertwined in such a way that Malraux’s life is “written” for his oeuvre, an oeuvre that draws so much from it. And life has no meaning for Malraux other than constant contact with death, which he defines in turn as a moment of life which can be metamorphosed into an artwork. This moment of creation is privileged by both Lyotard and Malraux.
In a lengthy passage from Malraux’s The Royal Way, Lyotard demonstrates the continuity of the cycle of decay and regeneration in the oneness of the Khmer forest:
Claude [...] had given up trying to distinguish living beings from their setting, life that moves from life that oozes; some unknown power assimilated the trees with the fungoid growths upon them, and quickened the restless movements of all the rudimentary creatures darting to and fro upon the soil like march-scum amid the steaming vegetation of a planet in the making. Here what act of man had any meaning, what human will could conserve its staying power? Here everything frayed out, grew soft and flabby, assimilated itself with its surroundings [...]. (14)
This moment of ontological doubt in fact has its analogue in Lyotard’s thinking on the sublime, and his debt to Kant becomes clear. For out of the dissolution of the self and its assimilation into the surrounding landscape comes the reassertion of being through language. As Lyotard writes, “in the ostensibly mute swamp where everything gets engulfed, larvae stagnate by the billions, fomenting renewal. Plants, animals, humans, cultures: everything will begin again. Plots resume” (12).
A central question of Lyotard’s book, then, concerns the state of first-person subjectivity in the face of death and so many “isms,” both political and artistic, doomed to decline, sameness, and assimilation. “What ‘I’ would still dare to introduce itself as master of narrative when the promise of final freedom that it proffers instantly runs aground on the inextricable and restrictive perversity of the language in which it is formulated?” (32) Malraux is acutely aware of the precariousness of the subjective voice, as evidenced by his interest in Jewish history and the “recounting of the forgotten voice” (26). Further, Lyotard sees a correspondence between Malraux’s psychology of art and the validity bestowed upon artworks and “this unforgetting of forgetting and listening to the inaudible whose is paradox is sustained in the Jewish tradition” (28). Malraux’s theory of art, his “anti-aesthetic,” may therefore be summed up by his realization that the artwork simply is without reference to a voice, an author, a reader, or a hero. It is authorized by no voice, and aims at no end.
Art, for Malraux as for Lyotard, takes on the status of event, a birth outside of narrative in the face of the disappearance of the ego, at the very moment when it is no longer capable of “hearing its own voice” (36). The subjective element (ego) dissipates, making way for an absolute writing. At this moment “a ‘there, now’ oblivious to history slices the interminable ebb and flow with the thinnest of wires” (38). In this sense, the artwork means nothing, but is rather a singular arrangement of its constituent elements. It does not serve as self-expression or expose the subjectivity of its author, hence its “inhuman” stature. As Lyotard writes, “the artwork breaks with convention, with the commonplace, with the flow. It is obtained through a conscious and conscientious labor that relentlessly endeavors to lay bare the ego. Through art the human bends its will to strive toward this inhuman that sometimes forces it wide open” (50).
What Lyotard admires in Malraux is his repeated gesture to transform the “staged idleness” of Europe in the 1920’s into an artwork, to take the raw material of life and impose on it a style. For it is the act of metamorphosis or rebellion that is valuable for Lyotard/Malraux more than the result of any such act. Human endeavors are doomed to redundancy at the hands of history, but something in the artwork resists this motion; the artist “plants his claw right into the event, and signs it” (64). The artwork thus produced is “reality gashed, short-circuited at a given moment on itself, a wounded mouth gaping over the void” (64). Following the logic of simulation, by substituting another world for the paucity of reality the work of art in fact forces the real world to confess that it is an illusion, an idea that Lyotard elaborates with respect to Diderot’s Salons in an earlier essay. For Lyotard, the act of metamorphosis (or the act of rebellion on the political plane) is essential as an assertion of being, whether or not it is doomed to failure. The gesture is born of nothing (“idleness,” or “the void,” to use two other of Lyotard’s formulations), and makes war with this nothingness; as such it is an indispensable affirmation of being or presence.
The metaphor of war is central to Malraux’s life as well as to his art. Not only is life a continual war with death, but artistic creation is a war with nothingness. Lyotard contends that wars and revolutions are opportunities for Malraux to come to terms with the limits of experience and to demonstrate that “we die and write for nothing” (66). And writing does entail a kind of death, that is to say the eclipse of the ego in favor of a different “I”: the monstrous “I without a self.” For this reason, Lyotard contends that “war is not the confrontation one thinks it is” and the battlefield is not a place so much as an internal struggle between ego (le moi) and the “I” of writing (le je d’écriture) (68). The image recalls Baudelaire’s image of the artist as escrimeur in “The Painter of Modern Life,” his essay on Constantin Guys: “c’est un moi insatiable du non-moi” (552). This same impulse causes Lyotard to ask, in his introduction to The Inhuman, “what if human beings […] were constrained into, becoming inhuman?” (2). War, indeed, is a differend.
The thesis of the “I-without a self” in Malraux and throughout Soundproof Room refers to the dimension of a self that is not within life–one might say the inhuman. According to Lyotard, “it evokes a closure, a deafness, but also the insistence of an anguish that biographical time, which resists it, does not sweep away in its flow” (86). Having written extensively about visual artists and art throughout his lifetime (Duchamp, Monory, Adami, Newmann), Lyotard nonetheless introduces an aural metaphor to describe this anguish: “painting is not for seeing,” writes Lyotard; “it demands this listening: the eye listens to something beyond the harmonious music of the visible” (100). This “something” is what Lyotard calls stridency, a sound lacking bearing and restraint through which “the unheard-of is exhibited, in a flash, at the threshold of the audible.” (76).
We don’t hear ourselves through our ears, according to Malraux, but rather through the throat. The figure of “hearing through the throat” also leads Malraux to a figure for communion, since “one hears that other whom one loves, if one loves him like a brother, with one’s throat” (86). For Lyotard, this is the central intuition of Malraux’s theory of aesthetic creation as elaborated in his numerous essays on the psychology of art. This is the essence of Malraux’s anti-aesthetics, in which what is left of subjects communes through what cannot be shared–something like the return to the ineffable in art, a response to the work of art as event or happening in all its singularity. Art is thus an expression of stridency, the unheard-of, a violent act of giving form to the formless, with all of its parallels in the Kantian sublime.
The Kantian sublime resists the sensus communis and the “good taste” of the beautiful, but Lyotard’s formulation of the “it happens” of aesthetic experience seems to offer the hope of communion, albeit of a limited sort: “just as we are lovers or brothers through fusion of airtight throats, the artwork places absolute solitudes in communion with each other and with the stridulation of the cosmos” (102). And yet there is no hope for mediation or dialogue between or among these solitary entities. “Singularities fuse only to the extent that they cannot exchange or hear each other” (102). The outer form of the work, its facies is a mere simulation, or dissimulation; the “soundproof room” of its empty inside “allows the mask to pick up the truth–nothingness–in the form of strident apparitions” (104).
In the final chapter of Signed, Malraux Lyotard evokes Malraux’s concept of a museum without walls, a “place of the mind” impossible to visit that rather inhabits us (304). For Lyotard, as for Malraux, great works of art are sublime epiphanies, “brush strokes of the absolute” (303). A precarious museum that lives within, apart from the corrupting narrative of art history, Malraux’s gallery exists in limbo, in this zone of the ineffable. The museum without walls represents what Lyotard calls “a perpetual disturbance”; no institution can be established based upon it. Art offers the promise of escape (rather than escape itself), and an intimation of truth as stridency.
The question of biography and the dynamic by which a body of work can “sign” a life and vice versa surface at the end of the philosopher’s life in Signed, Malraux and Soundproof Room. The idea of an inhuman art that regenerates beyond the grave is therefore all the more pressing. Lyotard’s works have asked the most provocative questions of postmodern theory: From “What is the Postmodern?” to “Can Thought Go on Without a Body?,” Lyotard persistently returns to questions of presence and the status of the human, often expressed in terms of an irreconcilable differend. Soundproof Room is an important culmination of this body of writing and necessary reading for theorists of the postmodern in art and politics.
1. Robert Harvey has commented on the heterogeneity of Lyotard’s writing, and thus characterized the style of Signed, Malraux, following Lyotard’s own characterization of Malraux; see Harvey 99.
Robert Payne
School of Humanities
University of Western Sydney
r.j.payne@uws.edu.au
In April 2002, the Supreme Court of the United States handed down its ruling of Ashcroft v. Free Speech Coalition, a case in which a certain semantic specificity seemed ultimately to take precedence over the moral and emotional imperatives that propelled the central argument of the petitioner. The U.S. government (nominally represented by Attorney-General Ashcroft) was seeking to overturn a Court of Appeals ruling against the constitutionality of its Child Pornography Prevention Act (1996), which had greatly–through a significant conceptual leap–expanded the category of what would count as child pornography. As cited in the Supreme Court ruling, the bill (CPPA) now prohibited not only pornographic images produced using actual children, but also “any visual depiction” that “is, or appears to be, of a minor engaging in sexually explicit conduct,” as well as any sexually explicit image that is “advertised, promoted, presented, described, or distributed in such a manner that conveys the impression” that it depicts a minor engaging in sexually explicit conduct (1).
These qualifying phrases (which I have emphasized), designed to make child-harming pornography harder to produce and distribute, opened the frame of prohibition to extremely nebulous territory. In so doing, they curiously destabilized a conventional application of visual epistemology: one based on the evidentiary function of photographic and video images, of the kind frequently upheld in legal contexts. A distinction between the actual and the virtual was inscribed in the bill and instantaneously erased. The government’s petition to the Supreme Court describes Congress’s findings that it is possible to produce pornographic images of “what appear to be” children “that are virtually indistinguishable to the unsuspecting viewer from unretouched photographic images of actual children” (4). In their zeal to speak for and to protect the unnamed and “unsuspecting” viewer, the legislators of the CPPA betrayed their own oversuspecting unwillingness to tell actual and virtual children apart, and transposed this into both an assumed inability on the part of their constituents at large, and a projected criminal exploitation of the potential representational ambivalence that is permitted by new media technology.
In ruling against the government’s petition, the opinion of the Supreme Court delivered by Justice Kennedy questions the logic of the CPPA’s definitional expansion, noting that the production of virtual child pornography can scarcely harm children if none are involved in the process. It is here that the government’s position makes a further leap of presumption, now explicitly naming its legislative target and the kinds of harm that might be inflicted by pornographic images of “what appear to be” children. In its Congressional Findings, supplementary to the CPPA, the government claims that
child pornography is often used as part of a method of seducing other children into sexual activity; a child who is reluctant to engage in sexual activity with an adult, or to pose for sexually explicit photographs, can sometimes be convinced by viewing depictions of other children "having fun" participating in such activity
and furthermore that
child pornography is often used by pedophiles and child sexual abusers to stimulate and whet their own sexual appetites, and as a model for sexual acting out with children; such use of child pornography can desensitize the viewer to the pathology of sexual abuse or exploitation of children, so that it can become acceptable to and even preferred by the viewer (n.3, 4).
One wonders whether “the viewer” in question here is the same “unsuspecting viewer” to be protected from the burden of virtual indistinguishability, and by extension whether members of Congress who were initially able to tell actual children from virtual (if only then to deny the distinction) were themselves subject to the insidious desensitization of which they warn. The wording of the findings would seem to demarcate “pedophiles and child sexual abusers” as a discrete unit of pathological individuals, one which maintains some exclusivity over such “use of child pornography.” If, however, the material in question is able to “desensitize” its viewer, and if such images are ineffably capable of transmuting appetite into conduct and also of “seducing other children into sexual activity,” might such slippages be as logically applicable to determining who is susceptible? In other words, if such material is as contagiously effectual as these findings imply, why are only “pedophiles and child sexual abusers” incriminated? The possibility of desensitized viewing is opened to those for whom child pornography has not yet “become acceptable […] and even preferred,” where this is apparently a desire that might be learned by effectively anyone who comes into contact with the material.
Also in 1996, Congress passed a similarly censorious legislative act, framed more specifically around prohibiting the provision to minors of “indecent” material on the Internet. The Communications Decency Act (CDA) sought to incriminate anyone who “knowingly”
initiates the transmission of [...] any comment, request, suggestion, proposal, image, or other communication which is obscene or indecent, knowing that the recipient of the communication is under 18 years of age (§223(a)(1)(B)(ii))
as well as sending to a minor via “interactive computer service”
any comment, request, suggestion, proposal, image, or other communication that, in context, depicts or describes, in terms patently offensive as measured by contemporary community standards, sexual or excretory activities or organs. (§223(d)(1)(B)
The act was successfully challenged in a district court by the American Civil Liberties Union, and this decision was later appealed and affirmed in the Supreme Court in Reno v. ACLU (1997). That court ruled the act unconstitutional on the grounds that the above provisions inhibited free speech. Where the constitutional legalities of this bill were informed by precedent cases that had defined current understandings of “obscene” and “indecent” and the relationship of these terms to freedom of speech, the more significant elements for my reading are the cultural implications that derive from the terms “transmission” and “communication.” I am suggesting these terms render more explicit an anxiety about the contagious effects of “patently offensive” material, especially when that material describes a corporeality centering on the contentious zones of “sexual or excretory” organs. As Judith Butler argues in Gender Trouble, these anatomical parts and their function as orifices of sexual and excretory activity locate points of weakness in the fictional seamlessness of the body as a discrete subject, the maintenance of which serves the political imperatives of a larger social body (14ff).
The open textuality of the Internet as a literal web of image and information availability suggests fertile conditions for a promiscuity that incites the spread of moral panic. Particularly, as the above cases demonstrate, the Internet provides a freedom deemed too dangerous in proximity–the proximity of transmissible contact–to society’s putatively vulnerable populations. In these specific ways, the charge of “knowingly” transmitting obscene material implicitly tropes the vindictive homophobia inherent to certain AIDS panics: namely, that HIV-positive gay men might target “the general population” for deliberate infection; or, relatedly, that HIV transmission establishes categories of innocent reception and, therefore, of guilty perpetration (see Watney; Sontag).
That Ashcroft v. Free Speech Coalition and Reno v. ACLU were decided according to legal precedents around speech, and its protection under constitutional amendment, offers further instances of what Butler (in her later work Excitable Speech) terms the law’s “catachrestic extensions of ordinary understandings of speech” (72). Butler’s context is the performativity of speech into action, and she discusses examples of the transitive relations between the two: where an act (placing a burning cross on an African American family’s front lawn) may be legally protected as speech, or where utterance (members of the U.S. military announcing their homosexual identity) may be construed to be and punished as conduct. The cases she explores hinge on the arbitrary placement of limits to self-expression, and the political negotiations around the purported freedom thereof. According to her sustained analysis of the U.S. government’s policy on gays in the military, in which the verbal self-expression of homosexual identity becomes a punishable offense, the word “homosexual” becomes a medium of contagion, “whereby to hear the utterance is to ‘contract’ the sexuality to which it refers” (113). It is this conceit of contagion, in which homosexuality is “figured implicitly on the model of AIDS,” that allows Butler to elaborate meanings of “communication”: the utterance of speech–of a particular word laden with contagious cultural implications–is received as having communicated “along the lines of a disease” (110).
The concept of moral panic was elaborated by Stanley Cohen in this now-famous opening passage to his 1972 study of “deviant” youth culture and conflict in Britain:
Societies appear to be subject, every now and then, to periods of moral panic. A condition, episode, person or group of persons emerges to become defined as a threat to societal values and interests; its nature is presented in a stylized and stereotypical fashion by the mass media; the moral barricades are manned by editors, bishops, politicians and other right-thinking people. (9)
Where Cohen highlights the role of the mass media in “defining and shaping social problems” in such a way as to generate “concern, anxiety, indignation or panic,” I am concerned to identify more complexity in the role of mass media in the contemporary context: as the site of the threat itself, where media representations are regarded to be as dangerous as that which, previously and concurrently, the media merely reported to be dangerous (17). A central feature of moral panic in this context is that its own defining dynamic echoes that which provokes its outrage. Panic spreads in proportion to the epidemic social ills whose momentum and dispersal it fears. Curiously, while in the legislation I have discussed speech is figured as the performance of dangerous acts, these laws are themselves prohibitions of speech by acts of Congress. Indeed, the name Congress might be said to perform the very same communicative, infectious dynamic that its acts wanted to prohibit.
For Simon Watney, writing of media representations of AIDS in the 1980s, moral panic theories fall short in that they are “always obliged in the final instance to refer and contrast ‘representation’ to the arbitration of ‘the real’,” overlooking the workings of ideology “within all representational systems” (41-2). In other words, an oppositional politics of dismissing the ideologically panicked inaccuracies or misrepresentations of a verifiably “real” situation (such as an overrepresentational link between AIDS and homosexuality) must still recognize that this position of dismissal is no less discursively constructed and dependent upon its own biased representations. Where media representation is the source of moral alarm (Internet obscenity, virtual child pornography) as well a site for the sounding of this alarm, the very nature of representation becomes ever more contentious. As Watney reminds us, representation locates a “permanent ideological struggle over the meaning of signs. A particular ‘moral panic’ merely marks the site of the current front-line in such struggles” (42).
In the panic I have been discussing, it is the particular kind of media representation that lends itself to an increased struggle for meaning, precisely as conventional holds on “the real” fall away. The censorious legislative attempts of both the CPPA and the CDA constitute anxious responses to the disappearance of the real into the virtual, a terrain in which existing legal sanctions (as the Supreme Court affirmed) fail to apprehend the representational relations that are ruptured and renewed in digital and online technologies. The specific virtualities named by Congress’s acts of censorship are recent technological developments: digital enhancement, alteration, or fabrication of images, and the Internet’s networks of teleconnectivity in which identities as well as images may be subject to enhancement, alteration, or fabrication. Concrete framings of law are clearly challenged by the inherent immateriality of these new modes of representation.
The concept of virtuality itself is not exclusive to the late twentieth century and the postmodern cultural frame as innovations such as virtual reality might have us believe. New media parlance has appropriated the word “virtual” as a prefix, akin to “cyber” or “hyper,” denoting the new ontologies of digital experience. Margaret Morse discusses virtuality as “the present subjunctive mode of a fictively shared present,” a definition which might encompass, as Morse outlines, the collective and yet individuating address offered by radio and television, or even less technologically advanced forms of interaction:
Cultural forms from television graphics and shopping malls to the apparatus of virtual reality, as well as practices from driving to conducting a war to making art employ various forms of engagement to construct a virtual relationship between subjects in a here-and-now. (4)
Virtual relationships exist between reader and fictional character, spectator and film or theater character; between shoppers in the fictional enclosure of a mall, tourists mediating their presence at a tourist attraction, and computer users communicating in an online chatroom. Internet users worldwide are engaged in a shared fiction, built around a joint practice that resembles the common experience of TV viewing. Even on a basic level, the computer screen deliberately remodels the design and function of the TV screen and relies to some extent upon our familiarity with these features. The virtuality of the Internet, however, lies more fully in the fictions of connectivity that its networking function allows: the various forms of physical and interpersonal telepresence promised to anyone who gains access to its web. The Internet creates the ability to achieve virtual contact with virtually any person, image, or information where optical and aural contact stand in for the tangible, which cannot cross (but can equally pertain to) the mediating apparatus. In this sense, it brings together and capitalizes on other virtualities (including tourism, television, shopping malls) with a much greater technological capacity and a much increased aptitude for the elaboration of its fictional ontologies.
In what ways might these notions of the virtual imply the viral? How are virtual relationships, which theoretically do not require actual contact or proximity between subjects, deemed to be viral relationships in which dangerous or unhealthy matter might be communicated? The textuality of the Internet permits anxieties of authentic subjectivity to surface, where the coherence of the individual subject and the body to which it is believed intrinsic are superseded by relationality: the network of possibilities in which the subject might find multiple connection. This form of interaction marks not the loss of subjectivity but the appearance and reproduction of new, posthuman, noncorporeal subjectivities that can, nonetheless, be launched from the corporeality of computer users who might only be connecting, in actuality, with their interface. As several scholars including Sherry Turkle have noted of their own interface connections, the relationship between computer user and the apparatus itself should not be overlooked. Emotional and physical responses to the apparatus, attached to which users may frequently spend many hours a day, constitute moments of actual, corporeal tangibility that not only shadow but precede any instances of virtual connection within the cyberspatial network.
In the rest of this essay, I will focus on a mode of constructing online identity that, while ostensibly received by users through a relationship of telepresence, significantly foregrounds its own mediating apparatus. Where personal webcams intend to engage the ontology of transparent surveillance available through user screens, I will suggest that in effect they offer a representation of life (after Turkle) very much on the screen.
Personal webcams are a genre of Internet sites devoted to the broadcasting of live, digital video images, captured by a web camera itself, from inside private homes and workplaces. Such sites, which are also known as “homecams,” “livecams,” “girlcams,” “gaycams” and so on, have exploded in number and popularity since the late 1990s, partly for their ease of operation: the operator need merely attach a relatively inexpensive webcam to his or her personal computer and, having met specific hardware and software requirements, upload its images on to the Internet. When images appear on viewer screens, they are usually still and will “refresh” (update) with a regularity that varies from site to site–generally within a range of once every 30 seconds to once every 15 minutes. Few sites have an increased capacity to provide “streaming” images, like video. The formal defining features of personal webcams are liveness and constancy, creating the effect of an ongoing and indiscriminate visual record of everything taking place within the camera’s field of visibility while it takes place. If not for physical distance, we understand, the viewer could be overcoming barriers of privacy to witness everything taking place firsthand.
Unlike the significant raft of outdoor webcams (whose framing of scenic or otherwise notable sites provides universalized views of nothingness), domestic webcams offer at a basic level the conceptual titillation of access to private space, and an apparently uncomplicated fulfillment of peepshow voyeurism. Numerous webcam sites capitalize on this specific market potential, some allowing viewers to pay for increasing levels of access to variously sexualized or pornographic displays. Other similar sites offer the viewer an interactive role in requesting the details of such displays: a kind of sexual “telerobotics” that conflates the performativity of computer command with sexual command.1 Many noninteractive webcams feature generic disclaimers about sexual content, as a counterpoint to acknowledging incidental nudity or sex. The now-defunct Sean Patrick Live! (formerly www.seanpatricklive.com), the webcam of a young gay Washington D.C. man, featured a common version: “There is no planned nudity or ‘shows’. However, as this is a candid view into another persons life, it is not intended for children [sic].” Interestingly, Williams’s appearances on cam were frequently nude, and his site’s selective archive of previous cam shots (also available for purchase) contained a high proportion of nudity and some sexual activity. The cam shot, in its commodifiable format, here converges with the pornographic “cum shot” or “money shot” (Williams). The archive is a display of highlights to advertise what was only rarely visible, and would not necessarily be again.
Jennifer Ringley, a pioneer of personal webcams through her site JenniCam, continued to display herself on camera for over seven years, “not because I want to be watched,” she wrote on her site, “but because I simply don’t mind being watched” (<www.jennicam.org>).2 Her rationale addresses a common anecdotal belief that webcams are borne necessarily of simple exhibitionism, and by extension that the basis of self-display is sexual exchange. Visitors to JenniCam were greeted with two viewer category options: member or guest access, where members were required to pay a subscription fee for images that refreshed more frequently (every minute rather than every 15 minutes). Membership also afforded access to a fuller archive of previous JenniCam image galleries, whereas guests could only view a selection that the site nonetheless called a “pretty comprehensive overview.” Notions of member and guest access encapsulate the entirely ambiguous relation between publicity and privacy that the Internet inheres. Member and guest status both connote a minimum of invitation and discrimination, a limited accessibility that the promiscuous nature of Internet browsing denies in advance. JenniCam‘s constancy of access and complete lack of visitor discrimination subverted any attempt at exclusivity that notions of membership, and even access to private space, might hope to offer. The extra level of access afforded members compounded the site’s knotting of privacy and publicity: while members were permitted the privilege of increased privacy, or access to 14 images per 15 minutes that remain private to others, what was actually offered to members was an increased unveiling or publication of private space. More of the private equates with more of the public. Any seeming opportunity to attain proximity to Ringley through the financially driven priority access on which her site literally traded needed to be content with her simulation projected on that which separated her from us. JenniCam‘s seduction into increased privacy encouraged viewers to overcome the surveillance apparatus–to look through the obstacle of the screen–but only by focusing on the textuality of this very apparatus and the finite potential that it offered.
In an article purportedly analyzing the post-feminist implications of the increased number of young women and teenage girls operating personal webcams, Susan Hopkins arrives at some ideological difficulty absorbing the practice among these “Camgirls” of posting “wish lists” on their sites. As a form of online gift registry, often linked to sites such as the Internet-based bookseller Amazon.com, the posting of wish lists is a phenomenon not exclusive to webcam operators or even young female webcam operators. For Hopkins, wishlists are “the most controversial feature” of camgirl sites, whose operators “encourage their fans to buy them books, CDs and other gifts.” Despite warning against generalizing about the vast range of these sites, Hopkins goes on to claim that it is “no surprise that the most attractive Camgirls–with exhibitionist tendencies–tend to receive the most gifts.” Aside from the simplifying assumption that webcams are necessarily exhibitionist–manifesting what she calls “the urge to be on camera 24 hours a day”–there is little understanding in Hopkins’s observation of the pragmatic utility of the wishlist. Rather, she focuses on an unsubstantiated dynamic of transactional expectation, of some moral concern, which she considers to be “virtual prostitution.”
The term “virtual” here interfaces two connected meanings: the current synonymity with “online” I have already mentioned, connoting a digital or specifically Internet-based status; but also a more general sense of adequate approximation, the tantamount. “Virtual prostitution” stands as a brisk conclusion, then, to Hopkins’s own virtual analysis, which discerns and then appears to ignore that online relations–not to mention post-feminism–discourage being described in oppositional binaries:
Men have been exploiting and objectifying women in cyberspace for years. What's new is that the Camgirls have taken control of this process--and cut out the middleman. So the line between victim and perpetrator is blurred. These young women offer only their image, while lonely (typically male) spectators send fan mail, gifts and cash "donations." Well might we then ask, who is exploiting whom?
In a similarly pitched article in online magazine Salon (which Hopkins refers to), Katharine Mieszkowski attempts vernacular detachment to disguise her suspicious unease, suggesting webcam-based wishlists as “an online beg-fest that makes it easy to take candy from strangers on the Internet.”3 While being sure to deny the false representation of the Internet as “one big cesspool of pedophiles and pervs searching for unsuspecting and underage kids to prey upon,” Mieszkowski nonetheless finds this profile hard to ignore, presuming to universalize what is merely her own distaste: that “the spectacle of teenagers displaying themselves online in exchange for material favors is something that could make anyone a little queasy.” Mieszkowski shares Hopkins’s eventual, conceptual approval that camgirl sites, and their posting of wishlists, represent an empowering set of self-determining practices for young women. It is their contextual ambiguity that remains of inexplicit concern to her, however. She argues that “the Web has a way of making even the most straightforward picture of a 14-year-old caught on her webcam into a pornographic image,” a claim that appears to refer to the practice of various other websites of archiving a mixture of camgirl shots with unrelated pornography, and perhaps to the potential for digital alteration of images.
The anxiety these writers share seems to derive less from a view of webcams as morally suspect or of wishlists as an incitement to predation than from vaguer but deeper insecurities of unknowing that are inherent in these media. Both articles operate, albeit with considerably less rhetorical outrage, on a similar conceptual plane to the semantic and legislative flounderings of Congress’s attempts to criminalize what was, by its own logic, entirely imprecise and perhaps even unrecognizable. Ambivalent charges of “virtual prostitution” and of the susceptibility to exploitation of images amidst the Internet’s virtuality of relations point to the failings, for these writers, of conventional epistemology and the insidious treachery of telepistemology. To reiterate Morse’s definition, virtuality operates in a “subjunctive” mode, implying a grammar of conditional, hypothetical, or contingent relations to a predominant ontology. That which is subject to this mode (uncertain relations between camgirls and their fans; images that “appear to be” of children engaging in sex acts) refuses to make its status known, or even knowable, forcing a continuous hedging of bets. The virtual occupies, then, the indefinable and liminal space on the threshold between known and unknown, knowing and unknowing. The disquiet that preoccupies the above accounts of virtuality focuses, I propose, on the presumed and inexact performativity of the virtual; the failure of the threshold of knowing to contain the flow of the unknowable. At the same time, it is this very imprecision that renders the virtual so compelling.
In a discussion of her acquiescence to the “holding power” of personal computers, Sherry Turkle notes it is “striking that the word ‘user’ is associated mainly with computers and drugs” (30). The trope of addiction that she acknowledges would figure computer use as an everyday dependency or habit. Turkle prefers to articulate her own use in terms of “seduction” rather than the “cliché of addiction,” and locates her attraction in the “possibilities of ‘conversation’ among the multiple windows on my screen and the way an instantly responsive machine allays my anxieties about perfection” (30). A sense of relationality with her computer seduces Turkle, and not the machine’s external agency, like that of a drug acting upon her. What she shares, then, is the virtuality of fictional presence. And in the fact that seduction operates at least initially on the level of appearances, the virtuality that seduces Turkle is (as she affirms) that between herself and the interface, and not between herself and what this seductive surface claims to disclose. For Jean Baudrillard, seduction is that which challenges the order of production; as a strategy of pure surfaces, it battles our cultural impetus “to produce meaning, to make the world signify, to render it visible” (63). Seduction is complicit in the fabrication of the fulfillment of its own goal: it champions the attraction of a surface that promises and ultimately outshines a cache of meaning beneath.
In that the personal webcam is formally structured by a continuous visual unfurling, it resembles a kind of striptease: the very topos of seduction whose narrative at once manufactures a secret of invisibility and continuously reproduces its own narrative process toward this goal. The webcam more closely approaches Baudrillard’s notion of seduction in that its seductive effectuality is to deny the teleology of the striptease narrative. The webcam’s resolute and noninteractive performance of everydayness perverts this teleology entirely by failing even to fabricate a secret of invisibility. Rather, it enacts a counternarrative of unlayering and relayering, a continual promise and denial of fulfillment. Paradoxically, this counternarrative is based on the narrative of temporal routine; and in that the mechanical process of image refreshment constitutes, by technological default, only an approximation of the moving image of film or video, we read the images as a narrative sequence. Just as the continued use of a drug of dependency gradually fails to provide the satisfaction inherent in its initial seductiveness, the personal webcam may recreate an analogous pattern of habituation. Seducing the user by the interface’s promise of access to a deeper level of fulfillment–beneath the surface, through the window–the webcam encourages habitual viewing by appearing with every new image to come closer to spectatorial satisfaction but simultaneously deferring to the potential of the next image.
But how satisfying can the seduction of constant deferral be? The webcam frame need not and frequently does not contain any evidence of its subject. Hours may pass in which the camera captures an empty room. And even if its operator does appear in the frame, she may not be doing anything more “performative” than sleeping, possibly turning over in bed every now and again. Given that these hours constitute a significant proportion of available viewing, why do we still bother to watch? Moreover, if the seduction of the webcam interface is that it promises to disclose a kernel of identity, in a regulated and iterative process, are we really coming closer with each image to gaining insight into webcam operators’ lives and identity? Are we really seeing through the screen?
In their use of the transparent window device, webcams most obviously demonstrate their lineal connection to television, and especially to what Jane Feuer calls “the ontological glory of [that] medium” (15). Television relies partly upon a perceptive agreement to the transparency of its screen, where the screen is merely a frame through which the viewer is able to see events that are, ideally, taking place instantaneously. Rather than exploiting a viewer’s naïveté, according to Morse, the transparency effect of television entails viewers’ “willing collusion in rituals and conventions” that comprise the televisual experience: a process of disavowal of what may defy logic or fact (18). Viewers agree to suspend disbelief in the unknowable virtuality of television’s liveness and its direct mode of address to them: to incorporate the televisual interface’s imposition of various intermediary devices, such as the graphics and multiple viewing frames.
Raised on television, Internet users approach the webcam frame with the same split belief system. The webcam’s interface both encourages and discourages the transparency effect of its post-televisual surveillance function. Arguing that panoptic societies manufacture the illusion of privacy and secrets as accessible realities behind screens of surveillance, William Bogard questions the conceptual validity of disclosure in telematic societies. “There, if we can still speak about the secret at all,” he writes, “it is only in relation to a private space, a private person, that has been absorbed into the screen itself” (126). The personal webcam’s hyperreal body is not so much beyond or behind the screen as on the screen. The screen defines and sustains it. In Bogard’s terms, webcams simulate the surveillance common to earlier screen forms, such as closed circuit TV. Where surveillance unmasks the presence of the real, Bogard argues, simulation masks its absence. The surveillance apparatus attempts to render the mediating surface of the screen transparent; simulation dissolves the surface as a medium of appearances to provide immediacy, not to the real but to the hyperreal (19-21). The seductive impetus of telepresence in this technology–to achieve mutual proximity with a remote body or location–becomes irrelevant in that the remote bodies of webcam operators are immutable. Rather, simulated versions of their authentic identity are all that is available to viewers, and these exist solely on the interface that claims to make visible their reality.
The interface and its various formal features, however, remain constantly present and tangible to the viewer. When Turkle writes that we have “learned to take things at interface value” (23), she is drawing an explicit link between users’ increasing comfort with the multiple-windowed interface of current computer technology and a broader cultural shift toward the acceptance of simulation and away from the epistemological impetus of transparency. “We are increasingly accustomed to navigating screen simulations,” she claims, and this is part of a reduced “modernist desire to see beneath the surface into the mechanics of the operating system” (41-2). The ongoing popularity of personal webcams attests to the continuance of a not insignificant desire in our culture to see through various screens of interpersonal separation. My argument, however, shares Turkle’s belief in interface seduction: there is a major and even defining sense of tactility to webcam use, based not simply on the thrill of technological innovation but also on the seamless integration of this technology into our everyday experiences and practices.
While the imposition of multiple interface elements aims, like broadcast TV, to assist a project of transparent transmission, it is these elements (and not what they make visible) that form the means to compel the webcam viewer. If the webcam window provides an automated oscillation between the spectacle of nothing and the promise of something, it is in this formal process (and not in its dubious content) that lies the webcam’s narrative. And while the regulated rhythms of image refreshment render this process strictly mechanical, the seconds taken for each new frame to open simultaneously locate the spatial compression of narrative contingency. The intervening download time while each image discloses itself offers the webcam’s only limited opportunity for the viewer to interpret the hypothetical and unexpected nature of its virtuality. Sometimes known as “Reload,” “Refresh” is a standard command on web browsers, allowing the user to recommence or update the downloading of a site. The image or site is at its most fresh during this process, given that it may be refreshed again at any time after the download. If the webcam image refreshes itself every time it updates, during the very moment of changeover, what happens to it in between? For the image to require refreshment implies its gradually decreasing freshness and, therefore, its gradually increasing staleness. Replaced with a fresh image after a programmed delay, each previous image is deemed to have gone stale, no longer fresh with narrative possibility.
Marina Grzinic’s comments on the frustrations and imperfections of telepresent technologies are resonant here. Drawing on Walter Benjamin’s famous theory that an object’s aura–its “unique appearance or semblance of distance” (cited Grzinic 215)–is destroyed by its reproduction, Grzinic attempts to recover aura in telerobotic technologies. She proposes transmission time as the digital media counterpart to photography’s exposure time, which she discusses, after Benjamin, as allowing the spatio-temporal specificities of the object to be traceable in its image. Where the transmission time of telerobotic (and by extension webcam) technologies manifests in download delays, it “forces us to think about the network of modems, routers, servers, and telephone lines that the image must travel in order to get to us” (221). Time delay confirms both the spatial and temporal distance of the object. Furthermore, Grzinic continues, these technical practicalities tend to produce discontinuities in the image, such as the “choppy and unnatural” motion of objects hopping that slow image refresh rates generate (221).
Grzinic’s argument for the compelling visual quality–the aura–of these imperfections supports my contention that the potential for narrative involvement in webcams lies in the textuality of their interface. Jon Dovey has commented on the perplexing realist authority invested in the aesthetic of “wobblyscope” video images, particularly in conjunction with surveillance media and home video (64). By the same token, the imprecision of unclear image quality and delays in the unfurling of webcam images provides the very points of interest for viewing in that they necessarily leave room for epistemological frustration. Grzinic likens transmission delays and slow refresh rates to “a fingerprint on the film, a drop of water on the lens”: they are “evidence of the image” (224). To my analysis, they are also evidence of virtuality and a tantalising, compelling hindrance to visual certainty. They offer viewers recourse to narrative precisely where the image content deters narrative. Nonetheless, the webcam image’s random availability makes available inferred narratives of sexual promiscuity–sexual freshness–as well as questions of its cleanliness. One critical incident in the JenniCam history reverberates with the ambiguous charge of promiscuity. In July 2000, the webcam both lost and gained viewers when Ringley’s sexual propriety was called into question. She was accused, according to one report, of “stealing her best friend’s boyfriend in full view of thousands of outraged fans” (Lipowicz). Some boycotted the site, while others–40 percent more viewers than usual–logged on in anticipation of increased sexual activity, the report implies, allowing the further inference that Ringley would knowingly trade on this express traffic to garner relief from financial debt. One of Ringley’s online journal entries at the time playfully masked her knowingness with a barely euphemistic image of performative fluidity: “JenniCam, instead of being a window into my regular boring life, will be a window into love. I’m convinced it will utterly ooze through the Internet” (cited in Lipowicz). Where the electronic display of an image of identity via promiscuous contact is figured as transmission or communication, the narrative of sexualization accrues intensity by the associative anxieties of contagion. The exponential and apparently unintentional growth in the number of visits to JenniCam–its “catching on”–is a cellular instance of what is figured as the Internet’s promiscuous transmissibility.
Several scholars have noted the common application of discourses of contagion to the transmission of computer viruses. In particular, the success of this metaphor draws on the shared unknowing of epidemic danger that exacerbated public misperceptions of AIDS at its most prolific and the contemporaneous phenomenon of computer hacking (Lupton; Kember). I began this essay with a reading of two pieces of U.S. legislation born from this exact fear: the harmful performativity of viral attacks on those points of the body (the human, social, and political body) deemed most vulnerable. Like the uncontainable damage caused by the electronic letter bomb, benevolently disguised and voluntarily received, exploding on arrival in the host’s email inbox, the Child Pornography Prevention Act imagined the desensitized catching on to dangerous behaviors by mere transmissible contact with unrecognizable agents of harm. The Communications Decency Act rendered the metaphor more explicit still, hoping to outlaw similar “transmission” and “communication” specifically centering on the body’s sexual and excretory orifices. As enactments of the state’s legal and political subjection of its citizens, the penetrating gaze of these bills aims to bring into visibility certain deviant behaviors, and to demarcate a sterilized zone from which contagion may be expelled. The surveillance of the U.S. military by the military, a surveillance that, as Butler discusses in Excitable Speech, aims at abjecting by “discharge” the “dangerous fluid” of homosexual communication, marks an analogous production of a purified body (110).
In his condemnatory discussion of the Supreme Court’s striking down of the CPPA (in another of its “extraordinarily permissive rulings”), Robert H. Bork writes that “it would seem merely common sense to think that graphic depictions of children in sexual acts would likely result in some action by pedophiles,” but he stops short of considering the “likely result” of virtual or less obviously fictitious depictions.4 Bork’s position itself lacks mere “common sense” in its failure to specify beyond the likelihood of “some action” by presumably all “pedophiles.” Indeed, for Bork, child pornography–virtual or otherwise–exists in the same reprehensible category as all pornography, along with “nude dancing” and “raw profanity,” around which there has been “no good reason to throw free speech protections” as guaranteed by the First Amendment of the U.S. Constitution. Pornography of any kind should not be available even to adults, he opines, and therefore the question of virtuality–of whether actual children are involved in any way–is irrelevant to his argument. Nonetheless, Bork subscribes to Congress’s series of easy elisions–of sexual imagery with sexual conduct, of pornographer with pedophile, and of pornography viewer with pedophile–arguing for a clear, performative link between virtual representation and imagined actions upon unrelated children.
In an effort to analogize this causality, Bork draws on another, more literal form of speech “exempt from regulation”: the broadcasting of “the rawest forms of profanity” on television.
Cable television is saturated with words never before used in public, and the broadcast networks are racing to catch up. [...] The industry response to criticism on this score is that such words give the programs authenticity because this is the way people talk. In reality, however, the arrow probably points in the other direction. People increasingly talk this way because they hear the words on television, and they hear the words on television because the Supreme Court's rulings have deprived the government of any effective sanctions for profanity.
Aside from the contention that both have been overlooked by the Supreme Court, Bork chooses not to trace the steps taken in his equation of profanity with child pornography. He also chooses not to entertain the question of how “sanctions for profanity” might be policed, let alone how they might actually function. His interpellation of a helplessly impressionable viewer, however, is clear and stands in accord with Congress’s equally monologic version of image reception. Like members of Congress, Bork fails to elaborate on his own apparent immunity to television’s believed contagious performativity, even as he concludes by acknowledging that “destroying limits to speech […] progressively liberates the worst in our natures.” Profanity, though, is apparently not in “our” nature: “never before used in public” and simply contracted from television. Having bundled profanity and pornography into the same basket of evil, Bork then applies different standards to each. His refusal to accept that representations of profanity can be authentic contradicts his understanding of pornography and its supposed performative function: that representations of child sex, even of the least “actual” authenticity, are “likely” to offer a template of behavior for real abuse.
Where Bork’s article is particularly useful is in its propulsion of a familiar anxiety around the uncontrollability of representation and the channels of its circulation. His expedient conflation of photographic, televisual, video, and digital technologies disallows any discernment of epistemological nuance among these media. This slippage operates in service of a simplistic, oppositional image/reality binarism, and is fuelled by an inflated apprehension of immorality and harm. Paranoid voices like Bork’s and those of congressional legislators manifest a moral panic that the means of representation–the mass media generally–are disseminating contagious, dangerous matter. Just as Bork sees profanity spreading without regulation across the airwaves and into the public lexicon, images that merely “convey the impression” of involving children in sexual conduct are deemed capable of transmitting an infectious agency among susceptible individuals, and possibly further. Congress identified, for instance, the affective contagion that it imagined would endear children to images of other children “having fun” in even completely contrived “depictions” of sexual activity: a contagion of victimhood. And yet at the same time, a contagious perpetration was imagined by the congressional findings, where a desensitized predilection for the offending material might “catch on” among, we presume, not-yet-pedophiles in the same manner as it infects existing pedophiles with appetite-whetting stimulus. The projected sweep of the contagion is as oddly broad and indiscriminate as it initially seemed specific. The language of the CPPA bill–intended to serve a specific legislative function by closing what it perceived to be a representational loophole in opportunities for exploiting children–enacts a similar performativity to the contagiously regarded criminality of its content. This is not to say that its wording performs the abuse it names, but rather that its attempts to delineate with more qualitative focus its legislative domain (even if that domain was to be quantitatively expanded) resulted in a slippery imprecision and indiscrimination, ruled by the Supreme Court to be “overbroad.”5
Despite the presumptuous evocation of community that subtends Bork’s calls for legislative stricture, his phrasing points more to contempt of an inadequately regulated public, to whose putative “common sense” he nonetheless defers. Further presuming moral commonality, his argument against profanity and the appearance of pornography alike yearns to reinstall a less “permissive” Supreme Court. Bork’s retrospective imaginary may find solace in that court’s landmark Bowers v. Hardwick ruling, the “inflammatory force” of which illustrates Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick’s broader elaboration of ignorance and its ambidextrous availability to the regulation of public and private spaces. Harnessing “an insolent display of legal illogic,” the Hardwick decision, Sedgwick writes, made “obtuse” and “contemptuous demonstration” of the court’s power to ratify homophobic discourse (6-7). Specifically, Justice White’s opinion found particular legal claims to a right to engage in sodomy–in one’s own bedroom–to be “at best, facetious” (qtd. in Sedgwick 6).6 Bork’s opinion, that for virtual child pornography to “likely result” in pedophilic activity is “merely common sense,” establishes by inversion a self-evidence of equal “mock-ignorant mock-jocose threat,” as Sedgwick describes White’s facetious “at best” (7; emphasis added). However, Bork’s prima facie condemnation of virtual material ignores the facetiousness of its avoidance of the categorical signifiers of actual pornography: that at best, virtual facetiae are merely euphemistically pornographic.
Likewise, the virtual body of the webcam operator exists only on the screen that makes it visible, and from which it is indistinguishable. The screen represents a sustaining membrane without which that body would cease to exist. To puncture the screen, for that body to become merely flesh, would destroy the transparent seal of surveyed sterility that the webcam simulates as a means to making the body visible and, in viewer imaginations, variously sexual. The webcam enacts, then, what Bogard calls “the elaborate artifice of penetration” (38). This artifice manifests in the complex of interface features that encourage webcam viewers to believe they can telepresently “get hold of [the] object,” in whatever means they desire (Benjamin 217). In its automaticity, the webcam’s seductive main feature of image refreshment marks a constant reiteration of the screen as a seal of freshness: a continuous promise of the image’s availability, but of the body’s uncompromised prophylaxis.
1. “Telerobotics” is the technological capacity to control a robot or other machine from a distance. One famous example is Ken Goldberg’s Telegarden, an art installation allowing remote Internet users to tend an actual garden, first located in the Ars Electronica Center, Austria. <http://www.usc.edu/dept/garden/> See Goldberg.
2. In late December 2003, without public explanation, Ringley ceased operation of the JenniCam website. Internet news reports suggest the decision may have come in response to online payment company PayPal’s cancellation of Ringley’s account because of the site’s supposed violation of PayPal’s non-nudity policy.
3. This ease was demonstrated by Save Karyn <http://www.savekaryn.com>, a website audaciously (and successfully) dedicated to erasing Karyn’s $20,000 credit card debt. The site’s operator transparently acknowledged that she offered nothing in return for donations, which included money as well as all manner of other goods.
4. A former judge and acting Attorney General under President Nixon at the height of the Watergate scandal, Bork’s own nomination to the Supreme Court by President Reagan in 1987 was lobbied against strongly by the American Civil Liberties Union and rejected by the Senate.
5. “Overbreadth” is ascribed to legislation whose proscriptive sweep effectively covers that which is protected by the U.S. Constitution, namely freedom of speech, press, and assembly.
6. Respondent Michael Hardwick had been arrested in his bedroom, where police found him engaging in the criminal act of sodomy with another adult male. He sued the state of Georgia for infringement of his fundamental rights, initially losing and later winning on appeal. The Supreme Court, in Bowers v. Hardwick (1986), ultimately upheld the constitutionality of the Georgia statute criminalizing sodomy.
Pelagia Goulimari
Angelaki: Journal of the Theoretical Humanities
goulimari@angelaki1.demon.co.uk
The vast postmodernism debate, whose expansive and canonical phase spanned from the early 1980s to the mid-1990s but which has yet to reach a point of settlement or closure, engages with a multiplicity of questions, among which “what is postmodernism?” is not necessarily the most important. A more urgent question in the debate is that of minoritarian movements. In many of the most influential interrogations of postmodernism, one can discern the promise of unprecedented participation for everyone on a global terrain without frontiers. It is a promise, however, on which the canonical texts of the debate ultimately fail to deliver. An analysis of these texts shows them following a binary scheme of political analysis that is still with us today and which it is our challenge now to leave behind: fragmentation versus unification. Minoritarian movements are seen as non-communicating fragments in need of unification by an avant-garde hegemonic force. In our post-hegemonic world, this model locks minoritarian movements into a false dilemma and fails to acknowledge their fertile interaction. In search of a “new” model that acknowledges both the distinctness and unceasing interaction of minoritarian movements, I propose a return to Deleuze and Guattari’s Anti-Oedipus.Here unfolds a world of “myriad connections, disjunctions, and conjunctions” (315) across fields (such as Marxism, feminism, postcolonial theory, and queer theory): small collectivities, here, which neither have “anything in common, nor do they cease communicating.”
Central to my account of the postmodernism debate will be Fredric Jameson’s canonical essay, “Postmodernism, or the Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism” (1984).1 In The Success and Failure of Fredric Jameson (2001), based on a series of articles published in this journal between 1995 and 2000, Steven Helmling describes “Postmodernism, or the Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism” as Jameson’s most accomplished attempt to date at success-as-failure: a dialectical model of writing full of contradictions, full of movement and agitation and vertiginous slippage of meaning (14-16, 110-11). Further, Helmling argues that between 1982 and 1984–between Jameson’s earliest piece on postmodernism, “Postmodernism and Consumer Society” and his definitive “Postmodernism, or the Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism”–Jameson “augment[s] polysemy” (16, 169-70).2 In fact, however, when one reads these successive writings in relation to the question of minoritarian movements, one finds a reverse movement toward monosemy, accompanied by an increasingly insistent rejection of minoritarian movements.3
In the first part of this essay, and in order to show this double movement, I will briefly review Jameson’s work on postmodernism between 1982 and 1984. In particular, I want to show how this work slowly crystallized a truth-claim about postmodernism as part of a triangle. First, postmodernism = minoritarian movements = sheer heterogeneity, radical difference, dispersal of non-communicating fragments. Second, late capitalism is a spectre of dissolution in that it is a total or global system paradoxically generating sheer heterogeneity, that is, generating minoritarian movements that are nothing but non-communicating islands of late capitalism. Third, the Left will overcome this spectre of dissolution and bring about a total systemic transformation by hegemonizing and thus unifying minoritarian movements. This hegemony is necessary rather than a matter of contingent, political articulation. The main theoretical element here is Lacan’s structuralist reading of schizophrenia as a breakdown of the signifying chain. Its main political element is that minoritarian movements are those disconnected signifiers and that the Left is the Lacanian “despotic signifier” or hegemonic force that will reunite them.
In the second part of this essay, I look at the effective adoption of the Jamesonian triangle of fragmentation, total system, unification as total systemic transformation–in its formal outline rather than its particular contents–in three major works on postmodernism: David Harvey’s The Condition of Postmodernity: An Inquiry into the Origins of Cultural Change (1989), Steven Connor’s Postmodernist Culture: An Introduction to Theories of the Contemporary (1989), and Linda Hutcheon’s The Politics of Postmodernism (1989), the latter of which simultaneously adopts and rejects this triangle. I follow the mutations of the Jamesonian triangle in these works, in relation to minoritarian movements. I also look at the effective rejection of the Jamesonian triangle in Ernesto Laclau’s “Politics and the Limits of Modernity” (1987), again in relation to minoritarian movements.
In the third and final part of the essay, I turn to Deleuze and Guattari’s Anti-Oedipus for an alternative conception of minoritarian movements and their interaction, in order to escape what I see as the double bind between fragmentation and unification. Deleuze and Guattari developed a distinction between two types of relation: that of schizophrenia or “deterritorialization” and that of paranoia or “territorialization.” I try to show that the Jamesonian triangle initiated a powerful and persistent “territorializing” tendency in the postmodernism debate. Finally, I argue that the Jamesonian triangle leads perhaps for the first time to the fragmentation it purports to overcome.
In this section I will examine the movement from Jameson’s “Postmodernism and Consumer Society” (1982), “Cognitive Mapping” (1983), “Periodizing the 60s” (1984), and his Foreword to Jean-François Lyotard’s The Postmodern Condition (1984), to the definitive “Postmodernism, or the Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism” (1984). The section is divided into three parts named for the Jamesonian triangle of late capitalism, the Left, and minoritarian movements.
In the first paragraph of his Foreword to The Postmodern Condition, Jameson introduces his main thesis on postmodernism: postmodernism “involves […] a new social and economic moment” (vii).
“Postmodernism and Consumer Society” already has recourse to a “new moment of late, consumer or multinational capitalism” but understands its link to postmodernism as only partially determining (125). Yes, postmodernism is “closely related” to consumer capitalism, and its “formal features in many ways [not in every way] express the deeper logic” of consumer capitalism; yet it remains distinct from consumer capitalism, so that Jameson can conclude: “there is a way in which postmodernism replicates […] the logic of consumer capitalism; the more significant question is whether there is also a way in which it resists that logic” (125, emphasis added). In “Postmodernism, or the Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism,” with expressions such as “postmodern period” (62, emphasis added), no distance remains between postmodernism and the new economic moment; Jameson assimilates postmodernism to its logic.
But what is this new “social and economic moment”? In “Postmodernism and Consumer Society” Jameson looks at two features of postmodernism–pastiche and schizophrenia–in order to deduce the nature of consumer capitalism. Through both pastiche and schizophrenia, as I will now explain, he detects social fragmentation. (Jameson seems to assume that social fragmentation expresses rather than resists consumer capitalism.)
In “Postmodernism and Consumer Society,” postmodernism is still a phenomenon in the arts–later, poststructuralist theory will be included. Jameson briefly relates pastiche to “each group coming to speak a curious private language of its own,” at the expense and to the detriment of “normal language […] of the linguistic norm,” as well as at the expense of “a unique personality and individuality, which can be expected [unlike groups] to generate its own unique vision of the world” (114). This is the first instance–a mere suggestion–of a link between the proliferation of new micropolitical groups and consumer capitalism. Jameson’s discussion of schizophrenic art continues the problematic of, and the lack of enthusiasm for, new micropolitical groups–initiated in the last quotation–in that schizophrenic art involves “isolated, disconnected, discontinuous material signifiers which fail to link up into a coherent whole” (119).
A quick comparison with Baudrillard’s La société de consommation (1970), to which Jameson’s “consumer society” refers, will show Jameson’s originality. Baudrillard’s “consumer society” has no dispersive or fragmentary effects. On the contrary, it is an expanded system of social reproduction, regulation, and control: “consumption is a system which assures the regulation of signs and the integration of the group […] a system of meaning” (“Consumer” 46). Further, consumer society is but a reaction to “the rise of new productive forces” (49). Baudrillard’s example of new productive forces, that of Puerto Rican workers in the U.S., might be seen to refer to all minoritarian groups. “Postmodernism and Consumer Society” seems to reverse this order, so that the proliferation of such new productive forces expresses consumer society.
After “Postmodernism and Consumer Society,” the term “late capitalism” quickly becomes dominant. This is part of a broader shift. Here poststructuralism is still considered both to be “radical” (“Postmodernism and Consumer Society” 115) and to have cognitive value comparable to that of Mandel’s Late Capitalism (1975). By the time of “Postmodernism, or the Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism,” Jameson has placed them on opposite sides of a distinction between the symptomatic and the cognitive. Poststructuralism is relegated to the symptomatic, while Mandel’s “late capitalism” represents the cognitive. “Postmodernism, or the Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism” quickly slips from the initial statement that postructuralism is “a very significant symptom of […] postmodernist culture” to the equation, “poststructural or postmodern period” (61, 62); on the other hand “Marxian ‘science’ provides […] a way of knowing and conceptualizing the world abstractly, in the sense in which, e.g., Mandel’s great book offers a rich and elaborated knowledge of that global world system” (91).
Jameson first develops his use of Mandel’s “late capitalism” in “Periodizing the 60s.” He adopts two main ideas. The first is that late capitalism is the purest and most extended form of capitalism so far. As Baudrillard and others wouldn’t disagree with this (see “Consumer Society” 50), the second idea is the crucial one: late capitalism is a spent force after the worldwide economic crisis of 1973-74.4 “Periodizing the 60s” quickly turns this “hypothesis” into a quasi-scientific prediction of the political fate of minoritarian movements (206): they were “produced” by late capitalism’s energy–now that this energy is exhausted, so are they (208). “Periodizing the 60s” continues to diagnose contemporary reality as fragmented–as “a now absolutely fragmented and anarchic social reality” (201)–but this reality is the work of a new subject of history, late capitalism.
“Periodizing the 60s” opens with the proposition that “history is necessity” (178). It concludes accordingly: now that late capitalism has lost its dynamism, the “prodigious release of untheorized new forces” is over and is “(from the hindsight of the 80s) a historical illusion,” “inflationary,” a matter of “devalued signifiers” caused by an unwise “universal abandonment of the referential gold standard” (208). (The U.S. and then the IMF abandoned the actual gold standard in 1970s. Jameson’s argument seems to be that micropolitics abandoned “the referential gold standard” of the category of class.) Jameson predicts:
the 80s will be characterized by an effort, on a world scale, to proletarianize all those unbound social forces[;] [...] by an extension of class struggle, in other words, into the farthest reaches of the globe [...] The unifying force here is the new vocation of a henceforth global capitalism, which may also be expected to unify the unequal, fragmented, or local resistances [...]. (208-09)
This is how Marxism “must necessarily become true again” (209). “And this is finally also the solution to the so-called ‘crisis’ of Marxism” (209). It seems to me that capitalism plays the role of a deus ex machina here.
What makes “Periodizing the 60s” fascinating is the fleeting presence, in this piece alone, of a second theoretical position–history as contingency–and a second affective position–an openness to minoritarian movements. The result is pure, unresolved contradiction. For example, Jameson’s genealogy of the 1960s incorporates political events: “a fundamental ‘condition of possibility’” for the unleashing of the new forces was McCarthyism and the merger of the AFL and the CIO in 1955, in that it led to “the expulsion of the Communists from the American labor movement” (181); or Jameson considers that “such newly released forces do not only not seem to compute in the dichotomous class model of traditional Marxism; they also seem to offer a realm of freedom and voluntarist possibility beyond the classical constraints of the economic infrastructure” (208).
Similarly, as examples of a different affective tone toward minoritarian movements, Jameson speaks of feminism as “stunning and unforeseeable […] a Yenan of a new and unpredictable kind which is still impregnable” (189), and he salutes “the challenge of the women’s movement whose unique new strategies and concerns cut across (or in some cases undermine and discredit altogether) many classical inherited forms of […] political action” (192).5
“Postmodernism, or the Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism” leaves contingency and openness behind: minoritarian movements are but “symptoms” of late capitalism. Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri make the reverse and, in my view, more convincing argument in Empire: capital is parasitic and reactive and simply borrows the inventions of the struggles of the proletariat to survive. They reject all “objective” theories of the dynamics of capital and all theories of cycles, in that such theories devalue the proletariat. The crux of their analysis lies in identifying the 1960s movements–in their indexes of “mobility, flexibility, knowledge, communication, cooperation, the affective”–as the new figure of the proletariat or the “multitude” (275).6
While “Postmodernism, or the Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism” is central to the postmodernism debate, while we still return to it, Jameson himself has moved on and has since said: “I have mainly singled out intellectual and social phenomena like ‘poststructuralism’ and the ‘new social movements,’ thus giving the impression, against my own deepest political convictions, that all the ‘enemies’ were on the left” (“Conclusion” 408).
“Postmodernism, or the Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism” upholds a modern model of genuine political expression, of a “great collective project,” comprising three interrelated elements: the individual, the norm and, crucially, the avant-garde (always in the singular) (65).7 Here Jameson postulates, first, that the “collective ideals of […] political […] avant-garde […] stand or fall along with […] the so-called centred subject” or that political “expression requires the category of the individual monad” (63); second, that the “fragmentation of social life […] to the point where the norm itself is eclipsed” goes hand in hand with “the absence of any great collective project” (65); third, that minoritarian movements are part of this new fragmentation brought about by late capitalism.8 Minoritarian movements are, therefore, an impediment to collective projects, rather than their embodiment. Now that capitalism works by “heterogeneity without a norm,” minoritarian movements play into the hands of “faceless masters [who] continue to inflect the economic strategies which constrain our existence”–minoritarian movements are, in effect, the enemy (65). What is implicitly at work here is a distinction within collective projects, parallel to the distinction between cognitive and symptomatic theory discussed above. This is a distinction between authentic and inauthentic collective projects on grounds that are purely formal and a priori: an authentic collective project is necessarily “avant-garde,” in the sense of confronting a total system or norm. In other words, an authentic collective project aims at the total transformation of a total system.
What is at stake here is much more than the validity of a modern triangle (the individual, the norm, the avant-garde). The important point, as I will now try to show, is that Jameson renews this triangle as part of the attempt to draw a clear line between minoritarian movements and what can be called the new New Left. This project is initiated in “Cognitive Mapping” and reaches its definitive formulation in the final pages of “Postmodernism, or the Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism.”
In “Cognitive Mapping,” Jameson defines cognitive mapping as that which “span[s] or coordinate[s] […] a gap between phenomenological perception and a reality that transcends all individual thinking or experience” (353, emphasis added). Here we have Jameson’s first attempt to revamp this modern triangle: cognitive mapping is defined in relation to the individual, on the one hand, and a global reality, a new norm, on the other, so that it occupies the position of the avant-garde. This new norm, to which the new avant-garde will respond, is minoritarian movements as fragmentation and as the new face of a now-global capitalism; this new norm is “a multidimensional set of discontinuous realities,” the “post-Marxian Nietzschean world of micropolitics,” “the random and undecidable world of microgroups” (351, 355, 356). Where there is global fragmentation and dissolution, cognitive mapping aspires to bring its opposite. As Jameson specifies, cognitive mapping attempts to map “the totality of class relations on a global […] scale” and is “an integral part of any socialist political project,” because “without a conception of the social totality (and the possibility of transforming a whole social system), no properly socialist politics is possible” (353, 355).
In a moment augmenting polysemy, Jameson comments that cognitive mapping is “a kind of blind”–“little more than a pretext” for debating the issue of the relation of the American Left to minoritarian movements (347). “Our essential function for the moment […] involves the conquest of legitimacy in this country for socialist discourse” (358). This “conquest of legitimacy” seems to require for the Left to reap the surplus value of the cultural, artistic, and political output of minoritarian movements: “the question is how to think those local struggles, involving specific and often quite different groups, within some common project that is called, for want of a better word, socialism” (360). The task is international rather than national: the new New Left is to articulate local struggles everywhere, thereby transforming them from an epiphenomena of global capitalism to elements in the reconstructed chain, in the avant-garde project, of international socialism.
Here, a couple of loose ends remain, which Jameson will attempt to tie up in “Postmodernism, or the Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism.” First, if, as Jameson writes in “Cognitive Mapping,” socialism stands for “transforming a whole social system,” what about the claims of those minoritarian movements which also have recourse to a whole social system and its transformation (certain strains of “difference” feminism, for example, with their radical address to patriarchy and its transformation) (347)?9 In a passage already quoted above, “Postmodernism, or The Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism” strengthens the link between Marxism and the cognitive: Mandel’s “hypothesis” (in “Periodizing the 60s”) now becomes “a rich and elaborated knowledge of that global world system” (91).
Second, if the individual stood for the centered subject in the modern triangle, what exactly does it stand for here–what are we to understand by “phenomenological perception” and “individual thinking or experience” (above)? In the final pages of “Postmodernism, or the Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism,” Jameson revises his account of cognitive mapping and now speaks of “individual and collective subjects” unable to grasp the totality and in need of cognitive mapping (92, emphasis added). It seems then that the individual is now another name for what Jameson sees as the isolated and fragmented perspective of minoritarian movements. So the three elements of Jameson’s new triangle are first, in the position of the individual, any minoritarian movement, understood as an isolated, spatialized, inert element; second, in the position of the norm, late capitalism as a field of minoritarian movements as isolated islands; and third, in the position of the avant-garde, international socialism as unification of minoritarian movements by the new New Left.
A brief contrast with Raymond Williams’s The Country and the City (1973) would be instructive. In speaking of (and for) the rural laborer, Williams bumps against the fixation of the Left on the male metropolitan proletarian, at the expense of other kinds of work and exploitation, which become invisible. Williams links the Left’s fixation on this figure with three additional tendencies–tendencies which, I believe, may be discerned in “Postmodernism, or The Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism.” These tendencies are the famous “simultaneous damnation and idealisation of capitalism”; the Left’s identification with “mastery–power”; and, finally, a specific dream of socialism as the first-born son of capitalism that will inherit all upon its demise:
What they say is damn this, praise this; and the intellectual formula for this emotional confusion is, hopefully, the dialectic. All that needs to be added, as the climax to the muddle, is [...] the saving qualification, that at a certain stage [...] capitalism begins to lose this progressive character and [...] must be replaced, superseded, by socialism. (Williams 37)
Throughout The Country and the City, Williams opens up, to the point of reversal, the distinction between the rural and the metropolitan. On the side of the rural he includes vagrant laborers (83-86), families without fathers–since even “in the villages what was most wanted was the abstract producer, the single able-bodied man” (85)–and Third-World laborers (279-88). On the side of the metropolitan he includes land enclosures, the laws restricting mobility, and, as we have seen, even a certain version of socialism.
In an analysis resonant with that of Deleuze and Guattari’s in Anti-Oedipus, Williams discusses the sedentary ethic inextricably linked with the rise of capitalism, whose target and enemy is migrant and “unproductive” labor: poor labor. As a result, he recasts and expands the definition of labor–we can say that he recognizes the labor of many others besides that of the male metropolitan proletariat. We have seen Jameson, on the other hand, putting his faith in capitalism to “proletarianize” those others. We will now see him “dissolving […] the lives and work of others into an image” (Williams 77).
A good metaphor for Jameson’s perspective on minoritarian movements in “Postmodernism, or the Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism” is that they are “scattered television screens positioned at intervals” (like the exemplary artwork by Nam June Paik he describes here); they force us to choose between two distinct ways of viewing them: either we “decide to concentrate on a single screen”–as for him, presumably, minorities do–or we attempt “to see all the screens at once, in their radical and random difference” (76). Needless to say, it is only the second, panoptic position that will “hold to the truth of postmodernism” and “do it justice” (92). Clearly, given Jameson’s choice of metaphor, the panoptic spectator he invokes is faced with a formidable challenge; indeed, that figure is “called upon to do the impossible” (76). But we are still a little taken aback when Jameson announces that our success in this undertaking involves “an imperative to grow new organs, to expand our sensorium and our body to some new, as yet unimaginable, perhaps ultimately impossible, dimensions” (80). Expanding our bodies to impossible dimensions? Is this a radical political enterprise, a cognitive enterprise, or some kind of a monstrous assimilation? How are we even to begin such a project of bodily transformation?
As we have seen, from his earliest work on postmodernism, Jameson consistently understands minoritarian movements as isolated and non-communicating. At the same time, something like a common ground gradually emerges–the new economic system–to the point where, in “Postmodernism, or the Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism,” minoritarian movements are “symptoms” on the body of late capitalism. Like TV screens, symptoms manifest a latent reality that is outside and beyond them–treating minoritarian movements as symptoms derealizes them, transfers their reality, vitality, and life onto something else. And yet, it seems to me that when the new economic system is described–as a world of micropolitics, micromultiplicities, and discontinuous realities–it is itself a figure for a world where the cultural, artistic, and political initiative has passed to minoritarian movements. In this state of affairs, Deleuze and Guattari, among others, look at lateral connections between movements. Jameson, on the other hand, adopts a conceptual framework that denies a priori the ability of minoritarian movements to enter into lateral connections or to confront and change oppressive doxas directly and without intermediaries.
Key to Jameson’s ghettoization of minorities is his particular scheme or mode of spatialization, and his understanding of space and historical time in the works examined. In “Postmodernism and Consumer Society,” Jameson argues that postmodernism is marked by a “historical amnesia” that expresses the new economic system (125). To demonstrate this, he briefly analyzes an extract from Marguerite Séchehaye’s Autobiography of a Schizophrenic Girl (120). The extract is a first-person narration of a past “schizophrenic” incident. It opens with the words “I remember very well” and closes with the “schizophrenic” girl going back “home to our garden and beg[inning] to play,” as a return to reality. What is the incident? A girl is walking in the countryside when, “suddenly,” as she is passing a school, she hears a German song sung by the schoolchildren and she stops to listen. A double transformation then occurs. The school and the children become barracks with prisoners compelled to sing, a vision imbued with a “sense of unreality.” At the same time and “bound up with” this disorienting double vision, a field of wheat becomes “dazzling” and seemingly infinite, with “limits I could not see,” and this further intensification of the hallucinatory moment brings with it a profound “anxiety” (120).
My understanding of this incident, indebted to Walter Benjamin’s “Theses on the Philosophy of History,” is that, instead of being immersed in a pleasant walk in the countryside or enjoying nature as an idyllic spectacle as is customary, and instead of playing in the garden, this girl has a genuine historical experience. As Benjamin tells us, “to articulate the past historically does not mean to recognize it ‘the way it really was’ […]. The true picture of the past flits by […] flashes up at the instant when it can be recognized and is never seen again” (247). The girl’s stroll is “suddenly” interrupted by the unexpected sound of a German song sung by children inside the school–perhaps this is holiday time, hence the surprise. This slight event sends her back into a time of war and concentration camps, “barracks” and “prisoners” (Autobiography of a Schizophrenic Girl was originally published in French in 1950). As a result, the familiar and timeless scenery of country fields is transfigured; “bound up with” barracks and prisoners, it is traversed by an added dimension, that of history, and becomes unlimited and dazzling.
The historical time recalled here is not that of public history. This, Benjamin tells us, is the form (continuous and present) of the history of the victors. The “tradition of the oppressed,” on the other hand, a genuine experience, comes to us from the corner of the eye, the ear, as involuntary and irrepressible as “a tiger’s leap” (248, 253). “Tiger’s leap” because for Benjamin, far from being passive or idle, the genuine historical experience–in this instance, the “schizophrenic” arrest that is pregnant with the girl’s own unknown predicament–is vitally connected to a revolutionary moment, a moment of praxis. If this is not the case here, this might be because the girl returned to reality too quickly; because the girl is not “schizophrenic” enough, so to speak. As I have already indicated, the narrative where the incident belongs is exemplary in the incident’s overcoming–the narrative itself is anything but “schizophrenic.” The incident is firmly lodged in a sequence initiated by “I remember very well” and completed by “I ran home to our garden and began to play ‘to make things seem as they usually were,’ that is to return to reality.”
Jameson, in his own interpretation, omits–I feel tempted to say symptomatically–the song, the children/prisoners, the school/barracks, and has eyes only for the unlimited wheat field now unbound from its connections and standing in sublime isolation. He therefore sees the incident as demonstrating that “the schizophrenic is thus given over to an undifferentiated vision of the world in the present”; “an experience of isolated, disconnected, discontinuous material signifiers which fail to link up into a coherent sequence” (“Postmodernism and Consumer Society” 120, 119). If, for Jameson, this is the definition of historical amnesia, a radical historical project would, by contrast, involve the unification of the disconnected.
This becomes clear in “Postmodernism, or the Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism.” Discussing E. L. Doctorow’s Ragtime (which Jameson argues is symptomatically ahistorical), Jameson claims that a radical historical project requires an intentional and active monadic subject grasping firmly the “historical referent” (71), that it requires a clear distinction between subject and object.10 He then argues that the postmodern version of this project would entail the active grasping of spatial fragments. He therefore repeats his analysis of the schizophrenic girl from “Postmodernism and Consumer Society” and adds the analysis of the exemplary TV screens discussed earlier and the two alternatives, contemporary and relevant, they offer. The first alternative, comparable to Jameson’s reading of the schizophrenic girl, is exemplary of minoritarian movements: impotent and symptomatic absorption in a TV screen. The second alternative, actively grasping all screens at once–that is, continuing the clear distinction between subject and object by new means–is exemplary of the Left as Jameson envisages it: it rises above ahistorical postmodernism toward a new historicity in the form of a “new mode of relationship” (75).
Since the emergence of the New Left in the 1960s civil rights movement, the simultaneous explosion in the reinvention of group traditions, histories, and agendas for the future appears to Jameson as ahistorical.12 Linda Hutcheon, in The Politics of Postmodernism, contradicts Jameson directly on this point. Not only is postmodernism (understood as contemporary culture, including theory) historical, but it derives “its historical consciousness (and conscience) from the inscription into history of women and ethnic/racial minorities” during the 1960s (10). If postmodernism is “typically denounced as dehistoricized” by Marxist and right-wing critics alike, this is because “the problematized histories of postmodernism have little to do with the single totalizing History” in which both parties take refuge (57).13
I have tried to show that Jameson’s “Postmodernism, or the Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism” crystallizes the following triangle: late capitalism as system generating fragmentation, minoritarian movements as fragments symptomatic of late capitalism, international socialism as unification promising total systemic transformation. In this section, I look at two of the first major adoptions of the Jamesonian triangle, David Harvey’s The Condition of Postmodernity and Steven Connor’s Postmodernist Culture: An Introduction to Theories of the Contemporary; Linda Hutcheon’s simultaneous rejection and adoption of the triangle in The Politics of Postmodernism; and Ernesto Laclau’s rejection of the triangle in “Politics and the Limits of Modernity.” My argument will be that Jameson’s triangle initiated–provided the toolkit for–a “territorializing” tendency in the postmodernism debate. Then, in a final section, I will elucidate the Deleuzo-Guattarian distinction between “territorialization” and “deterritorialization.”
David Harvey’s The Condition of Postmodernity is a post-Jamesonian work in many ways. What is tentative in Jameson is asserted in Harvey. For example, even in the hardest version of “Postmodernism, or the Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism,” Jameson is able to undermine the reality effect he is creating–of minoritarian movements as fragments symptomatic of late capitalism–when he says that we need to “project some conception of a new systemic cultural norm […] in order to reflect […] on the most effective forms of any radical cultural politics today” (57). For Harvey, on the other hand, the links between minoritarian movements, fragmentation, and late capitalism are self-evident. For example: “the reproduction of the social and symbolic order through the exploration of difference and ‘otherness’ is all too evident in the climate of postmodernism”; and “racial minorities, colonized peoples, women, etc. […] become a part of the very fragmentation which a mobile capitalism and flexible accumulation can feed upon” (345, 303).
Most notably, The Condition of Postmodernity is a post-Jamesonian work in that “Postmodernism, or the Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism” is here codified into a set of terms of participation in the postmodernism debate:
• One cannot participate except as a representative and on behalf of a particular territoriality with avant-garde pretensions and promising total systemic transformation (in Jameson’s case, international socialism; in Harvey’s case the Anglo-American New Left).
• Participants should invoke a global spectre of dissolution that their territoriality will confront and overcome (in both Jameson’s and Harvey’s case, capitalism; in, for example, Hutcheon’s case, patriarchy).
• Participants project this global spectre of dissolution onto those threatening their territoriality (in Jameson’s case, both minoritarian movements and those Marxists or post-Marxists who do not subscribe to his versions of proper Marxism and proper socialism; in Harvey’s case, both minoritarian movements and those Marxists or post-Marxists who do not subscribe to historical materialism). On their own those others are at one with the spectre of dissolution, once within the territoriality in question they contribute to the spectre’s defeat.
Harvey participates in the postmodernism debate explicitly as a representative of the New Left, on behalf of the New Left. He argues that a return to historical materialism will reverse the centrifugal tendencies within the New Left, as well as helping the New Left to expand its territoriality by incorporating gender, race, and the like. In relation to his title, Harvey asserts that “postmodernism does not reflect any fundamental change of social condition,” and he outlines two interpretative options (111). Postmodernism can be understood either as “a departure […] in ways of thinking about what could or should be done,” or as “a shift in the way capitalism is working these days” (111, 112, emphasis added). Harvey opts for the latter.14 In relation to his subtitle (An Inquiry into the Origins of Cultural Change), Harvey first argues that while “embrac[ing] the new social movements,” the New Left “tended to abandon […] historical materialism as a mode of analysis” and was left bereft of its traditional claim to understand the “social processes of transformation that underlay” such epiphenomena. Secondly, Harvey argues that the New Left tended to treat the “new social movements” as “something that should be omni-present from the very beginning in any attempt to grasp the dialectics of social change” (emphasis added). As a result, the New Left reduced itself to “compet[ing] on the same terrain,” politically and theoretically unarmed, with the “new social movements” and the poststructuralists. Harvey proposes that this dip into the phenomenal world, this misadventure, be viewed as necessary, in the sense of mediating the New Left’s rise from the “shackles of old left politics” toward “recuperating such aspects of social organization as race, gender, religion, within the overall frame of historical materialist inquiry” (353-55).
With Postmodernist Culture, Steven Connor participates in the postmodernism debate on behalf of the Anglo-American theoretical humanities. He presents the Anglo-American humanities as “the most significant and central determinant” of contemporary global culture (201). Their world-historical political mission is to bring about “an important, indeed, probably epochal stage in the development of ethical awareness” (244). Their political task is the “creation of a common frame of assent which alone can guarantee the continuation of a global diversity of voices”; the creation of a “horizon of universal value” (244, 243).
Together with postcolonial studies, Connor views feminism not as part of the Anglo-American humanities but as a threat to it. Feminism leads to a “disastrous decompression” and “dissipat[ion]” of politics (226). Having devoted one and a half pages to this, by now, vast and illustrious critical field, he reproaches feminism for its “stance” of marginality, for “this strange tendency of authoritative marginality to flip over into its own dark side” and for the “irrationalist embrace of the agonistics of opposition” (231, 243).
While elevating Anglo-American criticism to a new avant-garde defined by the recognition of diversity, Connor withdraws any actual recognition from the forces of diversity themselves.The world seems to be diverse for the sole purpose of giving the ethical consciousness occasion to show itself by recognizing diversity. Otherwise, for Connor the world in itself, diversity in itself, is unethical–as, for Jameson, the world of micromultiplicities is a fallen world redeemed only when it comes under the wing of international socialism.
Whereas Connor participates in the postmodernism debate on behalf of Anglo-American criticism, Hutcheon, in The Politics of Postmodernism, participates on behalf of feminism.15 We have already seen her arguing against Jameson’s monolithic view of history and in favor of a pluralized view of history: “we now get the histories (in the plural) of the losers as well as the winners, of the regional (and colonial) as well as the centrist, of the unsung many as well as of the sung few, and I might add, of women as well as men” (66). A pluralized view of history–a view that, instead of separating time and space, posits the existence of a multiplicity of time-spaces–enables the positive appraisal of minoritarian movements, and allows Hutcheon to undermine Jameson’s (and Harvey’s) calls for a new alliance under the wing of the Left.
However, Hutcheon wants to go further: she wants to assign feminism an avant-garde role in the new postmodern world and, within feminism, she wants to assign an avant-garde role to “difference” feminism. Her argument is as follows: postmodernism and feminism share a common “problematizing of the body and its sexuality” (142). If “feminism is a politics […] [while] postmodernism is not,” if postmodernism is “complicit[ous] with power and domination” while feminism is “the single most powerful force in changing the direction in which (male) postmodernism was heading,” this is because feminism “radicalized the postmodern sense of difference” (4, 142). Feminism “made postmodernism think, not just about the body, but about the female body; not just about the female body, but about its desires” (143). So Hutcheon argues that there is a global status quo, patriarchy, which can be radically transformed only by “sexual difference” feminism; only within the context of “sexual difference” feminism can other minoritarian movements and other feminisms hope to end their complicity with a global system of oppression and work to overcome it.16 Hutcheon now finds herself using a conceptual schema formally indistinguishable from that of Jameson. The result is a pure contradiction at the heart of The Politics of Postmodernism. On the one hand, she rejects Jameson’s Big History and embraces “the lessons taught […] of the importance of context, of discursive situation”; at the same time she advocates a return to Big History, to a single global context and its single global transformation (67).
The immediate context for Ernesto Laclau’s “Politics and the Limits of Modernity” was the hostile reception of his and Chantal Mouffe’s new theory of hegemony among some Anglo-American Marxists.17 In Hegemony and Socialist Strategy (1985), Laclau and Mouffe outline a theory of hegemony as the articulation of signifiers by means of a “hegemonic force” comparable to the Lacanian “despotic signifier.” The crucial and controversial aspect of their theory is that no element in a political alliance–no political group–can claim to be necessarily and a priori hegemonic. Alliances have to be articulated in practice, the identity of the hegemonic force in a particular articulation is purely contingent (and always transient) and cannot be determined a priori by recourse to a foundation (be it capitalism, patriarchy, etc.). This, on the one hand, requires a weakening of the aspirations of radical collective actors, but, on the other hand, enables a huge amplification of possibilities for their interaction.
In “Politics and the Limits of Modernity,” Laclau draws from his theory of hegemony a new position for the Left–a position, in some respects, diametrically opposed to Jameson’s and Harvey’s. As we have seen, Harvey presents us with two pairs of interpretative options. First, postmodernism can be understood either as “a shift in the way capitalism is working these days” or as “a departure in ways of thinking about what could or should be done.” Second, the task of the New Left is either to “recuperat[e] […] race, gender,” etc. within a Marxist territoriality based on historical materialism and class politics or to assume that they “should be omnipresent from the very beginning in any attempt to grasp the dialectics of social change.” Harvey chose the first options, Laclau chooses the second.
First, Laclau argues that “there has been a radical change in the thought and culture of the past few decades” (“Politics” 329). This radical change in emancipatory political thought is an ongoing reconstruction of the radical moments in the various traditions of modernity, conducted from within these traditions. In the case of the Marxist tradition, its genealogical reconstruction–“a living dialogue with that tradition, to endow it with a certain contemporaneity against the timelessness that its orthodox defenders attribute to it”–involves a recognition of its multiple fissures (from Lenin, to Luxemburg, to Sorel, to Gramsci), against “its myth of origins” and “the myth of its coherence and unity” (339).
Second, the anti-foundationalist reconstruction of radical tradition requires the recognition not just of Marxism’s plurality, but of the plurality of the radical tradition itself.
If we are to reconstruct radical tradition (because this is precisely what this is about), not as a necessary departure from a point of origin, but as a genealogy of the present, it is clear that Marxism cannot be its only point of reference. The plurality of current social struggles [...] entails the necessity of breaking with the provincial myth of the "universal class." If one can talk about universality, it is only in the sense of the relative centralities constructed hegemonically and pragmatically. The struggles of the working class, of women, gays, marginal populations, Third World masses, must result in the construction of their own reappropriations of tradition through their specific genealogical efforts. This means, of course, that there is no a priori centrality determined at the level of structure, simply because there is no rational foundation of History. The only "rationality" that History might possess is the relative rationality given to it by the struggles and the concrete pragmatic-hegemonic constructions. (340)
In other words, as Laclau put it in “Building a New Left,” Marxism has to be reinscribed “as a historical, partial and limited moment within a wider historical line, that of the radical tradition of the West” (179). Laclau closes “Politics and the Limits of Modernity” with a proposition with far-reaching consequences: that the combination of anti-foundationalism and “metaphysical contingency,” contingency as a transcendental a priori, can in itself serve as the emancipatory metanarrative of our time (343).
By contrast, Jameson’s “Postmodernism, or the Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism” provides the tools for what Laclau calls a “homeland” Marxism as well as for a “homeland” feminism, etc.18 It provides the tools, as I will now go on to argue, for the construction of “artificial territorialities” which in their mutually exclusive avant-garde aspirations now lead to the feared fragmentation and dissolution.
Schematizing and simplifying greatly, whereas Jameson and Laclau propose two different models of hegemony–with Jameson the identity of the hegemonic force can be determined a priori, with Laclau the identity of the hegemonic force is contingent–Deleuze and Guattari propose a posthegemonic world. Laclau shares Jameson’s distinction between unification and fragmentation or dispersion, as well as his rejection of dispersive politics. In Hegemony and Socialist Strategy, Laclau and Mouffe write that “the role of theory is not to elaborate intellectually the observable tendencies of fragmentation and dispersion, but to ensure that such tendencies have a transitory character” (14). On the other hand, in Anti-Oedipus Deleuze and Guattari propose “couplings and connections” and “transverse communications,” by virtue of dispersion (1, 319). They describe “schizorevolutionary” processes constituting collectivities as pure multiplicities, and distinguish them from “paranoiac fascisizing” processes constituting collectivities caught in a double bind between fragmentation and unification (277).
A pure multiplicity is “irreducible to any sort of unity” (42).19 Deleuze and Guattari borrow Melanie Klein’s concept of “partial objects” to describe the elements of a pure multiplicity. Partial objects are not “parts of even a fragmented whole”; they “are recognized by their mutual independence” and are “different or really-distinct […] disparate” (323). This dispersion goes hand in hand with “myriad” connections:20 “partial objects […] all have their positive determinations, and enter into aberrant communication following a transversal”; “neither is there anything in common [between them], nor do they cease communicating” (69, 60). This connection of the disparate, where each partial object can be connected to a number of other partial objects, Deleuze and Guattari call the “first synthesis” or “connective synthesis” or “production of production” (38).
Then, in a moment of stasis, partial objects and their myriad connections–partial object coupled to partial object–turn into “a third term […] an enormous undifferentiated object” (7). Deleuze and Guattari, borrowing from Antonin Artaud, call this new part the “body without organs”: “The body without organs is produced as a whole […] alongside the [other] parts that it neither unifies nor totalizes. And […] it brings about [new] transverse communications” between them (43). That is, instead of the parts (the partial objects) being parts of the whole, the whole (the body without organs) is itself one of the parts of a pure multiplicity.21 The body without organs is “antiproduction” in the midst of production, but only in order to multiply the connections: “the body without organs […] reinjects producing into the product, extends the connections”; it is “perpetually reinserted into production” (72, 8).22 How? The body without organs is followed by a “distribution in relation to” itself; the coupled partial objects now appear as separate, as “co-ordinates” or as “points of disjunction [on the body without organs,] between which an entire network of new syntheses is now woven” (12).
The second synthesis or disjunctive synthesis or “production of recording” works through “inclusive disjunction”–“either […] or […] or […]”–on the immanent field of the body without organs. The “paranoiac fascisizing” use of the second synthesis has two aspects. Firstly, it turns this immanent, produced field into a transcendent, producing, common field that (like capital and workers in Marx) appropriates the work–the connections–of partial objects while appearing as their mysterious “quasi cause” (10-11, 72-74).23 Deleuze and Guattari call this pseudo-transcendent, pseudo-producing, pseudo-common field an “artificial territoriality.” Secondly, the “paranoiac fascisizing” use of the second synthesis introduces differentiation by means of binary opposition–what Deleuze and Guattari call “exclusive disjunction” and “either/or”–including the binary opposition between binary opposition and a fearful chaos of undifferentiation, where “disjunctions are subjected to the alternative of the undifferentiated or exclusion” (120). While inclusive disjunctions on an immanent field multiply connections, exclusive disjunctions on a transcendent field halt connections, disallowing them in advance: what possible connection can there be between the two sides of an exclusive disjunction? Similarly, whereas, as we have seen, partial objects are both distinct and connected, a chaos of undifferentiation is comprised of elements as indistinct as they are incapable of connection to each other–once again connection is disallowed.
Corresponding to inclusive disjunctions are “intense feeling[s] of transition” (18), “experience[s] of death” that are also “passage[s] or becoming[s]” (330). The third synthesis or conjunctive synthesis or “production of consumption/consummation” passes through the becomings toward a kind of subject: not a transcending subject, nor an agent, but something that follows events within the immanent field of the body without organs. This is a “faceless and transpositional subject,” “an apparent residual and nomadic subject,” “a transpositional subject […] collecting everywhere the fraudulent premium of its avatars” (77, 330, 88). After the partial objects and the body without organs, this is the third and last part of the pure multiplicity that Deleuze and Guattari call the “desiring-machine”: the “adjacent part” (330, 338).24 Deleuze and Guattari call this connective, inclusively disjunctive, nomadic, polyvocal, transversal, nonhierarchical, mortal, collective subject in transition a “subject-group” and distinguish it from the “subjugated group”: “[Our] […] final thesis […] is therefore the distinction between […] the paranoiac, reactionary, and fascisizing pole, and the schizoid revolutionary pole […] the one is defined by subjugated groups, the other by subject-groups” (348-49, 366-67).
Subjugated groups could very well have revolutionary aims. What distinguish them are not their aims but their processes of constitution. Emerging from exclusive disjunction in relation to a transcendent field, they have two aspects. First, they are segregated and segregative: incapable of connection, they are constituted as isolated islands of a superior people surrounded by inferior enemies (103, 269). Second, in the meeting of a segregative group and a transcendent field, the polyvocality of subject-groups gives way to what Deleuze and Guattari call “biunivocalization.” The subjugated group expresses a meaning residing in a transcendent field: biunivocalization is “the flattening of the polyvocal real in favor of a symbolic relationship between two articulations: so that is what this meant” (101).
Subject-groups, on the other hand, are always “at grips with, and directly coupled to, the [other] elements of the political and historical situation” which “they express all the less” (97, 100). In spite of their names–Deleuze and Guattari also call them “active groups” (94)–they bypass distinctions between subject and object, active and passive; they neither express nor are expressed, they neither cause nor are causing.25 Subject-groups are not those groups striving for self-realization, but those capable of being affected by others, those capable of interaction, impurity, and inauthenticity. Instead of constituting itself as an island whose superior self-identity (a=a) is threatened by enemies, a subject group is constituted as a, b, c…
To summarize so far, Deleuze and Guattari outline three syntheses–connection, disjunction, conjunction–and three parts–partial objects, the body without organs, and the adjacent part–of a pure multiplicity, the desiring machine. They distinguish between two uses of these syntheses and parts: a schizorevolutionary and a paranoiac use. The schizorevolutionary use, associated with subject groups, involves partial and non-specific connections: connections are partial in that they do not refer to a global entity, but by the same token they are each complete and lacking in nothing; there can be several connections between two partial objects. The schizorevolutionary use, as we have seen, also involves inclusive and non-restrictive disjunctions, as well as polyvocal and nomadic conjunctions. The paranoiac use, associated with subjugated groups, involves global and specific connections: partial objects are now seen as parts of a pre-existing global entity to which they refer, in relation to which they are lacking, and which alone completes them; connections are seen as taking place between these pre-existing parts, so that a connection is always secondary and incomplete. The paranoiac use, as we have seen, also involves exclusive and restrictive disjunctions, as well as biunivocal and segregative conjunctions.26 Why? Deleuze and Guattari’s distinction between the paranoiac and the schizorevolutionary is indissociable from their analysis of capitalism.
In brief, Deleuze and Guattari distinguish between three societies–primitive territorial, despotic, and capitalist–in their “history of contingencies, and not the history of necessity” (140). Starting from the postulate that “society is not first of all a milieu for exchange […] but rather a socius of inscription”, they name the three socii as the body of the earth, the body of the despot, and the body of capital (142). Whereas the immanent body of the earth codes population and other flows (into, for example, tribes) and whereas the transcendent body of the despot recodes them (into, for example, castes), capital decodes: as Marx and Engels said, all that is solid melts into air. Whereas precapitalist socii code flows, capitalism is based on a conjunction of decoded flows–for example, conjunction of decoded flows of population and decoded flows of money–that Deleuze and Guattari call an “axiomatic” (139). In order to survive, capitalism needs to regulate the axiomatic with a resurrection of the transcendent despotic state “under other guises” and “in unexpected forms” (220, 223). These instances of fake transcendence immanent to capitalism are “artificial territorialities” and the processes of their constitution are “(artificial) reterritorializations.”27
Capitalism oscillates between two poles–reterritorialization, which preserves it, and deterritorialization, an unfettered decoding threatening it with extinction.28 “Capitalism is inseparable from the movement of deterritorialization, but this movement is exorcised through factitious and artificial reterritorializations”; “capitalism is continually reterritorializing with one hand what it was deterritorializing with the other” (303, 259).29 What exactly do deterritorialization and artificial reterritorialization consist of and how exactly do they work? We have now gone full circle. Deterritorialization involves the schizorevolutionary connections, disjunctions, and conjunctions, while artificial reterritorialization involves paranoiac-fascisizing connections, disjunctions, and conjunctions, as outlined above. In some sense, the schizorevolutionary–desiring-machines and their desiring-production–“functions at the end,” “under the conditions determined by an apparently victorious capitalism” (130, 139). For Anti-Oedipus the fight against capitalism is defined as careful and patient invention of deterritorialization in relation to a singular situation opening onto an immanent cosmopolitan field (319-20, 380). (As we have seen, Anti-Oedipus bypasses the opposition of part versus whole with the alliance of singularity and multiplicity.)
If we use this quick sketch of the conceptual apparatus of Anti-Oedipus to look back on Jameson’s diagnosis of late capitalism and his prescription of a way out through international socialism, what strikes us is this: our enslavement (fragmentation) and our liberation (unification) are indistinguishable, in that they are both reterritorializing. In spite of their apparent opposition, they stand together in their common exclusion of deterritorialization–of the schizorevolutionary processes outlined in Anti-Oedipus. As we have seen, Jameson diagnoses minoritarian movements in their enslaved (so to speak) state as disconnected and, in their disconnectedness, as symptoms of late capitalism, while he announces minoritarian movements in their liberated state to come as parts of international socialism. The former (fragmentation) and the latter (unification) are in a relation of exclusive disjunction. This analysis is reterritorializing in different respects. The exclusive disjunction between late capitalism (fragmentation) versus international socialism (unification) is itself reterritorializing. Also, in spite of their apparent opposition, both late capitalism and international socialism are transcendent fields: Jameson “biunivocalizes” minoritarian movements in that he sees them as expressing a transcendent field that is late capitalism; he sees international socialism not as a pure multiplicity but as a whole unifying the parts. From the point of view of Anti-Oedipus, all instances of transcendence are now fake, so that both late capitalism and international socialism extract a surplus value from minoritarian movements while keeping them unconnected to each other–in the latter case, minoritarian movements are unified by their common participation in international socialism but remain laterally unconnected. As between them late capitalism and international socialism appear to exhaust the realm of the possible, the lateral, unmediated connections between minoritarian movements become a constitutive impossibility.
With Jameson’s international socialism, as with Harvey’s American New Left, as with Connor’s Anglo-American humanities, as with Hutcheon’s sexual difference feminism, one of the elements of an unimaginably multidimensional and interconnected political situation aspires to play an avant-garde role by lifting itself above the immanent field. But in doing so, it behaves as a segregative and segregated territoriality (we are a superior people surrounded by an inferior world), now creating the fragmentation it purports to overcome. (It seems that avant-gardism and segregative territorialities are not in exclusive disjunction, either.) As participants representing minoritarian movements imported Jameson’s triangle, and as they matched his avant-garde aspirations with their own, the postmodernism debate, promising unprecedented participation for everyone, risked generating unprecedented reterritorialization. Deterritorialization and schizorevolutionary processes, on the other hand, could bring to the postmodernism debate the other, double life of minoritarian movements: a vibrant life of partial, inclusive, polyvocal, and nomadic political encounters, an already emerging post-hegemonic world.
Anti-Oedipus moves through a dizzying array of concepts, conceptual distinctions, and registers. In this brief account I have concentrated on the concepts, distinctions, and registers I deemed pertinent in understanding the situation of minoritarian movements within the postmodernism debate, thereby perhaps giving the misleading impression that Anti-Oedipus offers a closed system. What it does do, though, is explicitly leave behind established oppositions, exclusive disjunctions, such as unification/fragmentation and undifferentiation/exclusive differentiation (a full list would be very long), replacing them with a proliferating array of new inclusive disjunctions. From register to register and from distinction to distinction, Anti-Oedipus stresses the “simultaneity,” “coexistence” (117, 278, 375), and inseparability (318) of the two terms of its distinctions; between the two terms, there are oscillations (260, 278, 315, 376), perpetual, subtle and uncertain shiftings, “border or frontier phenomena ready to cross over to one side or the other” (126), “underground passages” (278), the possibility of “going from one side […] to this other side” (380); the two terms “interpenetrate” (378), are “contained in […] one another” (324), “continually deriving from” each other (349). In short, ” it is clear how everything can coexist and intermix” (377).31 32 33 When Anti-Oedipus declares that “we live today in the age of partial objects,” it brings into focus not a world of fragmentation in need of unification, but a “world of transverse communications,” with its “myriad little connections, disjunctions, and conjunctions,” threatening late capitalism with extinction (42, 319, 315).
This world finally enters the postmodernism debate in 2000, with Hardt and Negri’s Empire. Profoundly influenced by Deleuze and Guattari, Empire continues, updates, and renews their work. It announces the end of a postmodernism debate dominated by the “alternatives” of unification versus fragmentation; instead it views both “alternatives” as part of “corruption,” the Empire’s ontological nullification of Deleuzo-Guattarian “pure multiplicity,” or what Empire calls “multitude” (both names for the creativity interaction of minoritarian movements). Corruption is the “substance and totality of Empire”–of the new societies of control (391). “At the base of all these forms of corruption there is an operation of ontological nullification”: “the multitude must be unified or segmented into different unities: this is how the multitude has to be corrupted” (391, emphasis added).
To elaborate further the possibilities and challenges of this “deterritorializing” and “schizorevolutionary” turn in the postmodernism debate would require us to consider Deleuze and Guattari’s notion of “becoming minoritarian” as it is developed in Kafka, their sequel to Anti-Oedipus; in A Thousand Plateaus, (especially in reference to Deleuze’s quick sketch there of the new “societies of control”); and, finally, in Hardt and Negri’s Empire.34 We can only say here that such a turn offers our best hope of an escape from both fragmentation and unification toward “myriad little” minoritarian interconnections. While the contribution of minoritarian movements to academic scholarship in the humanities is now undeniable, their very institutional success is presenting us with a new challenge: as we jettison the canonical treatises on postmodernism which would relegate these movements to the status of troubling symptoms, will the movements themselves prove better able to tolerate the seeming loss or chaos of intermixing, better able to produce a new kind of thinking that takes place across, between, and together?
A version of this essay was delivered at the “Effects of Reading” seminar at Merton College, Oxford University, on 9 November 2001. I would like to thank the organizers, Clare Connors, Lydia Rainford, and Sarah Wood, and the participants for their helpful comments. Thank you to Gerard Greenway for his many criticisms. I would also like to thank Postmodern Culture‘s reader and editors for their helpful suggestions for revision–I am especially grateful to Jim English for his generous help.
1. The case for the centrality, in the postmodernism debate, of “Postmodernism, or the Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism” and its earlier version, “Postmodernism and Consumer Society” (1982), is strongly made by Anderson. I agree with the general point but understand this centrality differently.
2. A note informs us that “this essay was originally a talk, portions of which were presented as a Whitney Museum Lecture in fall, 1982; it is published here essentially unrevised” (111).
4. “What is decisive in the present context is his [Mandel’s] notion that, with the worldwide recession of 1973-74, the dynamics of this latest ‘long wave’ are spent” (“Periodizing” 206).
5. In the texts by Jameson I examine, there is only one other such instance, one moment of “juncture” between Marxism and feminism: see “Cognitive Mapping” 355.
6. See, for example, Hardt and Negri 234-39, 268-69, 272-76, 402-03. What they call the “multitude” is a Deleuzo-Guattarian “pure multiplicity” (see final part of this essay).
7. We have already seen above an early version of this argument in “Postmodernism and Consumer Society,” including two of the three elements of genuine political expression, the individual and the norm: Jameson argues that “each group com[es] to speak a curious private language of its own,” at the expense and to the detriment of “normal language […] of the linguistic norm,” as well as at the expense of “a unique personality and individuality, which can be expected [unlike groups] to generate its own unique vision of the world” (114).
8. This fragmentation is “also a political phenomenon, [as] the problem of micropolitics sufficiently demonstrates” (“Postmodernism, or the Cultural” 65).
9. Throughout the pieces I examine, the only content Jameson ever gives socialism is in a sentence in “Cognitive Mapping”: socialism is “a society without hierarchy, a society of free people” (355); at the same time, the road to socialism seems to require a rigid hierarchical distinction between the unifier (the Left) and those in need of unification (minoritarian movements).
10. The “disappearance of the American radical past” involves the loss of the “activities and the intentionalities” that focus the present and anchor the past so that it neither drifts away nor suddenly and unintentionally invades the present (as in the schizophrenic incident discussed above which Jameson considers ahistorical); it also involves “some degraded collective ‘objective spirit’” rather than “the old monadic subject” (“Postmodernism, or the Cultural” 70, 73, 71).
The voice that speaks is that of a degraded collective spirit rather than that of an individual; grasping the “historical referent” with a firm hand is replaced by sudden invasions of the past into the present–Toni Morrison’s Beloved seems a good example of what Jameson would call ahistorical.
13. In this context, Hutcheon reverses Jameson’s argument in relation to Doctorow’s Ragtime (see n11): “it could be argued that a relatively unproblematized view of historical continuity and the context of representation offers a stable plot structure to Dos Passos’s USA trilogy. But this very stability is called into question in Doctorow’s […] Ragtime” (95).
14. See also The Condition of Postmodernity 98.
15. Hutcheon had already published A Poetics of Postmodernism: History, Theory, Fiction (London: Routledge, 1988).
16. Intriguingly, Hutcheon doesn’t even mention the name of Luce Irigaray, the feminist philosopher most closely associated with “sexual difference.”
17.The hostile reception to Hegemony and Socialist Strategy crystallized in Geras.
18. See “Building a New Left”: “I have never been a ‘total’ Marxist, someone who sought in Marxism a ‘homeland'[…] The ‘language games’ I played with Marxism were always more complicated, and they always tried to articulate Marxism to something else” (178).
19. This is “a pure dispersed and anarchic multiplicity, without unity or totality, and whose elements are welded, pasted together by the real distinction or the very absence of a link” (324).
20. “Myriad break-flows […] determine the positive dispersion in a molecular multiplicity” (342).
21. The body without organs and the partial objects can be described in terms of Spinoza’s substance and attributes, in that the body without organs is immanent while the partial objects are “distinct and cannot […] exclude or oppose one another” (327, see also 309).
22. That the body without organs allows a permanent revolution–breaking and remaking–of connections which might otherwise become fixed is an important point stressed by. Holland, throughout his articles and books on Deleuze and Guattari. See, for example, Deleuze and Guattari’s Anti-Oedipus 28, 35-36, 96-97. However, as we will see, the body without organs also lends itself to a “paranoiac fascisizing” use, hence what Holland calls its “constitutive ambivalence” (38).
23. In the so-called “sixth chapter” of Capital, Marx shows how capital comes to appear as “a quite mysterious being” (516).
24. The body without organs and the partial objects are “two kinds of desiring-machine parts, in the dispersion of the machine itself” (329); the desiring-machine “brings together–without unifying or uniting them–the body without organs and the partial objects” (327); then comes “the last part of the desiring-machine, the adjacent part” (330). “Here are the desiring-machines, with their three parts: the working parts, the immobile motor, the adjacent part” (338).
25. The segregative use of the conjunctive synthesis “brings about the feeling of ‘indeed being one of us,’ of being part of a superior race threatened by enemies from outside” (103). When God is dead, and when modernity has destroyed all that is solid, the segregative use involves “an enormous archaism,” a spiritual, transcendent, eternal entity (104). The “segregative use […] does not coincide with divisions between classes, although it is an incomparable weapon in the service of a dominating class” (103). While there are obvious examples which turn this argument into a truism–such as the Jewish conspiracy against the spirit of the German people in the eyes of the Nazi–the edge of this argument becomes more clear with less obvious examples. To give one, in relation to the agonizing debate in feminism as to whether or not feminism needs a strategic essentialism, that is, recourse to an essence of women as a common ground, the answer here would be: no, strategic essentialism is neither necessary nor helpful.
26. For example, see: “objective or subjective […] That is not the distinction: the distinction to be made” is between paranoiac and schizorevolutionary investments (345); or “desire and its object are one and the same thing […] Desire is a machine, and the object of desire is another machine connected to it” (26). “Subject-groups […] have as their sole cause a rupture with causality” (377).
28. Artificial territorialities–as pseudo-transcendent objects “borrowed” from the despotic state and as “feeble archaisms bearing the greatest burden of current functions”–are immanent to capitalism yet “more and more spiritualised” (236, 268, 177). They are diffuse, so that “no one escapes”–not even groups with revolutionary aims (236).
29. Deterritorialization, the axiomatic and reterritorialization are the three “surface elements” of capitalism (262).
30. Jameson calls this latter passage “remarkable” (see “Marxism and Dualism in Deleuze” 19, 35 n.6) and describes Anti-Oedipus‘s analysis of capitalism as “surely one of the most interesting and promising lines of investigation opened up by the ‘Marxism’ of L’Anti-Oedipe” (20). See also Anti-Oedipus 257-58, 261.
31. I agree with Paul Patton’s conclusion that “the concept of deterritorialisation [understood as connection of deterritorialisations] lies at the heart of Deleuzian ethics and politics, to the extent that Deleuze and Guattari’s mature political philosophy might be regarded as a politics of deterritorialisation” (136).
32. See the “simultaneity of the two movements of deterritorialization and reterritorialization” (260).
33. Subject-groups and subjugated groups “are perpetually shifting”; between the “paranoiac-segregative and schizonomadic […] [there are] ever so many subtle, uncertain shiftings” (64, 105).
34. In a subtle and nuanced account of Anti-Oedipus and its sequel, A Thousand Plateaus, Jameson’s starting point is that Deleuze and Guattari use “great mythic dualisms such as the Schizophrenic and the molar or Paranoid” (“Marxism” 15) but he moves to the position that Anti-Oedipus “complexifies” some oppositions, though it retains “the great opposition between the molecular and the moral” (29). He concludes with the suggestion that such great mythic oppositions be grasped as reterritorializations carrying “the call of utopian transfiguration” (34). Anti-Oedipus makes clear on two occasions that reterritorializations are “ambiguous”–they can have a positive role when they are part of a movement of deterritorialization (258, 260). It also states that “everywhere there exist the molecular and the molar: their disjunction is a relation of included disjunction” (340).
35. See Deleuze, “Control and Becoming” and “Postscript on the Societies of Control.”
36. Corruption is the “substance and totality of Empire”–of the new societies of control (Hardt and Negri 391). “At the base of all these forms of corruption there is an operation of ontological nullification”: “The multitude has to be unified or segmented into different unities: this is how the multitude has to be corrupted” (391).
Jason B. Jones
Department of English
Central Connecticut State University
jonesjason1@ccsu.edu
In his seminar of 1966-67 on the logic of fantasy, Jacques Lacan reported to his audience that he had recently been asked what need, what exigency drove him to theorize the objet a as object/cause of desire. According to the transcripts of this unpublished seminar, Lacan also passed along his answer: it was about time. This witty response discloses an important insight into Lacan’s re-reading of Freud: psychoanalysis, in its metapsychology and its clinical orientation, is fundamentally a theory of temporality and history. When we speak of sexuality or the unconscious, for instance, we are essentially just euphemizing the past. And although psychoanalysis is obsessed with the past, it also, in the Lacanian approach, demands that we reject memory and our common experiences of the past. In its place, we are offered retroaction or Nachträglichkeit, deferred action: a system whereby future events control the meaning of ones in the past. To put all of this a slightly different way: within psychoanalysis, effects frequently determine their causes, rather than the other way around. This way of thinking, I want to suggest, is psychoanalysis’s most original interpretive contribution, and recalling its structure may be helpful to humanists and psychoanalysts alike. For, culturally as in the clinic, the best interpretations arise from a proper understanding of retroaction.
If “everyone knows” that Lacan emphasizes deferred action, nonetheless it is the case that the peculiar mode of causality this implies is still far from understood. Joël Dor has argued that the problem with so-called “wild” analysis–and, implicitly, the sociocultural or literary application of psychoanalysis–is its application of a positivistic causal model to psychoanalytic theory (5-6). And as I will show, even sophisticated versions of political analysis often fall on the side of memory or reminiscence rather than history, properly (or, at any rate, psychoanalytically) speaking. The bizarre temporal logic of Lacanian psychoanalysis, in other words, potentially clarifies the stakes of social and cultural psychoanalysis, especially as such a project seeks to grapple with the “mutual foundering of the subjective and the social” (Jones, “Revisiting” 29).
Before turning to the particulars of this argument, I want briefly to acknowledge two widely held criticisms of psychoanalysis, both founded on the idea that it is either ahistorical or aggressively hostile to history. We can call these criticisms “universalist” and “deterministic.”
Many people of course reject psychoanalysis for purporting to discover universal traits, such as the Oedipus complex, the fact of castration, or even the unconscious. In this argument, universal traits are supposed to be outside of history, present in all cultures and across all times. Some people accept that universal traits are in principle possible, but claim that Freud’s “discoveries” are unverifiable. For others–and perhaps this route has been more common in the humanities over the past two decades–universality itself has come under suspicion, generally as a masquerade for power.1 Whatever the particular objection, critics who lament psychoanalysis’s universalism typically point to the variety of human sexual and familial relations as a prima facie disproof of Freud. The best response to these objections has come from writers such as Joan Copjec, Charles Shepherdson, and Slavoj Zizek, who, each in their different ways, observe that the universalist argument misses the point: rather than prescribing a single model of development for everyone, psychoanalysis instead sets itself the task of explaining why sexuality and identity are not natural.2 Freud himself puts this well in the Three Essays on the Theory of Sexuality (1905), explaining that “the sexual instinct and the sexual object are merely soldered together,” which means that every person’s sexual choices warrant explanation, rather than being self-evident or only biological (148). The florid variance of sexual and familial dispositions, and their shifts over time, confirm psychoanalysis rather than contradict it. In fact, we could turn the universalist criticism around: psychoanalysis would be at a loss to interpret a symptom-free society with static family and sexual arrangements. Psychoanalysis explains how we can experience history at all, complete with a distinct past, present, and future, as opposed to a ceaseless and cyclical natural rhythm, where temporality is not in question.
While the universalist view is now espoused mainly (though not exclusively) by psychoanalysis’s critics, the determinist view is, as it were, analysts’ and theoreticians’ in-house way of denying history. There is of course a grain of truth in the popular notion that psychoanalysts always blame childhood wishes and conflicts for adults’ suffering. According to the cliché, the analyst begins by asking the analysand to “tell me about your mother”–suggesting that the root of one’s problems is to be discovered in the history of the mother’s misdeeds. But of course if suffering stems from infantile desires, then we are essentially saying that, in some basic way, people never grow up: we are, in effect, denying the operative force of history. Any theory of history has to be able to accommodate change, and, in too many versions of psychoanalysis, change is essentially ruled out. And though I will return to this point in some detail later, let me say briefly that developmental versions of psychoanalysis reproduce this difficulty in a more putatively scientific form. By taking the fables and mythologies of psychoanalysis literally, rather than as logical explications of fantasy, developmental accounts of psychoanalysis tend to deny the contingency of events in favor of a schematic, and therefore nonhistorical, approach to the past. A more insidious version of determinism arises when we conceive of the restoration of the past as an important goal of analysis–when we try, as the expression goes, to make the telling fit the experience–rather than conceiving of that restoration as merely an early step to be overcome. This mode of analysis depends on the coercive demands of shared reality and on the tyranny of the past. Moreover–and this is a point I will return to soon–it assumes that the subject “fits” the world.
This version of determinism is, as I have said, insidious, because it’s nearly impossible to avoid. I can illustrate this difficulty with a recent example. In “The Direction of the Treatment and the Principles of Its Power” (1958), Jacques Lacan dismisses the recuperative powers of memory. Here’s how Bruce Fink renders the passage in his new re-translation:
But that, of course, is no more than a misconception: one does not get better because one remembers. One remembers because one gets better. Since this formulation was found, there has no longer been any question regarding the reproduction of symptoms, but only regarding the reproduction of analysts; the reproduction of patients has been resolved. (249)3
Fink glosses this paragraph with a footnote: “this entire paragraph seems to be ironic, Lacan clearly agreeing with Freud that one gets better because one remembers” (“Direction” Fink 345n). What’s notable about this footnote is the way that a moment of doubt–registered by seems–is immediately braced into certainty by a foregone conclusion of what Lacan must mean–registered by clearly (and when has it ever been safe to describe the Écrits as “clear”?). But Fink’s certainty is arguably too hasty. This paragraph from “The Direction of the Treatment” is consistent, for example, with Lacan’s explicit insistence, in Seminar I: Freud’s Papers on Technique (1953-54), that “it is less a matter of remembering than rewriting history” (Seminar I 14/Le séminaire I 20). In an analysis, Lacan emphasizes, it is rewriting history that makes one better, and which then allows one to “remember” more. As I will be arguing throughout this essay, the crucial thing to keep in mind is that Lacan means this point about rewriting history literally: it’s not a question of making one’s contemporary telling fit the past experience; instead, it’s a matter of changing the past experience–or, perhaps more precisely, of changing its structural inscription in the signifying chain–such that it corresponds with one’s contemporary telling. The paradox of psychoanalysis is that this historical writing is undertaken in the name of futurity, not revisionism. Indeed, the first two seminars carefully distinguish between the everyday experience of memory, which Lacan deprecates as reminiscence, and the structuring effects of symbolic memory, which he often calls rememoration. His disdain for reminiscence persists throughout the decades of the seminar. In the passage from “The Direction of the Treatment,” Lacan means that the efflorescence of memory that accompanies a successful interpretation reflects rather than produces the rewriting of the symbolic necessary to an effective treatment. Rather than being “ironic” in this passage, Lacan is stating his point in plain speech: interpretation provides meaning and truth to otherwise senseless events.
One need not be especially adept in either psychoanalysis or literary criticism to recognize that such precipitous certainty suggests anxious defense. (Especially Fink, in The Lacanian Subject [1995], afforded such painstaking and enlightening scrutiny to Lacan’s claims about symbolic memory from the first two seminars and “Direction.”) The cherished dogma, in this instance, is that the truth–represented by memory–will set us free. The claim that remembering makes one better salves the ego, and serves as a palliative to those anxious about psychoanalysis’s status as a science or therapeutic practice. The analyst makes a pact with the analysand’s ego, saying, in effect, “Come with me, and I will help you discover the truth about your past, and how you have come to be what you are. It may be difficult, and you will have to overcome resistances, but ultimately you will conquer the unconscious’s fantasmatic version of reality. You will soon learn that you and reality are not in conflict, but fundamentally in accord.” And that means psychoanalysis is really and truly a science, because it is oriented toward reality, appealing constantly to it as the guarantor of psychic health. While of course most analysts have–and certainly Bruce Fink has–a more complex view of how analysis works, I think it’s fair to characterize this view as the unacknowledged or unconscious fantasy of analysis itself, and to say that it constantly threatens to override psychoanalysis’s distinctive approach to causality and the past.
Despite my criticisms of the determinist view, I want to acknowledge that psychoanalysis does accept a certain determinism, albeit an inverted determinism according to which the future determines the past. For the time of psychoanalysis is neither developmental nor experiential, but retroactive. Freud ceases to be a psychologist and becomes the inventor of psychoanalysis when he rethinks the etiology of hysteria: in Studies on Hysteria (1895), Freud maintained that “hysterics suffer mainly from reminiscences” (7)–which means that they suffer from their past–while in The Interpretation of Dreams (1900 [1899]) he shifts ground, arguing “hysterical symptoms are not attached to actual memories, but to phantasies erected on the basis of memories” (529-30)–which means that their unconscious has literally changed their past. Instead of suggesting that psychoanalysis aims to recover the past, then, I want to suggest that its sense of the past is logical, not experiential. Its temporality emerges in phrases like Freud’s claim that every finding of an object is in fact a re-finding (Three 222); in Jean Laplanche’s observation that sexuality and the unconscious lean upon the biological order (15-18); and in Lacan’s mathemes and topological fever-dreams. The point is that causality and history work retroactively, belatedly–in a word, according to Nachträglichkeit. On the one hand, this is a point obvious to anyone who has read Freud or Lacan. Lacan’s discovery, in Freud’s text, of deferred action ought incessantly to remind us of the doubtful relevance of what we usually think of as memory, and of what we normally think of as the past.
Psychoanalysis, Lacan always says, has no tools at its disposal but speech. Psychoanalysis speaks to the subject of enunciation–of speaking as such–rather than the subject of the enunciated–of the particular thing that is said: “there is no unconscious except for the speaking being” (Television 5). This focus emphasizes two temporal dimensions of analysis. First, an abyss of time yawns between the beginning and ending of an utterance: in that abyss, and in no other time or place, can you find the subject. Second, by focusing on speech, Lacan emphasizes a retroaction proper to subjectivity: the end of the utterance completes the meaning of the beginning, and in some instances radically revises it. But Lacan also means that what the subject says is a bit of a ruse, a lure, a trick. The subject is always saying one thing and unknowingly meaning another. This is commonly misunderstood: it’s not so much that the subject’s speech is a kind of double entendre in its content; rather, the point is that there’s a structural double entendre inherent to speech. The hysteric’s symptoms and refusals amount to a kind of question: che vuoi? Why am I what you say that I am? No matter what the content of the speech, the message is always elsewhere, on that Other stage.
The point of dwelling on this aspect of analysis is that the subject’s speech is so frequently obsessed with the past. In five texts from the 1950s–Seminar I (1953-1954), Seminar II: The Ego in Freud’s Theory and in the Technique of Psychoanalysis (1954-55), “The Freudian Thing” (1955), “The Instance of the Letter in the Unconscious, or, Reason since Freud” (1957), and “The Direction of the Treatment” (1958), Lacan repeatedly makes the same two arguments: if you think you understand what the analysand is saying, you’re wrong; and you’re never more wrong than when the analysand is speaking of the past. He argues that in most analyses, the analyst and analysand make the same mistake: both believe in the truth of what they are saying about the patient’s past, symptoms, and “cure.” Perhaps more precisely, they are alike deluded by the emotional verisimilitude of the analysand’s memories.
For the seductiveness of the past constitutes the engine and the risk of analysis–a Janus-faced reality that emerges immediately whenever Freud writes on technique. Consider, for instance, this remarkable description of psychoanalytic progress from “The Future Prospects of Psycho-Analytic Therapy” (1910):
At its beginning psycho-analytic treatment was inexorable and exhausting. The patient had to say everything himself, and the physician's activity consisted of urging him on incessantly. To-day things have a more friendly air. The treatment is made up of two parts--what the physician infers and tells the patient, and the patient's working-over of what he has heard. (141)
Even granting the Rotary Club atmosphere of this particular essay, in which Freud tries to recruit more adherents to the psychoanalytic movement, there is something a little disquieting about a description in which the only person who speaks is the analyst! A more typical view–and one that is often quoted–is found in “Constructions in Analysis” (1937), where he claims that “what we are in search of is a picture of the patient’s forgotten years that shall be alike trustworthy and in all essential respects complete” (258). What I will be claiming throughout this section is that this view of analysis is a sort of trick. Certainly, there is an attempt to attain a complete version of the past, but not because it is valuable in itself. Narratives about the past turn out to be a sort of royal road to the unconscious, better even than dreams, because the constant disruptions of the “picture […] in all essential respects complete” force the analysand into a dawning recognition that language speaks us.
This emphasis on the self-estrangement of historical narrative emerges early in Freud’s descriptions of technique. In a short, eponymous encyclopedia article, called “Freud’s Psycho-Analytic Procedure” (1904), he declares that, after explaining the analytic rule to his analysands, he immediately asks for a “detailed account of their case history” (251). At first glance, this seems trivial and self-evident: of course the doctor will want to know his patient’s history. But surely if the idea of repression means anything it means this: that analysands are constitutively incapable of delivering the goods when it comes to their own illness. It is not only that they will have forgotten or confused key details, but that the story they want to tell is almost certainly not the story that they should be telling, at least not if they want to improve. (And, for that matter, there is no reason to trust that the analysand will want to improve–after all, the subject has a passion for ignorance, and if improvement were simply a matter of wanting to, psychoanalysis would just be an especially trite form of self-help.)4 In other words, a founding axiom of Freudian technique is that anything the analysand says during this “detailed account” will be misleading.
Misleading, at least, at the level of content. Freud declares in this encyclopedia article that asking for a history of the case has a pragmatic benefit: the analysand’s historical narrative will produce a useful number of “associations,” which Freud defines as “the involuntary thoughts (most frequently regarded as disturbing elements and therefore ordinarily pushed aside) which so often break across the continuity of a consecutive narrative” (251). In other words, Freud asks for a narrative because he knows he will not get one. If analysands follows the analytic rule, then their narratives will always be interrupted. The claim here is not that the associations are the “true” history, or that they inadvertently provide relevant facts that the analysand has forgotten. Instead, Freud calls our attention to their meaningless disruptiveness. Put another way, it is the disruption that is the meaning, insofar as it signifies the existence of an Other speaker. Lacan characterizes this emphasis on disruption thus: “following the thread of analytic discourse goes in the direction of nothing less than breaking up anew, inflecting, marking with its own camber–a camber that could not even be sustained as that of lines of force–that which produces the break or discontinuity” (Seminar XX 44/ Le séminaire XX 44). The analyst must, on the one hand, inflect the analysand’s discourse otherwise, in order to note moments of disruption, but as he says here, this marking cannot be sustained–it cannot, in other words, support a new narrative. In a Lacanian analysis, this point is embodied in the technique of punctuation, which enables the analysand to see that, to a certain degree, even the purportedly consecutive narrative is in fact a failure to master speech. As Lacan succinctly explains in “The Function and Field of Speech in Psychoanalysis” (1953), “punctuation, once inserted, establishes the meaning; changing the punctuation renews or upsets it; and incorrect punctuation distorts it” (96/”Fonction” 313-14). In other words, in the course of their narratives, analysands will naturally lend emphasis to certain words or phrases, an emphasis that is as much a part of their meaning as any lexical definition. The analyst tries to shift that emphasis in a variety of ways–by ending the session, by a request to repeat a word, or even by a well-timed “Hmm?” The effect, Lacan asserts, is to reveal to the analysand that there is an unconscious: “in order to free the subject’s speech, we introduce him to the language of his desire, that is, to the primary language in which–beyond what he tells us of himself–he is already speaking to us unbeknown to himself, first and foremost, in the symbols of his symptom” (80/”Fonction” 293). This amounts to a lesson in non-mastery: that the stories analysands want to tell about their past are not the whole story. During the first months of an analysis, the analyst’s interventions may well be confined simply to punctuating the analysand’s speech in this fashion. In section three, we will reconsider punctuation and its relation to what is called regression; for now it is enough to note that for both Freud and Lacan, what is punctuated, early in the analysis, is analysands’ narratives about the past.
Why does the past need to be punctuated so aggressively? What is it about analysands’ narratives of their past that cries out for resignification? To answer these questions, Lacan distinguishes two kinds of memory, reminiscence and rememoration. In effect, reminiscence is our everyday experience of memory, the historical narrative offered up by the analysand; as I will show in section three, rememoration is Lacan’s name for the work of symbolic memory, the structural history of the subject, which organizes its existence but which cannot be brought forward into consciousness.
The first two seminars, and many of the early écrits, devote themselves to Lacan’s critique of aiming at reminiscences as an analytic end in themselves. He claims, in Seminar II, that “reminiscence properly speaking […] is the passage into the imaginary” (320/Le séminaire II 369). The argument here is obviously not that the memories are false, though that may be the case. Instead, Lacan wants us to see that reminiscences buttress, or, at the bare minimum, refuse to challenge, our self-image. The specificity of psychoanalysis’s approach to memory emerges when we recall that even traumatic memories are imaginary in this way. Freud repudiates the seduction hypothesis in 1897, when he decides that his patients are at least sometimes not remembering actual events of abuse, but rather reporting fantasies that enact unacknowledged desires. Psychoanalysis begins with the observation that sometimes it is more comforting to imagine oneself a victim than to acknowledge experiencing certain desires.
Lacan’s point is not merely that reminiscences can bolster the self-esteem of analysands. The term imaginary designates also the structuring fantasy of a unified body–that is, it refers to our psychic picture of our bodily unity, a unity that often clashes with our experience of our bodily life. It is this imaginary unity that justifies Freud’s claim that the ego is a bodily ego. In “The Freudian Thing,” Lacan observes that reminiscences will always be voiced in relation to this unity:
It is not because of some mystery concerning the indestructibility of certain childhood desires that the laws of the unconscious determine analyzable symptoms. The subject's imaginary shaping by his desires--which are more or less fixated or regressed in relation to the object--is too inadequate and partial to provide the key. (133/"La chose freudienne" 431)
What persists from childhood is less a particular wish or desire that could be recalled to mind than a structuring outlook on the world, a tendency to assume that a present-day desire means one thing and not another, or at any rate, that it can be alleviated or satisfied one way and not another. Lacan instead wants to emphasize memory’s signifying structure, and the metaphorical transformations through which trauma becomes represented in the psyche.
Lacan also claims that reminiscences mistake the subject’s relationship to objects. Freud said that every object is in fact a re-found one. As we have just seen, a reminiscence associates a particular object with a recollected desire–that is, it specifies a particular object as the source of satisfaction or trauma. Viewed this way, the history offered by the analysand will be the story of innumerable inadequate substitutes for the one real loss. But such a perspective misunderstands the relationships of objects out there in the world to the subject’s objects:
Freud distinguishes two completely different structurations of human experience--one which, along with Kierkegaard, I called ancient, based on reminiscence, presupposing agreement, harmony between man and the world of his objects, which means that he recognizes them, because in some way, he has always known them--and, on the contrary, the conquest, the structuration of the world through the effort of labour, along the path of repetition [...]. The object is encountered and is structured along the path of a repetition--to find the object again, to repeat the object. Except, it is never the same object which the subject encounters. In other words, he never ceases generating substitutive objects. (Seminar II 100/Le séminaire II 124-25)
The proximate target of this argument is, of course, Plato’s theory of reminiscence, which holds that the soul recognizes truth in the world because it has always known it (in the eternal forms). The analogy is explicit: if every finding is a re-finding, as Freud says, then this must mean that objects in the world elicit desire because they correspond with some lost object that once provided satisfaction. Memory, on this reading, consists of the more-or-less passive reception of impressions from the world.
Lacan rejects this view utterly, arguing that we are constantly making the world, including the world of desire. Every new object substitutes for an object that was primally lost, not thanks to a putative correspondence, but because of the structure of signification. In “The Instance of the Letter,” Lacan writes that only because remembering can be “rooted in the signifier” that it “resolves the Platonic aporias of reminscence” (158/”L’instance” 519), a point he glosses in the seminar this way: “the object of the human quest is never an object of rediscovery in the sense of reminiscence. The subject doesn’t rediscover the preformed tracks of his natural relation to the external world. The human object always constitutes itself through the intermediary of a first loss. Nothing fruitful takes place in man save through the intermediary of a loss of an object” (Seminar II 136/Le séminaire II 165). Two things are worth emphasizing here: the first is that the subject does not so much remember the past as recreate it, in part because what the subject remembers is the wrong thing: “in man, it is the wrong form which prevails” (Seminar II 86/Le séminaire II 109). The second point is that conceptualizing analysis as the restoration of the past is wrongheaded. If the restoration of the original object were even possible, it would spell the death of desire. As Lacan will argue in the seminar on anxiety, “the subject must fail, necessarily, so that its desire is not suffocated” (Harari 99). Every object is a re-found object, but happily, not the original one.
Like Freud, Lacan claims that an analysis progresses toward the past: “the path of restitution of the subject’s history takes the form of a quest for the restitution of the past” (Seminar I 12/Le séminaire I 19). The key words here are “history” and “takes the form of,” since at those moments Lacan distinguishes between what analysands believe they are being asked to produce–that is, memories in the form of reminiscence–and the level at which the analysis is intervening–that is, history and rememoration. You cannot simply explain to the analysand that what is unfolding is imaginary, because, of course, this would elicit aggression. In other words, as he declared in the seminar on “The Names-of-the-Father,” “the praxis of analysis is obliged to advance toward a conquest of the truth via the pathways of deception” (“Names” 95). Or, somewhat less provocatively: “what is involved is a reading, a qualified and skilled translation of the cryptogram representing what the subject is conscious of at the moment” (Seminar I 13-14/Le séminaire I 20). The shift from “a picture of the past […] essentially complete” to a “cryptogram” of the analysand’s consciousness during a session gestures beyond the imaginary, to the symbolic rewriting of history that characterizes a Lacanian analysis.
Ni du côté de la nature, de sa splendour ou de sa méchanceté, ni du côté du destin, la psychanalyse ne fait de l’interprétation une herméneutique, une conaissance, d’aucune façon, illuminante ou transformante.
–Lacan, “De la psychanalyse dans ses rapports avec la réalité” (352)5
Some of the issues I have been raising may come into clearer focus if I acknowledge one of the meanings of my title: a chief “time of interpretation” is, of course, the notorious Lacanian principle of the variable-length session, derisively referred to as the “short session” by Lacan’s critics. By varying the length of sessions, Lacan is able to make the temporal experience of a session meaningful; what’s most relevant here is his corollary assertion that restoring meaning to the analytic session is what makes authentic regression possible.
Lacan’s argument for the variable-length session can be found most clearly in “The Function and Field of Speech” (1953):
It is [...] a propitious punctuation that gives meaning to the subject's discourse. This is why the ending of the session--which current technique makes into an interruption that is determined purely by the clock and, as such, takes no account of the thread of the subject's discourse--plays the part of a scansion which has the full value of an intervention by the analyst that is designed to precipitate concluding moments. Thus we must free the ending from its routine framework and employ it for all the useful aims of analytic technique. (44/"Fonction" 252)
If the session is over at the analyst’s discretion, rather than at the end of the fifty minutes, then the analysand is always left to consider why the session ended at that time: was it because something important was said, or because nothing at all had been said, and I was wasting time? Did the analyst have someplace to be? It stirs up the analysand’s discourse, making it more productive and responsive, if perhaps less comfortable. This provocation turns out to facilitate the reworking of symbolic history.
When that has occurred, Lacan goes on to say in his next sentence, authentic regression can come into being:
This is how regression can occur, regression being but the bringing into the present in the subject's discourse of the fantasmatic relations discharged by an ego at each stage in the decomposition of its structure. After all, the regression is not real; even in language it manifests itself only by inflections, turns of phrase, and 'stumblings so slight' that even in the extreme case they cannot go beyond the artifice of 'baby talk' engaged in by adults. Imputing to regression the reality of a current relation to the object amounts to projecting the subject into an alienating illusion that merely echoes one of the analyst's own alibis. (44/"Fonction" 252)
As always, Lacan emphasizes here the gap between the act of utterance and what is being said. As we have seen, the subject’s speech, especially the narrative he tells of his history, is fundamentally imaginary: consistent with the ego and with the subject’s self-image. When variable-length sessions stir the subject up, they can potentially change the frame of such narratives, “decomposing” the ego that otherwise strives for unity. It is only as the subject recognizes the extent to which the ego’s tale is not the full story of his desire that some sort of change could be effected. And as Lacan suggests, inferring from the subject’s narrative that relations with the object are currently regressed is a kind of causalist myth of the type that he derided earlier.
The variable-length session interferes with the analysand’s attempt to maintain the self-consistency of her discourse. In this sense, it echoes Freud’s advice from “On Beginning the Treatment” (1913), where he claims that a “systematic narrative should never be expected and nothing should be done to encourage it. Every detail of the story will have to be told afresh later on, and it is only with these repetitions that additional material will appear” (136). A systematic narrative should not be encouraged, of course, because that violates the analytic rule and impedes associations, as I discussed in the previous section. The argument here is not only that additional material will come into consciousness–though Freud partly means this; instead, the repetition of the narrative continually presses against the ego’s attempt at self-mastery. Since such imaginary unity is simply not possible, ever more material becomes available. The silent common ground between this early essay by Freud and Lacan’s controversial variable-length session is, simply, surprise: they alike emphasize ways of artificially disrupting the routine of everyday speech and narrative, in the name of a higher end: the truth.
Truth has nothing to do with historical fact. Truth has nothing to with “what really happened.” Truth in analysis is an interpretation that functions as a cause, one that effects change. The analyst cannot know whether an interpretation will yield truth, because, as Lacan writes, the subject receives from interpretation “the meaning that makes this act an act of his history and gives it its truth” (“Function” 50/”Fonction” 259). In other words, an interpretation works because of the subject, not because of anything inherent in the offered interpretation. Again, the example of the variable-length session illustrates this nicely: if ending a session quickly produces a change in the analysand, it is not because the “message” from the analyst got through. It is because the meaning the analysand attributed to that interpretive act changed her approach to the analysis. And in Seminar IV, Lacan claims that all successful interpretation depends on misunderstanding: “C’est la façon dont il faut s’attendre à ce qu’elle se développe, c’est la moins anormale qui soit, et c’est justement dans la béance de ce malentendu que se développera autre chose qui aura sa fécondité” (341).6 Or, as he would put it a decade later, “an interpretation whose effects are understood is not a psychoanalytic interpretation” (“Responses” 114/”Réponses” 211). As we saw earlier, failure is crucial to the maintenance of desire; from a Lacanian point of view, analysis is partially about pushing a particular failed narrative until it has to be abandoned, leaving a space for a more tolerable narrative to emerge.
In keeping with Freud’s notion of the association, the Lacanian re-reading of psychoanalysis uses fantasy and imaginary narrative at cross-purposes. Lacan famously begins his video Television with just this point: “I always speak the truth. Not the whole truth, because there’s no way, to say it all. Saying it all is literally impossible: words fail. Yet it’s through this very impossibility that the truth holds onto the real” (3/”Télévision” 509). What Lacan means here is that the failure of words to refer adequately to their meanings leaves a space for the subject to come into being. Because arriving at a final meaning is impossible, the subject has to commit itself to one meaning over others, and must suffer the consequences of that commitment. Viewed from this perspective, the gaps in the analysand’s narrative have an importance as gaps–as spaces of possibility for a different understanding–rather than simply as holes that would ideally be filled up.
Psychoanalysis is therefore not a hermeneutics. It is not a question of uncovering hidden or secret meanings, but, rather, a question of making possible the discovery of truth. This discovery begins, as I have been insisting, when the subject accepts that imaginary unity is not the whole, or even the most interesting, story:
In the course of analysis, as I have pointed out to you, it is when the traumatic elements--grounded in an image which has never been integrated--draw near that holes, points of fracture appear in the unification, the synthesis, of the subject's history. I have pointed out how it is in starting from these holes that the subject can realign himself within the different symbolic determinations which make him a subject with a history. Well, in the same way, for every human being, everything personal which can happen to him is located in the relation to the law to which he is bound. His history is unified by the law, by his symbolic universe, which is not the same for everyone. (Seminar I 197/Le séminaire I 222)
This passage’s otherwise exemplary clarity is blurred by the use of “subject” to refer both to the person in analysis and the virtual subject on whose behalf an analysis typically is directed. Lacan here foregrounds the distinction between the “unification, the synthesis of the subject’s history”–that is, the imaginary narrative that the analysand wants to tell–and the “symbolic determinations” that give the subject a history. The trauma is “impossible” or unintegrated at the level of the imaginary (at the level of the ego), all the while registering itself in the subject’s symbolic history.
This symbolic history is rememoration, and refers to the idea that the syntax or grammar of the psyche is itself a mode of memory–in fact, it is the only efficacious memory in an analysis, despite the fact that it cannot be invoked directly. Lacan sees the role of this rememoration as a way of negotiating the ego’s imaginary demands for unity and the traumatic “impossible” of the real. In Seminar XI (1964), he describes it this way: “When the subject tells his story, something acts, in a latent way, that governs this syntax and makes it more and more condensed” (68/Le séminaire XI 66). It is this syntax that an interpretation aims at, because it is what keeps the subject at a specified distance from the real. This is described in the Ethics seminar (1959-1960) through the notion of das Ding, the extimate arbiter of symbolic efficacy: “there is not a good and a bad object; there is good and bad, and then there is the Thing. The good and the bad already belong to the order of the Vorstellung; they exist there as clues to that which orients the position of the subject according to the pleasure principle” (63/Le séminaire VII 78). As we saw earlier, Lacan observes that the subject emerges against the backdrop of a primal loss, a loss that allows its desire to come into being and, indeed, which allows the existence of the subject itself. In the Ethics seminar, that lost item is das Ding, and the job of the pleasure principle and the various unconscious representations (Vorstellungen) is to remember precisely where that object was lost, so that it will not be directly refound. Instead, the symbolic order ceaselessly throws up substitutive objects that provide satisfactions at the level of Vorstellung, without threatening to approach too close to das Ding. An analysand will present for analysis because something at this level has gotten “jammed.” The task of interpretation is to “hit the real,” ideally allowing the subject to come unstuck.
Symbolic memory is what functions according to the combinatory of metaphor and metonymy. Metonymy names, for Lacan, the sliding of desire from substitute object to substitute object. Metaphor, by contrast, “is the very mechanism by which symptoms […] are determined. Between the enigmatic signifier of sexual trauma and the term it comes to replace in a current signifying chain, a spark flies that fixes in a symptom–a metaphor in which flesh or function is taken as a signifying element–the signification, that is inaccessible to the conscious subject, by which the symptom may be dissolved” (“Instance” 158/” L’instance” 518). We should not be confused by the reference to “enigmatic signifier”: in contrast to Jean Laplanche, Lacan is not claiming that there is an original message to be deciphered. Instead, the signifier is enigmatic because it is both lost and remembered–lost, primally lost, but registered all the same within the symbolic. Metaphor names the process by which that signifier annexes others to itself. And because, as Lacan observes, a symptom is just an interpretation that doesn’t work, interpretation has to aim beyond the symbolic, trying to shift or uncouple das Ding from its formal representations. Symbolic memory is thus at a wholly other level than reminiscence, “even if the elements organized by the former as signifiers are borrowed from the material to which the latter give signification” (“Freudian Thing” 133/”La chose freudienne” 431). In other words, of course it is true that the signifiers that hold off das Ding are drawn from the subject’s experience. Yet they serve so different a purpose in the symbolic–being organized entirely in reference to an object that never existed in experience–that they are finally incommensurate with the subject’s own account of its life.
This incommensurateness is, at the end of the day, the good news. Because there is only a metaphorical connection between the traumatic real and the experienced events of a person’s life, there is always an opportunity for new metaphors to emerge that will enable the analysand to find new sources for pleasure, new chances for satisfaction. And indeed, because symptoms work according to a process of signification and metaphor, their meaning is always deferred–including, paradoxically, the question of whether or not they are actually symptoms! The inference Lacan draws is that the future determines the past:
The past and the future correspond precisely to one another. And not any old how--not in the sense that you might believe that analysis indicates, namely from the past to the future. On the contrary, precisely in analysis, because its technique works, it happens in the right order--from the future to the past. You may think that you are engaged in looking for the patient's past in a dustbin, whereas on the contrary, it is as a function of the fact that the patient has a future that you can move in the regressive sense. (Seminar I 157/Le séminaire I 180)
Psychoanalytic interpretation creates a past for the analysand. On the one hand, as Dany Nobus has argued, this makes Lacanian analysis “less deterministic, for including more radical options of freedom, less historical, for [being] strictly future-orientated, and less restrictive, for also accommodating psychotic patients” (88). Yet it does not turn psychoanalysis into voluntarism, for the exact same reason that the “cure” works at all. You can’t make an efficacious intervention by simply repeating the truths of psychoanalysis: “Do not give way on your desire!” “There is no guarantor of virtue!” and so forth. After all, words fail. They fail because of the subject’s commitment to its imaginary narrative, but they also fail because history is real–because its thorny perdurability cleaves the subject’s discourse, resisting assimilation to either symbolic or imaginary memories.7
People do History precisely in order to make us believe that it has some sort of meaning. On the contrary, the first thing we must do is begin from the following: we are confronted with a saying, the saying of another person who recounts his stupidities, embarrassments, inhibitions, and emotions. What is it that we must read therein? Nothing but the effects of those instances of saying. We see in what sense these effects agitate, stir things up, and bother speaking beings. Of course, for that to lead to something, it must serve them, and it does serve them, by God, in working things out, accommodating themselves, and managing all the same–in a bumbling, stumbling sort of way–to give a shadow of life to the feeling known as love.
–Lacan, Seminar XX, Encore (45-46/Le séminaire XX 45)
By way of conclusion, I want briefly to note the value of reframing Lacanian concepts in their clinical orientation. A couple of different kinds of advantages accrue. The first is that this optic corrects a series of difficulties in the American reception of Lacan, including the pervasive judgment that Lacan is more interested in philosophy than in the clinic. As Charles Shepherdson’s Vital Signs explains, until we start to understand the conceptual specificity of the Lacanian field, we can’t understand the projects of writers like Kristeva, Irigaray, and Foucault. Further, we will be encouraged to remember that Lacan is not a poststructuralist in the American sense–not, in other words, interested in the free play of the signifier, but rather the opposite of this: obsessed with why signifiers get “stuck” for a particular subject. We come closer to the real praxis of psychoanalysis when we insist on the clinical dimension of these texts. When we strip away Lacan’s concepts from their clinical dimension, we are oriented toward the empty speech of imaginary narratives.
A second reason to think about the Lacanian clinic is that it will help us do our humanistic business. We better understand the complex structure of, say, Jameson’s “political unconscious” when we read his claim that “it is in detecting the traces of that uninterrupted narrative, in restoring to the surface of the text the repressed and buried reality of this fundamental history, that the doctrine of a political unconscious finds its function and necessity” (20). We can better understand the limits of traditional applied psychoanalysis, and renounce the practice of “psychoanalyzing” authors–or, at least, we can recognize this practice as a kind of folk psychology, fully responsive to the interpretive demands neither of psychoanalysis nor of literary criticism. It also reminds us of the privileged relationship–for both Freud and Lacan–between literature and analysis. Not only in the sense that Freud and Lacan both insisted that the preponderance of psychoanalytic training should involve a wide and deep reading in literature, either. According to Serge André, in Seminar XXIV: The Non-Known (1976-77), Lacan argues that “in contrast to the fraudulence of meaning, […] there is poetry, which can accomplish the feat of making a meaning absent. He invites his audience to find in poetry what psychoanalytic interpretation can hope to be […]. ‘Only poetry […] permits interpretation’” (327). Literature offers a field in which we can learn to break up the congealed meanings impeding our own psychic life. The analogy between an interpretation and, say, a poem is helpful: the “point” of an interpretation or a poem–whatever paraphrase of their meaning we could develop–is far removed from the material effects of their language. Tracking the effects of the signifier in language gives us the opportunity to watch our assumptions about the world fail: an aesthetic and ethical opportunity alive to the specificity alike of psychoanalysis and literature, and binding them both to the world.
I would like to thank several people for their comments on earlier versions of this essay: Kate Briggs, Kate Brown, Stephanie Cherolis, Dan Collins, Angela Hunter, Walter Kalaidjian, Howard Kushner, Gaurav Majumdar, Kareen Malone, Elissa Marder, and especially Adrian Johnston and Aimee Pozorski. Christopher Lane and Robert A. Paul also guided its development.
1. Sometimes even psychoanalysts make this criticism–see, for instance, the introduction to the recent collection Bringing the Plague, which argues that “from a poststructuralist standpoint, the classical psychoanalytic notion of a psychic apparatus wholly or largely unformed by the multiple contingencies of a specific place, time, and society serves to naturalize and reinforce the privilege of those who hold power in the dominant culture of the West” (18).
2. See Copjec, Shepherdson, and Zizek Sublime. I discuss Shepherdson’s argument in more detail in “Sexuality’s Failure.” Also relevant is the distinction Eric Santner draws between “universal” and “global” approaches to difference, in the opening pages of On the Psychotheology of Everyday Life (1-8).
3. Fink’s translation here is essentially the same as Sheridan’s (see Sheridan 260). The French provides no insight as to the putative irony: “Mais ce n’est là bien entendu qu’une maldonne: on ne guérit pas parce qu’on se remémore. On se remémore parce qu’on guérit. Depuis qu’on a trouvé cette formule, la reproduction des symptoms n’est plus une question, mais seulement la reproduction des analystes; celle des patients est résolue” (“La direction” 624).
4. See “Direction” Fink 252 (“La direction 627).
5. Dany Nobus translates this passage thus: “neither on the side of nature, its splendour or evil, nor on the side of destiny, psychoanalysis does not make interpretation into a hermeneutics, a knowledge in no way illuminating or transformative” (176).
6. In Nobus’s translation: “this is the way one has to expect interpretation to develop, it is the least abnormal of all, and it is precisely in the gap of this misunderstanding that something else will develop, that will have its fecundity” (160).
7. The argument that history is real is of course associated with Slavoj Zizek. Space precludes a full discussion of his multifaceted approach to historicity, which argues simultaneous that the real is a meaningless kernel and that certain apocalyptic events come to stand in for the real. For my purposes, the first version–the historical real as unsymbolizable kernel–is most useful (see Sublime 119-20 and “Class” 110-11).
Anustup Basu
Department of English
University of Pittsburgh
anbst42@pitt.edu
Toward the beginning of Gabriel García Márquez’s novel El Otono del Patriarca, the protagonist, who is the dictator of an imaginary Latin American republic, is seen to witness his own funeral. That is, he sees himself being buried de facto, in terms of an ordering of words (“the king is dead”) and visibilities (the public rituals of the royal funeral) that creates sovereign publicity and power. However, by a profound trick of fate, it so happens that the physical body of the king that graces this occasion does not belong to the protagonist himself–it is of his double Patricio Aragonés, who has recently been killed by a poisoned dart. The corpse of the official imposter is interred with full state honors. When the dictator peeks out of his half-ajar bedroom door to watch the ceremony taking place in the audience hall of the presidential palace, he is offered a glimpse of what may be called the televisual in its most sublime form. By virtue of this unusual situation, he temporarily assumes a godly, panoptic perspective that he will never achieve again in his career.
I am using the concept of the televisual in its basic sense, that of projection and reception of visibilities across distances–in other words, as a primary cognitive task of the human who wants to read the world. But we face a profound question in trying to see matters from the dictator’s “televisual” point of view: what exactly must be the nature of “distance” in this case, when the “self” is paradoxically made to see the “self” being buried afar? It is the mysterious and extraordinary body of the sovereign himself that needs to be unraveled before one can even begin entering that ontological conundrum. We can say that “distance” here is manifested first of all by a death-induced split between the phenomenal and the epistemo-constitutive poles of the king’s body; the mortal carcass of the sovereign is thereby detached from the abstract stately form endowed with the iron deathmask of power. The patriarch (we will call him by this name to distinguish him as the not-named son of Bendición Alvarado who was, till now, holding the post of the dictator) feels alarmed and powerless because he, for the time being, is the bearer of none of the aforementioned bodies. Patricio Aragonés hijacks the first of the two to be buried with him, while the mask and the regalia, which ensure that the king lives long after the king is dead, are left intact but vacant. The patriarch realizes–even as contending forces belonging to the church, the cabinet, and the military get ready to compete for the throne–that the paraphernalia of power make an inhuman terminal that is presently empty, but always with a life of its own. This distinction between the two bodies of the sovereign is a fundamental one that Marx makes between the “mediocre and grotesque” protagonist and the hero’s part he assumes in the farce in Eighteenth Brumaire of Louis Bonaparte (144). In our present case, Patricio Aragonés the double, by dying and being buried spectacularly, has, for all practical purposes, pushed the “real person” out of his earthly mantle. This is established in the “audience room” as an event in the public domain of knowledge through a ceremonial bringing together of signs, affects, and things: there is the royal corpse with its “chest armored with military decorations, the showy dress uniform with the ten pips of general of the universe, […] the king-of-spades saber he never used, the patent leather boots with two gold spurs” (García Márquez 28), as well as the people brought to bear witness–the old man who gives the Masonic salute, the one who kisses the ring, the schoolgirl who lays a flower on him, or the fishwife who embraces his body and sobs. And then there are the sounds–the sudden cannon shots from the fortress on the harbor and the rolling of the cathedral bells.
The production of the corpse as spectacle in “direct telecast” causes much consternation in the mind of the patriarch. After all,
the vast paraphernalia of power and the lugubrious martial glories reduced to his human size of a fagot lying in state, God damn it, that can't be me, he said to himself in a fury it's not right, God damn it, he said to himself, contemplating the procession that was parading around his corpse, and for an instant he forgot the murky reasons for the farce and felt raped and diminished by the inclemency of death toward the majesty of power [...]. (García Márquez 28)
The moment of panic is hence that in which the patriarch realizes that he is not the powerful author of the scene being realized below with the dictator at the center. He discovers that he is not controlling the perceptual universe around him; it is rather because of the very facticity of his “death” that he is able momentarily to occupy the omniscient, inhuman point of view that is at the heart of the visual architecture of power itself. It is clearly a publicity stunt gotten out of “hand,” a situation in which the image no longer represents an essence of the self, but has become a perverse automaton. From the point of view of the patriarch, the non-temporality of such a perception is out of joint with history as autobiography, simply because it cannot fall within the order of living consciousness and the finite human’s being in the world. Only when the patriarch becomes a ghost and transcends the eschatological limitations of the human is the theatre of the rotten state–with its body of secrets, constellation of forces, subjects, interests, conflicts, and corrosive intrigues–revealed to him. This is thus a magical truth that is produced, an otherworldly knowledge that only Hamlet’s father and those he haunts can possess–a “total” and inhuman picture of the world fomented by the spirit.
Hence, what seems “unreal” is only so from the vantage point of the individual reduced to his own ghost. It becomes clear that the erstwhile dictator can subsequently “come back” from the dead not by reentering the stage as the “real” persona and thereby proving the previous spectacle to be a false one, but by casting himself as “double of the double,” the next one in a long line of imposters–indeed, by way of an all new coup d’état that inserts his face into the mask left behind by Patricio Aragonés. The return is possible not by disrupting the “direct telecast” and revealing it to be illusory, but by violently reinstating its realness in letting oneself be claimed by it completely. Hence, from the phenomenological point of view of the average spectator and as per the uninterrupted flow of the direct telecast, it would be such that it is never Patricio Aragonés who is assassinated, but the patriarch himself who goes into and returns from the dead. And that is exactly how it happens subsequently: it is the “unburied” president who comes back triumphantly, chasing away the bishop primate, Ambassador Schontner, and other conspirators who have been exposed by a televisuality that only a ghost or a god could have witnessed. If the mask of the “dictator” (as opposed to the faces of the patriarch or Aragonés) is a special instance of the televisual, it is because it preserves an inorganic continuity for itself, independent of all those incessant ebbs and flows of doublings. It is assumed by individuals who slide into it or slip out of it without being able to make it into an expressive tool to be used solely for their personal ends. The mask as televisual therefore becomes an aspect of power itself, rather than a reflection, image, or possession of powerful men who may be mediocre or grotesque, or patriarchs with herniated testicles underneath their uniforms. But then, the question becomes, what can be the nature of such a mask? In what sense is it always already televisual, with or without the presence of television as a technological reality? What we will be trying to examine by starting from the premise of the televisual mask is a modality of power that organizes distances, bodies, movements, statements, and visibilities in a certain manner. In modern telematic societies, this process of publicity becomes far more complex.
We need to pause for a minute to dwell on the existential predicament of the patriarch and to “world” it comically, even philosophically, in the light of our occasion. It would be pertinent to recall Heidegger’s concern with the lure of modern technology that causes Dasein to lose itself through a massified familiarity with the world. Mass technology in that sense, becomes a
Being-with-one-another [that] dissolves one's own Dasein completely into the kind of Being of "the Others," in such a way, indeed, that the Others, as distinguishable and explicit, vanish more and more. In this inconspicuousness and unascertainability, the real dictatorship of the "they" is unfolded. (164)
As a freakish and exceptional case, the status of a “super-spectator” can be ascribed to the patriarch since for him the extinguishing of the self and the revelation of the being of dictator as being of “others” is staged figurallyin front of him. He is thus able to descend from the skies and locate the dead “self” as a “human size of a fagot” in the landscape of the other. A more illustrative example, one that involves “real” televisual technology rather than the metaphysical situation we have been discussing so far, comes later in the novel. The old, weak, and dying patriarch once again witnesses the dictator as the televisual other. This time, as his body grows more and more decrepit, his wits dull, and his memories fade, the image on the screen grows younger:
He recognized his own amplified voice in the quarters of the presidential guard and he looked in through the half-open window and saw a group of officers dozing in the smoke-filled room opposite the sad glow of the television screen and there he was on the screen thinner and trimmer, [...] sitting in the office where he was to die with the coat of arms of the nation behind him and three pairs of gold eyeglasses on the desk, and he was reciting from memory an analysis of the nation's finances with the words of a sage that he never would have dared repeat, damn it, it was a more upsetting sight than that of his dead body among the flowers because now he was seeing himself alive and listening to himself speak with his own voice, [...] I who had never had been able to bear the embarrassment of appearing on a balcony and had never overcome the shyness about speaking in public [...]. (233)
Many more years later, after ruling the land for over a hundred years, when the patriarch dies inside the palace, people watching from a forbidding distance come to know of the passing away only when the regime that endows signs with meaning and valence–the architectural compact of words and things in a given situation of power–throws up a wondrous spectacle, one which crosses the thresholds of human presence, agency, and judgment, and passes onto a realm of the absurd only an animal can dare enter: a wandering cow appears on the balcony of the presidential palace.
We are, in a general way, already talking about fascism and the strange existential predicament of the individual grappling with it. This, despite the fact that the individual in this case may either be the Fuhrer himself, or the enlightened philosopher trying to understand this modality of power through a meaningful reading of the world. Both García Márquez’s patriarch, who thinks he “holds” power and the primordial Heideggerian thinker–whose inventory of tasks include avoiding this or that ensnarement of being as subject, staying away from the herd, and thinking about Being–are seen to be already inducted into an overall mass-technological production of “they-selves.” In bringing these two figures together in a constellation of thought, we are trying to understand a historical turn in Western industrial societies when the autumn of the patriarch (who may or may not have an enlightened head on his shoulders, but who always “holds” the scepter of power with a despotic sway) also proves to be the twilight of the disinterested philosopher. These figures “represent” two important aspects of the historical agency of the Western subject of enlightenment. As we know, Kantian modernity was founded on these two agents and their respective executive-juridical and moral-legislative authorities as caretakers of the political state and the ethical one.1 It was this secular compact between power and knowledge in the body politic that created the epistemological figure of the European human who presumed to make history exactly the way he liked it. While the Heideggerian project was to announce the end of that philosophy of progress and deconstruct the transcendental subject that it proposed as the free-willed agent of history, it also entailed an atavistic and agrarian denial of industrial modernity.2
I want to draw out several points here. The first concerns the relation between distance and power. The patriarch realizes that the mask of power is not an aspect naturalized to him, by the dint of his own activity. The televisual visage of the dictator–which is made omnipotent through the technological erasure of distance–is that which powerfully animates his human face, and not the other way round. In “dying” and acquiring the panoptic vision, what the patriarch sees is much more than various subjects breaking their conspiracies of silence and registering support for or antagonism against him. Over and above that, he is disturbed in hearing that great monologue of a language instrumentalized by the state–power speaking to itself, as Heidegger puts it–that reduces his faggot self, friends, and foes, to a vast herd of “they selves.” The “Master” of the land understands that even he, once pressed into the production of information values in terms of the televisual, is not free from what Walter Benjamin called the “growing proletarianization of modern man and the increasing formation of masses” (“Work of Art” 234). The patriarch is therefore alienated from the dictator as televised icon only by a lesser degree than the pauper, in terms of a graduated and differential hierarchy of distance and accessibility.
When we transpose the problem from the landscape of “primitive accumulation” in Garcia Márquez’s novel to modern metropolitan societies, the situation becomes more dense and intricate in its alignment of forces. If modern technology is that which massifies and disempowers the human subject who had formerly killed god and taken his place, it is equally important to understand that this fateful loss of agency shared by the patriarch and the beggar alike can be defined only in terms of formalistic positionalities of power, as in a chess game, unless it is related to production and the laboring process. It would be a mistake to account for lines of force, energies, visibilities, words, and things that constitute flexible and dynamic diagrams of power purely in terms of the self-conscious human and his conspiratorial or benevolent intentionalities. But the point is also to understand that such diagrams certainly have something to do with bodies of “interest,” congealment of some desires and foreclosure of others, density and regularity of some ideology statements and rarefactions of others, and uneven circuits of social rewards that gather and group humans together in the registers of class, caste, race, religion, gender, or nation. Also, thinking the televisual in terms of such complex forms of metropolitan power has to involve pondering over technologies of the social that de-essentialize classic self-other categories, making them into flexible and mobile Benettonesque visages that can transform peoples into multiculturalist populations, and ways of life into marketable lifestyles.3 I am speaking, for instance, of that form of televisuality that can generate the most celebratory image of “in-corporation” in the racial history of the United States, one that can spectacularly compound the figure of the prince with that of the pauper–in the form of William Jefferson Clinton as the first American “black president.”
Secondly, I would like to relate the Heideggerian anxiety about an increasing erosion of distance between the earth and the sky not to the obsolescence of being in the world, but to a question that seems to have resonated in various conceptual forms in the works of a long line of Western thinkers, from Antonio Gramsci to Gilles Deleuze: how was it possible that modern technologies of mechanical reproduction and electrification of public communication should produce European fascism as one of its first, grotesque world historical spectacles? The paradox, as it is expressed in Benjamin’s “Work of Art,” can be outlined as follows: from the perspective of the enlightenment humanist one could say that mechanized mass culture in the twentieth century was supposed to “de-auratize” the work of art and make it more democratically available; but what Benjamin notices in his time is a disturbing incursion of aesthetics into politics, rather than the politicization of art that could have been possible. This, for him, constitutes a “violation” of the technologies of mass culture, by which the “Fuhrer cult” produces its ritual values of aesthecizing war and destruction (234-35). Benjamin formulates the problem as belonging to a society not yet “mature” enough to “incorporate technology as its organ” (235, emphasis added).
Thirdly, I would note here that the problem extends to the act of communication itself as conceptualized in hallowed liberal democratic categories; that is, in terms of he who speaks and he who listens, various social, moral, and juridical contracts, and consequent rights, freedoms, and the choices that are said to facilitate rational exchanges and consensus. During the publicity drive toward building up domestic and international support for the 2003 war on Iraq, no functionary of the United States government (except U.S. Vice President Dick Cheney) actually made a public statement directly suggesting that Saddam Hussain had an active part to play in the devastation of 11 September 2001. Nevertheless, it was subsequently noted in the opinion polls that an alarming number of American people believed that the Iraqi despot was involved in the conspiracy and its execution. Hence the two propositions–Saddam the evil one, and 9/11, the horrible crime–seem to be associated in a demographic intelligence without having any narrative obligation to each other; that is, without being part of the same “story.” The outcome, it would seem, was achieved by a mathematical chain of chance, by which two disparate postulates, in being publicized with adequate proximity, frequency, and density, gravitate toward each other in an inhuman plane of massified thought. They, in other words, are bits and bytes of newspeak which come to share what I will call an “informatic” affinity with each other, without being organically enjoined by constitutive knowledge.
The formation of the latter entity is of course something we are prone to consider a primary task of the philosophical human subject, who is also the modern citizen with rights and responsibilities. Attaining knowledge by reading the world is how we are supposed to self-consciously exercise reason, form views, and partake in an enlightened project of democratic consensus and legislation. Hence, insofar as these pious protocols of liberal politics are concerned, the presence of this mass prejudice4 poses some disconcerting questions: How does one account for the fact that what is, at face value, the most sophisticated technological assemblage for worldly communication and dissemination of “truth,” should sublimate what, in Kantian terms, must be called an unscientific belief or dogma? To be mediatized literally means to lose one’s sovereign rights. Hence, what happens to the idea of government by the people and for the people if the “false” is produced as a third relation which is not the synthetic union of two ideas in the conscious mind of the citizen or in the general intellect of the organic community, but is a statistical coming together of variables? How is the cynical intelligence of power that calls this sublimation into being to be configured and what consequences does it have for human politics? Lastly, this manufacture of the false as “informatic” perception requires money, in order not only to bring the variables Saddam Hussain and 9/11 into a state of associative frequency, but also to minimize and regulate the appearance of other variables from appearing in the scenario. For instance, in this case, to reduce, for the time being, the frequency of the proper name Osama. Hence, the obvious question–what is the role of money in a purportedly postmodern, increasingly technologized sphere of communicative action? What does one do when Hitler’s lie proliferates without Hitler the liar? In a way, this anxious query seems to yet again resonate the old Pascalian question posed at the very gestative period of a godless modern world: how does one protect the interests of abstract justice from being outfunded and dominated by real, material interests of power in the world?
The title of this subsection is clearly paradoxical. We need to create a clearing in our inherited discursive domains in order to broach this figure of thought in a satisfactory manner. Let us briefly return to the concept metaphor of organicity that Benjamin invokes in his diagnosis of a technologization of mass society in his times.5 The statement comes under considerable duress and loses its positivistic, idealistic charge if it is located in the overall context of Benjamin’s oeuvre. The historical landscape of politics, aesthetics, and culture Benjamin draws up in his major works–pertaining to Baudelaire’s Paris, the German trauerspiel, the works of Kafka and Brecht, or a possible philosophy of history–is indeed one of ruins. It is not spirited by an otherworldly and inevitable Hegelian impulse of progress–as an ongoing chronicle of constitution already foretold. Society in that sense is not a vegetative mass that builds itself relentlessly by subsuming the fall of heroes and other tragedies; it is perpetually giving rise to and destroying institutions that are at once pillars of civilization and of barbarity. The social as such is always fraught with anarchic fragmentations, discontinuities, and with the event as unforeseen catastrophe. There is indeed an inhuman aspect about the very process of figuration in Benjamin’s thinking–in the helpless movement of the angel of history blind to the future and caught in tempestuous circumstances, in the welter of shock and distraction (rather than contemplative stances of the human) of moving traffic in Paris and of the moving image, or in the past that indeterminately strives to turn toward a rising sun in the historical sky like a flower induced by a secret heliotropism. These concept metaphors of supra-normalcy, machinism, mysticism, and a magical naturalism that abound in Benjamin’s work, are features that can be located in a general temper of disenchantment in Western thought between the great wars–one that pertained to a rigorous questioning, after Husserl, of a unified phenomenology of the subject, of closed scientifico-propositional systems of logic, and of a Hegelian positivistic philosophy of historical progress. Benjamin’s work, in that sense, can be placed alongside Marcuse’s return to Nietzsche and Freud, or Adorno and Horkheimer’s analysis of the culture industry and the instrumentalization of reason. The logic of this grouping lies in proposing not a common methodological home for these thinkers, but a common historical understanding: namely, that fascisms in the world, more than ever, render philosophy absolutely homeless and in dire poverty. The greatness of these thinkers lay in the fact that in their examination of mediatization and reification, degradation of aesthetic and intellectual culture, and a corrosive Weberian rationalization of society into bureaucracies and markets, they chose to be in a perpetual state of critical exile, without seeking assuring, administered shelters of the subject, unity, and law.
Gilles Deleuze has rearticulated Benjamin’s argument about the work of art and technologies of mass reproduction by transposing it from its organicist parabasis into a subhuman, machinic, and molecular-pragmatic one. In invoking Deleuze in conjunction with Benjamin, I am not trying to harness them, with their obvious methodological differences, into a synthetic metacommentary.6 Neither is my objective that of proposing a dynastic continuity that could eclectically house them in a peaceful philosophical tradition of the West. Indeed, there can be no bridge of “truth” between them. The purpose on the other hand, is perhaps to do violence to pieties of propositional logic and bring the two discourses together in a constellation, or a catachrestic assemblage. In other words, to read them historically as powerful theoretical fictions that disrupt habits of the commonsensical–as instances of thinking which are, at once, political and taking place in a moment of danger. Such a critical but disjunctive bringing together of Benjamin and Deleuze would recognize and take into consideration the shifting epistemic configurations of knowledge and power in the world, locating the former in a scenario where the great edifices of Newtonian geometry, the moral subject of Kant and Hegel, and the Darwinian positivisms of the previous two centuries are in a state of ruinous dispersal, while placing the latter in a universe of Heisenbergian uncertainties.
According to Deleuze, the discourses of fascism, as the dominant myth of our time, establish themselves by an imperial-linguistic takeover of a whole socius of expressive potentialities. The latter, for him, constitutes an immanent field of particle signs, of matters, perceptions, and memories that become attributes of consciousness models (like in the phenomenology of the subject) and deictic enunciations (like that of the Nazi mythology) only on a secondary level. In other words, the relationship between a diffuse semiotics and a molar semiology is always one where the latter is a part of the former, and not the other way round (for instance, it is not an essential, organic act of national narration that imperially and categorically imparts meaning to all signs). The relationship between the two is always that of either catastrophic balance or antagonistic movement. That is not to say that we have languages without language systems, but that language systems exist only in relation to the expressive nonlinguistic materials that they continually transform.7 What is also important here is that eruptive singularities and anarchy of signs and expressions always harbor potentials to transvaluate and alter normalizing enunciations of the subject or grand metanarratives of history. Without sharing Deleuze’s occasional impulses toward a transcendental empiricism or an acosmic vitalism, one can find in him a consistent effort toward thinking the battleground of language in terms of perpetually altering disjunctive assemblages, rather than in those of synthetic, organicist propositions pertaining to culture, nation, or narration. The “maturity” of society, as per a Deleuzian critique, can be understood to be a perpetually dangling holy carrot of Western-style modernity that promises a moment of synthetic arrival–an ideal state of perpetual peace when the organs of culture are no longer abused, but incorporated into the being and destiny of the national, or even the world spirit as a whole.
According to liberal historicist imaginations that take social maturity all too seriously, the basic fault of the Nazi party would simply lie in the fact that it proposed an “inauthentic” founding myth of the state, in the form of the psychobiography of the white Aryan male. The root of the error thus was only in the content, in Adolf’s perversion and lies, and not in the technological form of the proposition or its social relations of production. The money-technology assemblage of propaganda, as such, is therefore taken to be value-neutral–it is only the voluntarism of the human that decides its deployment between truth and falsehood, between good and evil. It is the same historicism that proposes that the present global dominance of neo-liberalism has at last created the post-historical moment of a finally naturalized episteme and a union devoutly desired between the earth and the sky.8 It is, in other words, a historicism that announces its own dazzling and spectacular death, and in the process tries to foreclose historical thinking in toto. As a result, unlike the inauthentic rampage of the Nazi pretender’s war machine, the founding violence of a neo-liberal, transnational sovereignty in the world, from Rwanda, to the Middle East, to the Phillipines, is seen by such an ideology to have a totalizing legitimacy drawn from the jealous and vituperative religiosity of a Market Being. It is in the auspices of such a naturalized episteme, when state language becomes global to a degree unprecedented in history, that the category “information” assumes a special “postmodern” status, in contrast to traditional and modern ways of reading the world through revelation, grace, discovery, or knowledge.
Deleuze on the other hand leads us toward a machinic understanding of fascism, rather than one that diagnoses the body politic in terms of sickness and health. In such a conception, Adolf does not feature as the madman who abuses technology, but is himself a grotesque, spectacular production of technologism itself. As we were saying, there are different forms of life and expressive energies in any situation of the historical which are capable of generating multiple instances of thought, imaginative actions, creative impulses and wills to art. Fascism destroys such pre-signifying and prelinguistic energies of the world, extinguishes pluralities, and replaces them with a monologue of power that saturates space with, and only with, the immanent will of the dictator. This is the moment in which the language system sponsored by the sovereign is at its most violent; it seeks to efface historical memory by denying its constitutive or legislative relation with non-linguistic energies of life and the socius; it casts itself and its monologous doctrines as absolute and natural. For Deleuze, this is a psychomechanical production of social reality, more than an organicity of community torn asunder by human alienation and the incursion of reactionary ideologies, false consciousnesses, and agents. Not that the latter do not exist, or are unimportant components in this world picture, but that this technology of power cannot be seen simply as a value-free arrangement of tools misused by evil ones. The figure of the dictator is therefore not that of the aberrant individual madman, but a psychological automaton that becomes insidiously present in all, in the technology of massification itself. The images and objects that mass hallucination, somnambulism, and trance produce are attributes of this immanent will to power.9 The hypnotic, fascinating drive of fascism is seen paradoxically to operate below the radar of a moral and voluntaristic consciousness of the human subject; fascism becomes a political reality when knowledge-based exchanges between entities of intelligence give way to a biotechnologism of informatics. The elaboration of the latter term requires caution and patience.
In Benjamin, we can see this being articulated in terms of a situation in which forms of storytelling (which are at once educative and exemplary to the citizen for his cosmopolitan education, and also amenable to his freedom of critical interpretation and judgment) are replaced by a new form of communication that he calls information. The first characteristic of information is its erasure of distance–it is its near-at-hand-ness that gets information a “readiest hearing” and makes it appear “understandable in itself” (“Storyteller” 88). The dissemination and reception of information are thus predicated on the production of the event as “local,” as “already being shot through with explanation.” For the conscious subject, this also entails the disappearance of a temporal interval required for movement within the faculties from cognition to understanding and then finally to knowledge. Information is that which is accompanied by the entropic violence brought about by a supercession of the commonplace, and a reduction of language into clichés. It is therefore in the ruins of a constitutive or legislative language that the instantaneous circuit of the commonsensical comes into being.
Thinking, knowledge, or communicability (which is different from this or that technologism of communication) become foreclosed in such an order of power because one cannot really say anything that the social habit does not designate as already thought of and prejudged by the dictator. The publicity of fascism is one where friend and foe alike are seen to be engaged in tauto-talk, repeating what the dictator has already said or warned about. Benjamin calls this an eclipse of the order of cosmological mystery and secular miracles that the European humanist sciences of self and nature and an enlightened novelization of the arts sought to delineate and solve. There can be neither secrecy in fascism, nor anything unknown. Conspiracies, in that sense, can only be manifestations of what is already foretold and waiting to be confessed. The SS (or sometimes, the CIA) can of course procure and store “classified information,” but it can never say anything that the Fuhrer does not know better. Information therefore becomes an incessant and emphatic localization of the global will of the dictator; in its seriality and movement, it can only keep repeating, illustrating, and reporting the self-evident truth of the dictatorial monologue.10 For Deleuze, it is in this sense of the immanent dictatorial will that Hitler becomes information itself. Also, it is precisely because of this that one cannot wage a battle against Hitlerism by embarking on a battle of truth and falsehood without questioning, but taking for granted, the very parabasis of information and its social relations of production. Hence, “No information, whatever it might be, is sufficient to defeat Hitler” (Cinema 2 269).
Like the patriarch in Garcia Márquez’s novel whose face was animated by the dictator’s mask, Adolf the Aryan anti-Semite does not exhaust the figure of Hitler. Informatics has not ceased after the death of Adolf and his propaganda machine, or the passing away of the particular discourse of the Adolphic oracle and its immediate historical context. As a figural diagram, as a special shorthand for a particular technology of power, Hitler subsequently must have only become stronger–that is, if indeed we are still to account for him as an immanent will to information that invests modern societies. But how can one conceptualize him without the formalist baggage of a historicist understanding of Hitler? In other words, without the grotesque, arborescent institutions of repression, like the secret police or the concentration camps, that constitute an armada of affects frequently used to domesticate the concept of fascism to Europe between the wars? If one were to put the question differently, that is, occasion it in terms of a present global order of neo-liberalism, marked by American-style individualism, consumer choices, democracy, and free markets that supposedly come to us after the agonistic struggles of liberation in the modern era are already settled, how can one enfigure the dead and buried tyrant in our midst in such an “untimely” manner? How is Hitler possible in a liberal constitution?
Perhaps one has to begin by not trying to enfigure Hitler in the contours of the human–as the irrational apex of the suicidal state, or the pathological Goebbelsian liar who perverted the tools of human communication into mass propaganda machines. Hitler in that sense, would not simply be the mediocre and grotesque madman who uses or abuses technology (apart from that, he of course is long dead and buried beneath the dazzling obscurity of a sanitized spectacle–a museum piece of mass culture). Rather, in his latest neo-liberal incarnation, he would still be a proper name for technology itself, but not as the figure of the psychopathic individual who simply imprisons the human in enclosed spaces like the death camp or exercises a Faustian domination over him through arborescent structures like the Nazi war/propaganda machine. The “postmodern” technology of information that we are talking about qua Hitler is neither external nor internal to the human individual; it is one that is a part of the latter’s self-making as well as that of the bio-anthropological environment he lives in. Hitler enters us through a socialization of life itself, through a technology of habituation that involves our willingness to be informed. It is a diffuse modality of power that perpetually communicates between the inside and the outside, erasing distance between them. It is in this context that Deleuze’s statement, that there is a Hitler inside us, modern abjects of capital, becomes particularly significant. Hitler, as per this formulation, becomes an immanent form of sovereignty that is bio-politically present, percolating individuals and communities in an osmotic manner. Hitler as information, is not the addressor who speaks to us while we listen. It was only Adolf who did that in the old days, as the anachronistic caricature of the sovereign who had not yet had his head cut off, but had simply “lost it.” Information on the other hand, is a metropolitan habit of instant signification; it is an administered social automaton that does not presume a contract between the speaker and the hearer. Since it has no point of origin other than the person informed, the instance of information is thus always one where the self listens to the “they-self,” to the point where the two become indistinguishable and unavailable as separate instances of an agonistic self-other psychodrama of the integrated Western subject. This, however, needs to be understood not in terms of the patriarch’s crisis, or the existentialist anxieties of the Heideggerian philosopher, but in terms of labor and production: information as value has no source other than the person informed because it is he who labors to produce social meaning. It is only then that we can understand technology according to its logic of production, rather than solely as an externalized “other”–a Frankensteinian monster seen from the point of view of the individual. But the obvious query here would be, if information has something to do with capital, does that make it essentially fascistic? More specifically, in a “postmodern age” witnessing the obsolescence of modern cultural institutions, when Hitler is to be understood in terms of a diffuse, horizontal presence rather than as a vertical axiomatic in human form, the question to ask, perhaps, is who or what is the dictator?
It is impossible to talk about information from the beginning, since it is always already on its way, unlike the story that originates somewhere and ends somewhere. I thus choose to assemble a scattered inventory of postulates.
Thesis 1: First, let me attempt to clarify, as best as possible, some categories that have been anarchically intersecting with each other in our discussion. By the term televisuality (as with telephonicity), I mean a simple mechanism of projecting and receiving visibilities and sounds across distances. It is in this basic form that the telescope or the postcard is televisual. The invention of the former was one of the signal events that created the human as a global postulate; indeed, the European anthropos was a sublime creation that emerged from the Pascalian horror at seeing an interstellar space without the face of the Holy Ghost hovering over the martins. The disenchanted birth of the self was coincident with the twilight of the starry sky which was a map of the epic world; it was, in other words, a genesis of a novel and secular cosmology itself, one that could be understood through cognitive functions of the transcendental human subject rather than through a patient wait for revelatory happenings. Televisuality in this abstract sense, has something to do with the primary epistemological tasks of the modern man–that of reading his godless, degraded universe in terms of a world historical totality. It is to be located in the very interstice between the home and the world that multiple strands of Western philosophy after the Greeks have tried to reconcile in different ways. For our immediate project, it is important to understand is that all conceptual forms of the televisual are not informatic, just as many incarnations of the televisual (the Internet or smart bombs for instance) may not have anything to do with this or that institution of television. We need to distinguish televisuality as techne, art, science, or fabrication, from the televisuality that is claimed by informatics.
What we are interested in is the moment in which televisuality becomes technologistic in a specific sense, as part of an overall social command of capital. Here, in using the proper name “technology,” we refer to a form of production (as distinguished from making or fabrication as potentia) that is, in toto, underwritten by the logic of capital alone. This technology of televisuality comes with an ideological baggage of “progress,” with a faith of technologism that is part of a global imperative of profit. Questioning technology as such is not to propose a primitivistic, Luddite-romantic return to an unmediated state of nature, but to understand historically, in terms of imminent potentialities of the world, whether one cannot think of forms of life and forms of making that are different. In terms of culture and politics, this also pertains to a basic distinction between a globality of exchanges between societies and a particular managerial-financial project of globalization. Hence, in suggesting that we need to make a distinction between televisuality in a simple form and a technologism of informatics qua capital, I am insisting on a pure, conceptual force of difference, as Marx does in making a distinction between use value and exchange value. That is, I am not positing an originary moment when the televisual was a pure event of the primitive, yet to be capitalized by informatics. It would be instructive to recall here how Marx designates primitive accumulation as a determinate extraction from the historicity of capital formation itself:
We have seen how money is transformed into capital; how surplus-value is made through capital, and how more capital is made from surplus-value. But the accumulation of capital presupposes surplus-value; surplus-value presupposes capitalist production; capitalist production presupposes the availability of considerable masses of capital and labor power in the hands of commodity producers. The whole movement, therefore, seems to turn around in a never-ending circle, which we can only get out of by assuming a "primitive" accumulation [...]; an accumulation which is not the result of the capitalist mode of production but its point of departure.This primitive accumulation plays approximately the same role in political economy as original sin does in theology. Adam bit the apple, and thereupon sin fell on the human race. (Capital 873)
Hence, to talk about the televisual as a nascent, prelapsarian moment in gross empirico-historicist terms is to subscribe to the same onto-theology of capitalism. That is, in terms of a secular narrative of progress, before informatics there could have been the televisual only as a magical revelatory task of God. After the fall, the history of the human thereby becomes a gradual but irresistible coming into being of informatics qua capital, starting with the fire and the wheel. The original “sin” of capital and the technological omnipresence of informatics would be seen to constitute the only mode of being for a species cursed with the labor of Adam. As per this logic, “after” information there can be only apocalypse and death; pure televisuality, without capitalist social relations, can only be of the epic order of gods and monsters. It is precisely to demystify informatics as a science of Power qua capital (potestas in the Spinozist sense) that one needs to understand televisuality as power (potentia) that is productive activity pertaining to labor.11
Thesis 2: Informatics is the technology which capitalizes and translates televisuality into value as information. It is the circulation of different kinds of words and images across global distances, in the least amount of time possible. Moreover, the mechanism of value in such a turnover is computed according to a digital architecture of temporality, where time is money. Informatics therefore creates value not in terms of veracity of knowledge (which is settled through rational debates between experts), but in terms of abridgement of reporting time. Hence, it does not rely upon modern cognitive-representational prejudices (the camera does not lie), but a machinic coda of efficiency (the camera has had no time to lie). This is where informatics differs from what can be called news in an older sense. The latter can be accounted for as a secular verification of rumor, a process of expert scientific recoding of the world, absolving it of miracles and magic. Informatics on the other hand is a pure force of circulating commonsense, in which the temporal logic of the bomb and that of the image coincide. Hence, in this realm of massified common sense, the specular pleasure of seeing the bomb drop is accompanied by the casting of the legitimacy of the bombing as an ongoing, “already explained” clearing for the immanent entry of the post-historical. Like capital, informatics tends toward the abolishment of circulation time; it is, in fact, capital itself (and not a reflection of it) precisely because it acquires a “life of its own” by the virtue of being value in serial flow.12 Marx makes this important distinction between money as simple medium of exchange, as in Aristotelian economics, and money that becomes capital precisely because it is in circulation. Put simply, the military-industrial assemblage that makes the moment of the bomb coincide with that of the image does not belong to an older paradigm in which societies at war exchanged violence through a terminal and fatalistic deployment of weapons and resources. Rather, it is one in which capital never ceases to flow–the bomb as money is immediately translated into image as money. In a figural sense, that is how we can understand “embeddedness”–as that which tends to informationize the temporal and spatial distance between making war and making news.
The relation between informatics and capital that I am proposing here is not that of a superstructural aspect of public culture reflecting the machinations of the economic base. In the general capitalistic production of social life itself, informatics does not mirror realities, but produces them. Informatics as such, is thus possible when money as capital increasingly becomes immediately socialized value, without going through formal mediating circuits of society, law, and culture. Apart from Antonio Negri’s thesis in Marx Beyond Marx, here I of course have Guy Debord’s observation in mind–that spectacle is capital accumulated to the point of image.13 Hence, in speaking of an immanent flow of capital qua informatics, I am not suggesting that money is translated into image-commodity on the screen and subsequently returned to its original form as televisual revenue. Rather, the movement is that of money through and throughout. In the Grundrisse, Marx makes a very important distinction between money and coin that may be instructive here:
Money is the negation of the medium of circulation as such, of the coin. But it also contains the latter at the same time as an aspect, negatively, since it can always be transformed into coin; positively, as world coin, but, as such, its formal character is irrelevant, and it is essentially a commodity as such, the omnipresent commodity, not determined by location. (228)
Hence, both the coin that goes into the making of the image, and the image itself, are only different moments of money as value in continuous, “omnipresent” circulation. Marx calls money a “mental relation” that can be seen to be emphatically in currency all the time, regardless of perceptual transformations from coin to image and back to coin again, in capital’s conditions of command (Grundrisse 191). It is in this sense that money does not stop being money once the image is produced; as Goddard puts it, there is always money “burning on screen,” or as Fellini says about the ancient curse of money on cinema, “when the money runs out, the film will be over.”14
Thesis 3: The televisual, as techne, becomes a part of informatics in the same manner as general attributes of social life become increasingly capitalized. Televisuality as a phenomenological proposition is of the order of the subject (he who posts the card and she who sees or reads out of love), and the distance between its origin and its telos is the enunciative space between the positions of the addresser and the addressee, where the card can be said to “world” itself in transit. It is this bipolar communicative arrangement between subjects (one of the many social contracts of the human) that is translated into immanent value on the move when televisuality is informationized, since, as we have said earlier, informatics, or the circulation of information, tends to erase all distance between the speaker and the listener. It is the habit of massification that reduces love to a cliché.
Thesis 4: This is not to say that informatics or the flow of information has nothing to do with institutions of truth, culture, representation, or art. Simply put, the forces of global informatics “report” such events whenever and wherever they happen by instantaneously translating them into value in circulation (screentime = money time). For instance, there are many ways of claiming “authenticity” for the art work, one of them being the originality of inscription in conjugation with the originality of the substrate. As per this logic, the piece garners auratic value only when the brush stroke of Van Gogh, as a geometric, tactile, or formal inscription, is seen to be in assemblage with the original substrate used (the paint, the canvas). The camera and print capitalism detached the two in the latter half of the nineteenth century, as Benjamin so astutely observed, when copies were produced by the mechanical substitution of the canvas and paint with ink and paper–in other words, by changing the substrate while keeping the abstract diagram of the painting intact. The work of art, in becoming capable of democratic dissemination, acquired what we have been calling a televisual potential in the simple form. But today, it becomes properly informationized when its abstract diagram is electronically transcoded, circulated, and then erased instantaneously from a substrate of pixels or digits in order to make room for the next one. It is in this sense that cinema or video–media that involve leaving lasting impressions on permanent bases like celluloid–are industrial recording technologies that are not informatic, but ones that can be subsequently informationized. The camera of informatics on the other hand, can “scan” one thing after another–the sunflowers, the Taj Mahal, a film by Rossellini, an advertisement–translating them into the same pulsating substrate of information, just as capital liquefies everything by translating them into money in transit. The Age of Information is indeed one in which all things solid melt into pulses and copies proliferate without originals. Different forms of artistic, cultural, social, and political activities, various bodies and objects, are all potentially informatic, but only in differential degrees of “newsworthiness” and other forms of commodity value. In concrete terms, what we are talking about thus has much to do with the increasing corporatization of the public sphere and the gradual obsolescence of institutions of public culture, “art” or pedagogic cinema, and public television like the BBC, PBS, or Doordarshan that the postwar developmentalist welfare state invested in.
Thesis 5: Scanning and transmission create images that are more matter and energy in the social circulation of value, rather than simulations of a “real” that is perceptually distant from the viewer but brought nearer to him through electrified re-presentation. As money on the move, information is not immediately knowledge, although knowledge can certainly be derived from it. For a classically defined individual subject contemplating the world, knowledge can be said to be formed in the temporal interval that houses the movement of the faculties from sense perception, to intuition, to understanding, and finally to reason; it therefore, is always “belated” in the order of the present. Knowledge thus can only follow the Taylorized seriality of informatics, which presents the now as an instant of socialized production that produces image-realities only on a commonsensical, psychologically automotive parabasis. The machinic intelligence of informatics can accommodate the self-conscious human only in an environment of habitual distraction, in an automotive sensory-motor engagement that can present the world as “shot through with explanation” by an already-generated body of clichés. Knowledge can only be a distant afterthought of the human, when informatics has already passed on, leaving “news” at its wake, to be analyzed by disciplinary experts. This is also why, properly speaking, there can be no “misinformation,” only different kinds of reported knowledge, some of which may be true and some false. All “false” publications circulated by the Enron management before 2002 were indeed information of the real order because they did not disrupt the circulation of value as informatics. Similarly, the “true” revelations about the company that followed were also information in the same sense–as screen time, they made money. The digitized memory of informatics, reliant on a continuous flow of impression and erasure, does not aim to produce a book of the world; the two moments, one pertaining to the “false” and the other to the “true” are only so from the retroactive perceptual universe of the citizen who is a student of history. The systemic intelligence of information does not seek to tie the two happenings in an obligatory relationship of causality that would be essential for dominant forms of metanarration. In the age of secular novelization, that was the task of the storyteller, whose modernist agon was to connect the past with the present via a weak messianic power. On the other hand, the organization of forms of life and intelligence into a global dynamics of information creates an epoch where it is only the “superstate,” as a transnational military-corporate diagram of governance, that is rendered capable of reading the book of the world. This is because if information is something that produces realities rather than reflecting them, it is only global superstatal formations of capital, like CNN or Fox, that can adequately invest in molar instruments of command and dominance in this field. It is thus here that the operative logic of the satellite intersects with that of the cannon; the phenomenology of information coincides with that of the bomb. No one can out-war the transnational corporate state because it has the bomb; no one can out-inform the same because it has the satellite. It also goes without saying that power based on informatics has serious consequences for human politics and governance. When state activity is based on an organizing principle of information rather than politics, (such as instant management of security and policing terror induced “emergencies”), governance includes legislative actions, rational debates, or knowledge formations only as “afterthoughts” that follow the instantaneous, preemptive reflex of informatic action. Informatics, as we have noted earlier, is that which makes the will of the state, rather than its word as law, immanently operable. This is done through a performative, on-the-spot surveillance and management of variables instead of traditional juridical protocols involving law, its interpretation, and its application. Elsewhere I have elaborated in greater detail how, in our post-9/11 world, informatization and policing on a global scale has become indistinguishable from militarization of civic spaces.15
Thesis 6: An ideology critique of CNN is quite useless if it is conducted purely on the basis of politico-ethical responsibilities and Kantian ideas of public exercise of reason. Such a discourse would locate the problem squarely on the question of voluntarism that idealistic modernity demands from its citizens, including the administrative heads of public media houses. The human intentionalities of CNN need to be understood only as attributes of a corporate body of “trans-human” interests–that of capital and its circulation.16 In that sense, CNN always telecasts the unfolding, circulating story of CNN itself, as value in a perpetual state of making on screen, where time, no matter what it reflects, champions, denigrates, or represses, is always money. A nominalist denunciation of media politics, based on categorical notions of “rights” and “representation,” is akin to a wishful critique of “capitalism” from a checks and balances perspective of liberal humanism–that is, a critique of predatory capital without a critique of wage labor or the money form. To go back to Deleuze’s formulation, such an effort would be to revise and reform Hitler with information itself, when no amount of the latter can be sufficient to defeat him. In nominal terms of the liberty that the free market brings, there actually can be no vertical installations of power or spaces of enclosure (the factory, prison, gulag, or concentration camps in their classic carceral incarnations, Hitler in his paradigmatic human figuration) to prevent the subaltern from speaking. It is an entirely different matter that she cannot speak either because it takes money to do so or because the speech itself has to accrue value in terms of global interests of money. The meritorious communicative actions between publics and counterpublics are thus always informed by the great monologue of power, in which money alone speaks to itself. In an immanent, multifarious global domain of bodies, statements, practices, lifestyles, and ideologies, it is the circulating logic of capital as informatics that determines the newsworthiness of each. Undeniably, it is also the radically innovative and revolutionary nature of capital that allows for a global panorama of activities without the graduated, hierarchical mediation of the priest or the king. However, the head of the sovereign that was cut off now micropunctually appears on the currency note. Nominally thus, in a postmodern theater of consumer capital, everyone can play the game of representations, since everyone has money. It is a different matter altogether, one that has not much to do with the language games of neo-liberal economics and ideology, that increasingly, to a degree unprecedented in history, some have a lot more of it than others.
Thesis 7: A Kantian understanding of modern culture would suggest that it is a “commanded effect” of social pedagogy–a real compulsion to be free–that allows the citizen to voluntarily submit to the ethical mass of a cosmopolitan whole.17 It is only by being cooked in culture that the citizen can be trained to follow the categorical imperatives of a secular morality out of his own reasonable volition and agency, rather than through a dogmatic and virtuous fear of an angry and jealous Jehovah. Kant’s formulation is of course only a special instance in a general Western aesthetics of teaching, moving, and delighting that determine the ethical value of art. It is important to note that in Kant this idealistic proposition is immediately and anxiously related to social relations of production: culture requires the development of skills that can lead only to “inequality among men” and the institution of private property (Critique of Judgment 356).18 In this light, we can formulate a working theory of the “postmodern” (which is not something that comes after the modern, but which is simply outside the categorical logic of modernity19) as per which the extension of industry into all domains of social life, and the financialization of the globe has, in the last century, led to a gradual obsolescence of an aesthetic of high modernism–that is, art with a pedagogical function. Informatics, in that sense, is a technology that is no longer subservient to the cultural skills of the human or his civil conversations. As a form of production, metropolitan informatics calibrates and reports cosmopolitan culture according to a differential and relative matrix of value and commodity relations. When we speak of a dominant ideology of global capital in its present form, we speak of a horizontal proliferation of energies and a particle semiotics of Anglo-American pragmaticist commonplaces20; in other words, of an immanent form of power that is quite different from the agonistic, transcendental battles of old Europe qua German idealism in particular, battles in which the human found a reasonable freedom in the historical task of supplanting the god or the tyrant. The point is, informatics, as a technology of the social, gains supremacy precisely in a so called post-historical, post-political world, where a massification of common sense states that there is nothing new to narrate at all, in terms of a “totality” of the “human” project.
Thesis 8: In the ancient Greek polis, the classical form of public action that the citizens undertook to achieve immortality was possible only in a spatial and temporal order free of the necessities of the household. The latter space was for production of goods and valuables for the animal existence of man; it was the domestic enclave of the Negro, the woman, or the infant (as in in-fans, or the one without language) as various incarnations of the animal laborans.21 Public action, or the task of the citizen, could thus begin only after the questions of property and labor were settled, after “man” had, through the labors of the woman and the Negro, provided for his animal existence. In the epoch of enlightenment modernity, we see a similar formulation in Kant, who suggests that it is only the man of property who is capable of disinterested public exercise of reason.22 Property, however, in the sense Kant uses it, is static and has value primarily as Vermögen–that is fixed capital, or ground rent, to use a term from nineteenth-century political economy. The German thinker is very careful to deny it the dynamic and expansive interest of capital. It is useful to recall here Kant’s anxious warnings against “dangerous money power” and too much foreign trade as being detrimental to the freedom of individual states and their co-existence in “eternal peace.”23 When it came to dictatorship of political realities of the republic, that is, the very question I began this essay with, Kant famously opted for enlightened, republican monarchy instead of aristocracy or democracy precisely to ensure that the spheres of interest-free public reason and interest-driven private practice were kept separate.24 Now the question therefore becomes, in an era of multinational capital, neo-liberal ideology, and unprecedented global trade, where the household and its logic of production extend completely over the public sphere, when all of us become shareholders in the public tasks of the animal laborans, who or what may be the monarch that says, “Argue as much as you want and about whatever you want, but obey!”?25 It is indeed money that is the sovereign in our occasion, in moving from being “a servant of commerce” to the position of the latter’s “despot” (Marx, Grundrisse 199).
What the patriarch in Garcia Márquez’s El Otono del Patriarca dreads is not the televisual as such, but the mysterious force of transfer, by which the televisual, without his command or approval has already become informatic. During the royal burial ceremony, the mask of power becomes televisual not just in the old ritualistic sense of seeing the sovereign in the distance through a series of graduated, hierarchical mediations; it becomes bewitchingly informatic for the patriarch after his “death,” precisely when the order of spectacle (of which he thought he was the author) and the dictatorial visage that it creates refuses to die with him. The mask as information merely circulates between heads of pretenders that climb into it from time to time, for their proverbial fifteen minutes, almost as if by a mathematical chain of chance that is inhuman in its operative intelligence. The patriarch’s dead, “fagot self” thus becomes the latest calendrical newsbyte in the eternity of circulating informatics and the deathlessness of the mask which is always on the screen. When the televisual becomes “live” as in informatics, it does not monumentalize the mortal son of Bendición Alvarado in his afterlife, as an arrested profile of power itself. The perpetual iconography of the dictatorial mask, telecast “live” amidst the ebb and flow of human fortunes, presents the figure of power as catachresis, as an unstable conglomeration of forces which deterritorializes and reconfigures from moment to moment, as it flows from head to head.
But the predicament, in our occasion, is of course not just the old patriarch’s alone. This metropolitan geometry of producing social meaning seems, to a far greater degree, to have inducted both the silent subaltern as well as the “interest free” humanist intellectual who presumed to speak for him to differential states of global in fan-ness–beings without language. By that token, one can certainly talk about a functional equation between “wealth, sufficiency, and truth” that fragments and destroys the constitutive, world historical impulse of the political which various strands of enlightenment modernity had propounded.26 Indeed, the habit of information becomes a technical possibility in what is called a post-historical landscape of ruins, where nature is gone for good, where the great pedagogical and exemplary institutions of culture are inducted into a transnational museum of images, and where it becomes increasingly difficult to make a categorical distinction between documents of civilization and those of barbarity. After all, how can one even speak of a public exercise of reason amidst an operational logic of capital that reduces discussion and consensus to the business of adequately investing in public relations, mathematizing and controlling the “free” information environment through a strategic saturation of images, and finally getting a desired feedback in terms of sales or opinion poll numbers? If, in social terms of massification (the tasteful individual or group can always switch off CNN or engage in parodic motions of culture and art without any socially transformative potential) we are all virtual laborers of consumption and consensus, how can man even presume to make history, with or without deliberative choice? Perhaps in understanding this systemic picture of global informatics we need to avoid the mistake of granting it a total moment of worldly arrival, that is, picture it as an instant that, in its all encompassing finality, extinguishes history itself (the meaning of history would then be confined to a charter of tasks and contracts attributable to the epistemological fiction of the self-conscious “human” subject). In other words, we need to understand that a working notion of virtual labor should not virtualize the concept of living labor itself, with its massive antagonistic energies directed against capital globally. Indeed the question of habit is a tricky one: it could be a fundamental Eurocentric habit of thinking politics solely in terms of representation, rights, property, law, legislation, and justice as per the normative protocols of liberal democracy that could lead us to the mistake that both history as a chaosmos of interacting forces and politics as class struggle are either over or mediatized beyond redemption.
The point is thus to understand that the metropolis, as a managerial and marketing terminal of power that besieges the global countryside through informatics and militarization, can generate the surplus energy to sustain itself only by perpetually producing the Negro at the frontiers. The metropolis, we must make clear at this point, is not the same as the modern city. The modern city had evolved a few centuries ago, through the creation of avenues and alleys of production, labor, and communication in between the great feudal estates, surreptitiously or dramatically cutting the bonds of filiality and rentiership. The metropolis, on the other hand, is an abstract diagram of an urban value system that informs the city, recasting the latter as a center for managerial, technocratic, and military governance. It is thus a site for news, surveillance, security, advertising, entertainment, consumer choices, products, marketing, spying, war, and communications. When the diagram of the metropolis inscribes the city, it reinvents the latter as a center of financialization rather than industrialization. Hence, the metropolis, as a figure of thought, should not be considered in an empiricist manner; real cities like San Francisco and Bangalore are merely dense, topological assemblages of money, technology, and goods in such a worldwide web of urbanity. This is also why the latter can be called the Silicon Valley of India, as a terminal of power that is different from its counterpart in the West only in terms of degrees and intensities of value-laden happenings. This is also the driving logic that increasingly redresses all urban formations in the world, in differential degrees, like rich and poor cousins of Las Vegas. According to this metropolitan cartography, there can be no political citizens in the old historical sense within a city now reserved for denizens employed in managerial action, because the worker engaged in class struggle and the conscientious Kantian legislator would be simply anachronistic figures–displaced refugees momentarily trespassing into prime real estate. If the latter figure is gone for good, the former is relocated, with the classical factory itself, in the “third world” elsewhere.27 In this context one could mention a recent statement made by the U.S. administration pertaining to an unreal and frightening diagram of an “ownership society”28, a violent and abstract coda of metropolitan conformity which constitutes the ultimate fantasy of capital–a totalized and consummate social vanishing of labor.
The search for another form of politics has to begin with a critique of the aphasic, self-conscious navel-gazing of the North Atlantic intellectual, who approaches a state of stupefied entropy on looking at a monstrous military-informatic-financial assemblage which has reduced the great modernist projects of culture and ideology to incidental arrangements that can be only locally applied. To restrict an understanding of the political that is emergent to a set of cognitive phenomenological tasks of the human subject, who, as Foucault points out, is an empirico-transcendental fiction of the West very much in the twilight of his career29, would be, in the last instance, subscribing to a transcendental stupidity not dissimilar from that of informatics itself. That is, the assumption that today everything and everybody is already spoken for, evaluated, and ordered by the hidden tongue of the market, instead of by the king or the philosopher of yore. This is why, when all of us are irremediably tinged with the curse of money, a caricature of liberal political action, conducted through conservative channels of human conscience and morality, becomes part of an overall shareholding of neo-imperial “guilt.”
A new form of political thinking has to begin by taking into account vast amounts of energies in the world antagonistic to capital in terms that do not refer back to the normalcy of the human subject inaugurated by the classical enlightenment of Europe. It is part of the transcendental stupidity of geo-televisuality to impart such hostile energies with a catalogue of profiles: the criminal, the delinquent, the madman, the Negro, the woman, the child, the African AIDS victim, the poor, the unemployed, the illegal immigrant, or the terrorist. Informatics is about the reporting of the state’s pharmacopic action on these bodies, as objects of charity, aid, medication, schooling, or military intervention. This is why the unspeakable antagonism of living labor in the world is never “visible” on CNN or any other corporate geo-televisual schema of metropolitan representation. The latter can discern only the ontology of money and its coalitionary interests; humans, who are only refugees great and small, can only climb into one or many of the designated profiles of massification. The centralizing, perspectivist drive of CNN–as a repetitive human psychodrama of development, birthpangs of modernity in the frontier, subjugated and freed consumer desires–overlooks forces from the margins of the frame in trying to fit entire crowds into the telegenic face. Labor and its multiple wills to antagonism (of which various narratives of resistance are only partial but undeniably important molar expressions) are actually unrepresentable precisely because they lack a “human” face. Global antagonisms to capital are at once utopic (as in “non-place,” since the logic of globalization cannot posit an “outside”) and pantopic; they are, in multiple forms, and in different degrees of sublimation, nowhere and everywhere. They constitute a gargantuan beastly body that Hegel feared, in being a passional, multitudinal formation no longer guided by the soul of humanism.
A judgment of the panorama of expressions of this global antagonistic will along the lines of good and bad can only be an afterthought; political thinking in our occasion can begin only with the acknowledgement of these energies as eventful, and not subject to essential categories of a state language that has become global. In other words, thinking has to proceed acutely, from an awareness of that very point of danger where the state fails to “translate” such affective hostilities into repetitive instances of its own psychobiography. It is this dire poverty of political language that the neo-liberal state tries to cover up with violence dictated in a situation of “emergency,” legitimized by an emotionalist, alternately folksy and biblical rhetoric of “good” and “evil.” Here I must strongly clarify that I am not registering support for this or that statist ideology of violence such as that of Al Qaida which, like its Western counterparts, merely captures and mobilizes some of these energies. But it is not difficult to see how informatics peddles the worst clichés of neo-liberalism in trying to enframe antagonism through a host of good and evil profile doublets according to which a population is invented and managed, or policed and fed–the model minority contra the inner city delinquent, the healthy contra the mad, the peaceful Arab contra the Islamic bigot. In terms of spectacle and violence, it thus falls perfectly within the logic of war/information to have the yellow cluster bomb interspersed with the yellow food packet during the recent war in Afghanistan. The global state of security today violently tries to foreclose the political by informationizing complex insurrectionary potentialities in terms of a simplistic, self-evident, and bipolar logic of peace and terror. The latter thus becomes a generic term to describe reductively a multiplicity of forces–from Latin American guerilla movements to African tribal formations to Islamic militancy in the Middle-East or Maoist rebellions in Nepal. The freedom of choice offered by the globally rampant North Atlantic machine of war and informatics is no longer between dwelling as a poet or as an assassin, but between being a statistic or a terrorist.
Informatics, in our occasion, is a form of power that, in its transcendental stupidity, tries to harness all antagonistic desires into a hermeneutic of consumer culture and a behavioralist sociology of the human. A functionary of the United States Federal Government once described a discontented lot at some part of the world as people who basically want refrigerators. The reportage in CNN takes place on the same parabasis of value as, and of, capital alone–one that always seeks to translate political energy into configurations of consumer desire, that of seeing and being seen on CNN. The old Clausewitzian exchanges between war and politics thus become mode retro moments of crises management in a general metanarrative of development; the agonistic dialectic of Hegelian history gives way to functionalist modalities of facilitation and investment–adequate CNN and adequate refrigeration. Thinking the new, thinking politically in our time, should begin with a radical questioning of the money form and its production of global social life. It needs to proceed without the comforting assurance of ready-at-hand narratives of resistance and has to explore existing practices and potentialities of antagonism, not only in terms of how, in moments of danger, they are sometimes territorialized by fundamentalist ideologies, but also in terms of how they perpetually, insidiously, and in completely inhuman ways, transvaluate values.
Brief portions of this essay have been published as Anustup Basu, “Bombs and Bytes,” Metamute 27 (Winter/Spring 2004).
1. See Kant, “Eternal Peace”: “It is not to be expected that kings philosophize or that philosophers become kings, nor is it to be desired because the possession of power corrupts the free judgment of reason inevitably. But kings or self governing nations will not allow the class of philosophers to disappear or to become silent, but will let them speak publicly” (456). From such a premise Kant creates the compound, secular figure of the moral politician who “employs the principles of political prudence in such a way that they can co-exist with morals” (459).
2. I will not open the can of worms about the fascist Heidegger here, who identifies the German volk as being qua Being and ironically ends up supporting the Nazi party, although perhaps one can say, not in the hope that it would develop a monstrous technological war assemblage which would require millions of human bodies as basic raw material.
3. For instance, one could consider in this respect Etienne Balibar’s argument about new racism as a differential index of exclusion and discrimination, a racism without a categorical deployment of race as a biological essence. In other words, Balibar argues that in the aftermath of the civil rights struggles of the 1960s, culture has increasingly replaced biology as a chief operative force in the modalities of racism. The celebratory spirit of Clintonian multiculturalism of the 1990s can be seen in this light.
4. To clarify the obvious: even if further “investigations” were to reveal a logical link between Saddam Hussain and Al Qaeda, it would not dispel this thesis about the present circumstances.
5. It must be understood that the version of the “Work of Art” essay I am discussing here is the one translated (often with unhappy results) by Harry Zohn in Illuminations. There are about eleven drafts of the essay. I also need to make clear that the hope in the ultimate maturing of society, in an irresistible dialectical development of the socius toward a politicization of aesthetics, is a Hegelian positivism that Benjamin inherits from the German idealist tradition and begins to discard in the “Work of Art” essay itself. The critique of such historicism arrives more memorably later in Benjamin’s study of Western modernity in “Theses on the Philosophy of History.”
6. The point, perhaps, is to commit a disciplinary sacrilege. A political departure from the comforts of metaphysical and ontological truths should not lead to a professional-academic hermeneutics of sanitized repetition, or to a domestication of thought into neatly separated and hermetically sealed categories like modernism and postmodernism.
7. See Deleuze Cinema 2 28-29 and 264-70.
8. I am of course alluding to Francis Fukuyama’s Kojevian-Hegelian thesis in The End of History and the Last Man.
9. See Deleuze, Cinema 2 263-69.
10. In this context see Arendt’s useful elaborations in The Origins of Totalitarianism.
11. See Negri, The Savage Anomaly 10-11 for a remarkable elaboration of these concepts.
12. See for instance in the Grundrisse: the “tendency of capital is circulation without circulation time; hence also the positing of the instruments which merely serve to abbreviate circulation time as mere formal aspects posited by it” (671).
13. See Negri, Marx Beyond Marx: Lessons from the Grundrisse, and Debord, Society of the Spectacle 24.
14. See Deleuze, Cinema 2 77-78.
16. Does the corporation have a persona in terms of the human figure? Perhaps we need to talk a bit more concretely, in terms of an illustrative feature of the American style neo-liberalism that is now rampant all over the world. In 1886, a bizarre distortion of the Santa Clara Supreme Court decision by the Court’s reporter led to corporations claiming that that they were also entitled to human rights laid out for the “people” in the Bill of Rights of the U.S. Constitution and the Fourteenth Amendment that ended slavery. This “corporate personhood,” as an inhuman concentration of immanently flowing money, a dense accumulation of interest-bearing forces, is the figure that has taken the business of rightful representation away from the hands of the human agent. As giant assemblages in a great civilizational plane of interest group maneuvers, advertising, propaganda, law, legislation, justice and consensus, corporate personas are to be seen as individual entities that share the same rights (including those of privacy) as humans, but also as bodies that have more to do with R&D than Homboltian education, lobbying than polity, managerial intelligence rather than the tics of the human. In contradistinction to the individual, they also incidentally have more money, more processing power, more energy, and more technical intelligence at their disposal.
17. See Kant, The Critique of Judgment 355-57.
18. Elsewhere, of course, in “Idea for a Universal History,” Kant suggests that man, with his “egoistic animal inclination,” needs a master who “is supposed to be just in himself and yet a man” (122-23). When we talk about enlightenment and Kant, it is always productive to remember that the ideal of normative freedom that is so essential for the moral education of the modern citizen, was, in his historical context, very anxiously located in a state that rested its fragile body-politic on the benevolent but despotic shoulders of Frederick the Great.
19. Indeed, in recent times it has become plainly evident that postmodern metropolitan formations can operate very effectively in tribalistic modes.
20. It needs to be made clear that I am not categorically tying this to a philosophical tradition of pragmatism. This robust anti-formalist, anti-Cartesian line of thinking that began in the nineteenth century with Charles Sanders Peirce was founded on the rejection of the individual as the sole custodian of truth, a critique of a medieval scholasticism that traced all knowledge back to one authority on the one hand and of massified commonsense as bad logic combined with metaphysics on the other. The call for Peirce was thus for an irreverent scientific experimental community that would not allow thought to ossify into dogma. Thinking pragmatically entailed a fundamental refutation of the subject-object duality endemic in continental thinking; reality was to be accounted for as an adequate, for-the-moment coming together of sensations and beliefs. It is not possible here to discuss this variegated tradition, including its later instances of conservative defense of American capitalism, but one can perhaps point out briefly that what we have been talking about so far qua informatics is precisely that form of power that forecloses “experience” or “action” in this sense. Informatics (rather than communitarian-experimental experience) is that which increasingly dominates the space of action between a globality of managerial, military, and money interests, and a locality of professional and familial satisfaction. Politics and knowledge thus threaten to become precisely what John Dewey warned against–merely spectatorial, with the correspondence between a locality of American communal belief, and a global materiality of Americanization in the world becoming increasingly informationized, taking place only through planetary circuits of investment, charity, terror, and militarization. Democracy too tends to become what Dewey, speaking in terms of human governance, called sovereignty chopped into mincemeat, buttressed by opinion poll demographics of power based on a numerical notion of equality and a formalistic isolation of the “I.”
21. See Arendt, The Human Condition for an elaboration of this theme.
22. See Kant, “Theory and Practice”:
He who has the right to vote on basic legislation is called a citizen [...]. The requisite quality for this [status], apart from the natural one that the person not be a child or a woman, is only this: that such a person be his own master (sui iuris) and hence that he have some property (under which we may include any art, craft or science) that would provide him with sustenance. [...] a man who, when he must earn a livelihood from others, acquires property only by selling what is his own and not by conceding to others the right to make use of his strength. Consequently he serves no one, in the strict sense of the word, but the commonweal. (420)
Kant is however careful in clarifying that the legislative equality among citizens should be dictated by a qualitative aspect of property, not a quantitative one: “Not the amount of property, but merely the number of those owning any property, should serve as a basis for the number of voters” (421).
23. See Kant, “Eternal Peace.” This is postulation 4: ” No debts shall be contracted in connection with the foreign affairs of the state.” While Kant is ready to admit state borrowing for the purposes of internal development, he is against debt
as an instrument of the struggle between the powers, a credit system of debts endlessly growing though always safe against immediate demand (the demand for payment not being made by all the creditors at the same time)--such a system, the ingenious invention of a trading people in this century, constitutes a dangerous money power. It is a resource for carrying on war which surpasses the resources of all other states taken together. (433)
24. See Kant, “Eternal Peace” 437-41 and “What is Enlightenment?” 137-39.
25. This is the disposition Kant attributes to the enlightened princely figure of Fredrick the Great. See “What is Enlightenment?.” The secular monarch permits his subjects to “make public use of their own reason and to submit publicly their thoughts regarding a better framing of such laws together with a frank criticism of existing legislation” (139).
26. I am of course referring to Lyotard’s thesis in The Postmodern Condition.
27. One has to be careful here; I am not proposing the category “third world” in a positive territorial sense, informed by traditional Eurocentric discourses of self and other. The relation between the globalized third world and the metropolitan diagram as planet city is a dispersed, micropunctual one that infectiously erodes classic inside/outside divisions: the country and the city, the East and the West, the home and the world. The international division of labor is a useful determination to make, but not in categorical terms of molar identities like nationhood.
29. See for instance Foucault: “man is neither the oldest not the most constant problem that has been posed for human knowledge […] […] As the archaeology of our thought easily shows, man is an invention of recent date. And one perhaps nearing its end” (386-87).