Volume 15, Number 2
January, 2005

 

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• Signs: Journal of Women in Culture and Society

• Works and Days 43/44
  Capitalizing on Play: The Politics of Computer Gaming

 

Heather Love

Department of English
University of Pennsylvania
loveh@english.upenn.edu

 

Review of: Esther Sánchez-Pardo, Cultures of the Death Drive: Melanie Klein and Modernist Melancholia.Durham: Duke UP, 2003.

 

Back in 1979, Robert Hass wrote, “all the new thinking is about loss. In this it resembles all the old thinking.” He seemed to be referring to the lack of adequation between language and reality: “because there is in this world no one thing to which the bramble of blackberry corresponds, a word is elegy to the thing it signifies” (4). Things aren’t that different in 2005: the fading of the object world can still break your heart. But the most recent thinking about loss doesn’t tend to be about language or representation. Rather, loss is increasingly played in the register of the world-historical, as critics have drawn on psychoanalytic models to consider the intersection between individual and collective trauma. Witness, memorialization, haunting, and the melancholy of just about everything: such work has taken up the question of “the politics of mourning.” What might constitute an ethical relation to the past? How can we draw on the losses of the past in order to imagine new futures?

 

I like the new thinking about loss very much, but sometimes I get to thinking about the old thinking about loss, about stories older and darker than Hass’s blackberry. For instance: Uranus and Gaia have twelve children; Uranus hates them, so he buries them inside their mother’s body, deep in the earth; Gaia gives her son Cronus a big knife and he castrates his father, frees his siblings, and rules over them. Cronus then has several children with his sister, all of whom he eats at birth to keep them from betraying him in turn. This works pretty well until his son tricks him into vomiting up his brothers and sisters, and they send their devouring father down into the underworld. Now that’s loss!

 

Now that the foundations of the world have been laid, it is hard to match these antics. One place to look, however, is in the annals of psychoanalysis, where such cycles of revenge, retribution, and flesh-eating are played out on the much smaller stage of the individual psyche. Melanie Klein (1882-1960) was particularly attuned to such dynamics. In her pioneering work in child analysis and the field of object relations, she described the mix of paranoia and jealousy, rage and anxiety, brewing inside even the smallest of human minds. Several decades later her work continues to shock with its uncompromising view of the psychic life of babies.

 

Klein made a number of important theoretical innovations with which critics and analysts are still coming to terms. While analysts before her had “analyzed” children by talking to their parents, Klein developed a technique to work with very young children directly, in an approach that combined play and talk. Her work is at the origin of the field of object-relations psychoanalysis, which sees development as implicated from the very start in the relation to others and which has appealed to many as an alternative to the Freudian tradition. Originally a disciple of Freud, Klein moved to England and drifted away from orthodoxy, finally distancing herself publicly in a series of debates in the 1940s (the Controversial Discussions) with, among others, Anna Freud. She challenged many central tenets of Freud’s notion of development: she situated the Oedipal crisis much earlier in time, challenged the notion of penis envy, and cast childhood experience in terms of “positions” rather than in terms of a developmental sequence of phases. In an especially dissident move, Klein developed a model of infantile experience that focused almost exclusively on the figure of the mother. Feminists have been drawn to this version of psychic development that focuses on the relation between the baby and the mother instead of on castration, the phallus, and the father.

 

Some have tried to imagine Klein’s account of early childhood as a kindler, gentler alternative to Freud’s, but it is not easy to do. For Klein, the relation between the mother and the child offers no refuge from violence. The infant does receive some satisfaction from the mother’s care, and it is out of such experiences that the internal image of the Good Mother is formed. But at just about the same time, the image of the Bad Mother is born out of experiences of frustration and disappointment. In this earliest phase of development, which Klein called the “paranoid-schizoid position,” the baby keeps these two images as far apart as possible, in order to keep the Bad from spoiling the Good; one of the key developmental tasks (and this can take a lifetime) is to integrate these two images and to survive the realization that these two opposed experiences have the same source.

 

The very bloodiest battles of object relations are fought between mother and child. The objects that make up the internal world are just what you might expect would be important to a little baby: breasts, mouths, feces, penises. While once in a while it is possible to get a good object and to keep it safely inside, mostly these objects are in pieces, and they are angry. Klein writes,

 

The little girl has a sadistic desire, originating in the early stages of the Oedipus conflict, to rob the mother’s body of its contents, namely, the father’s penis, faeces, children, and to destroy the mother herself. This desire gives rise to anxiety lest the mother should in her turn rob the little girl of the contents of her body (especially of children) and lest her body should be destroyed or mutilated. In my view, this anxiety, which I have found in the analyses of girls and women to be the deepest anxiety of all, represents the little girl’s earliest danger situation. (92)

 

The early life of the child looks in that case more like Seed of Chucky than like a scene of oceanic bliss. This is perhaps what Jacques Lacan had in mind when he referred to Melanie Klein as an “inspired gut butcher” (qtd. in Kristeva 230).

 

Klein’s version of infant life, however, is made up of equal parts rending violence and restorative sadness. These infantile situations recur throughout life. While they are the cause of continuing anxiety and aggression, they also give rise to other feelings, also central to Klein’s project: longing, concern, and the desire for reparation. The crucial developmental turn for the child is from the “paranoid-schizoid position” (characterized by splitting and unbridled aggression) to the “depressive position,” where the child actually feels concern for the objects under attack. Listen as Klein describes the “infantile depressive position,” a state which she understands as “melancholia in statu nascendi“:

 

The baby experiences depressive feelings which reach a climax just before, during, and after weaning. . . . The object which is being mourned is the mother’s breast and all that the breast and the milk have come to stand in for in the infant’s mind: namely, love, goodness, and security. All these are felt by the baby to be lost, and lost as a result of his own uncontrollable greedy and destructive phantasies and impulses against his mother’s breasts. Further distress about impending loss (this time of both parents) arises out of the Oedipus situation, which sets in so early and in such close connection with breast frustrations that in its beginnings it is dominated by oral impulses and fears. The circle of loved objects who are attacked in phantasy and whose loss is therefore feared widens according to the child’s ambivalent relations to his brothers and sisters. The aggression against phantasied brothers and sisters, who are attacked inside the mother’s body, also gives rise to feelings of guilt and loss. The sorrow and concern about the feared loss of the “good” objects, that is to say, the depressive position, is, in my experience, the deepest source of painful conflicts in the Oedipus situation, as well as in the child’s relations to people in general. (147-48)

 

The widening circle of violence here recalls the clashes of the Titans–but the guilt and concern are new. While Klein in no way underestimates the pure cussedness of this greedy little baby, she sees a potential for repair in the feelings of loss that accompany the urge to destroy. Klein offers an appealing conjunction: on the one hand, she recognizes just how bad things can be; at the same time, she points toward a desire (albeit a desire couched in depression) that they should be better.

 

Such a conjunction is at the heart of Esther Sánchez-Pardo’s attraction to Klein’s work in her recent book, Cultures of the Death Drive: Melanie Klein and Modernist Melancholia. The title of the book is drawn from Freud’s characterization of melancholia. In his famous distinction between mourning and melancholia, Freud describes melancholia as a form of pathological mourning in which loss is disavowed and the lost object is internalized and becomes subject to recrimination. He writes, “what is now holding sway in the superego is, as it were, a pure culture of the death instinct, and in fact it often succeeds in driving the ego into death, if the latter does not fend off its tyrant in time ” (54-55). Sánchez-Pardo draws not only on Freud’s account of melancholia but also on work by Sándor Ferenczi, Karl Abraham, Sándor Radó, Nicholas Abraham, and Maria Torok, and others, at the same time standing by her claim that “Melanie Klein is the theorist of melancholia par excellence” (4).

 

Like many contemporary critics, Sánchez-Pardo attempts to bridge the gap between psychoanalytic accounts of individual subjectivity and historicist accounts of the social world. She puts forward a very particular definition of the “culture of the death drive,” one that draws as much on the social conditions of the early twentieth century as it does on a transhistorical notion of a death instinct:

 

It is my contention that melancholia is generated by what I call “cultures of the death drive,” a variety of forces that produce melancholia, a malaise affecting the “privileged” victims of a new urban, industrialized, and capitalist world order: women, lesbians, gay men, blacks, Jews, ethnic minorities, and in general those who suffered the consequences of deterritorialization and diaspora after the wars. (194)

 

Sánchez-Pardo understands melancholia as something socially produced. While its relation to childhood “positions” cannot be set aside, it is the result of particular historical forms of exclusion. As a result, she argues, it attaches to particular kinds of people.

 

Cultural, social, historical, political, and psychosexual factors bear on the production of individuals who are prone to melancholia. One of the conclusions of this study is that women, feminine masochists, lesbians, and gay men are more prone to melancholia. To engage in psychoanalytic and textual inquiry into the reasons why these heterogeneous groups are privileged victims of modernist melancholia is one of my aims. (195)

 

Sánchez-Pardo is hardly the first person to suggest that women, feminine masochists, lesbians, and gay men are “more prone to melancholia.” Like so many central psychoanalytic concepts, melancholia has been taken up to offer yet another perspective on what is wrong–really deeply wrong–with homosexuals, women, racially marked subjects, and people not from Western Europe. This is not at all what Sánchez-Pardo means, however. Sánchez-Pardo comes to diagnose society, not the individual. She sees melancholia not as a matter of arrested development or any other personal “fault”; rather, it is a result of the social exclusion of modernity’s others. This social violence is a matter of concern and care for Sánchez-Pardo: like the depressive infant, she has reparation on her mind.

 

Such a task is laudable–even, you might say, a matter of pressing personal concern. And Sánchez-Pardo works very hard. Cultures of the Death Drive is a massive text, almost more like two books than one. The first section is a close analysis of Klein, with special emphasis on her cultural context and on the importance of gender and sexuality in her work. The second focuses on melancholia in modernism, and considers several literary and visual texts through a Kleinian psychoanalytic lens. The book will be of interest to people with varying levels of familiarity with Klein; while Meira Likierman’s recent book on Klein might be clearer and Julia Kristeva’s weirder, Sánchez-Pardo’s specific emphasis on melancholia, the social, and modernist aesthetics is valuable.

 

Part II of the book begins with a chapter (really more like a second introduction) in which Sánchez-Pardo surveys major modernist scholarship of the last few decades and announces her intention to analyze the “cultural, literary, and artistic production of women, lesbians, gay men, and racialized and stigmatized Others” (205). She goes on to devote chapters to the work of Virginia Woolf, Lytton Strachey, Djuna Barnes, and Countee Cullen. Though these authors do fill out the list of “stigmatized Others” that she mentions, the exclusive focus on their work is hard to explain. There are so many figures whom she might have considered under this rubric: Charles Baudelaire and Marcel Proust, for instance, or Marguerite Yourcenar, Jean Toomer, or Jean Rhys. It might also make sense to move beyond the traditional limits of modernism to more recent writers such as Marguerite Duras, Tsitsi Dangarembga, or W. G. Sebald. What about Elfriede Jelinek? She seems to be living in a pure culture of the death drive.

 

The problem is not so much that these are not good choices for talking about modernism and melancholia–they are. The problem is rather that, despite repeated acts of definition, the contours of this project never emerge with real clarity. So much interesting theoretical and cultural work has been done on the intersection of representation, melancholia, and the social in recent years that it has become increasingly difficult to stake out fresh terrain. However, some of the most relevant recent work in the field does not appear in this study. Critics such as Anne Anlin Cheng, David L. Eng, and Ranjana Khanna have engaged deeply with questions of racialization and melancholia; it would also be interesting to take up the writings of Frantz Fanon and Octave Mannoni, whose writing was foundational for these critics. Given that sexuality is so central to her project, it is odd that Sánchez-Pardo does not engage more fully with the work of queer critics who focus on the politics of mourning and negativity (Douglas Crimp, Leo Bersani, or Tim Dean, for instance).

 

The position of psychoanalysis in the contemporary intellectual climate is insecure enough that books that depend on a psychoanalytic framework often include an implicit or explicit apology for this approach. On the one side, psychoanalysis has been attacked by the skeptics, those who have argued that Freud was a bad scientist (see, for instance, Frederick Crewes’s edited collection Unauthorized Freud); on the other, it has been attacked by social theorists who object to its privatizing and ahistorical focus on the individual psyche.

 

Although a lot of recent work in queer, postcolonial, and critical race studies draws on psychoanalysis, it remains a hard sell for modernity’s “privileged victims.” Psychoanalysis is at the heart of the modern project of normalization that gives birth to these Others. And the rest, you might say, is history–the project of naming and identifying in this period is inseparable from stigmatization and violence. Sánchez-Pardo works hard to keep Klein clear of these charges. In particular, she presents a version of Kleinian theory that emphasizes the flexibility of gender and sexual positions, arguing that “Klein did not fall into the traps of the furor curandi and the pathologization of homosexuality by which most of her contemporaries were driven” (115).

 

There is some truth in this claim, and there are certainly ways in which Klein’s take on gender and sexuality offers an appealing alternative to Freud’s take on gender and sexuality. (There are, of course, ways in which Freud’s take on gender and sexuality offer an appealing alternative to Freud’s take on gender and sexuality as well, but that is another story.) But there is also a sense in which one simply cannot avoid “falling into the trap” of pathologizing homosexuality because homosexuality is like that–it comes pre-pathologized. Even Sánchez-Pardo’s significantly groovy take on sexual development falls into that trap, if it is one.

 

It is almost impossible to track the way to homosexuality. Simply put, there is no single way, not even psychoanalytically speaking, and certainly not in Klein’s narrative of the Oedipus conflict. Klein posits only one prerequisite for the attainment of the normal (i.e., the most common) heterosexual position, the supremacy of the good mother-imago, which helps the boy to overcome his sadism and works against all his various anxieties. (114-15)

 

The slip between normal defined as “the most common” and normal defined as right–between the descriptive and the normative–is a confusion that is endemic to modernity. But it is particularly exacerbated in psychoanalysis, which retains its legacy as a curative science.

 

Still, if psychoanalysis is a cure, it is a poisoned cure, one that incorporates the gut-wrenching (and sometimes even gut-butchering) realities of psychic and social life. And when it comes to talking about loss and its repercussions, nobody does it better. At the end of the book, Sánchez-Pardo writes, “throughout this volume, I have been pervasively and systematically addressing loss, something that has come to interest many of us during this period, when loss, trauma, and aggression seem to be of great concern” (391). Sánchez-Pardo is undoubtedly right about this focus, and it’s hard to imagine the situation changing anytime soon.

 

Furthermore, this book asks what loss is good for: “What political and social forms of freedom, we ask, can be derived from Klein’s theorization of the relationship between melancholia and the depressive position? And to what extent, then, can we return for models of freedom to a modernist aesthetic that dwells on and draws its force from the memorializing of social ‘loss’?” (388). While Sánchez-Pardo does not answer such questions, she takes an important first step by insisting on loss. In a world in which disavowal and aggression hold sway–in which paranoid-schizoid tendencies seem to be winning out over depressive ones–sorrow, longing, and concern are themselves crucial to the work of reparation.

Works Cited

 

• Freud, Sigmund. The Ego and the Id. Trans. Joan Riviere. New York: Norton, 1960.
• Hass, Robert. “Meditation at Lagunitas.” Praise. Hopewell, NJ: Ecco, 1990.
• Klein, Melanie. The Selected Melanie Klein. Ed. Juliet Mitchell. New York: Free, 1986.
• Kristeva, Julia. Melanie Klein. Trans. Ross Gubermann. New York: Columbia UP, 2001.

 

Andrew Strombeck

Department of English
University of California, Davis
amstrombeck@ucdavis.edu

 

Review of: Peter Knight, Conspiracy Culture: From Kennedy to the X-Files.New York: Routledge, 2000.

 

In the post-9/11 world, cultural paranoia and its number-one star, conspiracy theory, have reemerged with a vigor unseen since their heyday in the fifties. The Bush Administration’s anti-terrorism rhetoric could be characterized as a form of conspiracy theory, epitomized by Bush’s use of “Axis of Evil” to conflate the undeniably different Iraq, Iran, and North Korea. On the left, a relentless stream of conspiracy-minded notions (some, of course, with a basis in truth) have been associated with the Administration, from a secret plan to cancel the 2004 elections to the idea of an “October Surprise” featuring the reappearance of an always-already captured Osama Bin Laden to the now infamous “Bush bulge.” Such an atmosphere heightens the need for a critical evaluation of conspiracy theory like Peter Knight’s Conspiracy Culture: From Kennedy to the X-Files. (A note on terminology: in this essay, “conspiracy theory” and “conspiracy culture” refer to thinking about actual conspiracies; “conspiracy theory criticism” refers to second-level thinking about conspiracy theory.) Knight, a lecturer in American Studies at the University of Manchester, makes a compelling case for the emergence of a widespread “conspiracy culture” in the post-Kennedy era, using evidence from literature, popular culture, and conspiracy subcultures. This conspiracy culture is indeed pervasive. Its components include an American government increasingly obsessed with secrecy, a popular politics of suspicion developed in response to this secrecy, and a host of cultural productions that simultaneously parody and spread these conspiracies. Knight argues that conspiracy theory indexes a larger alienation characteristic of late capitalist life, that conspiracy theory “express[es] a not entirely unfounded suspicion that the normal order of things itself amounts to a conspiracy,” a claim validated by the tone of post-9/11 politics. Yet while Knight is astute in reading recent conspiracy culture as more pervasive than assumed by earlier critics like Richard Hofstadter, Knight seems too ready to sever the connection between conspiracy theories associated particularly with “right-wing white men” and a wider conspiracy culture. Even while recognizing that conspiracy theory is differently experienced by different subjects, Knight resists asking why conspiracy theory has by and large remained the property of white men.

 

This book is part of a recent cabal of conspiracy theory criticism, which includes Mark Fenster’s Conspiracy Theories: Secrecy and Power in American Life, Timothy Melley’s Empire of Conspiracy: The Culture of Paranoia in Postwar America, Patrick O’Donnell’s Latent Destinies: Cultural Paranoia and Contemporary U.S. Narrative and Jodi Dean’s Aliens in America: Conspiracy Cultures from Outerspace to Cyberspace. Knight himself is something of a conspiracy-theory industry, having in the past four years edited both a collection of essays (Conspiracy Nation: The Politics of Paranoia in Postwar America) and a multi-volume conspiracy encyclopedia (Conspiracy Theories in American History). The publication of this conspiracy criticism has been propelled, perhaps, by the reemergence of conspiracy culture in the 1990s, represented on the one hand by the sustained popularity of The X-Files, which highlighted the playful aspects of conspiracy subculture, and on the other by Timothy McVeigh’s 1995 bombing of the Alfred P. Murrah Federal Building in Oklahoma City, which unveiled to the public an active and conspiracy-minded militia subculture. Like Knight’s work, all of this criticism seeks to debunk the idea, generally associated with Richard Hofstadter’s “The Paranoid Style in American Politics” (1963), that conspiracy theory is the exclusive domain of an extremist right. Part of the project at work here is the establishment of conspiracy theory as a legitimate object of study, a move that, while less than perfectly necessary after two decades of cultural criticism, works against a dominant ideology that posits conspiracy theory as extremist fringe defined as pathological against a “healthy politics” associated with a pluralist middle. Knight begins by carefully differentiating his sense of a wide conspiracy culture from the narrow vision of conspiracy theory offered by its debunkers, who would include–in addition to Hofstadter–professor of Middle Eastern studies Daniel Pipes and feminist literary critic Elaine Showalter. These critics, instead of trying to understand the cultural causes of conspiracy theory, hold it up to a “gold standard of rationality” and maintain that it represents instances of personal pathology–paranoia–projected onto an outside world (11). Cultural studies, of course, has its own pitfalls, and Knight warns against these in describing what he sees as Fenster’s “bending over backwards to find the glimmerings of utopian political desires buried in the products of conspiracy theory” (20). Instead, Knight sets out to determine just what it is that makes conspiracy theorists tick.

 

Knight differentiates this newer conspiracy culture from Hofstadter’s extremist vision in several ways: Knight argues that in the postwar era, the U.S. government has become more secretive, a shift best represented by the classifying of thousands of Kennedy assassination documents. During the postwar era, the U.S. intelligence community has ballooned (the CIA was founded in 1947), and revelations of this community’s wrongdoings have tumbled out in a steady stream (the Church hearings in the seventies, the Iran-Contra hearings in the eighties, etc.). This results in what Knight, following Michael Rogin, describes as a “spectacle” of secrecy in American politics (29). In response to this increased governmental intrigue (or at least the perception of such), Americans have embraced conspiracy as an explanation. This sense of conspiracy is based not on the idea of a unilateral conspiracy accomplished by a single secretive group, but on the idea that large institutions–corporations and governments–control everyday life. Contemporary conspiracy culture also differs from its extremist form in its intensity of belief; in conspiracy culture, conspiracy is “less an item of inflexible faith than an often uncoordinated expression of doubt and distrust” (44). Finally, our conspiracy culture differs from its predecessors in its playfulness. Knight cites a variety of sources, most prominently The X-Files but also conspiracy-themed publications like Disinformation.com and The Steamshovel Press, that treat conspiracy with a mixture of irony and sincerity.

 

Knight sees conspiracy culture as, to an extent, coterminous with postmodern culture; his reading of the simultaneous emergence of both comes across most clearly in his (mandatory for conspiracy criticism) chapter on the Kennedy assassination. Echoing pronouncements by Baudrillard and Fredric Jameson, Knight calls the assassination a “primal scene of postmodernism” because it heralds a sense of “unmanageable reality” (116). The assassination produces an endless proliferation of conspiracy narratives, none of which provides any closure (115). While new evidence continually surfaces–the 1992 Assassination Records Review Board identifies an astonishing 4.5 million documents and items related to the assassination–this evidence offers little access to any “deep” meaning about the assassination. Knight gives a good sense of the desire circulating around the assassination, a desire he shows at work both in thousands of amateur assassination researchers and in postmodern writers (DeLillo, Ellroy, Mailer) who take up the assassination.

 

In his next two chapters on feminist and African-American uses of conspiracy theory, Knight demonstrates how conspiracy theory shares yet another facet with postmodernism, its rejection of universalist “metanarratives” in favor of local stories about particular subjects. These chapters offer fresh ways to consider the uses of conspiracy theory for disempowered subjects while demonstrating the critical limits that are hardwired into conspiracy narratives. Knight argues that for some feminist and African-American writers, conspiracy theories become a way to narrate the real historical forces that are in fact aligned against them: patriarchy and racism. Since both patriarchy and racism operate in a variety of spheres–domestic, economic, political, social–conspiracy theory provides a way to imagine these forces as totalities. Moreover, conspiracy theory provides the leverage necessary to pry open a dominant ideology that posits both patriarchy and racism as already-solved problems. Even so, conspiracy theory presents certain formal limits that stunt its tactical usefulness. Using Betty Friedan, The Stepford Wives, radical feminist manifestos, Mary Daly’s Gyn/Ecology, and Naomi Wolf’s The Beauty Myth, Knight shows that the language of conspiracy pervades some feminist texts in the form of male supremacist cabals, the “brainwashing” of women, etc. Conspiracy theories, Knight argues, provide a way to name a “faceless problem” (135). The difficulty, Knight points out, is that conspiracy theory not only figures but also creates hierarchies; both Friedan and Wolf, in order to write, have to locate the conspiracy as acting on women other than themselves. Knight, drawing on Patricia Turner’s I Heard It Through the Grapevine, finds similar uses of conspiracy theory at work in African-American communities; the essential point here is that “unconscious thoughts and behavior of whites amount to a conspiracy to keep African Americans oppressed . . . life in the ghetto is the same as if there had been a deliberate conspiracy” (146). For African Americans and other minorities, conspiracy theory functions differently than it does for whites; because of the historical forces aligned against them, Knight argues, conspiracy “comes naturally” to minorities. While this idea has its potential pitfalls, particularly the implicit suggestion that African-American conspiracy theory is an inevitable kind of pathology, it does point to an important concept: that conspiracy theory is experienced differently by different subjects. Knight’s analysis implicitly revisits the quandary of postmodern agency: how to articulate “the death of the subject” at the very moment when nonwhite, non-male subjects have been granted agency. With its obsession with invisible cabals and institutional intrigue, conspiracy culture rehearses anxiety over the death of the subject. But Knight’s reading of African-American and feminist conspiracy theory reveals subjects that are very much intact, with conspiracy theory serving to reinforce identities rather than threaten them.

 

Knight concludes that contemporary conspiracy culture at its best offers a vertiginous sense that “everything is connected.” This idea, which echoes Fredric Jameson’s argument in the first half of The Geopolitical Aesthetic, is that conspiracy narratives both reflect and distort the lived conditions of late capitalist globalization. It is an idea both compelling and reductive. On the one hand, it readily explains the prevalence of conspiracy theories under late capitalism, but on the other, it reinforces the notion that there is a singular subject (implicitly white and male) who experiences late capitalism through a universal lens. While Knight seems thus accurately to diagnose the impossibility of late capitalist political knowledge, so establishing the exigency of conspiracy theory, he implicitly celebrates a postmodern third person, without attending, as he does elsewhere in the book, to the uneven ways in which conspiracy theories are deployed across different political subjects and the ways in which they may function differently, to take just one of his examples, for African Americans.

 

If most earlier conspiracy theories worked to demonize some Americans (African Americans, Native Americans, immigrants) for the benefit of others (white males), is a postmodern irony enough to allow contemporary conspiratorial explanations to evade this demonization? A more nuanced account of contemporary conspiracy theory might foreground the disciplinary mechanisms latent within conspiracy discourse, asking, for example, whether some forms of conspiracy theory favor some subjects over others; this is an analysis Knight points toward but does not complete in his chapters on African-American and feminist conspiracy theories. Such an account might go further toward explaining why, though it has at times been useful to other subjects, conspiracy theory remains, in its production and consumption and in its highest literary forms (DeLillo and Pynchon), largely the province of white men. This qualification seems especially important when the major critics of conspiracy theory–with some exceptions, notably Patricia Turner and Jodi Dean–are themselves white men. The field threatens to become a refuge for white masculinity within cultural criticism instead of an opportunity for a self-conscious consideration of the limitations white masculinity places on discourse.

 

This particular lapse points to other blind spots. The largest of these–one that exists with other works of conspiracy criticism–lies with Knight’s too-rigid differentiation between earlier conspiracies–he refers to these as conspiracies of the Us-vs.-Them variety–and contemporary conspiracy culture. In part, this separation mischaracterizes early conspiracy theories. As David Bennet demonstrates in The Party of Fear: From Nativist Movements to the New Right in American History, conspiratorial explanations have long been important within American history; president Andrew Jackson, for example, gained political capital by crusading both against the “many-headed hydra” of the National Bank and, in a subtler fashion, against the “pernicious” influence of immigrant-linked Catholicism. Thus, to locate pre-Kennedy conspiracy theory as solely the domain of “extremists” is misleading and belies the deep genealogical connection between “extremist” conspiracy theory and contemporary conspiracy culture.

 

Conspiracy Culture gives readers a sense of conspiracy theory as a complex cultural phenomenon, one capable both of binding together popular fears, extremist beliefs, and politics proper and of “keep[ing] aloft several different explanatory possibilities at the same time, refusing to let any one element of the paranormal, the paranoid, and the conspiratorial claim the final ground of stability” (191). Conspiracy theory self-consciously engages with a host of theoretical issues, including disciplinary power, feminism, anti-racism, and political theory, in the process emerging as critical theory’s alternate universe, a universe in which all the issues are the same and all the conclusions different. This “parallelism” is thus the source of conspiracy theory’s potential and its shortcomings; it is also an important warning for the cultural critic, who only at his or her peril fails to look hard into conspiracy theory’s cracked mirror.

 

If the conspiracy culture Knight describes is a multiplicity along the lines that Deleuze and Guattari describe in Anti-Oedipus, it is not a multiplicity without limits; in conspiracy theory, anti-Oedipus needs its Oedipus. With conspiracy theory reemerging as a powerful political force in America, questions like these become crucial in understanding and engaging in politics. Conspiracy theories may be energizing, but for whom? Knight does good work toward analyzing the ideological function of conspiracy theory, demonstrating how conspiracy theory’s forms are both used and interpreted differently by different gender and minority subcultures. His overall analysis is accurate, with this qualification: the feeling that “everything is connected” remains a state of affairs enjoyed most thoroughly by the white men best positioned to take advantage of it.

 

Work Cited

 

• Bennett, David H. The Party of Fear: From Nativist Movements to the New Right in American History. Chapel Hill: U North Carolina P, 1988.

 

Chris McGahan

English Department
Yeshiva University
clm7458@nyu.edu

 

Review of: McKenzie Wark, A Hacker Manifesto. Cambridge: Harvard UP, 2004; and Vincent Mosco, The Digital Sublime: Myth, Power, and Cyberspace.Cambridge: MIT P, 2004.

 

Anyone with an interest in political and cultural developments in and around cyberspace would welcome new books by McKenzie Wark and Vincent Mosco. Coming from different angles–Wark from critical theory (with a clearly evident debt to the idiosyncratic work of Paul Virilio) and Mosco from the political economy of media–both writers have already made important contributions to a still-emergent body of literature on new media and the Internet. Though one can point to exemplary Internet scholarship like Slater and Miller’s The Internet: An Ethnographic Approach, too few critical texts address the Internet as the technocultural phenomenon it has become. In 1999, such a problem would have been regrettable, yet understandable, given the relative novelty of the Internet as a medium for political advocacy, mass and micro cultures, and webs of commerce; today, it is nothing short of lamentable.

 

Mosco and Wark thus deserve credit for having done a great deal, in texts like the former’s “Webs of Myth and Power: Connectivity and the New Computer Technopolis” (2000) and the latter’s Virtual Geography: Living with Global Media Events (1994), to throw light on the practical and theoretical dimensions of the network society. In the article noted above and in other recent texts, Mosco has assiduously tracked how the realities of the global division of labor and capital’s movement to radically reconfigure media markets give the lie to utopian claims about the democratization effects supposedly inherent to the ever-wider spread of information technologies. Wark’s pioneering discussion of global media events in Virtual Geography established an early theoretical framework useful for later examinations of some of the key cultural factors bearing on the dissemination of information on the Internet.

 

In Wark’s A Hacker Manifesto and Mosco’s The Digital Sublime: Myth, Power and Cyberspace, the authors attempt to surpass the reach of their previous work. On the one hand, Wark postulates that hackers, understood in a broad sense to include intellectual laborers who use information technologies in their work, constitute a new “class” equipped with a revolutionary capacity to do battle with capital via the “vector,” Wark’s term for the global circulation of information; on the other hand, Mosco provides a broad examination of the discursive bases upon which popular and academic understandings of cyberspace have tended to be uncritically associated with dubious concepts like “the end of history” and “the disappearance of geography.” Wark thus delivers up an argument that is in some measure rooted in political economy, while Mosco departs from the terrain of political economy proper to investigate the ideological underpinnings of cybercultural myth-making. In both cases, these ambitious projects provide valuable insights into Internet culture and politics. Before getting to a discussion of these, however, I want to indicate a general problem with the methodology employed by both projects. In the spirit of Wark’s manifesto, I will call this problem “the filtering out of actually existing cyberspace.”

 

An unfortunate feature of these books is the degree to which they speak about hackers (however broadly categorized) or the mythical “digital sublime” while paying little attention to what actually happens when hackers become involved in or are subjected to Internet social networks, institutional protocols, and cultural genres. One can search almost entirely in vain in these texts for specific instances of cybercultural practice. Now, it is possible to identify certain understandable reasons of method for this omission. In Wark’s case, the form of the manifesto does not permit detailed discussion, and Mosco self-avowedly seeks to analyze the “myths” framing academic and popular understandings of the Internet rather than talk about what netizens are actually getting up to online. That said, this review will show that the cogency of Mosco’s and Wark’s arguments is weakened by the absence of sustained consideration of actually existing cyberspace.

 

Since its release earlier this year, A Hacker Manifesto has attracted a lot of attention, including a review by Terry Eagleton in the 25 October 2004 issue of The Nation. Beyond the author’s stature–Wark is now professor of media and cultural studies at the New School University–a likely reason for the book’s having drawn such interest is its loose focus on hacking; after all, two decades after its emergence as a hot topic in popular culture, the cultural work of hackers is still surrounded by more mystique than understanding. Because, however, Wark has framed his project so as to address a much wider set of issues, his book is unlikely to clear up many common misperceptions regarding the practical or ideological orientation of hacking or hackers. Another reason for the book’s notoriety is that its analysis extends a thesis put forward recently and notably in Hardt and Negri’s widely read Empire: that the global body of technologically literate culture and service industry workers (for Hardt and Negri, “social workers”) has the potential to become, via their privileged role in the production, circulation, and maintenance of the information required for the function of capital on a global scale (“immaterial labor”), a revolutionary, anti-capitalist force of unprecedented potency. This conceptualization of Internet-era intellectual labor as a new basis for revolutionary agency is indeed the heart of Wark’s book.

 

Wark lays out various proposals concerning his understanding of hacking as a form of class struggle in brief and rather oracular chapters with titles like “Revolt,” “Subject,” and “World.” The thrust of his argument is that cultural workers are becoming constituted as a class via the emergence of an objective conflict between their need for a free flow of information with which to do their work and the full-scale commodification of information following the establishment of the so-called new economy and a corresponding regime of restrictive intellectual property law. The form of politics proper to this new class, Wark maintains, consists of demands not for the redistribution of wealth or collective ownership of the means of production but rather for universal access to information as a means for conceiving and realizing new desires and new forms of life. Rather than working to reform or overthrow the state, he writes, this form of politics is radical to the extent that it “seeks to permeate existing states with a new state of existence . . . spread[ing] the seeds of an alternative practice of everyday life” (256). Wark calls this “expressive politics.”

 

In terms of what he has to say about hackers as agents of class struggle, Wark is at his most persuasive when he suggests that one of the key struggles lying ahead for the productive classes of the underdeveloped world and their hacker allies is to combat not only the exploitation characteristic of neo-colonialism but also the ever-wider control exercised by finance capital and its institutional agents over the organization of nearly every feature of political and social life. The latter struggle, he makes clear, will require both the establishment of networks of resistance and a fundamental refashioning of modernity’s objects. Hackers can support both aims, Wark contends, through their knowledge and their collective inclination to wrest information from its “bondage” to the commodity form.

 

This looks like sound, provocative analysis. But the point would have been more convincing had Wark acknowledged that there is already a massive activist network organized to do (at least in part) what he is describing: the anti-globalization movement (or as Naomi Klein refers to it, the “movement of many movements”). Because he evidently views anti-globalization activists as having come together in defense of local or national interests rather than in tune with the kind of free-ranging anarchist politics he favors, Wark objects to the anti-globalization movement and has no interest in exploring any of its immediate or long-term promises for social transformation. In fact, Wark goes much further than to take issue with some of the aims or strategies of the anti-globalization movement; indeed, he disparages the movement so roundly for its “representational” (in other words, primarily redistributive) politics that he appears to find no value in it whatsoever. Can it really be the case that Wark sees no potential for theorizing or developing a future left politics in the anti-globalization movement? In any event, one gets little specific sense from Wark’s text of how hackers’ technical knowledge and creative energies have been or could be mobilized in support of such a movement or any of its aims, though there is abundant evidence on the Internet that protests against the World Trade Organization (WTO) or the General Agreement on Trades and Tariffs (GATT) have been abetted by such efforts. Here is one of those instances where it would have been helpful for Wark to refer to actually existing cyberspace in his research.

 

Ultimately, Wark most runs into trouble in his tendency to forego dialectical thinking in his account of the hackers’ historical role in relation to global capital. Looking back to another manifesto that twenty years ago proved key to creating an ethos of technologically engaged opposition to the prerogatives of capital, we can recognize that in her text on cyborg politics Donna Haraway was concerned to avoid segregating the kind of postmodern subjectivity she chose to identify with the term “cyborg” from what Wark would now call “the military entertainment complex”: “From one perspective, a cyborg world is about the final imposition of a grid of control on the planet” while from another “a cyborg world might be about lived social and bodily realities in which people are not afraid of their joint kinship with animals and machines, not afraid of permanently partial identities and contradictory standpoints” (154). Indeed, what was most compelling and most radical in Haraway’s way of conceiving the cyborg was that she recognized that any politically progressive course that might be forged on the basis of or in conjunction with cyborg identity and agency would have to be taken in full cognizance of the historical and ongoing imbrication of information technology with the maintenance of what Deleuze called “societies of control.” The creation of the Internet by the U.S. Defense Department is perhaps the example par excellence of how this has worked in practice, though obviously the Internet has morphed into something tremendously different from what Arpanet, the prototype for a global, packet-switching information network established in the late 1960s, was designed to be.

 

In his reading of hackers’ general political orientation, Wark does allow for the danger that they will confuse their interests with those of the vectoralist class, the owners of the means of information production. But to do only that is to do too little. A realistic account of the historical conjuncture would include the full (and not just passing) recognition, à la Haraway, that the work of hackers is in some measure responsible for what Wark now tasks them with dismantling: the widely pervasive social surveillance and military domination enabled by information technology. One should not rhapsodize over hackers’ capacity for creating the “new” without fully taking this problem into account.

 

Though Mosco’s The Digital Sublime: Myth, Power, and Cyberspace moves forward from a different starting point, the two studies do seem at moments to converge (as when, for instance, Mosco speaks of hackers as trickster figures who work to reveal a “mythic utopia locked up by our stagnating tendencies to freeze revolutionary technologies in the ice of outdated social patterns” [48]). Otherwise, he focuses on narratives connected to postmodernism and the “technological sublime,” a notion he borrows from the historian David Nye to help him account both for the general tendency to glorify new technologies and for the various ways in which cyberspace has been subjected to hyperbole.

 

Mosco’s readings of texts by people like Fukuyama, Negroponte, and Ohmae are illuminating. Mosco effectively shows how Fukuyama’s “end of history/ideology” thesis is applied in a boilerplate fashion to his explanation of the significance of the Internet, with the “digital divide” being swept aside as an ultimately immaterial impediment to the otherwise “frictionless” operation of free markets in the post-Cold War era. Negroponte is deservedly taken to task for his brand of digital boosterism, which, as Mosco explains, consists of pretending to treat info-tech innovation as something that is in little need of hype, while at the same time making overstated, technologically determinist claims for the absolute–and absolutely wonderful–transformation of life that is sure to arrive as a result of such innovation. Finally, Ohmae’s contention that we are in the process of achieving a “borderless world” is revealed as, at worst, manifestly distorted and, at best, true in only a very limited sense.

 

Mosco does not, however, offer any counterexamples from actually existing cyberspace, examples that might have worked well to refute these writers’ untenable claims. In his response to Ohmae, for instance, Mosco might have mentioned the “virtual Confederacy” that Internet scholar Tara McPherson has addressed as a case of the importance of place to cybercultures. McPherson’s work on the expression of Southern white identity in the U.S. via the Internet suggests that rather than in every case bringing about “the end of geography,” participation in cybercultures can instead encourage participants to re-consolidate their affective and political attachments to geographic regions.

 

The last quarter of Mosco’s book returns to political economy to examine the history of the World Trade Center site. The chapter posits the story of the WTC’s construction and destruction as both symbolic (or in his terms “mythical”) and decidedly material in its effects: symbolic in that the construction represented a foundational moment in the transition toward a service economy in the U.S. and the destruction a similarly loaded denouement to the dot-com era, and material in that both the erection and the collapse of the towers occasioned a largely undemocratic restructuring of the space of downtown Manhattan. Mosco turns to this historical narrative to demonstrate the pertinence of political economy–applied in this case to a critical investigation of infrastructure development in one especially significant “informational city”–to the study of cyberspace, while keeping in view the fact that the Internet is liable properly and comprehensively to be understood as a postmodern phenomenon of special significance only if one is also able to take account of the key symbolic economies accruing within and around it. Indeed, Mosco does bring certain features of actually existing cyberspace into his discussion at this point to demonstrate that the anti-democratic decision-making regarding the WTC can find a profitable analogy in the similarly iniquitous administration of the Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers (ICANN), an entity with no real accountability for its administrative role in Internet governance, and that the boondoggle of the new economy is in a certain sense akin to what was widely regarded as a monumental failure of architecture and urban planning.

 

As suggestive as these notions are, I was somewhat disappointed to see that Mosco has very little to say, after bringing it up in a digression about branding as a feature of contemporary marketing, about the anti-globalization movement. It is clear that he quite accurately sees the movement as something like an “anti-(free) World Trade Center” and that he recognizes the importance of the Internet to the organization and conduct of the various elements in this movement. But he doesn’t take the opportunity to examine how anti-globalization activists have struggled to counter the very same myths about the Internet and globalization that he takes apart in the first part of his book. As with Wark’s take on hacker politics, Mosco’s book regrettably leaves aside consideration of the crucial cybercultural work taking shape within anti-globalization networks. Against this tendency, I would like to suggest that when dealing with the propagation of myths about the Internet, we should make certain not to forget one of the most important to have so far emerged: that “another world is possible.”

 

Works Cited

 

• Eagleton, Terry. “Office Politics.” The Nation. 25 October 2004: 40-42.
• Haraway, Donna. “A Cyborg Manifesto: Science, Technology, and Socialist-Feminism in the Late Twentieth Century.” Simians, Cyborgs, and Women: The Reinvention of Nature. New York: Routledge, 1991. 149-81.
• Hardt, Michael, and Antonio Negri. Empire. Cambridge: Harvard UP, 2000.
• McPherson, Tara. “‘I’ll Take My Stand in Dixie-Net’: White Guys, the South and Cyberspace.” Race in Cyberspace. Eds. Beth Kolko, Lisa Nakamura and Gilbert Rodman. New York: Routledge, 2000. 117-32.
• Mosco, Vincent. “Webs of Myth and Power: Connectivity and the New Computer Technopolis.” The World Wide Web and Contemporary Cultural Theory. Eds. Andrew Herman and Thomas Swiss. New York: Routledge, 2000. 37-60.
• Slater, Don, and Daniel Miller. The Internet: An Ethnographic Approach. Oxford: Berg, 2000.
• Wark, McKenzie. Virtual Geography: Living with Global Media Events. Bloomington: Indiana UP, 1994.

 

Jason Read

Philosophy Department
Colby College
jread@colby.edu

 

Review of: Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri, Multitude: War and Democracy in the Age of Empire.New York: Penguin, 2004.
Where Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri’s first book, Empire, defined an object of critique–the book’s title is also their name for the global order they seek to analyze–their follow-up, Multitude, attempts the more difficult project of identifying and describing the revolutionary subject. The difference between the two books is not rigid: the “multitude” makes its appearance in Empire, and Multitude continues to examine “Empire” and the new global powers in the age of “the war on terror.” Even so, while the first book addresses the hot topics of globalization and neo-liberalism and thus fits easily into ongoing conversations and debates, the second addresses a problem that is rarely posed: the problem of revolutionary subjectivity, of the powers and possibilities capable of changing the existing global order. This problem does not lend itself to the same debates and discussions. This difference could perhaps be used to explain the ways in which the two books have been received: while the first was a crossover hit, making it into the pages of The New York Times and Time, the second has not had nearly the same success. The handful of major publications that have addressed Multitude have dismissed it as a kind of sophomore slump. The New York Times even went so far as to enlist Frances Fukuyama, perhaps the individual most predisposed to disagree with Multitude, to declare that Hardt and Negri’s fifteen minutes of fame are officially over.

 

Multitude is organized as a response to two questions: what remains of Empire (the concept) in the wake of the United States’ unilateral war against terror and in Iraq? And what subjective forces, desires, and identities are capable of combating Empire (the political formation)? The first of these questions is somewhat extrinsic to the organization of the text, reflecting transformations in the world that have taken place since the publication of the first volume; the second, however, is intrinsic to the text’s organization. The problem of revolutionary subjectivity is first announced in Empire as a kind of lacunae, as that which is difficult or even impossible to name or imagine in the present. While Marx could see continuity and even teleology underlying the revolutions of the nineteenth century, the various protests of the twentieth century–Tiananmen, Los Angeles, Chiapas, Seoul–appear to be discontinuous, without an identifiable subject or struggle to help us connect the dots (Empire 54). Marx compared the sporadic revolutions that marked the nineteenth century to the burrowing of a mole, whose discontinuous emergence from the dark earth is evidence of a hidden continuity and a concealed identity, the continuity of class struggle and the common identity of the proletariat. What is lacking in the present is any sense of that common substance or common vocabulary to connect the various struggles; they are left to stand out in their singularity, contingency, and heterogeneity.

 

Hardt and Negri’s assertion that struggles have become incommunicable, that they cannot be seen as discrete expressions of a common process, subject, or identity, traverses a decades-old debate about the relationship between economic conditions and political struggles. What unifies different political struggles separated by place and time, for Marx, is the recognition of a common economic enemy, capitalism, and a common economic language, that of exploitation. The heterogeneity of political protests was counteracted and supported by the universality of economic conditions. The notion that the economy is a universal and necessary condition underlying and supporting the apparent contingency of political desires and subjectivities has come under assault from multiple directions in past decades, in the work of Hannah Arendt, Ernesto Laclau and Chantal Mouffe, and Jacques Rancière, among others. Common to these diverse views is the idea that Marx’s strategy of finding the common economic essence underlying the various appearances of politics amounts to a negation of the political in all its contingency, heterogeneity, and specificity. Politics, roughly to characterize these diverse views, is not the expression of some underlying economic essence or identity, but the staging, articulation, or constitution of identities. For Rancière, the most recent advocate of a reconsideration of the political, the salient relation is not between the economy and politics, but between the “police,” which divides society into its corresponding classes and groups, and “politics,” which challenges these divisions by giving voice to a group that does not fit within the existing classifications (Disagreement 30). To deny the difference between economic conditions and political constructions is to deny the very existence of the political, which is founded on the rigorously egalitarian fact of speech. Equality is not a goal to be realized through politics, but an ungraspable presupposition of politics, a presupposition that manifests itself whenever the “people”–“as the part of those that have no part”–speak (“Peuple ou Multitudes?” 95). Much of Rancière’s work can be understood as an exploration of the link that Aristotle posited between mankind as a “speaking” and “political” animal (Disagreement 1). Thus, for Rancière, the break between economic conditions and political identities is not a problem to be rectified, but a condition for the liberation of political philosophy, for the return of politics to thought and thought to politics. As Rancière argues, politics will no longer be subordinated to sociological “meta-politics,” which assigns a place to all subjects and more or less “polices” these identities, interpreting all speech according to the grid of class locations (vii). Thus politics is restored to its dignity when it becomes a site for the constitution of political subjectivity and not simply the site for the articulation of demands that are already constituted within the factories and workshops of the economy.

 

Hardt and Negri’s writing traverses the same ground, the apparent separation of the economic from the political, but it does not come to the same conclusions. What Hardt and Negri share with such philosophers as Rancière is the question of how to conceive of or even imagine a political subject adequate to the task of acting in and transforming the current global situation. As Hardt and Negri’s analysis suggests, this problem comes to light in the wake of the “proletariat” which can no longer be assumed to be tunneling underground, waiting for the right conditions to emerge in all of its revolutionary splendor. However, while for some of these other thinkers the loss of the “proletariat” as a figure which traverses the gap between the particularity of social conditions and the universality of political goals signals a complete break in the project of linking social conditions to the constitution of political subjectivities, for Hardt and Negri it is an opportunity to reconsider this connection in light of the transformations of social conditions, of labor, and of production. The “multitude” emerges for Hardt and Negri as a new figure of political subjectivity defined not in opposition to economic conditions but through them: “Multitude,” write Hardt and Negri, “is a class concept” (103).

 

If it is correct to say that the concept of the multitude is rooted in an economic analysis, it is even more accurate to say that it is rooted in an understanding of a fundamental transformation of the economy. As a political concept, the multitude depends on the other central concept of Hardt and Negri’s analysis, “immaterial labor.” As Hardt and Negri make clear, it was this connection, as it was initially developed in Empire, that opened the door to much criticism, specifically that their analysis pointed to a new elite: the text-messaging “bloggers,” hackers, and service workers who will lead the next revolution. For some critics of Empire, the concept of “immaterial labor” is situated at the impossible meeting point where nineteenth-century Marxist analysis of a vanguard class of workers intersects with the twentieth-century idea of a new information economy: an unholy alliance of V. I. Lenin and Robert Reich. What these critics, such as Timothy Brennan, saw in the idea of “immaterial labor” is the combination of a failed political strategy, locating a privileged class or sector of the economy that controlled the levers of production, and misguided empirical analysis, the idea of a radically new economy based on information that changed all of the rules (103). Multitude responds to this criticism by reframing the concept. “Immaterial labor” as a concept developed through the empirical, philosophical, and sociological studies of Maurizio Lazzarato, Paolo Virno, and Antonio Negri refers to the hegemony of intellectual or affective elements, information, communication, and desire in the production and circulation of commodities. Hardt and Negri clarify in Multitude that this “hegemony” is analogous to and even derived from Marx’s argument in Capital regarding the hegemony of industrial production, in which a small sector of the economy determines the form and the rate of production. Compared to agricultural or industrial production, immaterial labor remains a small sector of the economy in quantitative terms; at the same time, however, it intersects with all sectors of production. Commodities produced in pre-industrial technological conditions such as sweatshops are researched, developed, and marketed according to the techniques, habits, and images of affective and immaterial labor; similarly, the agricultural meets the immaterial as the genetic material from seeds is developed, copyrighted, etc. Immaterial labor is thus hegemonic in qualitative rather than quantitative terms (109). For Hardt and Negri the essential point is not simply that there are hegemonic relations between the different sectors of the economy–they are not, after all, looking for new areas of investment–but that the new transformation of labor entails a fundamental transformation of society and subjectivity.

 

Forms of production become truly “hegemonic” when they constitute not only relations of control over other forms, but also general cultural sensibilities (115). The multitude as a political concept is perhaps best defined from the historical vantage point when immaterial labor constitutes a general transformation of society. While all forms of production create the world in their own image (in an age of industrial production the world is seen as a machine), what immaterial labor–or biopolitical production–produces are not only things but also the languages, habits, concepts, and desires of social existence. While material production creates the means of social life, the objects and spaces through which it is lived, immaterial production creates social life itself (149). This is what Hardt and Negri refer to as the “becoming common” of labor–labor produces the common, the shared content and context of life, while at the same time becoming common. A similar, but distinct point, regarding the connection of the multitude to the new forms of labor, is made by Paolo Virno, who argues that the generalization of habits, desires, and concepts destroys the “special places” of society, thought, and language, with their particular vocabularies, and replaces them with “common places” (36). For Virno this transformation entails both a breakdown of the division between public and private as a diffuse “non-public public sphere” replaces both and a transformation of the relation between the one and the many: in an age of exchanged and commodified culture, it becomes abundantly clear that the individual exists only as process of individuation within social processes.

 

It is worth pointing out that the concept of the multitude traces its genealogy not only to a particular site of intellectual production, namely Italy, but also to a particular manner of producing and circulating concepts, in which the same concepts, “multitude,” “immaterial labor,” and “biopolitics,” are produced and developed by multiple authors without clear lines of ownership and inheritance. A thorough consideration of the concept of “multitude” would encompass not only the work of Negri, Hardt, and Virno but also the work of many others, a legacy which stretches from Spinoza and the revival of Spinoza criticism to work on the economy, politics, and ontology. There is thus some overlap of form and content in the development of the concept of the multitude, as that concept is produced and debated through exactly the technologies and subjectivities of immaterial labor that that concept is meant to make clear. To speak anecdotally, those I have met who are most passionate about the idea, who log the most hours in the various listservs where these concepts are discussed, are not academics, but the very immaterial laborers Hardt and Negri work to describe.

 

In the works of Virno, Hardt, and Negri, the multitude as a new form of political subjectivity is based in part on an anthropology of the new structures of society and labor. The multitude is founded on an idea of a “common” substance that is expressed in multiple instances and is produced, or at least partly brought about by the transformations of labor and society: “In philosophical terms we can say that these are so many singular modes of bringing to life a common laboring substance: each mode has a singular essence and yet they all participate in a common substance” (125).

 

Hardt and Negri are not content to limit the concept of the multitude to the workplace, however diffuse or disseminated across society the workplace may be. The multitude, if it is not simply to reproduce the Marxist-Leninist-Maoist tradition of locating the vanguard in different sectors of the economy, must be imagined as immanent to virtually all of society; that is to say, if the multitude is, as Hardt and Negri argue, a “class concept,” it is a concept that thoroughly reworks that which is understood by class. Hardt and Negri had already argued for an extended understanding of the concept of the proletariat in Empire:

 

The fact that under the category of proletariat we understand all those exploited by and subject to capitalist domination should not indicate that the proletariat is a homogeneous or undifferentiated unit. It is indeed cut through in various directions by differences and stratifications. Some labor is waged, some is not; some labor is restricted to within the factory walls, some is dispersed across the unbounded social terrain; some labor is limited to eight hours a day and forty hours a week, some expands to fill the entire time of life; some labor is accorded a minimal value, some is exalted to the pinnacle of the capitalist economy. . . . Our point here is that all of these diverse forms of labor are in some way subject to capitalist discipline and capitalist relations of production. This fact of being within capital and sustaining capital is what defines the proletariat as a class. (Empire 53)

 

It could be argued, however, that the concept of the proletariat has a built-in rigidity that makes it difficult for it to become a figure for a new subjectivity. In Multitude, Hardt and Negri develop the concept of the multitude through a discussion of two figures that have always been situated at the borders of any traditional concept of the proletariat: the peasantry and the poor. As Hardt and Negri remind us, Marx’s denunciation of the peasantry as failed contender for revolutionary subjectivity was based upon the physical isolation and dispersion of the (specifically French) peasantry: “In Marx’s view, political subjectivity requires of a class not only self-representation but first and most fundamentally internal communication” (123). As this separation breaks down, the peasant becomes both part of the international production and dissemination of a commodified food supply and subject to the various conditions of “immaterial labor”: the patenting of genetic codes, the modification of crops, etc. The peasant no longer stands outside the working class. A similar point could be made with respect to what is called “the industrial reserve army,” “the unemployed,” or “the poor.” With workers of all sorts precariously poised on the brink of unemployment or underemployment, and with many of those excluded from work proper producing the cultural forms and languages essential to capital, the division between who is inside or outside of capital falls apart. Production has become “biopolitical,” directly producing the conditions and fabric of existence itself, from the very nature of food to the habits and styles of existence. Thus, Hardt and Negri suggest it is perhaps no longer useful to argue in terms of identity and difference, or inside and outside; better to speak instead of singularity and communality: “We are a multiplicity of singular forms of life and at the same time share a common global existence. The anthropology of the multitude is an anthropology of singularity and commonality” (127).

 

It is possible to chart some of the limitations of the concept on the terrain of its intellectual production. Many critics (especially in major periodicals that have recently moved Hardt and Negri from the “hot” to the “not” column) have seen this concept of the multitude as a utopian fantasy, out of touch with the real divisions of the world. While such claims of “utopianism” are as easy to make as they are empty, there is something to the charge that Hardt and Negri’s idea of the multitude fails to describe the divisions of the present. Not the old divisions of working class, proletariat, poor, and household production–Hardt and Negri have made it clear that these divisions fail to capture both the commonality and singularity of contemporary production–but divisions within the anthropological condition of the multitude. Which is not to say that Hardt and Negri entirely neglect a consideration of the hierarchies, ideologies, and strategies that submerge the commonality and singularity of the multitude in a tide of conflicts and identities. As Hardt and Negri stress, the multitude is to some extent virtual; it is a series of material possibilities more than an empirically existing class. The question is not “What is the Multitude?” but “What can the Multitude become?” (105). Moreover, they demonstrate how empire constitutes new hierarchies, divisions, and exclusions, what Hardt and Negri call hierarchies of inclusion, which no longer divide between nations or zones but run above and beyond such boundaries; these are hierarchies that create internal “third worlds” within the major global metropolises (166). What Hardt and Negri do not consider, or do not consider enough, is how the very forms of labor and commonality that constitute the multitude, also constitute divisions within the multitude. The internal exclusion that Hardt and Negri write of means that all populations are included within the same market, which constitutes the basic conditions of existence, without at the same time being useful to it–that is, exploitable by it. Massive populations, whole continents, are deemed superfluous and are left to die. As Étienne Balibar has argued, “at the moment at which humankind becomes economically and, to some extent, culturally ‘united,’ it is violently divided ‘biopolitically’” (130). What Hardt and Negri do not consider is thus the extent to which the very conditions that define the multitude, the formations of labor, communication, and social relations, may be themselves complicated by the socioeconomic divisions of the world. Moreover, these conditions, the “commons” of language and desire, may in turn deepen the divisions of the world, to the point where the divisions are anthropological as much as they are economic or cultural. The anthropological condition of the multitude continuously threatens to divide the world into a multitude and something like a sub-multitude whose simultaneous exclusion from the common languages, desires, and labors of immaterial labor and inclusion in the market as a condition of survival might constitute an exclusion from the very conditions of political subjectivity altogether. This paradoxical situation could be described as an inclusion in Empire but an exclusion from the multitude.

 

These final remarks are not meant as a dismissal of the concept. The multitude as a concept is a powerful figure of analysis, imagination, and desire; however, it must become a condition for understanding not only the possibilities of the future, but also the dangers of the present.

 

Works Cited

 

• Balibar, Étienne. “Violence, Ideality, and Cruelty.” Politics and the Other Scene. Trans. James Swenson. New York: Verso, 2002. 129-146.
• Brennan, Timothy. “The Italian Ideology.” Debating Empire. Ed. Gopal Balakrishnan. New York: Verso, 2003. 337-367.
• Hardt, Michael, and Antonio Negri. Empire. Cambridge: Harvard UP, 2000.
• Rancière, Jacques. Disagreement: Politics and Philosophy. Trans. Julie Rose. Minneapolis: U Minnesota P, 1999.
• —. “Peuple ou multitudes? Question d’Éric Alliez à Jacques Rancière.” Multitudes. 9 June 2002. 95-101.
• Virno, Paolo. A Grammar of the Multitude: For an Analysis of Contemporary Forms of Life., Trans. Isabella Bertoletti et al. New York: Semiotexte, 2004.

 

Charles Altieri

Department of English
University of California, Berkeley
altieri@uclink4.berkeley.edu

and

Rei Terada
Departments of English and Comparative Literature
University of California, Irvine
terada@uci.edu

 

Review of: Robert Smithson. Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles. 12 Sep.-13 Dec. 2005.

 

We saw this show together. We saw it differently. We enjoyed those differences and wanted to convey that pleasure. Below we mention Smithson’s Four-Sided Vortex, which gives the viewer the ability to see one’s companions in a mirror instead of oneself, for a moment. Here are some glimpses of our experience.

 

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Boy Genius

 

MOCA’s approach to the problem of exhibiting Robert Smithson de-emphasizes writings, plans, and reproductions of large-scale works (although these are represented, selectively) in favor of Smithson’s paintings and drawings, a few films, and several elegant and quietly assertive sculptures. Through this relatively intimate Smithson–a living room and backyard kind of Smithson–the viewer remembers and catches glimpses of the colossal earthworks. The effect is to imply a continuity between the kind of interest we have as children in the rocks and old lumber that collect at the side of one’s house and the architect’s ambition to reshape the landscape, or between junior high school notebook fantasies and Smithson’s brainy, eclectic sketches for projects (for example, his Proposal for a Monument in Antarctica [1966]). In the showily juvenile male fantasies of the barely post-adolescent Smithson, airplane parts and erect nipples are motifs of competing interest; the famous Smithson too was never more than a very young man, his language full of ostentatious allusion, deadpan humor, and other tropes of precocity. The question is not so much how Smithson’s smart-aleck rhetoric becomes something more as how he manages to convey the nascent challenge in adolescent intellectualism when it starts asking questions of the physical world.

 

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Beginnings

 

Robert Smithson seems an enticing anomaly. In an age where the reigning interest is political, Smithson still gets treated as he would want to see himself–that is, through the lens of powers attributed to genius or, as he puts it, as above all a “generative artist” (88), creating context more than responding to specific cultural forces. Thus MOCA’s show brings into focus Smithson’s capacity to reinvent himself in order to make art objects so visibly and entertainingly the realization of a thinking that could have no other satisfying outlet. Make no mistake: Smithson was so deeply engaged in the cultural life of his time that he could become perhaps his age’s most powerful critic of the then-dominant formalist modernism. But he could manage that role because his fealties lay not with the human or social orders so much as with an imaginative site produced by the mind’s dialogue with geologic time and crystallographic space. Comparisons to Leonardo are not uncommon, and not unjustified in relation to Smithson’s constant inventive activity, as well as in relation to how that activity seems to warrant a position apart from the culture wars.Born in 1938, Smithson worked at first (after high school and the army) primarily in drawing and in painting. His brushwork and palette in works like Eye of Blood (1960), From the Valley of the Suicides (1962), and various renderings of the passion of Christ make me think of Philip Guston on speed. There is everywhere the intense painterly activity unwilling to settle for representation, but like Guston, Smithson insists on providing an image as the provocative source of that activity. But this Guston-on-speed also manifests a Blakean spirit of linear excess, here adapted to what would become the cross between the psychedelic and the comic book sensibilities common in the art of the mid-seventies. In one respect Smithson’s painting is the work of the classic repressed nerd (fifteen years before the emergence of that figure for genius), albeit one talented nerd. I love the tension between human and organic forms in the painting and drawings responding to Dante’s valley of the suicides: clearly suicide is no solution, since the soul’s discomfort only carries over into other forms of alienated material existence. The Christ paintings are remarkable for their evocation of a manifestly staged pathos that elicits what can only be called “vulnerability on a divine scale.” Even Christ, or especially Christ, finds it impossible to inhabit an expressive body and must resign himself to metonymies like hands and feet. When the entire body emerges in Jesus Mocked (1961), it seems so aware of its impotence relative to what it might want to signify that it is ready for the tomb.

 

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Thought as Non-Site

 

Like Warhol, whose early works include little portraits of people covered in gold leaf, miniature versions of his paralyzed icons of fame, Smithson explores anxiety about and attraction to reification as the other side of familiarity with inanimate nature. By this logic he moves from comic-like representations of cultural stereotypes to paintings based on Dante and Blake–allegories of imprisoned persons whose fantasies of escape into mind produce only a more rigid version of the body, or “emanations” that seek to represent something that is neither body nor mind, but wind up seeming less than both. Meanwhile, on the separate track of the sketches for sculptures and architecture, Smithson’s persona unfurls, like an emanation itself, in the handwritten annotations that populate these pages. The notes seem to immerse the sketches in a mental non-space of arcana and asides. Like the voiceover Smithson uses in a film or two, these jottings have a thin, haphazard relation to the shapes on the page, but present the artist’s thinking self as an ironic, disembodied interlocutor.

 

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The Unrepresentable and the Presentable

 

I think of Cézanne as the presiding model of visual genius here. Cézanne had similar beginnings. He did not know Blake or prefigure the alienations of psychedelic culture, but his early work shares with Smithson’s the sense that the only good image is an image so distorted by the painter’s energies that these energies have to seem utterly overdetermined in relation to what they are trying to represent. The representable is haunted by the unrepresentable, with the painter’s affective identity established by the effort to locate the sense of difference between the two as an effect of the ego.Then both artists eventually sublate the energies that undo representation into the will to form enabling the precision of gestures toward representation. (I am counting the Nonsites as bizarre representations by representative materials.) Both realize that identifying the individual subject only with the production of excess with energies possible for the eye is less a result than a cause of alienation. Ultimately the work of genius is not to express the self’s anxieties but to find sites where anxiety seems trivial in comparison to the mind’s capacities for intricate impersonal appreciation of where it can find itself situated. One does not have to look very hard at Smithson’s Eye of Blood to see how it could be transformed into a stone spiral jetty in a red sea, in a world where the return of energy to the subject is a sign of insufficient awareness of the contemporary person’s limited place in the world.

 

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Blind Spots and Rabbit Holes

 

At least two kinds of Smithson’s mirror works are represented at MOCA: wall-mounted or floor-standing arrangements of brightly painted metal with reflecting panes, and heaps of rocks and minerals bisected by glass. The first group are funhouse-like pieces with pop/op touches. Smithson frames blind spots as though once you knew where one was, you could handily store things in it. Thus the sculptures model and parody psychic interiors. Untitled painted metal and glass polyhedrons (1964-65), like large split and mounted beveled stones, make the floor hover over one’s head and parts of the room at middle height disappear. A reconstruction of Smithson’s Enantiomorphic Chambers–a series of metal and glass frames resembling a row of partly opened residential windows–evokes infinite regress when you try to look through all the frames from one end. The floor-standing sculptures look more unassuming and are more deceptive. Four-Sided Vortex (1965), a mirror-lined steel rectangle about three feet high, is a kind of negative wishing well: looking in, you can stand in such a way as not to see yourself, only the person beside you. A similar untitled piece from 1965 looks like the kind of green plastic wastebasket you might come across in a city park, but drops the eye into a kaleidoscopic netherworld.

 

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Minimalism Maximized

 

Smithson put himself on a path to this capacious perspective by turning from painting to collage, then to wall structures that drew their inspiration from crystallography, then to a geological perspective that could contextualize why the crystalline might prove so fertile a source of fascination. To grapple with the content promised by these different angles of vision, Smithson turned from expressivist traditions to the minimalism that had recently become fashionable. But he could accept neither the cult of all-at-once apprehension that attracted Donald Judd and Frank Stella nor the pure play on conditions of response that characterized work like Robert Morris’s circles. Technically his work in floor sculpture would be characterized not by minimalist seriality but by progression in various dimensions (22). And, more important, that work would not settle as either a distinctive, immediately graspable object or an event manifesting some aspect of the phenomenology of seeing. Rather, object and event would enter dizzying interactions allowing both object properties and event properties to dangle intricate metaphoric possibilities leading beyond the material object but not beyond theater (in the sense of the term popularized by Michael Fried). In Smithson’s later work, all the event properties that include the viewer’s perspective return us to aspects of his materials while opening them up to the play of mind. Even his simplest structures, like Pointless Vanishing Point (1967) and Leaning Strata (1968), make manifest forces that enter perception while focusing one’s attention on astonishingly elegant objects that one has to let unfold and linger before the mind’s eye.My general claims about Smithson’s relation to minimalism will be difficult to demonstrate in this limited space. I hope it suffices to say that a good part of the breakthrough stems from his appreciating the capacities of mirrors to provide both distinctive substance and irreducible metaphors of reflection and mobility. By making the mirrors part of floor sculptures, Smithson can extend the sense of enantiomorphic structure into complex interactive fields. As one walks around the sculptural object, the mirrors simultaneously stabilize the assemblies of rock by making them dynamically occupy space and destablize those assemblies by playing on what is substance, what shadow, and what illusion. For example, in Chalk Mirror Displacement (1969) (see Figure 1), eight long but low rectangular mirrors radiate out from a center, dividing the work into an open octagon. Because the space is filled with crumbled mineral chalk of various sizes, one is tempted to think of this piece as a large pill box for minerals. But the minerals will not rest in their container. We are constantly stopped as we move around because the glass seems both transparent and reflecting. So the pile of chalk seems both continuous and discontinuous: at times the chalk appears as fluid as water, even as we see the edges and shadows that mark discrete objects. Yet these discrete objects also enter into various mirroring relations, so what is substantial merges with what is reflected. And the chalk comes to seem endlessly alive, proliferating textural qualities and rewarding the sense that as one moves one is productively bound to sheer contingency. How one sees and how one thinks depends here entirely on where one stands.

 

Figure 1: Chalk Mirror Displacement (1969) Estate of Robert Smithson Courtesy of James Cohan Gallery, New York © Estate of Robert Smithson/Licensed by VAGA, New York

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Lyric Sheets

 

Smithson’s mirror-divided piles of rocks and minerals are the really lyrical pieces in the exhibition. The mirrors lie on the floor with the minerals on top of them (as in his Nonsite from 1969), line a corner so as to seem to round out an actually interrupted cone (as in Mirror with Crushed Shells [Sanibel Island] [1969]–see Figure 2), or bisect minerals sloped into symmetrical heaps so that as the viewer looks at any segment of the pile, the reflection of the segment seems to join it to the whole, even though our actual view of the whole is occluded by the slicing glass. In each case the reflections act as supplements so nearly perfect that we continually overlook what’s missing and what’s been quietly replaced. This is “aesthetic ideology” so smooth that you can barely feel its sublimated violence. The piles of stones themselves imply human contact, since they’re beautified by sorting. Loose aggregations rather than objects, they are not integral enough in the first place to be broken by the more explicitly human interruptions of the dividing glass sheets. As a result there is something simultaneously sacrificial and nonviolent about these pieces. The glass planks that section them are as simple and surgical as the monolith in Kubrick’s 2001, yet painless, as though phantom limbs really restored amputations and any cut were also a repair.

 

Figure 2: Mirror with Crushed Shells [Sanibel Island] (1969) Estate of Robert Smithson Courtesy James Cohan Gallery, New York © Estate of Robert Smithson/Licensed by VAGA, New York

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Nonsites and the Play of Difference

 

In Rocks and Mirror Square II (1969/1971) (see Figure 3), Smithson turns the dividing panes of mirror into a rectangular container and rocks take the place of the chalk, now located both within the mirror and outside as a border. Here relations between what is inside and what is outside seem as unstable as the dizzying interactions between substance and reflection and between determinateness of structure and the flow of constant visual eventfulness. Because we are invited to move around, we cannot help thinking that the psyche is caught within this same play of inner and outer, self-reflection and escape from self into elegant sheer materiality. At the same time, the rocks convey an aura of immense power to resist inwardness because they retain their obdurateness even as they seduce us with texture and intricate play among edges and shadows. Ultimately it seems impossible not to feel at once deeply grounded in geological time and as inconstant as passing reflections. And both worlds of flux and permanence seem to mock our merely human interests. One might say that Smithson’s genius was most evident in his realizing in practical terms how almost a century of abstraction in art might produce this turn from the anthropomorphic in life.

 

Figure 3: Rocks and Mirror Square II (1969/1971) Image used by permission of the National Gallery of Australia Art © Estate of Robert Smithson/Licensed by VAGA, New York, NY

 

I am going to have to pass over Smithson’s many intriguing sketches and diagrams, the remarkably inventive photo sequences that place mirror surfaces in various landscapes, and Smithson’s fascination with what might be called marginal architectural forms that begins with his work on the Dallas Airport. But I have to at least mention my favorite Nonsite, Mono Lake Nonsite [1968] (see Figure 4). This combination of wall and floor objects offers an apparent wall map of the lake with most of its surface covered by a plain white painted rectangle. Then the floor piece provides one rectangle nested within another, the larger one matching in size the white painted area. The rectangles present the stuff that the map refers to but which cannot be represented by the map–the outer rectangle containing rocks and the inner one sand. Likewise, I must remark on two films, the justly famous thirty-two-minute film of the building of Spiral Jettyand a film of Smithson describing a suite of architectural photographs he made at the Hotel Palenque in which his speaking tone proves as intricate as the relation between inside and outside in his work with mirrors.

 

Figure 4: Mono Lake Nonsite (1968) Robert Smithson Image used by permission of the Museum of Contemporary Art, San Diego

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Minimalist Architecture

 

The domestic cousins of Smithson’s negative places–unrealized plans, blind spots, margins, minds–are airports, outbuildings and hotels, the between- and afterthoughts of supposed destinations. The exhibition gives us Smithson’s recorded comments over a slideshow of photos he took at the Hotel Palenque, a dilapidated Yucatan inn of no more vernacular fascination than any neighborhood dive, where you might imagine someone like William Burroughs staging a literary decline. In a laconic vein somewhere between Cage and Godard, Smithson praises or pretends to praise to an amused university audience the idiosyncrasy that accumulates there or anywhere. A set of double doors painted green, turtles in the turtle pond, “interesting” rubble–minimalism’s respect for the indestructibility of curiosity, or irony about that respect?

 

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Memorials

 

The otherwise admirable catalogue does not pay much attention to questions of tone, or, for that matter, to the expressive detail of his work. It is too busy trying to figure out what Smithson might be thinking–perhaps one of the pitfalls of being taken as a genius. The most useful of the essays for me were Eugenie Tsai’s summary of Smithson’s career, a wide-ranging interview focused on his dislike of Duchamp, and particular treatments of his relation to Christianity, of his idea of the enantiomorph, of his work in the Yucatan with mirrors, and of his legacy in the form of “post-studio art.”

 

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Futures

 

In the brief film Swamp (1969), Smithson urges his collaborator, Nancy Holt, to walk with her movie camera into a marsh thick with rushes and reeds higher than her head. Smithson directs her to go left or right or turn around and walk further, seemingly randomly, in this landscape without reference points. Anxious almost immediately, Holt keeps saying, “I can’t see anything!” Smithson tells her it’s OK, she should just keep walking, straight ahead as much as possible. It’s a surprisingly tense encounter, the little contest between her body and the rushes that give way easily underfoot, but never give onto anything else. She never becomes less anxious and never learns anything about where she is. In the middle of a discussion about how much film is left (Smithson thinks there should be more), the film runs out. We might read Swamp as a mini-emblem of the antiheroism of Smithson’s contacts with the nonhuman, contacts that record resistance to the latent inanimacy of the living body without making too much or too little out of it.

 

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Robert Smithson closed at the Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles on December 13. The show travels to The Dallas Museum of Art and the Whitney Museum of American Art. The catalogue for this exhibit is Robert Smithson, ed. Eugenie Tsai (Berkeley and Los Angeles: U of California P, 2004).

 

Dana Cuff

Department of Architecture and Urban Design
University of California, Los Angeles
dcuff@ucla.edu

 

“For it is a simple matter to love one’s neighbor when he is distant, but it is a different matter in proximity.”

–Jacques-Alain Miller (79-80)

 

Figure 1: Spite Fence Eadweard Muybridge, San Francisco (1878)[1] Image used by permission of Kingston Museum and Heritage Service.

Introduction

 

The figure of the neighbor in contemporary culture is both spatial and social: neighbors begin as strangers necessarily inhabiting proximate space. When that closeness is intense in duration, distance, and circumstance, it gives rise to potent, if not perverse, reactions. An estate owner’s three-story fence that imprisons and intimidates his neighbor (see Figure 1) is surely spiteful, but neighbors can be far crueler, as we know from the history of the battle to integrate U.S. neighborhood schools since the mid-twentieth century, or even the genocide waged against proximate others in Germany or Rwanda. Intensified by proximity, the presence of difference–inescapable otherness–may press cultural norms past tolerable boundaries.

 

Of course, neighbors are not usually spiteful. The notion of neighborliness often connotes the benign, minor kindnesses bestowed among co-residents that punctuate a steady state of general disregard. But when irritations arise, they can mushroom into disputes that do not seem warranted on the surface. Neighbors wage battles with and against neighbors to defend unpretentious terrains that would appear insignificant. So perhaps neighborliness should be construed as a set of concerted practices by individuals in a relationship somewhere between friendship and enmity. The rhetoric of the neighbor condones interaction without intimacy or intensity; we especially resist vehement interchange for fear of antagonizing those among whom we must live. It is this repressed desire for something more or less than neighborliness that erupts in bizarre local disputes, often directed just outside the neighborhood.

 

The main reason neighbor relations are charged is sheer proximity. Unlike other social relations, including friendship, enmity, love, and even familial relation, space is inherent to neighborship. Unlike the “neighbor” at the office or the one seated beside us at a concert, residential neighbors live their daily lives near one another over extended periods of time. This remains true even in an era of increasing household mobility. Further, residential neighbors are in a significant and often causal relation. Their actions impinge upon one another, and at some levels, are mutually dependent: neighbors affect each other’s property values and make their street a safer or more dangerous place. We may like, dislike, or hate our neighbors, but we are locked in relation with them to some degree.

 

In this essay I scrutinize the figure of the neighbor through the architecture and planning of the American residential landscape. Neighbor architecture–that is, the forms of neighborhoods and all that goes into shaping them–has received little consideration in the study of architecture, as has the construct of the neighbor itself. Psychic and cultural negotiations concerning the latter are made visible to some extent in critical discussions of literal negotiations over neighborhoods; when neighbors debate a proposed affordable housing complex, for example, their arguments about traffic, parking, and density are understood to reflect fears of difference. But there has been little critical reflection on established physical forms for neighborhood, in contrast to architectural styles for individual buildings or urban planning strategies for larger regions. The open-endedness of possible neighbor architectures, I suggest, produces a new way of looking at residential architecture itself.

 

Just as neighbor relations are unlike other intersubjective relationships, neighborhoods are unique physical environments. Unlike districts, towns, or regions, neighborhoods embody a social relation linked to specific land use. A neighborhood is comprised of people living in close proximity in significant relationships, yet they are usually there by default. Further, the figure of the neighbor involves not only the space between strangers, but the relation of the house as a non-human object to its human occupants and the relationship between interiority and exteriority modeled therein. Bachelard writes in The Poetics of Space that “it is not enough to consider the house as an ‘object’ on which we can make our judgments and daydreams react. . . . the phenomenologist makes the effort needed to seize upon the germ of the essential, sure, immediate well-being it encloses” (3-4). Bachelard’s idealized imagery places the experience and memory of the self inside the house, from cellar to attic. The interiority of the individual and the house in turn both reside within an exterior public presentation. The house is figured not as an inanimate solid object, like a rock, but like the well-worn boots in Van Gogh’s painting, read so eloquently by Jameson. The house is a receptacle for humanness and a record of its existence. But the same can be said for the neighborhood as a whole, which has its own interiority. The figure of the neighbor reverberates in my reading of myself and of my neighbor in his house and in our neighborhood.

 

What happens in the neighborhood when the villager’s workboots give way to Warhol’s “Diamond Dust” stilettos; when the generational family home yields to mass-produced Levittown? The “flatness or depthlessness” and “new kind of superficiality” that Jameson attributes to postmodernism is indeed present in an endless string of similar commodified houses. The postwar suburb homogenizes a group of strangers through exterior repetition and erodes presumptions of interiority. Yet the repetitive plans of mass-produced houses also attempt to provide some reassurance as to the identity of the inhabitants. Behind the front door, inside the picture window, is a place known to each neighbor as her own. In the mass-produced house we can imagine both our own uniqueness and our neighbor’s familiarity. Decorating the same basic shell furnishes each household with a limited degree of individuality. But in the mass-produced house, the neighbor’s interiority is not fully explored; it remains both real to and somewhat distant from us. The postwar suburb corresponds to the territory between workboots and high heels, between the fully situated biographical individual and the interchangeable, depthless stranger. The mass-produced box house reproduces an arm’s length familiarity among neighbors.

 

The Neighbor as Political Figure

 

“Propinquity–neighborliness–is the ground and problem of democracy.”

 

–Michael Sorkin (4)

 

The figure of the neighbor as I am defining it here is an up-close construction of human otherness. Thus neighbor relations are proto-political, growing from imposed, inescapable, and open-ended confrontation between self and other. Sociality located beyond the household and before the city forms a grain of sand around which participatory democracy or civil society can begin to take shape. And if the neighbor can be associated with the political conceptually, it is also incumbent upon us to reckon with the concept empirically: neighborhoods are among the most forceful political entities in the U.S. today.

 

The potency of neighborhood politics has led some observers to conclude that the future of national politics is not to be found in the bleak “vanishing voter” syndrome, but in community associations. The energy that propels neighborhood activism is indeed an abundant resource: the proximate differences encountered by residents can become the substrate of collective practices, from processes for deciding how deviance on the neighborhood street will be handled to more formal local planning decisions. According to this optimistic view of community associations, civil society begins in the neighborhood; neighbors trying to stop gang activity in a nearby alley may then try to keep their library open via a citywide tax referendum. A civics founded on such actions would by definition encompass opposing views, which would have their own legitimate forums (city council hearings, neighborhood watch meetings). Neighborhood civics has its shadow side, however, in not-in-my-backyard activism that shunts unwanted and uncertain change somewhere else. Local interests exceeding the scope and scale of individual households are often defined through the us-versus-them distinctions inherent to gated developments. Over half of all new urban housing now takes the form of “private communities” in which all the terrain is locally owned–streets, parks, parking, everything.² Like Charles Eames’s film Powers of Ten, which figures exponential growth through the camera’s dramatic leaps back from the object, private communities step away from the household to construct the next degree of otherness outside the neighborhood gates.

 

There is a paradox here: cohesive community politics also seem to weaken the ethics of neighborhood. At present the notion of community conjures a romantic, if not naïve, utopianism even as local planning boards are inundated with citizens protesting even the most minor local transformations. There are relatively few established cultural norms for neighbor relations and set patterns of interaction in neighborhoods (as opposed to the workplace or the family), yet such norms are beginning to take shape in the U.S. The American neighborhood is casting its political form through its physical environment and through battles over it.

 

Sub-urbanism

 

In his introduction to an edited collection subtitled The Politics of Propinquity, Michael Sorkin argues that free civil society is located in the city because of its intensity and its spaces of circulation and exchange. This repeats the argument famously made by Jane Jacobs some forty years earlier, with a slight but significant shift in emphasis. Sorkin decries the would-be universalism of the public sphere, advocating instead friction, multiplicity, and difference. In a way, he is advocating the recognition of the shadow figure of the neighbor–the realistic, frictive neighbor–as essential to the political function of the public sphere. Both Jacobs and Sorkin advocate dense urbanism, however. It would seem that they crave the vital intensity of the city. While it is true that, historically, urban settings have indeed generated strong communities, it remains a limitation that neither Jacobs nor Sorkin cares to imagine the suburban space of the neighbor and hence of contemporary political action.³ Although I, too, would argue that the next generation of neighborhoods will reside not beyond but within the city, I want to understand more clearly the recent evolution of the U.S. suburban landscape.

 

The architecture and planning of postwar suburbs–seemingly a self-contradiction–in fact design a narrative of sociality for middle-class America. The suburb makers marketed themselves as “community builders,” a role that deflected attention from their actual prioritizing of interiorized households closely if weakly linked to others nearby.⁴ These developers built groups of houses that paid little heed to the prospect of neighboring; instead they focused on the individual dwelling taken as an independent entity. Their capitalist realism, operating for the convenience of the supplier, quickly became the currency of the consumer as well (see Schudson and Kelly).

 

The assumptions built into the pattern of that currency are astonishingly simple. Among suburban households, the street serves as the primary collective icon. Efficient infrastructural organization gives access to equal-sized land parcels, yielding blocks of private houses facing one another and thus sparking obsessions with traffic and parking. The cul-de-sac, a distinct and popular form for the suburban street, implies a closed, small web of neighbors. As we jump down in scale from the relations between a collection of households to the relationship between adjacent abodes, we encounter an implicitly neglected neighbor inscribed in the ambivalent side-yard setbacks that separate one house from another, and a more self-conscious neighbor in the picture window through which, in glimpses, the other is revealed. The self is not only contained by the house but shielded by it from the proximate other.⁵ The thin skin of the suburban house both confronts and defends against the figure of the neighbor, at the same time that it exposes a limited view of its own occupants. This dynamic is inadequately conceptualized by the binarism of publicity and privacy. The space just outside the suburban house is distinct from the public sphere (think Times Square or Santa Monica beach). Likewise, the space within the suburban house is unprivate in numerous ways: the unvarying reproduction of its interior plan, the windows puncturing the façade, and the public function of the living room, to name a few. Exteriority associated with publicity provides resident strangers with group identity, while interiority engages an intimate, regulating privacy. Thus domestic architecture’s delicate task is to filter intimacy with strangers. Inevitably, that close-up intimacy forms intense relations of contact and avoidance, as when neighbors become complicit in overheard domestic violence or become enemies over a dispute about the fence separating them.

 

If Arendt is right that the public sphere demands visibility, that reality requires our shared perception of a visible world, then the neighborhood is a kind of hyperreality in which enduring proximity can push us to share too much, so that we want to shield our eyes or plug our ears. The right and duty to the phenomenal world that Kant urges upon individuals is, by Arendt’s logic, deflected in the case of the neighborhood from the individual’s relation to nonhuman phenomenality to the realm of intersubjectivity.⁶ A sure discomfort invoked by this shift sets at least some of the deeper terms tacitly guiding suburban development. The constant distance separating one house from another or the street from the house, for example, not only overtly addresses fire safety regulations but implicitly serves as a buffer against unwanted intimacy.

American Figures

 

How did the figure of the neighbor implied by suburban housing evolve in the postwar era? I suggest that while there was one primary model of postwar suburbia–the collection of isolated houses exemplified by Levittown–a secondary model existed beside it: the modern neighborhood exemplified by the Mar Vista Tract in Los Angeles, designed by architect Gregory Ain. Of these two models, only Levittown has been reproduced, sometimes in easy replication, in other cases in perverse mutation. My comparison between Levittown and Mar Vista will be followed by two examples in which designers explicitly sought to have impact on the articulation of neighbor relations. Each case ultimately harks back to Levittown–to an extreme at Sagaponac on Long Island, New York, and as its figurative mythical twin at Celebration, Florida.⁷

 

Baseline

 

The ur-suburb Levittown sets the benchmark against which subsequent experiments in mass-produced, middle-class housing have been measured. It is generally argued that Levittown reflected the “American dream,” not just of home ownership but of domestic life itself, yet it is more accurate to state instead that it constructed that dream. This sleight of hand persists in representations of suburban sprawl as the inevitable result of popular desire. If we examine but one angle of that phenomenon–the way a suburban neighbor is variably figured–we will also see how a taste for the suburbs was formed and how local politics evolved there.

 

In the late 1930s and early 1940s, American architects, planners, and politicians projected a forward-looking society that would emerge after the war, living in houses in neighborhoods that likewise abandoned the past. Creative fantasies were primarily limited to the individual house, individual investment, to the self and the privacy especially coveted during the Depression and World War II, when deprivation, working, housing, and fighting were insistently, if not oppressively, collectivized. Architecture magazines conjectured numerous private homes of the future, but ultimately these differed little from the cost-efficient houses merchant builders dropped on subdivided farmland to accommodate veterans returning from the war.

 

At Levittown, thousands of identical, four-room “Cape Cods” were built to standards laid down by numerous local and federal agencies (see Figure 2).⁸ These houses matched their prospective occupants’ most urgent need: to escape overcrowded shared apartments. Rather than fulfilling residents’ deep desires (as presumed by the rationale that popular taste guided suburban development), these houses met the needs of the builders. In Levitt and Sons’s efficient house plan, not a single square foot is without explicit assigned function, as would be the case in an entry hall or even corridor (see Figure 3). The only ambiguous space is a stairway leading up to the unfinished attic, projecting a future in the oneiric sense and in terms of real estate speculation. Possibility soon depended on a do-it-yourself way of life. To help homeowners realize that possibility, local publications offered advice about how best to expand, decorate, and remodel–that is, to individuate ever-so-slightly over 17,000 homes that came in just two basic models.

 

Figure 2: Levittown Aerial View, ca. 1957.

 

Figure 3: Levittown Floor Plan.

 

In John O’Hagan’s 1997 documentary film Wonderland, early residents–each portrayed as an everyman of Levittown–describe Levittown’s Blue Velvet side. Apocryphal stories, often repeated, feature self-similar houses that looked so much alike that husbands went home to the wrong wives. A woman recounts her experience of being haunted by a ghost whose greatest audacities are removing the lining from her jacket and nicking a corner of her coffee table. The interiority of the neighbor is figured to be as bland as the public appearance of the house on the street with which one was already familiar. Private interiors, it turns out, are imagined to be as knowable as the Bendix washer or TV built into every residence.[9] At the same time, the reassuring, banal minimalism of Levittown is cast as a mask of superficial sameness that veils an underbelly where wife-swapping, racism, alcoholism, eager consumerism, and general malaise were housed alongside the mythos of the model American family.

 

The figure of the neighbor in the original Levittown exists mainly in absentia. The interstitial space between houses is ambiguous at best, front yards are deep and relatively uninhabited, porches are non-existent (see Figure 4). Except in the last Ranch model home built in 1949, the small puncture in the façade was hardly large enough to be called a picture window, and served as the only frontal link between inside and out, mediating family and neighborhood.[10] This is not to say that Levitt and Sons and the Federal Housing Administration had no conception of the neighbor. The influx of so many residents just home from war, starting families and struggling financially, made the Levitts fear their development would deteriorate into a new kind of slum unless they instituted measures of control. A variety of means were used to define the neighbor through authoritarian control, pressure to conform, and the insistence on privacy through absence of physical expression. The Levitts insisted, for example, that lawns be mowed; when they were not, a crew performed the task and billed it to the resident. Later a homeowners’ “community appearance committee” continued the practice. The Levitts also ruled that drying laundry be moved inside on weekends. The laundry line, symbol of the intimate proximity of lower-class urbanites, was shunned or interiorized in Levittown, at least on its most public days. A newsletter explained that “hanging wash on Sunday might annoy neighbors, who are probably entertaining friends or relatives. Why not save it for Monday or hang it in the attic?”[11] To accommodate this rule women did dry their laundry in the attic or even in the living room. Levittown’s public face–at least when the neighborhood was inhabited by men home from work and by guests–required active disidentification with the visible intimacy of neighbors.

 

Figure 4: Levittown Street Scene. Photo by Dana Cuff (2004).

 

The problems associated with slums and potentially with Levittown were pathologized in the logic of Levitt: they could infect and spread to others. This necessitated a further measure: fences were not permitted. All residents had visual access to their neighbors’ back and front yards. This democratized the Panopticon’s principle of surveillance: at Levittown, everyone could openly police everyone else. With no mediation between interior and exterior, residents’ secrets, their hidden selves, had to be contained in four small rooms. In public, social conformity dominated the relationship between houses through regulations and residents’ practices. Nonconformity was an affront that bordered on subversion and potentially destabilized the emerging community (see Kelly 62). Levitt and Sons’s project to establish stability was taken on in earnest by the Levittowners.

 

As for the neighbor as a proto-political figure, Levittowners were not “bowling alone.”[12] Amid the ocean of individual houses, neighborhood centers contained schools, community stores, and parks, and residents started innumerable local clubs and branches of national voluntary organizations. Presumed degrees of homogeneity were discredited in these voluntary organizations; as members discovered their differences, factions, conflict, and debate were the norm. Groups tended to splinter along class lines, so that group survival depended upon leaders who could generate cooperation and tolerance.[13] Political action as a form of resistance was marked in the early days of Levittown, but the Levitts were quick to shut down opposition.[14]

 

Modernism’s Figure

 

“A modern, harmonic and lively architecture is the visible sign of authentic democracy.”

 

–Walter Gropius

 

At another tract of postwar middle-class houses, a progressive neighbor was figured not only in the street and front yards but inside the houses. Architect Gregory Ain’s Mar Vista Tract in Los Angeles (1947) is one of a handful of modernist experiments across the United States that offers a striking contrast to Levittown.[15] Like the latter, Mar Vista is a study in mass housing for the middle class, though much smaller: just over fifty houses were built on three parallel streets. The small scale of production created a district within a town rather than a region de novo. Instead of standard long and narrow lots, Ain created short and wide lots, each with about eighty feet of street frontage. Landscaping by the distinguished modernist Garrett Eckbo unified the exterior through tree-lined streets and uninterrupted parkways. At the rear of the houses, fences separate private yards, but the landscape simultaneously treated those spaces as a continuous whole (see Figure 5). Houses together with vegetation create a formally explicit double reading of the individual and the collective, of privacy and public identity, that distinguishes the Mar Vista Tract.

 

Figure 5: Ain’s Aerial Perspective Rendering Image used with permission of the Architecture and Design Collection, University Art Museum, University of California, Santa Barbara.

 

The occupants of this modernist suburb moved for many of the same reasons as did their Levittown counterparts.[16] Yet the figure of the modern neighbor was as distinct from Levittown’s as were the modern house and neighborhood itself. Rather than relying on social controls like the rules the Levitts laid down in Levittown, Mar Vista’s repetitive house form provides an expanded realm to the private individual while leaving the imagination of the neighbor open and unscripted. In contrast to the social conformity that dominated Levittown, this willingness not to figure the neighbor, I suggest, is a stronger indication of the capacity for tolerance and actual association than Levittown’s nervous implication that the neighbor must be a lot like oneself.

 

Instead of a reassuring veil of sameness, the Mar Vista Tract creates its neighborhood from an unpretentious abstract form. Minimalist rather than stripped-down, economy serves an aesthetic purpose in Ain’s design. The street becomes a parkway, a shared field both defined and occupied by walled compounds. Together the self-similar objects create not a scattered array as at Levittown, but a unified wall along the street that links the diverse progressives who chose to live there. No friendly neighbor is figured in these façades, where the filtering function is architecturally explicit: the street-side exterior belongs to the collective, formal and clear (see Figure 6); the inside belongs to the household at whose invitation the other enters an open, fluid realm of intimacy (see Figure 7). Bedroom boundaries are somewhat ill-defined, living rooms can open to adjacent rooms, and the innermost interior is integrally linked to a private exterior. Movable walls open spaces to one another, a dining/work table bridges the kitchen and the living room, large planes of glass bring in light and views of the garden from the rear yard. The modern window wall at Mar Vista is at the rear, domesticated rather than exhibitionist in its orientation to the private yard. Thus the façade does not engage the neighbor as stranger at all, neither representing the householder to him nor forming itself around a fantasy of him. Rather, it gestures to the intimate other, the friend or neighbor who has been invited into the house: once past the front door, all is open to him.

 

Figure 6: Mar Vista House Photo by Dana Cuff (2004).

 

Figure 7: Mar Vista Floor Plan Projection Image used with permission of the Architecture and Design Collection, University Art Museum, University of California, Santa Barbara.

 

If an interplay of desire and danger may in a modest way be found in Mar Vista, it is as a quietly revolutionary notion of domestic life, lived as much within the private exterior and between rooms as within enclosed, utilitarian spaces with specific programs (e.g., kitchen, bedroom). The stark exterior shocked passersby; some sought this unknown future and some felt threatened by it. Mar Vista’s abstraction and even disfiguring of the house transforms the specificity of its structure into a domesticated form of the sublime. At Levittown, the face of each house offers self-conscious, controlled hints of the individual within–a curtain, a railing, a vase, a rosebush in the front yard. At Mar Vista, a wall plane folds into a roof that hovers over a clerestory window; the house seems to contain space rather than people. We have little idea what lies behind the façade, except that its occupants must have made a genuine choice to be there at all. Anonymous yet apart, the houses at Mar Vista make clear that otherness is admissible. In fact, early Mar Vista was home to diverse neighbors. Residents recall that their neighbors included gay and lesbian couples, artists, working women (including a hooker), communists, union activists, musicians, Jews, interracial couples, professionals, and laborers.[17] While surely romanticized in recollection, this cacophony of others may have composed one form of the “authentic democracy” to which Gropius refers. At Mar Vista, figure and ground are ambiguous, variously perceived between the individual house and the collective whole; at Levittown, there is only the house.

 

Modern architecture at the mid-century has commonly been associated with progressive or even leftist ideals.[18] Gregory Ain was a communist and, according to one study, a women’s rights advocate.[19] Yet according to early residents, Mar Vista was decidedly not about politics in the formal sense. Instead, the mere atypical choice to live there gave Mar Vista residents their identity, and that appreciation of what was not-the-norm reflected and lent a tolerance for difference among “thinking people.”[20] They stepped determinedly into a domestic future with their unscripted neighbors. The strangers who chose to reside in Mar Vista asssumed they had some small but profound common ground, but Ain’s architecture–which was in fact that ground–does not attempt to determine or figure its content for them.

 

Developing Neighborhoods

 

Levittown and its modern suburban alternative, the Mar Vista Tract, laid down two distinct directions for the U.S. postwar figure of the neighbor. In the intervening six decades, it was Levittown whose figure of the neighbor evolved, replicating and mutating, but never really straying from a structural model in which the nuclear family predominates, contained by the house and controlled by regulation and a loose organization of houses in the landscape. Mar Vista’s aesthetic and functional future, with its abstract public expression and more inventive private sphere, was nipped in the bud. Its dynamic, open-ended setting for self and other was not sustained in the typical suburban imaginary. The few progressive architects and planners who tried to implement innovative neighborhood schemes met stiff resistance from skeptical bureaucrats at federal and lending agencies whose approvals were required. Architectural conformity was one of the strategies such agencies employed to reduce the financial risk of mass housing.[21]

 

Of course the dream of a quiet house in the garden, promised by early postwar suburbs, faltered. The actual landscape of the postwar suburb is hardly idyllic; the traffic is a nightmare; our ownership is fragile at best; politics have grown embittered; and at base, we don’t feel safe in the suburbs anymore. The two suburban developments to which I now turn portray two opposed approaches to the dilemmas of contemporary suburbia. Both design approaches stem from Levittown. Each uses architecture self-consciously to form and market the development, and each has been promoted as an exemplar of contemporary residential design. The first, Sagaponac, lies on Long Island, east of its progenitor, Levittown, and when completed will consist of three dozen unique contemporary architectural works. The second, Celebration, Florida, is the brainchild of the Disney Corporation and the darling of the neo-traditional New Urbanist movement. Sagaponac takes Levittown’s emphasis on the isolated house to an extreme; Celebration demonstrates that Levittown can be reclothed. Both settings interiorize and sustain the preeminence of the private household (if not of the house) while maintaining a problematic relationship to the collective public sphere.

 

Hyper-Suburbia: Designing the Neighborhood Away

 

When developer Coco Brown decided to build on his land holdings in Sagaponack, New York, he didn’t look to early models of community design, such as Radburn, or to architecturally coherent neighborhoods such as the Mar Vista Tract or Frank Lloyd Wright’s Oak Park. Instead, under the advisement of architect Richard Meier, he hired a cast of some thirty-five star architects to build one-off showcase houses sited on large subdivided lots spread across his hundred acres (see Figure 8). Prospective residents would purchase one of these speculative custom designs to acquire cultural capital, take part in some hyper-suburban American Dream, and have other like-minded weekenders for neighbors.[22] As in the rest of the Hamptons, the future occupants of these second homes come from Sorkin’s and Jacobs’s New York City, where they must have developed a need to escape all that propinquity.

 

Figure 8: Sagaponac house designed by Hariri and Hariri Photo by Dana Cuff (2004)

 

In reaction to the failures of the postwar suburb, Sagaponac retreats further inside and away from the public sphere. While it is a subdivision, Sagaponac is hardly a neighborhood–the term seems quaint applied there. It is a collection of private, ready-to-wear statements their occupants purchase with the option of minor tailoring. Rather than being sited in a walled or gated community, at Sagaponac each house is protected by its surrounding vegetation, which naturalizes and effectively thickens the wall (see Figure 9). Gropius is cited in an essay that touts the optimism of Sagaponac’s architecture: “the Houses at Sagaponac are, in their different ways, doubtlessly modern; they are surely lively, and in their heterogeneity, they are harmonic in a way that contradicts Gropius’s intended meaning, but in so doing are, however imperfectly, truer to his words” (Chen 11). A convoluted apology, but not without meaning. Modern architecture at Sagaponac, the author suggests, exposes a desirable diversity, a “discrete kind of utopia” defined against the status quo and bolstered by the possibility of the new. When Gropius made his statement, he had fled persecution in Germany to seek in the U.S. freedom for political and architectural expression. No collective, political or otherwise, is imagined at Sagaponac, but the value it places on freedom for individual expression is consistent with both neo-conservative notions of an ownership society (in which owners are free to do as they please with their property) and neo-liberal versions of multiculturalism (which remove the burden of seeking collective solutions to broad social problems). This privatized utopia is hardly the “authentic democracy” Gropius meant.

 

Figure 9: Sagaponac house designed by Harry Cobb in the background, with a streetside marketing sign showing the architect’s rendering. Photo by Dana Cuff (2004).

 

Despite the contemporaneity of its architecture, Sagaponac develops not the modern figure of the neighbor implied by Ain’s houses, but the neighbor of its precursor, Levittown. Both Levittown and Sagaponac specifically interiorize the private lives of residents in vivid contrast to ill-defined exterior shared realms. While Levittown figured similar occupants of repetitive house forms, Sagaponac imagines that its residents share the fundamental quality of being highly discriminating consumers. Sagaponac intimates that its residents hold a common value: the house is an investment in art that extends one’s status and wealth. The extreme demands for social conformity at Levittown are mirrored in Sagaponac’s inordinate emphasis on individualism–a renowned architect, a unique building, a discriminating buyer, a solo developer. The conception of the neighbor is not the neighbor as other, but as fellow individualist.

 

If it’s unfair to link Sagaponac to Levittown, it is for only one reason: it does not even intend to form a community, but instead a loosely curated collection of artworks. Although their partial proximity makes neighbors of the residents, their bond will be primarily their investment in Sagaponac. The houses, designed to include their own guest houses, accommodate the idealized family isolated with its intimate friends. Outside the dwelling, Sagaponac adopts the development pattern of the masses, selling speculative houses unified only by a basic infrastructure of streets and sewers. In some ways, Sagaponac demonstrates how deeply ingrained the Levittown model of housing has become. As in the Mar Vista Tract, it isn’t necessary to have a highly articulated interstitial realm in order to create spaces for the practices that emerge among proximate strangers. But it is difficult to imagine that Sagaponac residents will ever find one another, by chance or on purpose. With houses set back from the street, hidden behind trees, no sidewalks and no nearby public meeting place, Sagaponac’s weekend residents will have a hard time managing a homeowners’ association, should any need for one arise.

 

Evoking the Neighbor

 

Figure 10: View down Celebration’s Market Street Photo by Dana Cuff (2004).

 

Figure 11: Residential Street in Celebration Photo by Dana Cuff (2004).

 

While Sagaponac’s occupants retreat into housing that respects absolute privacy, Celebration, Florida symbolically molds an idealized community. Perhaps the distinct rejection of architects by the typical suburban neighborhood has allowed new urbanism to become such a potent force in the domestic landscape. Even as the Levittown pattern of a field of isolated, interior-oriented objects tied only by roadways has gone virtually unchallenged, precisely its neighborhood elements of parks, pools, and shopping within residential blocks have been phased out. The speculative house prevailed over most American neighborhoods until 1991, when leaders of the Congress for the New Urbanism published the Ahwahnee Principles. Seaside, a contemporary neo-traditional development in Florida, became the talisman of the new urbanist movement, and a new future for neighborhood architecture took shape. This future looked nostalgically and unapologetically to a time before the car, household mobility, and big-box retail. The new urbanism would remake an older U.S. small town, resuscitating and transforming the mythos of community, simplicity, security, and so on. After having produced many books, articles, and, most importantly, newly built suburban neighborhoods, new urbanism has been soundly criticized from nearly every academic perspective and absorbed by the marketplace with profound efficacy. Such a discrepancy has not been seen since Levittown.[23]

 

Celebration, new urbanism’s most complete manifestation, illustrates the weird contradictions of its design ideology.[24] This suburban development near Orlando is more than a themed environment; it is wholly branded. It has borrowed the Disney name not only to insure its property values, but to create what residents call a fantasyland within everyday life. That everyday life is regulated to an unprecedented extent to present a homogeneous group of neighbors on the outside. Taking its cue from the Levitts, the Disney Corporation insures that neighbors maintain the look of neighborly sameness, from the color of their curtains to the depth of their mulch. Celebration’s town plan centers around a pedestrian-oriented business district, but like the scattered neighborhood centers in Levittown, Celebration’s commercial district struggles to survive. The residential architecture employs the symbols of community life: porches, small parks, playgrounds, a family of historicist architectural expressions, public benches, parkways, a couple of diners, a town hall. The town hall is empty, however, because Celebration is governed by the Disney Corporation: democracy is literally reduced to its architectural sign.[25] As for the neighbor, perhaps no place in America has so explicitly conjured a figure of the “we” through its architecture. Even private house interiors at Celebration, anthropologist Dean MacCannell argues, are organized for public view to eradicate fears that a hidden difference lurks behind the façade (113-14). In this pressure-cooked neighborhood, civility can be as superficial as brick veneer, as some bitter and well-documented battles between residents have demonstrated.[26]

 

Sagaponac and Celebration, then, articulate anxiety about the neighbor. Sagaponac adopts Levittown’s deployment of the detached house as the rigid container of privacy and glorifies that privacy in expressions of individuality, while Celebration extends that privacy’s complement: the construction of a highly regulated and spatially defined common realm. When the figure of the neighbor is so overtly defined, informal practices of neighboring seem less necessary. In the fantasy of Celebration, it is as though one already knew one’s neighbors; in the fantasy of Sagaponac, one need never meet the neighbor, assured that we share the same good taste and desire for privacy. Thus the political fruits of civility born of actual negotiation with the unknown are diminished.

 

Reconfigurations

 

What lies beyond the paint, outside the box of domestic privacy, is uncertain turf. This space, both unprivate and unpublic, is home to the figure of the neighbor and birthplace of civil society. It is just here that we need a new conception of architectural community. Architectural critic Paul Goldberger, worried over Sagaponac’s insular qualities, mustered just two counter-cases of developments from a vast repertoire of architectural examples: Radburn, built in the 1920s, and Celebration. Both, he believes, represent efforts at community-building and embody a public realm. Aware that this is not quite accurate, yet stopping short of criticizing Celebration, he goes on: “The great accomplishment at Radburn is that it creates a sense of the public realm without making the place feel in any way urban.”

 

Goldberger cannot name this public realm that is not urban because as yet it has no name, nor has it been defined. But he identifies it at Radburn, where there is “a fully suburban, even almost rural, kind of feeling.” “Rural,” “suburban,” and “urban” describe this interstitial space of the neighborhood no better than “public” and “private.” At Radburn the houses faced onto a shared open space that linked the development together. In more typical suburbs, neighbor-form is an ill-defined realm of side yards, curbside mail boxes, elementary school parking lots, and cul-de-sacs. These inadvertently intimate grounds give way to a nearby Starbucks, the laundromat, the city council hearing room, and the city park. This circumstantial, ad hoc, and interstitial figure of the neighbor is not easily named or programmed into architectural form. Although Goldberger recognizes it when he sees it at Radburn, he misapprehends Celebration’s neighbor-coating as some Habermasian public sphere.

 

Postwar residential landscapes interiorized the private sphere, giving over the visible exterior to a more formal, shared realm. In spite of the intentions of builders like the Levitts, however, the suburban house could not contain its occupants. The interiors were too small, the yards too open, and most of all, the proximity too great. An inadvertent figure of the neighbor arose whose superficial sameness distracted residents from their actual differences. The appearance of difference or otherness triggered conformist reactions, and thus emerged the informally divisive politics of the neighborhood. By contrast, at the Mar Vista Tract the figure of the neighbor remained more unscripted and left room for difference. In both settings, local politics evolved not only to represent, but also to construct group identity. Unexplored, exteriorized public identity within a neighborhood was reinforced by a collectively identified other. From the early Island Trees residents who fought the name change to Levittown to Celebration residents worrying about their teenagers at the wider area’s public high school, identity and difference are constructed together.

 

Here it is worth reconsidering Sagaponac, where one can predict that sizable interiors, closed exteriors (closed off by landscape as well as by orientation away from other houses), lack of proximity, and weekend-only occupation will yield little that resembles a neighborhood–only “Houses at Sagaponac,” as the development is called. This would be of no consequence whatsoever if not for its ethical implications regarding the state of civil society. By the standards of such society, I would argue, residential developments hold an ethical imperative to anticipate some neighbor while stopping short of dictating or fantasizing who that neighbor is. If architecture and planning are to contribute to the formation of deliberative democracy and civil society, we should design for an emergent, as yet unknown neighborliness. Consider what might have happened at Sagaponac had Coco Brown established a continuous easement across some part of every site for a walking trail.[27] Not only would the individual retreats have been inclined to address that small gesture toward publicity, but the weekend residents would have had some alternative to the mythical ideal of household isolation. Like the unscripted front green contained by a continuous building wall at Mar Vista, such a gesture might have allowed Sagaponac to imagine itself not just as a series of buildable lots, but as a loose string of neighbors.

 

The fact that neighborhood architecture is pliable–although Levittown provides the recipe for suburban settlements, at least it does so flexibly–is one of the most promising conclusions that can be drawn from these case studies. From modern to postmodern developments, from Levittown to Celebration, an observable transformation of neighborhood architecture sheds light on future paths. The next phase of neighborhood architecture will be affected forcefully by three shifting conditions: the rising significance of neighborhood politics, emerging domestic technologies, and changing conditions of regional land use that are forcing residential development into urban infill sites. These conditions place otherness in greater proximity than ever before, heightening urges to expose or to repress differences within the neighborhood. These conditions can spark new figures for the neighbor, and new bases for civil society.

 

Notes

 

1. The “spite fence” was a famous landmark on Nob Hill in San Francisco. The owner of the mansion in the photo built an immense fence (so high that it required buttressing) around a less well-off neighbor. By spoiling his view and house, the landowner hoped to force his neighbor to sell his property. Today what are called “spite fence laws” prohibit such malicious actions.

 

2. For a discussion of neighborhood privatization, see Ben-Joseph.

 

3. The recent national elections remind us of the political differences between city and suburb (the former voting primarily Democratic and the latter, Republican). While these data are troubling, they do not necessarily reflect the “suburban canon”: the idea that suburbanites flee difference while expressing intolerance. Although the history of urban migration outward has been made up of such flight, today’s suburbanites are more heterogeneous than ever and cannot easily be distinguished spatially, economically, or racially from their urban counterparts. Much of what was classified as “urban” in the election data (Standard Metropolitan Statistical Areas) is suburban in form. This essay considers suburbs not because they represent some particular class of Americans, but because they are the places where most Americans live.

 

4. The term “community builders” comes from Weiss. “Merchant builder” is a more common term and the title of a book by Eichler, son of a prolific developer of modern houses.

 

5. Proxemics is a field of study that evolved from ethology in which the regular spatial patterns of human behavior are held to be most vividly portrayed in the different cultural norms of personal space. See such founding works as Hall and Sommer.

 

6. Arendt draws her notion of the public world of stable appearance from Kant; see her Lectures on Kant’s Political Philosophy.

 

7. My interpretation of these four places stems from existing literature and my own field work. I visited each site, photographed it, studied local archives, and interviewed residents (except in the case of Sagaponac, which is still uninhabited at the time of this writing). I agree with critics such as Paul H. Mattingly that suburban studies has not sufficiently engaged suburbanites’ own stories of their communities. Residents in this project by and large expressed contentment about their neighborhoods, and gave nuanced descriptions of both social and physical spaces.

 

8. According to Kelly’s historical account, “in the abstract, Levittown was virtually a replica of the officially recommended subdivision styles of the FHA” (47n8).

 

9. The original Levittown in Long Island (as opposed to subsequent Levittowns built in Pennsylvania and New Jersey) was built over a period of four years, from 1947 to 1951. The first phase, completed in 1948, was comprised of 6000 identical Cape Cods built as rental units and later offered for purchase. The next phase, starting in 1949, introduced several variations on the Ranch model. The 1950 and 1951 houses included built-in televisions; all houses had washing machines. In the end 17,500 houses were built by Levitt and Sons in Levittown (Kelly 40-53).

 

10. At the rear of the Ranch house, generous glazing faced the back yard.

 

11. 1952 Levittown Property Owners Association booklet, Levittown Public Library collection. While there remains a regulation against fences in the covenants, codes, and restrictions, at present nearly every house has a fenced rear yard.

 

12. See Putnam on the devolution of communitarianism to isolationism in the modern U.S.

 

13. Sociologist Herbert Gans reports extensively on politics and everyday life in the third Levittown, built in Pennsylvania eight years after the Long Island Levittown community. His information about volunteer organizations comes from living there as a participant observer (see especially 52-63). While he focuses on socio-economic status, Gans inadvertently tells much about the residents’ ideas of otherness and the relationship between their volunteer activities and their participatory politics.

 

14. A resident association opposed Levitt’s proposal to change the original name of the subdivision from Island Trees to Levittown. Eventually Levitt made the change unilaterally, but not before removing the resident association’s permission to use the community room. Levitt was quick to shut down all opposition. He purchased the local newspaper in 1948, just when the paper took stances against several of his initiatives, including a rent increase. Levitt insinuated in a brochure that the Island Trees Communist Party had spearheaded the opposition (and it appears this may have been the case). See newspapers in the Long Island Studies Institute archives at Hofstra University and brochures at the Levittown Public Library.

 

15. The most obvious and significant difference is scale: Mar Vista was planned for 100 homes (of which half were built) in comparison with Levittown’s 17,500. In addition, Mar Vista houses were more expensive than Levitt houses (approximately $12,000 and $8,000, respectively). Other examples of modern suburban houses include the Eichler Homes, built primarily in Northern California, and the Crestwood Hills development in Los Angeles.

 

16. See the surveys of residents’ reasons for moving and their aspirations for life in Levittown in Gans (33, 35, 39). Information on Mar Vista residents is gathered from my interviews with original residents, 2004.

 

17. Interviews with early residents, 2004.

 

18. For a discussion of the interconnections between residential modernism and progressive social ideals, see Zellman and Friedland.

 

19. On Ain’s political orientation, see Denzer’s “Community Homes: Race, Politics and Architecture in Postwar Los Angeles.”

 

20. On the politics of modernism at Crestwood Hills, see Zellman and Friedland. Several early residents have histories of union organizing or other leftist political activism. They imagined their primary political stance in relation to the neighborhood, however, to be one of tolerance as part of a forward-looking society. One early resident described Mar Vista as a neighborhood of “thinking people” in contrast to those who chose to live in West L.A.’s Levittown equivalent, Westchester. Still, it should not be imagined that Mar Vista was or is a model of tolerance. One resident recounted a petition drive to force an early Latino family in the neighborhood to move away. While the current population at Mar Vista still includes a few of the original buyers, residents now represent a higher income group (homes at present sell for nearly $1 million) and are afficionados of mid-century modernism as a nostalgic ideal.

 

21. See, for example, Zellman and Friedland on Crestwood Hills (n25). Wright discusses the Federal Housing Administration’s “adjustment for conformity” criteria for evaluating housing plans (251).

 

22. For statements by Brown and brief essays by several authors, see Brown. The area of the Hamptons where the houses are built is called Sagaponack, but Brown named his development Sagaponac (without the k). Among the four case studies presented here, Sagaponac is unique in two important ways: it is exclusively for the wealthy, and it consists primarily of second homes rather than permanent residences. As such, it is an outlier development rather than a middle-class suburban one.

 

23. Even as architectural critics proclaim the death of New Urbanism (see, for example, New York Times architecture critic Nicolai Ouroussoff’s comments on a proposed stadium), suburban developers, the U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development, and foreign planning bodies in Sweden, Spain, and China, to name but a few, are adopting its tenets.

 

24. See MacCannell. For more on Celebration, read the two participant observer volumes: Frantz and Collins, Celebration, USA, and Ross, The Celebration Chronicles.

 

25. In 2003 residents were added to the governing board and in the near future, residents will for the first time have a majority on that board.

 

26. An early battle over the school made Disney’s control over the town evident. Residents who wanted to change school policy were dubbed “the negatives” by supporters of Disney’s educational plan, silenced and evicted. See Pollan.

 

27. Ironically, this kind of informal public infrastructure is a dominant design component in a number of schemes by the firm Field Operations whose principal, Stan Allen, is a Sagaponac architect.

Works Cited

 

• Arendt, Hannah. The Human Condition. Chicago: U of Chicago P, 1958.
• —. Lectures on Kant’s Political Philosophy. Ed. Ronald Beiner. Chicago: U of Chicago P, 1992.
• Bachelard, Gaston. The Poetics of Space. Trans. Maria Jolas. Boston: Beacon, 1994.
• Ben-Joseph, Eran. “Land Use and Design Innovations in Private Communities.” Land Lines: Newsletter of the Lincoln Institute of Land Policy 16 (Oct. 2004): 8-12. <http://www.lincolninst.edu/pubs/pub-detail.asp?id=971>.
• Brown, Harry J., ed. American Dream: The Houses at Sagaponac. New York: Rizzoli, 2003.
• Chen, Aric. “Domestic Architecture Reborn.” Brown 10-12.
• Copjec, Joan, and Michael Sorkin, eds. Giving Ground: The Politics of Propinquity. London: Verso, 1999. 106-128.
• Denzer, Anthony. “Community Homes: Race, Politics and Architecture in Postwar Los Angeles.” Community Studies Association Conference, Pittsfield, MA, 2004.
• Eichler, Ned. The Merchant Builders. Cambridge: MIT P, 1982.
• Frantz, Douglas, and Catherine Collins. Celebration, USA. New York: Holt, 1999.
• Gans, Herbert. The Levittowners. New York: Vintage, 1967.
• Goldberger, Paul. “Suburban Chic.” Interview with Daniel Cappello. The New Yorker 6 Sept. 2004 <http://www.newyorker.com/online/content/?040913on_onlineonly02>.
• Hall, Edward T. The Hidden Dimension. Garden City: Doubleday, 1966.
• Jacobs, Jane. The Death and Life of Great American Cities. New York: Vintage, 1961.
• Jameson, Fredric. “The Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism.” Postmodernism, or, The Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism. Durham: Duke UP, 1991. 1-54.
• Kelly, Barbara M. Expanding the American Dream: Building and Rebuilding Levittown. Albany: State U of New York P, 1993.
• MacCannell, Dean. “New Urbanism and its Discontents.” Copjec and Sorkin 106-128.
• Mattingly, Paul H. “The Suburban Canon over Time.” Suburban Discipline. Eds. Peter Lang and Tam Miller. New York: Princeton Architectural, 1997. 38-51.
• Miller, Jacques-Alain. “Extimité.” Lacanian Theory of Discourse: Subject, Structure and Society. Ed. Mark Bracher. New York: Routledge, 1994. 79-80.
• Ouroussof, Nicolai. “A Sobering West Side Story Unfolds.” The New York Times 1 Nov. 2004: E1.
• Pollan, Michael. “Town-Building Is No Mickey Mouse Operation.” New York Times Magazine 14 Dec. 1997: 56-88.
• Putnam, Robert D. Bowling Alone: The Collapse and Revival of American Community. New York: Simon, 2000.
• Ross, Andrew. The Celebration Chronicles. New York: Ballantine, 1999.
• Schudson, Michael. Advertising, the Uneasy Persuasion. New York: Basic, 1984.
• Sommer, Robert. Personal Space: The Behavioral Basis of Design. Englewood Cliffs: Prentice-Hall, 1969.
• Sorkin, Michael. “Introduction: Traffic in Democracy.” Copjec and Sorkin 1-15.
• Weiss, Marc. The Rise of the Community Builders: The American Real Estate Industry and Urban Land Planning. New York: Columbia UP, 1987.
• Wright, Gwendolyn. Building The Dream: A Social History of Housing in America. New York: Pantheon, 1981.
• Zellman, Harold and Roger Friedland. “Broadacre in Brentwood? The Politics of Architectural Aesthetics.” Looking for Los Angeles: Architecture, Film, Photography, and the Urban Landscape. Eds. Charles Salas and Michael Roth. Los Angeles: Getty, 2001. 167-210.

 

Laura O’Connor

Department of English
University of California, Irvine
loconnor@uci.edu

 

This article explores the influence of linguicism–discrimination against others on the basis of language and speaking style–on the poetics and politics of literary Creoles by examining the “Synthetic Scots” of modernist poet Hugh MacDiarmid. When languages that have previously been separate are brought into contact as a result of colonization, migration, and globalization, both the languages themselves and popular perceptions of them alter significantly. The proliferation of hybrid Englishes that has accompanied the monocultural thrust of “global” English has affected literary production in English significantly. Hybrid Englishes are formed in what Mary Louise Pratt describes as “contact zone[s] . . . where cultures meet, clash, and grapple with each other, often in contexts of highly asymmetrical relations of power, such as colonialism, slavery or their aftermaths as they are lived out in many parts of the world today” (4). The close proximity of English to Scots, Gaelic, and Welsh, and the documented history of their long interaction, make the internal context of the British Isles a fertile site for analyzing colonial contact-zones, places where English coexists with other vernaculars that have been marginalized or almost supplanted by it. As I will suggest, the literary Creoles that develop under conditions of linguicism illuminate the dynamics of intimate and hostile relations across a contested border. MacDiarmid’s poetics reveals, for example, that forms such as blazon and caricature reflect and attempt to reintegrate on a linguistic level one’s neighbor’s ambivalence toward oneself.

 

Even as it expresses the ambivalences of linguistic proximity, the convergence of diverse languages and dialects is in many ways a boon for literary creativity. Behind the apparent cohesion of a literary language lies “an intense struggle that goes on between languages and within languages,” Mikhail Bakhtin observes, and a multilingual or multidialectal environment enables writers “to look at language from the outside, with another’s eyes, from the point-of-view of a potentially different language and style” (Dialogic 66, 60). When writers combine two or more linguistic systems that relate to one another in a single literary utterance as do rejoinders in a dialogue, they objectify the worldviews of the juxtaposed idioms to form what Bakhtin characterizes as the “intentional hybridization” of “dialogical” discourse.

 

The ability to see one’s own linguistic habitus in the light of another’s owes something to linguicism, according to Bakhtin. He locates its prehistory in parodic-travestying expressions of neighborly hostility, the “ridiculing [of] dialectological peculiarities, and making fun of the linguistic and speech manners of [other] groups . . . that belongs to every people’s most ancient store of language images” (82). The habit of disparaging the speaking styles of neighboring speech communities and social inferiors is as old as ethnocentrism (the Greek barbaros is supposed to be an onomatapoeic imitation of incomprehensible speech) and the competitive pursuit of social prestige: “The rich man speaks and everyone stops talking; and then they praise his discourse to the skies. The poor man speaks and people say, ‘who is this,’ and if he stumbles, they trip him up yet more” (Ecclus. 13.28-29). In this essay I use the metaphor of the “Pale/Fringe” contact-zone to track how the linguicism of English-only Anglicization (figured as “the English Pale”) and the concomitant translation of the receding Gaelic and Scots culture into a romanticized “Celtic Fringe” made linguicism a pervasive and constitutive feature of British cultural life. English-only linguicism encompasses the destruction or near-supplantation of indigenous languages; the ostracism of competing vernaculars from the center of power; and the stigmatization of speakers of other languages or vernacular Englishes as “beyond the Pale.” The literary Scots of MacDiarmid exploits the discrepant registers of his hybrid linguistic heritage in order to dramatize, interrogate, and reconfigure the high/low hierarchy established between the encroaching English and marginalized Scots vernaculars.

 

In 1977, a BBC interviewer asked Hugh MacDiarmid, then the grand old man of Scottish letters, what difference it would have made had he been born ten miles further south and hence an Englishman. Growing up in Langholm had imbued him with “a border spirit where differences are accentuated by proximity,” MacDiarmid replied, “the frontier feeling” that made him a fervent Scottish nationalist and an unremitting vanguardist (Thistle 287). The “frontier feeling” is evident in MacDiarmid’s nationalism, which is defiantly bellicose toward the powerful English neighbor, and in his eagerness to experiment, to push the boundaries of consciousness, and to restlessly, ceaselessly innovate. He is intimately familiar with the bordering English culture, yet his “border spirit” intensifies his antipathy and estrangement from it. Neighborly hostility became the creative agon and the raison d’être of his lifelong campaign for Scotland’s cultural secession from England.

 

The genesis of “Hugh MacDiarmid” out of an encounter between Christopher Murray Grieve (1892-1978), a minor Scottish poet in English, and a Scottish etymological dictionary is one of the marvels of literary modernism’s annus mirabilis, 1922. Grieve had turned to the dictionary in order to lampoon what he then saw as the mindless sentimentality of the Scots verse found in the “poetry corner” of provincial newspapers. In the course of caricaturing a poetic practice he despised, however, Grieve discovered a nascent literary vernacular in the play of “differences accentuated by proximity” between the Scots headwords and their English glosses that persuaded him that the vernacular could be renovated into an international literary language. He patented his new voice with an ultra-Scottish authorial signature: “an immediate realization of . . . [the] ultimate reach of the implications of my experiment made me adopt, when I began writing Scots poetry, the Gaelic pseudonym of Hugh MacDiarmid” (Lucky Poet 6). “Synthetic Scots,” the stuff out of which “MacDiarmid” is forged, is composed in an ambiguous zone of inter- and intralingual translation between Scots and English, under the remote influence of Scotland’s third language, Gaelic.

 

In order to appreciate the complexities of Grieve/MacDiarmid’s “religious conversion” and the commonalties and differences between his predicament and those of Anglophone writers elsewhere, it is necessary to know something of the conflictual multilingual history of the British Isles (Buthlay 149). Scottish developed out of a Northumbrian dialect into a literary vernacular in the fourteenth century and served as the official language of the kingdom of Scotland for two centuries.¹ By the late-eighteenth century, the Scottish-Southron bidialectalism of the fifteenth century had polarized into diglossia, the coexistence of a “High” (English) vernacular with a wide range of functions and a “Low” (Scots) vernacular with restricted usage.² English/Scots diglossia is part of a larger pattern of Pale/Fringe linguicism that boosts the superiority of English and belittles Gaelic, Welsh, and other varieties of English as “beyond the Pale.”

 

The changing metaphorical status of “the Pale” illustrates the role of linguicism in securing the hegemony of English. “The Pale” originally referred to the double ramparts built to keep native Gaels out of confiscated Irish lands and the inner sanctum of the settler-colony and to prevent English settlers from assimilating native mores. In Edmund Spenser’s A View of the Present State of Ireland, the segregating Pale comes to represent the frontline of a perilous linguistic struggle to Anglicize the natives before they could Gaelicize the settlers. The Pale’s dual function of exclusion and restraint in the war between colonial and native speech-communities survives in the idiomatic phrase “beyond the Pale,” which later came to delimit the boundaries of verbal propriety for the modern bourgeois British subject. The phrase “beyond the Pale” calls attention to the intimate reciprocity between the dispositions that are ingrained into our bodily demeanors and the circulation of social prestige “out there” in the public sphere, a symbiosis between the formation of bourgeois subjectivity and the flow of cultural capital that Pierre Bourdieu has theorized in a French context. The broad consensus among the Enlightenment literati and bourgeoisie to adopt (Southron) English as the standard British vernacular changed the tacit rules of what Bourdieu calls the “linguistic marketplace” so that those who could perform the accredited English speaking-style were given a respectful forum to say their piece, while those who lapsed into “Scotticisms” were consigned to the margins.³ Anglophone Scots schooled themselves to measure up to the prestigious English standard and shunned the vernacular. Their self-improving endeavors further widened the High/Low divide by enhancing the prestige of English at the cost of devaluing Scots, and this in turn intensified the pressure to jettison the vernacular in favor of the standard, and so on in a self-perpetuating loop. This loop, which delineates “the Pale” of modern British society, is propelled by the structural disparity between the relatively rare competence in the vernacular and the much more uniform recognition of it, which allows those who have mastered the English acrolect to command deference from those who recognize it as “the best” speaking-style but are not quite able “to talk proper” themselves.⁴

 

Because the degree to which one could neutralize one’s “braid Scots” speech measured one’s “class,” accent and speaking-style became highly charged signifiers of ethnicity, class, and of the cross-wired class-and-ethnicity in the Pale. In everyday encounters, the “differences accentuated by proximity” between the mutually intelligible vernaculars are routinely exaggerated into a caricature of deviant Scots, in contradistinction to the assumed and implicit norms of the Pale. The Anglicization of Scotland’s linguistic habitus was popularly regarded as “improvement,” but because the proscription of Scots from the hub of civic life and the inhibition of Scottish styles of speech required repressing the social body, it often felt coercive. In this linguistic milieu, the symbolic status of the “Scotticism,” an utterance that sounds distinctly and distinctively Scottish to one’s own or to others’ ears, becomes charged with ambivalence. Associated with loss of public face and innermost expressivity, Scotticisms became the object of overt condescension and covert pride. Scotticisms exemplify Bakhtin’s theory that “speech genres are the drive belts from the history of society to the history of language” because they disclose the ambivalent slippage between Anglo mask and unreconstructed Scottish ethnicity that delineates the contours of the Pale/Fringe in Scotland (Speech Genres 65).

 

Scotticisms are tacitly defined by contrast to the purportedly “unaccented” literate speech. Dr. Johnson’s dictum in A Dictionary of the English Language (1755) that “the best general rule” of pronunciation is established by “the most elegant speakers who deviate least from the written word” (qtd. in Mugglestone 208) sets up a Pale between “literate speakers” whose purportedly unaccented speech is assumed to correspond exactly with ordinary spelling and the speakers of other classes and regions whose sociolects are stigmatized as “dialect.”⁵ The dominant opinion that there is only one correct way to spell and pronounce words, and that it is the English way, vastly increased the authority of English as a universal language of logic, clarity, and formal grace. The normative sway of standard English can be seen in the way Jamieson’s Etymological Dictionary of the Scottish Language profiles Scots as halbsprache, “somehow less than a language but more than a dialect” (McArthur 142). The title of Jamieson’s dictionary asserts that Scots is a language, but by confining itself to a peculiarly Scots vocabulary and mediating the “local” Scots idiom through the explanatory apparatus of “universal” standard English, it codifies the vernacular as ancillary. In contradistinction to the default mode of impersonal, up-to-date, informational English, the Scots headwords are profiled as colorful, quaint, arcane, vanishing “fossil-poetry” or deviant idioms. The documented etymologies linking Scots with other languages independently of English (though Jamieson repeatedly downplays ties with Gaelic⁶) and the sheer heft of literary citations in the multi-volume opus legitimize Scots as “something more than a dialect,” however.

 

It seems counterfactual when writing Scots to maintain the illusory “accent-free” effect of standard English, but the use of English orthography to script Scottish habits of pronunciation portrays Scots as unlike the idiom of “the most elegant speakers.” An exaggerated emphasis is placed upon phonological and idiomatic differentiae by tagging dropped fricatives with apostrophes and underscoring divergences from received pronunciation with non-standard spellings, setting the vernacular apart as a specimen of reported “dialect.” Nonetheless, while the scripting of Scots as a dialect indirectly associated a vernacular speaking-style with illiteracy, it also suggested character, lack of affectation, homespun sagacity, and spontaneity in contrast with “standardized” English. The Scots literary revival, led by Allan Ramsay and Robert Fergusson, and at the end of the century by Robert Burns and Walter Scott, tapped into and increased the covert prestige of the vernacular, but at the same time the revivalists partly reinforced the language/dialect dichotomy through the restricted use of Scots for dialogue and popular ballads.

 

The Pale/Fringe concept draws attention to how the Pale is necessarily defined by what lies “outwith” the Pale, to borrow the suggestive Scots synonym for “beyond,” the outermost limit that bounds and coexists with it. The arduous effort by Enlightenment Scots to become fully Anglicized Britons was accompanied by the salvaging of cultural alterity from the hitherto despised Gàidhealtachd (Gaelic-speaking area). James Macpherson’s translation of Gaelic Fenian mythology into Ossian (1761-5) was a cornerstone in the formation of the Highland romance and the Celtic Fringe. The hyperbolic image of Scottishness that emerged–a panoply of bagpipes, tartans, clans, bards, and sublimely empty (because depopulated) landscape–was fabricated in English, yet authenticated through allusion to Gaelic antiquity and Jacobite fealty to a nobly lost cause. The common nineteenth-century pattern in Europe of articulating an idealized “national character” through literature was distorted in Scotland, Tom Nairn argues in The Break-Up of Britain, because material self-interest encouraged the bourgeoisie and intelligentsia to neutralize or suppress protonationalist separatism, leading to an émigré/Kailyard split in Scottish intellectual life (146).⁷ An émigré intelligentsia migrated, literally and/or psychologically, to a London-centered transnational Republic of Letters, and the Kailyard (meaning “cabbage-patch,” “rustic”) literati developed a “stunted, caricatural . . . cultural sub-nationalism” of tartanry, which, “uncultivated by ‘national’ experience in the usual sense, [became] curiously fixed or fossilized . . . to the point of forming a huge, virtually self-contained universe of kitsch” (Nairn 163). Scotland’s imageme (the ambivalent and unfalsifiable polarity within which a given national character is held to move) is thus a compromise-formation, a symptom of a contradictory desire to enjoy the comforts of empire without relinquishing those of nationality (Leerssen 279).

 

Literary criticism and antiquarianism, both of which were profoundly influenced by Matthew Arnold’s On the Study of Celtic Literature (1867), became an alternative means for analyzing the character of Scottish culture and its double-edged relationship with its proximate English other. Arnold argues that the disinterested criticism of Celtic (Gaelic and Welsh) literature could help to transform Anglo/Celtic antipathy into a creative interracial symbiosis: what the poetic, spiritual, ineffectual, and primitive Celt lacks, the prosaic, materialistic, worldly, and progressive Anglo-Saxon can supply, and vice versa. G. Gregory Smith took Arnoldian Celticism to task in Scottish Literature: Character and Influence (1919), a book that exerted considerable influence on MacDiarmid’s poetics and that was reviewed by T.S. Eliot under the revealing title “When Was Scottish Literature?”⁸ Smith takes issue with Arnold’s ethnological assumption that any trait which is at variance with England’s self-image “may, must, and does come from an outside source; given a spiritual lightness and vivacity in the dull, heavy, practical genius of Teutonic England, it must have come from the Celts” (29). “We have grown suspicious” of ethnic stereotyping that “separate[s] the contrasts in character [by placing] the obverse of a coin in one bag and the reverse in another,” Smith remarks, and posits instead a dualistic notion of identity, drawn from Scottish literature, where “the real and fantastic . . . invade [one another] without warning” like the “polar twins” of Stevenson’s Dr. Jekyll & Mr. Hyde (29, 33, 20). In Smith’s logic, Scottish literature’s supposed contrariness reflects how “Scottish” traits have been split off from one another by English neighbors. Complementarily, Scottish literature integrates what cannot be admitted to be integral on the border itself.

 

Smith coins the phrase “Caledonian Antisyzygy” to designate the commingling of two contrary moods in Scottish literature, a meticulous observation and “zest for handling a multitude of details” which sometimes borders on “a maudlin affection for the commonplace,” and a “whimsical delight” in the fantastic, “the airier pleasure to be found in the confusion of the senses [and] in the fun of things thrown topsy-turvy” (4, 5, 19). Antisyzygy, I would suggest, is particularly useful in describing the literary reintegration of a national imageme split by border friction. Smith introduces the neologism with playful archness, commenting in a parenthetical aside that either Sir Thomas Browne or Sir Thomas Urquhart (the translator of Gargantua and Pantagruel⁹) might have so named the trait, but it is evident that disjunctive-conjunctions, “almost a zig-zag of contradictions,” encapsulate the “character” of Scottish literature for him (4). Smith writes that “the Scot, in that medieval fashion which takes all things as granted, is at his ease in both ‘rooms of life,’ and turns to fun, and even profanity, with no misgivings,” and regrets that much literary evidence of the Scottish “delight in the grotesque and uncanny” has been lost through the “decorous” bias of canon-formation (35). Like Bakhtin, Smith intuits a generic kinship between an aesthetics that appreciates “the absolute propriety of a gargoyle’s grinning at the elbow of a kneeling saint” and the uncanny doubles of Robert Louis Stevenson (23, 35). He connects a “constitutional liking for contrasts,” “contrariety,” and enjoyment of “things thrown topsy-turvy” to the Scottish “fine sense of the value of provocation” and “the sheer exhilaration of conflict” manifest in “the old fun of flyting” (a medieval genre of stylized invective and witty raillery) (19-20, 33).

 

In the context of this cultural narrative of division and partial repair, MacDiarmid’s “Theory of Scots Letters” draws on Smith’s Caledonian-Antisyzygy concept to propose a new direction for a “true” Scottish culture that would work to reassemble the ambivalence of the national imageme. The “future depends upon the freeing and development of that opposite tendency in our consciousness which runs counter . . . to the canny Scot tradition” and hence “the slogan of a Scottish literary revival must be the Nietzschean ‘Become what you are’” (Thistle 136-7). He distinguishes the antisyzygical “true Scot, rapid in his transitions of thought, taking all things as granted, turning to fun and even to profanity with no misgivings, at his ease in both rooms of life” from the “canny Scot,” who is presented by contrast as the Scottish counterpart of the Irish “false-national,” the “West Briton.” Thus while on one level the uncanny Scot is predicated on a non-binary notion of antisyzygy, on another MacDiarmid reinstates coin-splitting stereotyping to debase the canny Scot, whose sobriety, stern conscience, and thrift make him the linchpin of empire, kirk, and industry (Thistle 135-6).

 

Smith (like Grieve before his conversion) discerns no antisyzygical potential in the Scots vernacular. Smith ridicules Kailyard poets as poor imitators of Robert Burns, “poeticules who waddle in good duck fashion through Jamieson’s, snapping up fat expressive words with nice little bits of green idiom for flavoring” (138-9). In December 1921, MacDiarmid engages in epistolary “guerrilla warfare” in the Aberdeen Free Press against the Doric revival proposed by the recently established Vernacular Circle of the London Burns Club (MacDiarmid, Letters 69). (Scots is variously known as “the Doric,” “Lallans” and “the vernacular.”) A vernacular revival would “cloak mental paucity with a trivial and ridiculously over-valued pawkiness!” MacDiarmid opines, “and bolster up [the peasant’s] instinctive suspicion of cleverness and culture” that keeps Scotland in “an apparently permanent literary infancy,” dwarfed by “the swaddling clothes of the Doric” (754). It would elevate the collective wallowing in the national imageme that takes place at annual Burns Suppers into a populist orthodoxy that would stifle all serious intellectual, literary, and artistic endeavor. A violent antipathy to bourgeois gentility lies behind the unfavorable comparison MacDiarmid draws between a popular poet like Burns, whose ready assimilation into the drawing room secured his decline “from genius to ‘gauger,’” and an unpopular one like Baudelaire, who deliberately made himself into “a bogey to horrify the bourgeois” (“Burns and Baudelaire” 71). For MacDiarmid, the Burns line “Gi’e me ae spark of native fire, that’s a’ the desire” reveals that his precursor’s enormous popularity is predicated on a suppression of the internationalism and intellectualism that MacDiarmid feels are two of the strongest (and most admirable) drives in Scottish history (MacDiarmid, “Robert Burns” 181).

 

Lest anyone mistake his opposition for cultural cringe or intellectual snobbery, MacDiarmid stresses that he desires the preservation of the Doric and “love[s] it as jealously [as anybody]” and that he “was brought up in a braid Scots atmosphere [and his] accent could be cut with a knife” (MacDiarmid, Letters 754). Almost with the same breath, MacDiarmid portrays vaunting the vernacular as a hokey impersonation of stock Scottish “character” and cites his Scots accent and speaking style as proof of personal authenticity. Responding to the Burns-club argument that Anglicizing makeovers were “mere caste mimicry,” MacDiarmid asks if there is anything to choose between going “Anglo” and going “Scot” “as far as mob-psychology goes, other than the peculiar virtue diehards may attach to minority manifestations?” (753). The rhetorical question arranges the repertoire of available articulatory styles in Scotland between “talking like a book” in the etiolated style of the Pale and “talking like a character from a book” in the colorful (because ethnicized) hyperbole of the national imageme. Convinced that the latter route was a “cul-de-sac” that would render a susceptible public “practically idea-proof,” MacDiarmid launched an assault against the prospect of “a Doric boom just now” by parodying the stock-in-trade of the Kailyard poeticule (756, 755).

 

The story of the genesis of “MacDiarmid” tends toward caricature, but this may be apt for a poet whose poetics develop out of a memory, on conscious and unconscious levels, of the genres of caricature, Menippean satire, and popular blazons. Indeed, MacDiarmid’s work reveals these rivalrous genres to be poetic correlatives of cultural schism that respond to the stresses of linguistic similarity and difference in proximity. The conscious and unconscious “memory” of these genres pertains to two distinct but related forms of caricature, a hackneyed notion of Scottish “national character” that shapes Scotland’s image at home and abroad, and the exaggerated othering of a Scottish way of speaking that sets the vernacular apart as a hodge-podge of Scotticisms. The title of MacDiarmid’s classic A Drunk Man Looks at the Thistle (1926) conjures a stereotypical Scot: a drunk man in tartan regalia who drinks whiskey, has strongly accented, idiomatic speech-patterns, and is named “MacSomebody.” The international legibility of the stereotype is shown by the near-reflex ease with which associated ethnic signifiers (“tartan,” “bagpipes,” “clannish”) supplement the “drunk” and “thistle” cues to complete a fixed yet phantasmatic image.¹⁰

 

At one stage in his nocturnal odyssey, the “fou” (drunk) speaker of A Drunk Man likens the magnetic sway of stereotype to a “siren sang” whose insistent refrain persecutes him:

 

But what's the voice
That sings in me noo?
--A'e hauf o' me tellin'
The tither it's fou!It’s the voice o’ the Sooth
That’s held owre lang
My Viking North
Wi’ its siren sang . . .
Fier comme un Ecossais. (2296-2305)¹¹

 

“Fier comme un Ecossais” is the voice of Europe singing the contrast between the aloof hard-drinkers of “the North” and the sensual wine-drinkers of “the South”; the voice of “the Anglo” upbraiding “the Scot”; and the voice of a divided self disavowing the uncanny “tither hauf” of “the canny Scot.” The obsessive replay of the refrain suggests that the speaker’s self-image is branded by a genre he experiences as name-calling. The incantatory voice bears a residue of slanging rituals, connecting “Fier comme un Ecossais” with the popular blazon, a speech genre that Bakhtin defines as epithets of praise or more usually denigration for “the best” attribute of a nationality, city, or group that merge praise-abuse in an indissoluble unity (Problems 429). The congealing of such epithets into commonplaces furnished the basis for Diderot and D’Alembert’s Encyclopédie entry under “caractère des nations“: “National characters are a certain habitual predisposition of the soul, which is more prevalent in one nation than in others . . . it is a sort of proverb to say: airy as a Frenchman, jealous as an Italian, serious as a Spaniard, wicked as an Englishman, proud as a Scot, drunk as a German, lazy as an Irishman, deceitful as a Greek” (qtd. in Leerssen 273).¹² David Hume’s essay “Of National Characters” (1748) discusses the cool North/warm South polarity, but “the proud Scot” is neither given a separate mention nor implicitly subsumed under the “English” (“the least national character”) category of his typology (244-58, esp. 253-6).

 

When MacDiarmid engaged in the dictionary-dredging compositional methods of the Kailyarders, he was surprised by poetry. The 1922 publication of Ulysses and The Waste Land opened his eyes to the “Dostoevskian debris of ideas” and Joycean vis comica that lay untapped in the Scots lexicon, whose “potential would be no less prodigious, uncontrollable, and utterly at variance with conventional morality than was Joyce’s tremendous outpouring” (MacDiarmid, Thistle 129). Through the lens of a Joycean vis comica, the antisyzygical play among “differences accentuated by proximity” in the lexicon–the abrupt shifts of register between the “poetic” Scots head-words and their “prosaic” English glosses; the arbitrary contiguities imposed by alphabetical order; the disjunctive anachronism of diachronically changing connotations; and the artificial synchrony created by containing the vocabulary within a single opus–was “a vast storehouse” for an avant-garde epic.

 

MacDiarmid’s “Synthetic Scots” mixes an eclectic range of variegated dialects into a literary Creole.¹³ It is an artificially made vernacular, a synthesis of disparate regional and historic strains of Scots culled primarily from print sources, rather than a naturalistic representation of a vernacular as it is purportedly spoken.¹⁴ For MacDiarmid, his new literary vernacular is also more “vital” and intensively synthetic than the English of his everyday life because it cathects with “something known of old and long familiar” in his subconscious. “The amazing difference in effect upon us when exactly the same thing is said in two different dialects . . . is a question not of logical but of vital values,” he argues in “Braid Scots and the Sense of Smell” (1923). Unlike the “moral censorship” of English, “amoral” Braid Scots can tap into the synaesthetic fusion that occurs on an unconscious level when visual and auditory percepts “become, in ways which there is no terminology to describe, olfactory too,” and hence it does not matter if “Braid Scots [is] only a dialect of English” because “we [can] produce physical-spiritual effects by employing Braid Scots which we cannot encompass through standard English” (72-3). In “Music–Braid Scots Suggestions” (1923), MacDiarmid writes that the words “crune,” “deedle,” “lilt,” and “gell” indicate “a Scottish scale of sound-values and physico-psychical effects completely at variance with those of England” which can be reactivated through experiment with “the essence of deedling” (88-9).

 

In order to lampoon Kailyard verse, MacDiarmid presumably proceeded by loading his parodic verse with those traits that are distinctly and distinctively Scottish.¹⁵ The tendentious motive was apparently superseded when the improvisatory compositional procedure of caricature, “to doodle and watch what happens,” began to form the poetry that confounded his mainstream prejudices about the limited literary range of Scots “dialect.”¹⁶ E.H. Gombrich writes that graphic caricaturists start from the generic norm and systematically vary the configuration of cues by loading (Ital., caricatura, act of loading) component parts and using their personal instinctive reactions to the expressive gestalts that result as a basis for further experiment (Art and Illusion 302). Though MacDiarmid underwent an attitudinal sea-change, the subsequent development of his poetics shows that he preserved the caricaturist’s procedure, “to doodle and deedle and observe what happens.” His freeform method reconnected him with the Mallarméan touchstone that poetry is “not an idea gradually shaping itself in words, but deriving entirely from words,” and enabled him to treat the entire range of Scots and English vocabulary as open to endless reordering and continuous variation rather than as automatically subordinate to the dictates of the Pale (Lucky Poet xxiii). MacDiarmid did not refer to his poetics as caricatural except implicitly, such as when he describes Synthetic Scots as “aggrandized Scots” or stresses the anti-decorous bias of art: “literature is the written expression of revolt against accepted things.”¹⁷ Caricature no longer serves solely as a measure of how the odds are loaded against “dialect,” but has potential for loosening and outwitting the Procrustean grip of standard English.

 

Though MacDiarmid wrote many fine short lyrics in Synthetic Scots, published in Sangshaw (1925) and Penny Wheep (1926), he wanted to prove the versatility and range of his literary Creole by giving epic treatment to the hitherto “unfulfilled” uncanny-Scot tradition. His breakthrough occurred when the composer F. G. Scott suggested that he “write a poem about a drunk man looking at the thistle,” and MacDiarmid realized that as a “symbol of the miseries and grandeurs of the human fate in general” as well as one of Scottish nationality, it was the “[perfect] theme for a very long poem and a complicated poem” because “it was capable of all sorts of applications and extensions (Bold 181). His confidence that the topos was endlessly complicated and capable of infinite variation is likely to baffle the reader who would be turned off by the prospect of a 2684-line poem that contains no action except that of a drunk man looking at the national emblem.

 

MacDiarmid seized upon the topic’s potential for upsetting stable categories of the “normal” and “bizarre,” however, by developing the antisyzygical point-of-view of the drunk. An “Author’s Note” to the 1926 edition of A Drunk Man Looks at the Thistle picks up on Smith’s observation that drunkenness can serve writers as a tongue-in-cheek device for justifying the sudden dislocations of Caledonian antisyzygies (23). “Drunkenness has a logic of its own,” MacDiarmid writes, and then counsels the teetotaler “to be chary . . . of such inadvertent reflections of their own sober minds” as they may catch in the “distorting mirror” of these pages (A Drunk Man 196).

 

“Caledonian antisyzygies” resemble Deleuze’s “art of inclusive disjunctions,” which “follow[s] a rolling gait” that “makes the language as such stutter: an affective and intensive language, and no longer an affectation of the one who speaks” (110, 107). Great writers “carve out a nonpreexistent foreign language within [their] own language,” Deleuze writes, “they make the language take flight, they send it racing along a witch’s line, ceaselessly placing it in a state of disequilibrium, making it bifurcate and vary in each of its terms, following an incessant modulation . . . much as in music, where the minor mode refers to dynamic combinations in perpetual disequilibrium” (110, 109). Though Deleuze and Félix Guattari sharply distinguish their concept of “minorizing” from literary creolization, they note that creolization has the conjoined tendencies of “impoverishment” and “overload” with which “the so-called minor languages” are routinely faulted, namely the shedding of syntactical and lexical forms which allow one to sidestep a constant instead of attacking it head on, and a taste for paraphrasis and proliferation of shifting effects which bear witness to the unlocalized presence of an indirect discourse at the heart of every statement (102-4).¹⁸ In the guise of a “stuttering” drunken stream-of-consciousness, MacDiarmid incorporates the twin tendencies of caricature toward elision and overload into the structural rhythms of the sequence in order to activate the antisyzygical doodling and deedling that places normative standards and scales in “perpetual disequilibrium.” The overloading of caricature, then, may offer a way to work through the culture of insult that often builds up in defense against unwanted proximity.

 

The speaker of A Drunk Man overtly dices with reader-expectation. “I amna fou’ sae muckle as tired–deid dune” (1), he declares in the opening line, establishing his bona fides by denying that the adulterated whiskey (“the stuffie’s no’ the real Mackay” [9]) has made him drunk. He adds parenthetically that a drunken stream-of-consciousness gratifies stereotypical images of Scotland and the canny Scot’s image of his reprobate brethren–“To prove my soul is Scots I maun begin/ Wi’ what’s still deemed Scots and the folk expect” (21-2)–which he can then “whummle” (25) by overwhelming readers with the intoxicating “logic” of drunkenness.¹⁹

 

MacDiarmid styled A Drunk Man a “gallimaufry” (hodge-podge) in advance press-notices for want of a better generic label for the ambitious work he felt would fail unless it took “its place as a masterpiece–sui generis–one of the biggest things in the range of Scottish literature” (Bold 89). Peter McCarey contends that MacDiarmid draws on the Menippean tradition, very much as Bakhtin argues Dostoevski does, by fashioning the unclassifiable genre out of the “Dostoevskian debris of ideas” he found awaiting polyphonic treatment in Synthetic Scots.²⁰ A Drunk Man hails an apostrophized Dostoevski as the avatar of a new epoch, “This Christ o’ the neist thoosand years” (1800), when the “canny Scot” shall give way to the uncanny one. Menippean satire, a genre of ultimate questions that mixes fantasy, slum naturalism, moral-psychological experimentation, and mysticism with genres like the diatribe and soliloquy, takes the topicality of the immediate and unfinalizable present as its starting point.²¹ Dostoevski “sought the sort of hero whose life would be concentrated on the pure function of gaining consciousness of himself and the world” because such a hero fuses the artistic dominant of becoming self-conscious with the characterological dominant of the represented person (Bakhtin, Problems 50).²² The task of gaining consciousness of himself necessarily absorbs an intellectual and/ or drunk who “dinna ken as muckle’s whaur I am/ Or hoo I’ve come to sprawl here ‘neth the mune” (95-6).²³ The Dostoevskian hero’s discourse as “he looks at himself, as it were, in all the mirrors of other people’s consciousnesses” creates the “interior infinite” of “an individual carnival, marked by a vivid sense of isolation” and fearful and watchful secretiveness which has a residual generic kinship with the praise-abuse decrownings and fearless regenerative laughter of the carnival square (Bakhtin, Problems 53, 156-7 and passim).

 

The thistle, skewed by moonlight and intoxication, is the “distorting mirror” that refracts back to the drunk man how he and his nation are perceived by proximate unfriendly others: “My ain soul looks me in the face, as it twere,/ And mair than my ain soul–my nation’s soul” (335-6).²⁴ The speaker calls attention to his drunken or “loaded” state as he zeroes in on and magnifies one aspect of the thistle and then veers off in another direction as a new perception initiates a different associative tack. “There’s nocht sae sober as a man blin’ drunk,” the speaker confides, baiting the reader with A Drunk Man‘s constitutive antisyzygy about whether the fixity on the thistle attests to an unsteady grip on reality or to an intensive analytic sobriety (277). Though but a “bairn at thee I peer,” the drunk man declares that, like Dostoevski, he is a microcosm of his nation in all its contrariety, “For a’ that’s Scottish is in me,/ As a’ things Russian were in thee” and resolves “to pit in a concrete abstraction/ My country’s contrair qualities” (2014-18).²⁵ “Speaking somewhat paradoxically,” Bakhtin writes, “one could say that it was not Dostoevski’s subjective memory, but the objective memory of the very genre in which he worked, that preserved the peculiar features of the ancient menippea” (Problems 121). In a similar vein, I contend that the poem provides a stereoscopic means for looking at national identity in the very aspect of its looked-at-ness and so preserves an “objective memory” of the Menippean subgenres of caricature and popular blazons.²⁶

 

The thistle is an abstract signifier of Scottish nationality, but these abstractions are woven into the concrete physiognomy of the plant “from which, and through which, and into which, ideas are constantly rushing.” An extended blazon to the emblematic icon of nationality, A Drunk Man ponders “the mystery of Scotland’s self-suppression” by subjecting the puzzling entelechy of the flora to minute scrutiny. The thistle’s status as the “devil’s vegetable” in European folk consciousness led to its adaptation into the genre of popular blazons, those popular expressions of praise-abuse for neighbors’ most pronounced “best” trait among which the Scotticism is classified. In “The Foreigner as Devil, Thistle, and Gadfly,” Felix Oinas tracks a pattern of name-calling that demonizes a despised and/or threatening neighbor by association with the hapless plant. Oinas writes that Finnish folk-names for thistles mean “Swede” and “Russian,” and the Russian folkname for them means “Tartar.” Anthropomorphizing the thistle with the name of an unwanted or malign alien and projecting their racial physiognomy onto the weed, a Russian peasant can simultaneously vent his antagonism by figuratively uprooting “Tartars” from the land and access a surcharge of zeal for an irksome task. The thistle-blazon humanizes the weed in order to demonize the human in a concrete proto-caricatural form that highlights the intimate link between name-calling and ascribing a disfigured human face to the ostracized party in order to profile them as beyond the pale. There is no evidence that MacDiarmid was consciously aware of the thistle-blazon described by Oinas, but A Drunk Man, which at one point likens the thistle’s “nervous shivering” to that of “a horse’s skin aneth a cleg [gadfly]” (1437-8), draws on an “objective memory” of the xenophobic folk custom.

 

Signifying as it does a stubborn rootedness and a foreign trespass that invites extirpation, the thistle seems an anomalous choice of national emblem because it betrays an ambivalent or precarious sense of entitlement to domicile. The thistle became current as the Scottish emblem around the time the Rose was adopted by the Tudors, and first appeared on silver coins in 1470. In her appraisal of William Dunbar’s (c.1460-1530) innovative literary use of the insignia, Priscilla Bawcutt notes that Lorraine also adopted the thistle as a defiant emblem against incursions from Burgundy (100-03). The thistle’s message of deterrence appeals to ethnic groups who see themselves as withstanding a political takeover against the odds. The thistle also represents the “frontier feeling” of those who inhabit contested borderlands.

 

The thistle’s catalytic effect on MacDiarmid’s comic genius owes much to his childhood experience of a living carnival, the annual Common Riding. Celebrated to this day in Langholm, the Common Riding evolved from an ancient custom of riding round the boundaries of the burgh’s common lands. In the ritual procession, children bearing heather brooms join standard bearers behind a leader who carries aloft a flagpole bearing a specially cultivated eight-foot-high thistle. The thistle-standard makes a resplendent spectacle in a MacDiarmid story based on the event: “tied to the tap o’ a flag pole it made a bonny sicht, wallopin’ a’ owre the life, an a hunner roses dancin’ in’t, a ferlie o’ purple and green” (Thistle 349).²⁷ The “concretely sensuous language of carnival” epitomized by the presiding thistle evokes memories of “a free and familiar contact among people” which the young Grieve had otherwise seldom enjoyed (Bakhtin, Problems 123-4).²⁸ An unalloyed joy is palpable in the verses recounting the Common Riding, which weave an accompanying traditional children’s chant into the ballad measure that supplies the cantus firmus of A Drunk Man:

 

Drums in the walligate, pipes in the air,
Come and hear the cryin’ o’ the Fair.

A’ as it used to be, when I was a loon
On Common-Ridin’ Day in the Muckle Toon.

The bearer twirls the Bannock-and-Saut-Herrin’,
The Croon o’ Roses through the lift is farin’,

The aucht-fit thistle wallops on hie;
In heather besoms a’ the hills gang by. (455-62)²⁹

 

Swept up in the “jolly relativity” of the communal chorus, the drunk man happily recollects his wife Jean “as she was on her wedding day” and is then seamlessly transported into the heroic position of thistle-carrier, as the narrative segues to one of the sequence’s few full-blown paeans to the thistle (476):

 

Nerves in stounds o’ delight,
Muscles in pride o’ power,
Bluid as wi’ roses dight
Life’s toppin’ pinnacles owre,
The thistle yet’ll unite
Man and the Infinite! (477-82)³⁰

 

The overwhelmingly positive connotations of the thistle’s “language of carnival” is counterpointed by the pejoration of the thistle in Biblical allegory. The thistle is figured in Genesis as the blighted fruit of expulsion from Eden: “cursed is the ground for thy sake; in sorrow shalt thou eat of it all the days of thy life; thorns also and thistles shall it bring forth to thee” (3:17-8). The Scottish-Renaissance objective announced in the manifesto-issue of Scottish Chapbook (Aug 1922), “to meddle wi’ the Thistle and pick the figs,” incongruously gestures toward the futility of the task by alluding to Matthew 7:16, “Ye shall know them by their fruits. Do men gather grapes of thorns, or figs of thistles?” Biblical allegory receives extensive metaphorical play in the sequence where the thistle signifies sinfulness and shriveled potential as well as the pathos (and bathos) of wrongful scapegoating. The thistle’s reprobate status has a decidedly Calvinist tincture in A Drunk Man:

 

O stranglin rictus, sterile spasm,
Thou stricture in the groins o’ licht
Thou ootrie gangrel frae the wilds
O’ chaos fenced frae Eden yet. (1294-5)³¹

 

Manichean allegory facilitates the proliferation of oppositional pairs along a damnation/salvation axis–wilderness/civilization; sterile/fertile; evil/good; grotesque/beautiful–which helps to “fix” the construction of the thistle as “other” (see JanMohamed 4 and passim). The wide currency of the commonplace that the thistle has a reprobate “character” illustrates the peculiarly bogus yet unfalsifiable nature of stereotypes noted by Leerssen.

 

MacDiarmid’s labeling of A Drunk Man as “my flytin’ and sclatrie” announces that his blazon to the quarrel between the “grugous thistle” and “o’er sonsy rose” is a palinode to “The Thrissill and the Rois” by way of Dunbar’s “The Flyting of Dunbar and Kennedy,” two works that also explore the ability of bordering rival cultures to accommodate each other.³² William Dunbar’s 1503 epithalamium for the marriage of James IV to Margaret Tudor, later entitled “The Thrissill and the Rois” by Allan Ramsay, celebrates a complementarity between the warlike yet protective thistle and the beautiful rose which became a staple of Anglo-Scottish diplomacy. In The Flyting of Dunbar and Kennedie (c.1500), Dunbar taunts a Gaelic- and English-speaking Highlander, Walter Kennedy, with a scatological pun on Erse (from Erische, Irish) that became a staple slur: “Ane Lawland ers wald mak a bettir nois” (Lowland speech would make a better noise; line 56). The “low” sclatrie and mooning gesture are essential to the sophisticated punning that belittles his antagonist’s mother-tongue as a (weakly enunciated) fart-expletive. The apostrophized “Grugous thistle, to my een” (2347) and “quarrel wi’ th’ owre sonsy rose” (2372) derive from Gaelic loanwords (grùgach, scowling; and sonas, prosperity), which, though MacDiarmid may have been unaware of their Gaelic etymons, lend satiric weight to his use of them.³³ The habit of using a pejorative epithet for affectionate praise is rife in colloquial speech. The frequent recourse in Scots to the diminutive “ie” for terms of endearment and/or derision in the vernacular is a striking example of the “ambiguous praise-abuse” of oral blazons. The edginess created by the fine line between belittlement and exaltation is blunted when spoken blazons are transposed into print; thus literary language must find alternative means to represent the ambivalence of neighborly rivalries.³⁴

 

The contrastive paths of Dunbar’s “Inglishe” into English and Scots can be seen in how the motto emblazoned on the thistle, “nemo me impune lacessit” was subsequently translated into markedly different registers in the two coeval dialects. The English motto, “no one assails me unharmed,” issues a universal caution to potential aggressors by conveying the threat of retaliation through the measured tones of understated menace. The all-purpose concision of the Latin and English mottoes is highly reproducible, suited to imprinting on coins and dissemination as a national slogan in international diplomatic channels. The motto in Scots, “wha daur meddle wi’ me,” is cast by contrast in the form of a rejoinder to an enemy within earshot who is at once overbearing and conspicuously anonymous. The fragment from an ongoing altercation has the stentorian tones of an already injured “me” whose rage is edged with paranoia. The oscillation between declarative, interrogative, and exclamatory speech-acts makes the “wha daur” rejoinder impossible to punctuate. Aggrieved without establishing either the grounds or source of grievance, the loud rejoinder is too “charged” to circulate within the stable decorum of print-media and diplomatic protocol. The English and Scots mottoes are mutually intelligible and semantically contiguous, but the social configurations of their expressive cues are incompatible and disjunctive. If one envisions each motto on identical thistle-emblazoned coins and compares their profile, the contrastive “faces” of the two idioms become apparent. The equilibrium of the official motto in English has a neutralizing, normative effect which makes the thistle seem as commonplace as any other emblematic flora, whereas the bellicose motto in Scots sets “the devil’s vegetable” huffing and bristling before our eyes. If the Scots rejoinder seems to skid and waver without the traction of a stable syntax, its errancy has an open-ended plasticity which makes the Latinate English motto seem flat and devitalized by comparison.

 

An earnest botanical dissection of an abstract emblem of nationality is no more bizarre, from the “perpetual disequilibrium” of an antisyzygical point-of-view, than the whimsy of allowing the profile of the thistle to determine the trajectory of philosophical inquiry. The long vigil with the thistle has the intense earnestness of the soul-searching doppelgänger and the hyperbolic comedy of topsy-turvy clowning. A Drunk Man‘s dicings with expectation and its variations upon customary scales promote the antisyzygical outlook that what is judged incongruous or jarringly unfunny by the mainstream today may be considered heimlich or comic in other contexts. The antisyzygical segues between uncanny and comic registers are reinforced on a linguistic level by two key strata in A Drunk Man‘s Synthetic Scots: an “enigmatic” idiom, based on the estrangement (ostranie) of the Romantic grotesque, which restores uncanny complexity to a disparaged vernacular; and a “rogue” idiom, derived from the popular grotesque of late-medieval folk genres, which affronts bourgeois gentility. The “ambiguous praise-abuse” of the national/alien thistle becomes a means of blazoning the comic-uncanny virtuosity of Scots.

 

The drunk man explores the mysterious entelechy of “the language that but sparely flooers/ And maistly gangs to weed” (1219-20) by pondering the intermingling of the base and the beautiful that “A Theory of Scots Letters” identifies as a special province of Scottish genius (Thistle 131).

 

The craft that hit upon the reishlin’ stalk,
Wi’ts gausty leafs and a’ its datchie jags,
And spired it syne in seely flooers to brak
Like sudden lauchter owre its fousome rags
Jouks me, sardonic lover, in the routh
O’ contrairies that jostle in this dumfoondrin’ growth. (1107-12)³⁵

 

The assumption that the thistle’s purpose lies in disclosing its “routh o’ contraries” to the beholder betrays an inability “to imagine the ‘other’ as anything but a [cryptic] message pertaining to the state of his own soul” (Manning 15).³⁶ The solipsistic self-regard is confounded by the contrastive lack of affectation in the beheld object: “For who o’s ha’e the thistle’s poo’er/ To see we’re worthless and believe ‘t?” (1413-4).³⁷ The thistle’s freedom from pretension delivers momentary insight into the absolute fallenness of humanity, and the speaker envisions the thistle spilling over into the philosophical laughter of the Baudelairean “absolute comic.” Baudelaire defines the “true subject” of caricature as “the introduction of this indefinable element of beauty in works intended to represent his [moral and physical] ugliness to man; [a]nd what is no less mysterious is that this lamentable spectacle excites in him an undying and incorrigible mirth” (147).

 

The returning gaze of the thistle mocks and confounds the drunk man’s sense of personal embodiment to such an extent that he questions whether he can distinguish between them:

 

Is it the munelicht or a leprosy
That spreids aboot me; and a thistle
Or my ain skeleton through wha’s bare banes
A fiendish wund’s begood to whistle? (369-72)³⁸

 

The resounding reply is immediate diabolical laughter, where the man, the thistle, and the devil become a composite “my face” that splits to reveal everything humankind keeps under wraps:

 

The devil’s lauchter has a hwyl like this.
My face has flown open like a lid
–And gibberin’ on the hillside there
Is a’ humanity sae lang has hid! (373-6)

 

The infernal hwyl is glossed by MacDiarmid as “ululation,” connoting a reverberating pure sound that spans the gamut of triumph, grief, despair, degradation, defiance, revenge, and mockery. The italicized “hwyl” provokes a muscular response to the unpronounceable Welsh loanword. The choice of a Welsh shibboleth (the absence of vowels is foreign to English, Scots, and Gaelic orthography) sets the barbarous “hwyl” apart as though it were too hot to handle, and offloads it onto a neighboring language without relinquishing a remote Celtic kinship with it. The “profound, primitive, and axiomatic” laughter of the Baudelairean “absolute comic” (157) in this scene is a Babelized gibbering that sunders the connections between speaker and addressee, signifying sound and print signifier. As well as bringing a ramifying carnivalistic aesthetic into play (much as McCarey argues the Dostoevskian loanword “nadryv” [tragical crack, line 870] does), the shibboleth highlights the issues of translation and reception with which A Drunk Man is centrally engaged.

 

A Drunk Man opens with the speaker inveighing against the Burns cult, a diatribe which reactivates international readers’ latent familiarity with Scots by introducing the stereotype he intends to “whummle.” He then recalls a vision of “a silken leddy” he had had in the pub earlier that evening by reciting an inserted verse-translation (italicized and footnoted as “from the Russian of Alexander Blok”). The interpolation creates an illusion of direct interlingual contact between Russian and Scots that can withstand and coexist with readers’ correct surmise that the drunk man speaks on MacDiarmid’s behalf when he confesses that “I ken nae Russian and you [Dostoevski] ken nae Scots” (line 2224). MacDiarmid’s retranslation into Scots of Babette Deutsch and Avrahm Yarmolinsky’s co-translation of Blok’s “Neznakomka” (“The Unknown Woman”) and “Predchuvstvuya tebya” (“I have foreknown you”) belongs to that burgeoning sub-category of translations whose ambiguous provenance is flagged by such equivocal prepositional markers as “after x” or “based on y” in a tacit pact to leave open to conjecture whether the text is a direct interlingual translation from the stated source or an intralingual retranslation of intermediary translations.

 

MacDiarmid’s re-translation, aimed through his image of the Russian source-culture and an oppositional image of the intermediary English target-language, substitutes whisky for wine, inserts a parenthetical aside about the drunk man’s Penelope-like spouse, and assigns a returning gaze to the blazoned silken leddy on the basis of two muted references to the “eyes” of the Blok hero’s doppelgänger and of the azure sea. Aside from these semantic modifications and the Scots diction, he stays close to the Deutsch and Yarmolinsky translation from which I quote below by way of contrast with the MacDiarmid version that follows:

 

But every evening, strange, immutable,
(Is it a dream no waking proves?)
As to a rendezvous inscrutable
A silken lady darkly moves. (Qtd. in Buthlay 19)

 

But ilka evenin’ fey and fremt
(Is it a dream nae wauk’nin’ proves?)
As to a trystin’-place undreamt,
A silken leddy darkly moves. (193-6)

 

The natural assurance in conveying an enigmatic register is indebted to the rich lexis pertaining to the uncanny in Scots. The “English” words “uncanny,” “canny,” “eerie” and “fey” (fated) are actually Scots loanwords, and Scots also has many other less familiar words including “fremt” (estranged), “oorie” (weird), “wanchancy” (unfortunate), and “drumlie” (troubled). The success of “fey and fremt/. . . undreamt” over “strange, immutable/. . . inscrutable” is reinforced by the way colloquialized aureate diction, “trystin’-place” and “silken leddy,” seems a plausibly unaffected idiom for a speaker with ready access to a trove of romantic ballads. The aura of ease with romance and enigma creates mixed familiarizing and defamiliarizing effects which have the paradoxical result of making MacDiarmid’s version seem more “true” than the intermediary source which is relegated by contrast to “crib” status. Russian critic D.S. Mirsky’s claim that MacDiarmid “produced ‘the only real re-creations of Russian poetry’ in any form of English” seems counterintuitive (A Drunken Man viii, emphasis added), because one wouldn’t expect a retranslated translation by someone who doesn’t know Russian to be true to the original. MacDiarmid’s success may be due to the way it minorizes the intermediary text with specific sub-community registers that are otherwise lost in translating a polyphonic literary idiom into a dominant vehicular language. The truth-effect depends on how the play between the English crib and its Scots retranslation objectifies those sides of Scots and English that pertain to its “specific linguistic habitus . . . which makes its worldview ultimately untranslateable, the style of the language in the totality” (Bakhtin, Dialogic 62). As well as objectifying a vein of uncanniness in Scots, MacDiarmid’s retranslation brings about a triangulated confrontation between the English and Scots versions before an imagined “internationalist” bar of Communist-Russian opinion.

 

MacDiarmid lends the man-thistle body-in-the-act-of-becoming an inspired hermaphroditic touch when he names the thistle-florets “roses” and thereby unsettles the antinomies between male and female, the grotesque and the beautiful, and Scotland and England. The conceit of “a rose loupin’ out” of the thistle’s “scrunts of blooms” structures the ballad of the crucified rose about the General Strike of May 1926 (1119-1218). The news of the union leaders’ humiliating settlement broke when MacDiarmid (an active labor organizer in his capacity as the only Socialist town councilor in Montrose) was addressing a mass meeting of railwaymen, and “most of them burst into tears–and I am not ashamed to say I did too . . . it was one of the most moving experiences I ever had . . . weeping like children . . . because we knew we had had it” (Bold 184). Very much in the spirit of menippea, “the journalistic genre of antiquity” (Bakhtin, Dialogic 118), MacDiarmid wrote that he was incorporating the ballad (“which I think will rank as one of the most passionate cris-de-coeur in contemporary literature”) into the then advanced work-in-progress, though there is no overt reference in the allegorical ballad to the contemporary events that inspired it:

 

A rose loupt oot and grew, until
It was ten times the size
O’ ony rose the thistle afore
Had heistit to the skies.

 

…

 

And still it grew until it seemed
The haill braid earth had turned
A reid reid rose that in the lift
Like a ball o’ fire burned.

 

…

 

Syne the rose shrivelled suddenly
As a balloon is burst;
The thistle was a ghaistly stick,
As gin it had been curst.

 

…

 

And still the idiot nails itsel’
To its ain crucifix
While here a rose and there a rose
Jaups oot abune the pricks. (1155-8; 1163-6;1171-4; 1203-6)³⁹

 

The utopian aspiration, camaraderie, and gathering momentum of mass political action is conveyed by the semaphoric language of the carnival square as a new body-politic almost emerges out of the old only to be destroyed anew by reactionary forces. The fact that a thistle “heisted to the skies” is invoked to celebrate a near-triumph by British labor activists rather than by Scottish nationalists may seem paradoxical, but it is less an index of the historical contingencies of 1926 or of socialism trumping nationalism for MacDiarmid than of how A Drunk Man‘s caricatural poetics is more in tune with mass-protest by the proletariat than with constitutional nationalism. The ballad measure and the symbolic freight of the thistle enable MacDiarmid to plumb a generic memory of the popular blazon that infuses the cri-de-coeur with a profound sense of human solidarity and regenerative idealism.

 

MacDiarmid’s poetics suggests, then, that the nature of caricature is twofold: it is an expressionist mode of combinatorial doodling and deedling that releases the poet from the reified biases of diglossia as well as a poetics of indignation that bridles against the complex sociolinguistic and psycholinguistic realities that profile a lesser-used language as anachronistic, restrictive, and marginal. The conjoined disjunctive tendencies largely hold each other in check, so that MacDiarmid’s caricatural poetics both does not react to and reacts against the Anglocentrism of Scottish letters. As we’ve seen, a similar argument may be made for the constructive nature of blazon, flyting, and antisyzygy. The subordination of one’s neighbor’s language is part and parcel of the division of the neighbor’s imageme into intimate and hostile, familiar and uncanny aspects that may be recomposed in a literary Creole, with its greater tolerance for ambivalence. In contexts of colonial diglossia, conscious and subliminal memories of linguicism survive in writers’ minds, in the stuff of their art (language itself, and speech- and literary-genres), and in the social fabric and cultural unconscious of their speech-communities. MacDiarmid’s poetry is exemplary because it illustrates that one may remain politically partisan and aesthetically independent while refashioning a diglossic heritage into art.

Notes

 

1. See Murison, The Guid Scots Tongue, Jones, and McClure, Language, Poetry and Nationhood. For a pithy and insightful analysis of the ambiguous status of Scots, see McArthur 138-159.

 

2. On diglossia, a sociolinguistic concept, see Calvet 26-40 and Grillo 78-83.

 

3. Competence in the credentialed speech functions as “linguistic capital” in the “linguistic market” that potentially earns the speaker a “profit of distinction” on each occasion of social exchange. See Bourdieu 55 and passim.

 

4. See Bourdieu 62 on the competence/recognition gap.

 

5. See Mugglestone 208-57 on literature and “the literate speaker.” On “the orthography of the uneducated,” see Williams 222.

 

6. Ferguson cites Jamieson’s failure to note the obvious Gaelic provenance of “glen” as indicative of his “disingenuous approach” (260).

 

7. MacDiarmid received a copy of Nairn’s book shortly before his death and replied to Nairn commending “the only serious work on Scottish nationalism” (Letters 889).

 

8. On T.S. Eliot’s review, see Crawford 254.

 

9. David Reid describes “Urquhart’s writing [as] a freak compound of all that Scottish prose after Knox is not” in Grant and Murison 195.

 

10. For my ideas about the stereotype, I am indebted to Leerssen; see also Bhabha 66-84.

 

11. Translator’s note: noo, now; A’e, one; o’, of; tither, the other; fou, drunk; owre lang, over long; wi’ with; fier comme un Ecossais, proud as a Scot. Here and throughout, I cite by line number from Kenneth Buthlay’s excellent annotated edition to which I am indebted.

 

12. Leerssen’s point about the unfalsifiability and ambivalence of stereotypes is illustrated by how the refrain, perhaps because of the translational pun on fier/fiery, is variously translated by Buthlay as “touchy as a Scot” and by MacDiarmid as “free-spirited as a Scot.”

 

13. For an overview of the controversial term “Creole,” see Lang. Lang asserts that “Creoles originate when one or more overlapping vernaculars create a mother tongue which never existed before”; Synthetic Scots corresponds to what he terms a “nuclear Creole” (2, 144). For useful comparative discussions of Scots as an English Creole, see McArthur 7-10 and Görlach. McArthur compares a passage from the King James Bible with both William Lorimer’s landmark New Testament in Scots (Penguin 1985) and the Tok Pisin Nupela Testamen (Canberra and Port-Moresby, Papua-New Guinea, 1969).

 

14. David Murison, the editor of C-Z in the ten-volume Scottish National Dictionary, observes that MacDiarmid’s conversation was almost entirely in English and “to questions about where he got this or that word he most frequently referred one to a book” (“Language Problem” 86). His Synthetic Scots “sticks cautiously to Jamieson” in practice and, notwithstanding the “Back to Dunbar!” manifesto and the oft-touted model of Landsmaal’s construction from Old Norse, “there is surprisingly little Middle Scots in his work” (88, 95). Though his selection procedure was often programmatic (alliterative passages, and even whole lyrics, are composed out of proximate items in Jamieson), “his touch is remarkably sure” (96). See Murison, “The Language Problem” 93-9. See also Herbert 26-41.

 

15. Such “distinctly and distinctively” traits are what Leerssen calls “the effets de typique” on which stereotyping is based (283).

 

16. “To doodle and watch what happens” is Gombrich’s phrase.

 

17. On “aggrandized” Scots, see A Lap of Honour; the latter phrase is Thomas Hardy’s, and MacDiarmid invokes it in the 1923 “Theory of Scots Letters” (Thistle 129), the 1931 “The Caledonian Antisyzygy” (Thistle 63) and in the 1977 “Valedictory” where he says it “sums up my whole position” (294).

 

18. Deleuze and Guattari’s concept of an unfinalizable “indirect discourse” is indebted to Bakhtin; see endnotes 5 and 10, 523-4. The correspondence between antisyzygies, Bakhtin’s concept of “hybridization,” and Deleuze and Guattari’s concept of “minorization,” is suggested by MacDiarmid’s comment in “English Ascendancy in British Literature” on “the vast amount of linguistic experimentation that has been going on in recent Russian literature, with the progressive de-Frenchification and de-Latinisation of the Russian tongue, the use of skaz (the reproduction of accentual peculiarities) and zaumny (cross-sense, as in Lewis Carroll)” (120). To illustrate his concept of disjunctive synthesis, Deleuze cites Lewis Carroll on portmanteau words: “If your thoughts incline ever so little towards ‘fuming,’ you will say ‘fuming-furious’; if they turn, even by a hair’s breadth, towards ‘furious,’ you will say ‘furious-fuming’; but if you have that rarest of gifts, a perfectly balanced mind, you will say ‘frumious’” (46).

 

19. Translator’s note: Amna fou, am not drunk; sae, so; muckle, much; deid dune, dead done, done in; stuffie, stuff; no’, not; maun, must; the real Mackay, colloquialism of unknown origin (perhaps connected with the Reay Mackay clan of Sutherland) for “the real thing,” “the genuine article” (G. Mackay & Co distillers adopted the proverbial phrase as an advertising slogan in 1870); whummle, overturn.

 

20. Quoting Thistle 131. See McCarey 17-27. For a Bakhtinian approach to MacDiarmid’s work, see also Crawford.

 

21. On the generic elements of the menippea, see Bakhtin, Problems 114-20.

 

22. Though MacDiarmid arguably falls short of Dostoevski’s “radically new . . . integral authorial position” with regard to the drunk man, he (like the German Expressionists) takes the “artistic dominant of self-consciousness” as a goal (Bakhtin, Problems 56-7, 54).

 

23. Translator’s note: dinna ken, don’t know; as muckle’s, as much as; whaur, where; hoo, how; ‘neth, beneath.

 

24. Translator’s note: Ain, own; twere, it were; mair, more.

 

25. Translator’s note: nocht, naught; sae, so; blin’, blind; bairn, child; a’, all; pit, put.

 

26. Frye writes of the larger class of Menippean satire into which the sub-genre of caricature falls that it “relies on the free play of intellectual fancy and the kind of humorous observation that produces caricature” (310).

 

27. Translator’s note: tap, top; bonny sicht, beautiful sight; hunner, hundred; ferlie, marvel.

 

28. In his autobiography, Lucky Poet, MacDiarmid writes that the Grieves were “jeered at a little,” making him “permanently incapable of ‘going with the herd’” (77). Gish writes that Valda Grieve recalled him as one of the loneliest people she ever met, one who shut himself off from others: “He just had this thing within himself. He was afraid of anything personal’” (8).

 

29. Translator’s note: Drums in the Walligate, from a children’s chant (“Ra-a-rae, the nicht afore the Fair! The drum’s i’ the Walligate, the pipes i’ the air); the cryin’ o’ the Fair, the proclamation of the Fair; loon, boy; the Muckle Toon, the affectionate name by which Langholm is known, lit. the big town; the Bannock-and-Saut-Herrin’, a barley-bannock and salted herring nailed to a wooden dish on a standard that signifies the Duke of Buccleuch’s rights in the mills and fisheries; Croon o’ Roses, a floral crown on a standard; lift, sky; wallops, dances; hie, high; heather besoms, children were rewarded with new threepenny bits for carrying heather brooms in the procession.

 

30. Translator’s note: stounds, throbs; bluid, blood; dight, arrayed.

 

31. Translator’s note: the groins o’ licht, see line 1265, “As ’twere the hinderpairts o’ God”; ootrie, foreign, outré; gangrel, vagrant; frae, from.

 

32. Bawcutt writes that Dunbar’s “art is the art of the caricaturist” (239-40).

 

33. Jamieson’s Etymological Dictionary cites the Gaelic etymon for “sonsy” but not for “grugous,” but MacDiarmid may not have consulted the dictionary. “Grugous” is glossed as “grim” in Jamieson’s dictionary; as “grim, grisly” in A Drunk Man; and as “ugly” in Complete Poems glossary.

 

34. Translator’s note: The internalized dualism of praise-abuse is mirrored on the thistle’s “grugous” visage, where a smile may overtake a scowl and vice versa. “Grugous” has an antisyzygical gruesome/gorgeous ring to Anglophone ears, a semantic working-together-at-cross-purposes that sets in motion the ramifying “zig-zag of contradictions” of the intoxicating “logic” of drunkenness.

 

35. Translator’s note: reishlin’, rustling; wi’ts, with its; gausty, ghastly; datchie, hidden; spired ti, made it soar; syne, then; seely, happy; fousome, disgusting; jouks, evades; routh, abundance.

 

36. Manning attributes this tendency to Calvinism.

 

37. Translator’s note: who o’s ha’e, whom of us have; poo’er, power.

 

38. Translator’s note: wha’s, whose; banes, bones; wund’s, wind has; begood, begun.

 

39. Translator’s note: loupt, leapt; oot, out; O ony, of any; afore, before; heisted, hoisted; haill, whole; braid, broad; reid, red; lift, sky; syne, then; gin, if; curst, cursed; ain, own; jaups, splashes.

 

Works Cited

 

• Bakhtin, Mikhail. The Dialogic Imagination: Four Essays. Trans. and ed. Caryl Emerson and Michael Holquist. Austin: U of Texas P, 1981.
• —. Problems of Dostoevsky’s Poetics. Trans. and ed. Caryl Emerson. Minneapolis: U of Minnesota P, 1984.
• —. Speech Genres and Other Late Essays. Trans. Vern McGee. Ed. Caryl Emerson and Michael Holquist. Austin: U of Texas P, 1986.
• Baudelaire, Charles. The Painter of Modern Life and Other Essays. Trans. and ed. Jonathan Mayne. London: Phaidon, 1965.
• Bawcutt, Priscilla J. Dunbar the Makar. Oxford: Clarendon, 1992.
• Bhabha, Homi. The Location of Culture. New York: Routledge, 1994.
• Bold, Alan. MacDiarmid: Christopher Murray Grieve: A Critical Biography. London: John Murray, 1988.
• Bourdieu, Pierre. Language and Symbolic Power. Trans. Gino Raymond and Matthew Adamson. Cambridge: Harvard UP, 1991.
• Buthlay, Kenneth. “An Awkward Squad.” McClure, Scotland and the Lowland Tongue 149-169.
• Calvet, Louis-Jean. Language Wars and Linguistic Politics. Trans. Michel Petheran. Cambridge: Oxford UP, 1998.
• Crawford, Robert. Devolving English Literature. Oxford: Clarendon, 1992.
• Deleuze, Gilles. Essays Critical and Theoretical. Trans. Daniel W. Smith and Michael A. Greco. Minneapolis: U of Minnesota P, 1997.
• —, and Félix Guattari. A Thousand Plateaus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia. Trans. Brian Massumi. Minneapolis: U of Minnesota P, 1987.
• Ferguson, William. The Identity of the Scottish Nation: An Historic Quest. Edinburgh: Edinburgh UP, 1998.
• Gish, Nancy. Hugh MacDiarmid: Man and Poet. London: Macmillan, 1984.
• Gombrich, E.H. Art and Illusion: A Study in the Psychology of Pictorial Representation. Princeton: Princeton UP, 1960.
• Görlach, Manfred. “Jamaica and Scotland–Bilingual or Bidialectal?” Englishes: Studies in Varieties of English, 1984-1988. Philadelphia: John Benjamins, 1991. 69-89.
• Grillo, Ralph. Dominant Languages: Language and Hierarchy in Britain and France. Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 1989.
• Herbert, W.N. To Circumjack MacDiarmid. Oxford: Clarendon, 1992.
• Hume, David. The Philosophical Works of David Hume. Vol. 3. Boston: Little, Brown, 1854.
• Jamieson, John, John Longmuir, and David Donaldson. An Etymological Dictionary of the Scottish Language. Paisley, Scotland: Alexander Gardner, 1879-82.
• JanMohamed, Abdul. Manichean Aesthetics. Amherst: U of Massachusetts P, 1983.
• Jones, Charles. The Edinburgh History of the Scots Language. Edinburgh: Edinburgh UP, 1997.
• Lang, George. Entwisted Tongues: Comparative Creole Literatures. Atlanta: Rodopi, 2000.
• Leerssen, Joep. “The Rhetoric of National Character: A Programmatic Survey.” Poetics Today 21.2 (Summer 2000): 267-92.
• MacDiarmid, Hugh. “Braid Scots and the Sense of Smell.” MacDiarmid, The Raucle Tongue 72-74.
• —. “Burns and Baudelaire.” MacDiarmid, The Raucle Tongue 68-72.
• —. “The Caledonian Antisyzygy and the Gaelic Idea.” MacDiarmid, Selected Essays 56-74.
• —. A Drunk Man Looks at the Thistle. Ed. Kenneth Buthlay. Edinburgh: Scottish Academic, 1987.
• —. A Lap of Honour. London: McGibbon and Kee, 1967.
• —. The Letters of Hugh MacDiarmid. Ed. Alan Bold. London: Hamish Hamilton, 1984.
• —. Lucky Poet. Ed. Alan Riach. Manchester: Carcanet, 1984.
• —. “Music–Braid Scots Suggestions.” MacDiarmid, The Raucle Tongue 88-89.
• —. The Raucle Tongue: Hitherto Uncollected Prose. Eds. Angus Calder, Glen Murray, and Alan Riach. Vol. 1. Manchester: Carcanet, 1998.
• —. “Robert Burns: His Influence.” MacDiarmid, Selected Essays 177-182.
• —. Selected Essays of Hugh MacDiarmid. Ed. Duncan Glen. London: Jonathan Cape, 1969.
• —. “A Theory of Scots Letters.” MacDiarmid, The Thistle Rises 125-141.
• —. The Thistle Rises: An Anthology of Poetry and Prose. Ed. Alan Bold. London: Hamish Hamilton, 1984.
• —. The Uncanny Scot: Selected Prose. Ed. Kenneth Buthlay. London: MacGibbon & Kee, 1998.
• —. “Valedictory.” MacDiarmid, The Thistle Rises 286-294.
• Manning, Susan. The Puritan-Provincial Vision: Scottish and American Literature in the Nineteenth Century. Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 1990.
• McArthur, Tom. The English Languages. Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 1998.
• McCarey, Peter. Hugh MacDiarmid and the Russians. Edinburgh: Scottish Academic, 1987.
• McClure, J. Derrick. Language, Poetry and Nationhood: Scots as a Poetic Language from 1878 to the Present. East Lothian: Tuckwell, 2000.
• —. Scotland and the Lowland Tongue. Aberdeen: Aberdeen UP, 1983.
• Mugglestone, Lynda. Talking Proper: The Rise of Accent as Social Symbol. Oxford: Clarendon, 1995.
• Murison, David. The Guid Scots Tongue. Edinburgh: Blackwood, 1977.
• —. “The Language Problem in Hugh MacDiarmid’s Work.” The Age of MacDiarmid. Eds. P. H. Scott & A. C. Davis. Edinburgh: Mainstream, 1980.
• Nairn, Tom. The Break-Up of Britain. London: New Left, 1977.
• Oinas, Felix. “The Foreigner as Devil, Thistle, and Gadfly.” Proverbium 15 (1970): 89-91.
• Pratt, Mary Louise. “Arts of the Contact Zone.” Professing in the Contact Zone: Bringing Theory and Practice Together. Ed. Janice M. Wolff. Urbana: NCTE, 2002. 1-18.
• Smith, G. Gregory. Scottish Literature: Character and Influence. London: Macmillan, 1919.
• Wechsler, Judith. “Speaking the Desperate Things: A Conversation with Edward Koren.” Art Journal 43 (Winter 1983): 381-5.
• Williams, Raymond. The Long Revolution. New York: Columbia UP, 1961.

 

Robert Meister

Department of Politics
University of California, Santa Cruz
meister@ucsc.edu

Proximity and Ethics

 

Since the fall of communism, there has been a growing literature on the responsibility of the “world community” to “never again” stand by while neighbors commit atrocities against neighbors (Power, “Never Again”).¹ This literature has yet to be reformulated as a comprehensive political theory of the recent fin de siècle, but it is already clear that such a theory would base a global politics of human rights on an ethical commitment to view local cruelties, and especially the infliction of physical suffering, as an uncontestable evil, the prevention of which can justify external intervention in ways that earlier forms of imperialism did not. The interstate system still exists, of course, and is supported by a United Nations charter that prohibits unilateral invasions of one state by another. But from the standpoint of the advancing theory of humanitarian intervention this is now merely a practical obstacle, making it advisable (but not essential) for a state intervening in another on purely ethical grounds to claim the support of a multilateral coalition as a proxy for the world community itself. At the level of theory, if not yet of practice, the subject matter of global politics is already focused on humanitarian intervention to stop atrocities committed at the local level. Thus the primacy of the global over the local (which was once the basis of political imperialism) is now ostensibly humanized and offset by the primacy of the ethical over the political: an ethics that concerns the cruelties that groups inflict on others in close proximity, and a politics surrounding the responsibility of third parties to intervene in response to those cruelties.

 

I am not here making the point that such humanitarian interventions can involve violence committed at a distance, though they often do. The intervention to prevent the proximate violence by Kosovar Serbs against their Albanian neighbors consisted largely of the NATO bombing of Serbian cities. Both the ethnic cleansing of neighbors and the aerial bombardment of cities are prima facie violations of modern humanitarian law, and both are the subject of separate trials now underway in The Hague. These trials demonstrate the twentieth-century paradox that bombing is both the quintessential means of intervention to stop barbarity at a local level and the paradigm of barbarity inflicted at a distance (see Lindqvist, A History of Bombing).

 

My topic is not whether the “world community” should have (at least) bombed Auschwitz or Rwanda when the genocides there became known, but rather the conception of ethics and politics that underlies such dilemmas. According to this conception, bombing (like foreign occupation) can be a justifiable form of political intervention by third parties when preceded by gross ethical barbarities occurring among neighbors. The ethical condemnation of atrocity, if not the atrocity itself, must here precede political intervention. Contemporary humanitarian practice requires such a sequence because it is based on the premise that, in theory too, ethics comes before politics. The opposing position–putting politics before ethics–is now commonly derided as the error shared by right and left throughout the twentieth century, an era of revolution and counterrevolution in which individuals were exquisitely sensitive to the suffering of their comrades and insensitive to pain inflicted on their foes (see Glover and Rummel). This is what politics is, Carl Schmitt argues–a selective antidote to humanitarian pathos that makes it ultimately possible to kill (and die) for the sake of countrymen or comrades (Concept of the Political 71). The emergent literature on human rights implicitly shares Schmitt’s “concept of the political,” and for this very reason gives primacy to the ethical as a refusal to withhold one’s empathy selectively on political grounds.

 

The primacy of ethics over politics implicitly presupposes, however, specific limitations on the field of ethics itself. Viewed broadly, the raw material of ethics concerns languages and bodies in the sense that these are what matter from the ethical perspective when considering questions of agency and choice.² Ethical discussion of languages (and cultural systems that resemble languages) are now commonly expected to focus on the problem of difference, and to prefer a baseline cultural relativism to the culturally imperialist danger of false universals. In ethical discussion of bodies–and especially bodies that suffer–the greater danger is now widely seen to be false relativism (Lévinas, “Useless Suffering” 99). A principled resistance to moral relativism when it comes to the suffering of bodies is, thus, the specific ethical view that underlies the present-day politics of human rights. For proponents of this politics, the suffering body is the ultimate wellspring of moral value, the response to bodily suffering the ultimate test of moral responsibility. “The supreme ordeal of the will is not death, but suffering,” said the French philosopher Emmanuel Lévinas, who took the primacy of ethics to its extreme by putting it ahead, even, of ontology and God (the world itself and its Creator) (Totality and Infinity 239). He argued that the suffering of another is always “useless,” always unjustified, and that attempting to rationalize “the neighbor’s pain is certainly the source of all immorality”(“Useless Suffering” 98-9).

 

Lévinas is not here referring primarily to the growing medicalization of humanitarian invention, although he does regard analgesia as a paradigmatically ethical response to physical pain (see Kennedy and Rieff). His point is that my ethical responsibility, which merely begins with first aid, does not arise from any previous relationship between sufferer and provider, or from a political history consisting of prior vows or crimes, but from “a past irreducible to a hypothetical present that it once was . . . . [and] without the remembered present of any past commitment”(“Diachrony and Representation” 170). Our responsibility to alleviate suffering comes before the past in the sense in which ethics can be said to come before politics. The priority of ethics arises “from the fear of occupying someone’s place in the Da of my Dasein“: “My . . . ‘place in the sun,’” he says, “my home–have they not been a usurpation of places which belong to the others already oppressed or . . . expelled by me into a third world” (“From the One to the Other” 144-5). Lévinas’s point is that in ethics, unlike politics, we do not ask who came first and what we have already done to (or for) each other. The distinctively ethical question is rather one of proximity–we are already here and so is the other, cheek-by-jowl with us in the same place. The neighbor is the figure of the other toward whom our only relationship is that of proximity. For Lévinas, the global movement to give ethics primacy over politics must be accompanied, within ethics, by the effort to give primacy to the ethics of the neighbor–the local over the global. In this way, the global primacy of ethics crystallizes around our horror of the inhuman act (the “gross” violation of human rights) rather than, for example, around the international distribution of wealth or the effects of global climate change.

 

Proximity is, thus, the marker that distinguishes an ethics of the neighbor as a basis for human rights from global concerns about injustice that might also be considered ethical. Proximity is not itself a merely spatial concept–both space and time can be proximate or distant–but it is useful to think of the ethics of the neighbor as a spatializing discourse within ethics, as distinct from a “temporalizing” discourse that subordinates ethics to political rhetorics associated with memory and identity (Boyarin, “Space” 20). The latter is held accountable for the atrocities of the twentieth century because it suggests that the suffering of one’s immediate neighbor can be justified through an historical narrative that links it to redeeming the suffering of someone else, perhaps an ancestor or a comrade, to whom one claims an historical relationship that is “closer” than relations among neighbors. To regard proximity of place as the ethical foundation of politics is to resist this tendency from the beginning, and thereby to set the stage for the fin-de-siècle project of transitional justice, which is both the alternative to human rights interventions and their professed aim.

 

Transitional justice assigns to historical enemies the task of living as neighbors in the same place. It employs techniques of reconciliation to create new and better relationships between previously warring groups, but the imperative to reconcile is ultimately ethical in Lévinas’s sense. That imperative is based on no relationship other than proximity and mutual vulnerability–the ever-present possibility that they will murder each other. If the subjects of transitional justice fail to reconcile, and mass murders occur, these atrocities are liable to be considered crimes against humanity that justify outside intervention. In the now-massive literature on transitional justice, gross violations of human rights are always assumed to be local, occurring between neighbors who occupy common ground, and the responders are treated as third parties who intervene (or fail to do so) from afar. Even if the responders have an historical connection to the site of intervention, perhaps as one-time colonizers, they are considered to be driven by ethics, as distinct from politics, in their willingness to respond on behalf of the world community that should never again stand by while neighbors murder each other.

 

It is implicit in this emerging conception that the site of ethics is the space of the neighbor (or neighborhood) and that the site of politics is global. Global intervention in the local can be justified in the name of universal human rights; but violence aimed at global causes of suffering (such as the Seattle riots against the WTO or the Chiapas rebellion against NAFTA) is not seen as a form of humanitarian direct action on a par with bombing Belgrade or Baghdad. In the emergent global discourse on human rights, “Nothing essential to a person’s human essence is violated if he or she suffers as a consequence of military action or of market manipulation from beyond his own state when that is permitted by international law” (Asad, “Redeeming the ‘Human’” 129). A perverse effect of the global “culture” of protecting local human rights is thus to take the global causes of human suffering off the political agenda. Any direct action taken against global forces runs the risk of being considered a violation of universal human rights (a violation such as “terrorism”) in the locality where it occurs.

 

Although my overarching intent is to show the limitations of the focus of post-Cold War politics on the global and of ethics on the local, I believe that this conceptual shift rests on the highly plausible belief that there is nothing worse than genocide, and that global acknowledgement of this ethical truth is what distinguishes the human from the inhuman. From this it follows that the credible fear of genocide is the primary source of moral claims that are worthy of global recognition, and that a new humanitarian order can be founded on protecting these claims, even if we protect no others, from historical and cultural relativism. If genocide is indeed the prime evil, then politics becomes quite simply the global question of how to respond.

 

I want to confront this belief head-on. I will discuss: (1) what it means for ethics to treat genocide as the prime evil; (2) the particular conception of politics that makes genocide originally conceivable; (3) the particular conception of ethics that aims to make it once again unthinkable; (4) the political implications of genocide, and of its possible repetition, for political rule, political rights, and political judgment based on the moral status of victimhood; (5) the implications of a genocide-driven ethics for political values such as justice, peace, and patience; and (6) the reasons, both ethical and political, for not regarding human suffering as the root of all evil. In discussing these questions, I concentrate heavily on the opposed writings of Emmanuel Lévinas and Alain Badiou, while pointing toward a view of my own that agrees with neither.

 

The Prime Evil

 

Since late in the twentieth century, political thought has seen a renewed interest in “radical evil” defined through the paradigm of genocide–often coded simply as “Auschwitz.”³ Theodor Adorno describes this reorientation of ethics as follows:

 

A new categorical imperative has been imposed by Hitler on unfree mankind; to arrange their thoughts and actions so that Auschwitz will not repeat itself, so that nothing similar will happen. (Qtd. in Cohen, Interrupting Auschwitz 4)

 

No one, however, has gone further than Lévinas in dismantling the structure of pre-Auschwitz thought to articulate such a “new categorical imperative,” and to restate the ethical a priori, what Derrida has called “the Ethics of Ethics” (“Violence and Metaphysics” 111). As Lévinas says,

 

It is . . . attention to the suffering of the other that, through the cruelties of our century (despite these cruelties, because of these cruelties) can be affirmed as the very nexus of human subjectivity, to the point of being raised to the level of supreme ethical principle–the only one it is impossible to question. (Qtd. in Derrida, “Violence and Metaphysics” 94)

 

According to Lévinas, “the disproportion between suffering and every theodicy was shown at Auschwitz” (“Useless Suffering” 97). Auschwitz here stands for the proposition that we are all, even (or especially) the most civilized among us, capable of genocide and that building moral thought around this recognition changes everything: henceforward, we must never lose our fear of being victims of genocidal violence, but must fear even more our propensity to commit it. Moral thought since Auschwitz thus starts with the premise that every encounter with a neighbor carries with it, “despite the innocence of its intentions, . . . [t]he risk of occupying . . . the place of an other and thus, on the concrete level, of exiling him, of condemning him to a miserable condition in some ‘third’ or ‘fourth’ world, of bringing him death” (Lévinas, Time 169; see also Totality and Infinity 194-247).

 

The political context within which genocide became all-too-thinkable within modernity is that of modern colonialism and the nationalist struggle against it.⁴ The origins of this dialectic may lie in an act of military conquest or in an unopposed claim to possession of territory that is already inhabited.⁵ Its domain is the spatial and temporal relation between a territory’s prior inhabitants, its colonial possessors, and, perhaps, its future citizens in a future independent state. The dialectic of colonialism allows us to think of occupying a common territory as either a matter of cohabitation or succession. It enables all sides to imagine the spatial proximity of indigenous peoples and later arrivals as an eliminable problem, while focusing their direct attention on who is threatening to eliminate whom in the present or in the near future.

 

As a relatively recent moral trope for the murderous encounter with the Other, “Auschwitz” is now commonly read backwards into the history of colonialism, which it has become possible to describe as a prolonged Holocaust (see Churchill and Stannard). The colonial and the anti-colonial mind can conceive of genocide because they both can (and probably must) imagine the same territory without its current inhabitants. Relations among current occupants appear within the framework of colonialism to be essentially matters of temporal succession. Thus in the native/settler dialectic everything depends on who came first and who will remain. From the perspective of colonialism, any present time of simultaneous cohabitation of racialized ethnicities must be seen as historically abnormal, and perhaps ephemeral. The hortatory claim that genocide is now unthinkable points us toward a postcolonial future in which current spatial predicaments rather than historical relations among neighbors come to the foreground. A human rights discourse based on an ethics of the neighbor aims to bring this about through the technologies of transitional justice that put evil (and history itself) in the past.

 

This form of argument presupposes a radical shift of moral orientation after 1945 in which “the Holocaust” rather than “the Revolution”–French, Russian, or arguably Haitian⁶–becomes the event that defines the relation between ethics and politics in late modernity. Before Auschwitz, the argument goes, a distinctive (and ultimately Schmittian) concept of the “political” allowed us to overcome our natural sensitivity to the suffering of fellow humans when they were constructed as the intimate “other.” This concept of the political produced the Holocaust as a horrifying endpoint to the genocidal logic of modernity that began in 1492.⁷

 

The new human rights discourse that has taken root since Auschwitz aims (when viewed in Schmittian terms) to depoliticize the distinction between who we are and who we are not (Rorty 128). By the century’s end, the ethics of human rights, which were once the mottos of democratic revolution, became instruments of global order. They now require that one put the claims of spatial proximity ahead of those of historical destiny and that one value the virtues of political patience over those of revolutionary struggle. An “ethics” so conceived puts “politics” based on historical grievance at the root of “radical” evil in the world and severely limits the pursuit of justice based on backward-looking claims.

 

From the perspective of an ethics of proximity, genocide victims (as represented by survivors) are the quintessential suffering subjects, the ultimate source of ethical value.⁸ Naming their plight as (actual or potential) genocide is now the duty of the rest of us, the first step in human rights intervention which is in turn defined by the ultimate moral duty to put humanitarianism ahead of all politics. Humanitarianism, thus, arises from a pre-political relationship between the victim of evil–he or she who suffers–and the spectator capable of discerning evil and willing to respond.

 

Human rights are not an afterthought to ethics in this fin-de-siècle discourse but rather its very foundation. The essence of human rights discourse is to “infinitize” evil by equating it to the situation of a hostage population subject to the sovereign power of a Schmittian state (Rancière 307-8; see also Arendt, Origins, esp. ch. 9). The quintessential subject of human rights discourse is the neighbor who is viewed by the state as both an enemy and an alien, but who lacks the protection that “enemy aliens” enjoy under established international law. These domestic enemies may not only be interned by the state (arguably for their own protection), they are also subject to being exterminated by the state, and even by the neighbor next door.⁹ At the end of such periods of gross violations of human rights, the immediate goal of what we now routinely call “transitional justice” (see Teitel), is to reduce domestic enmity itself to a problem of excessive proximity, the likelihood that hostile neighbors will kill each other. The excesses of proximity are, of course, what the world market needs to eliminate, and integration of the local economy into the global–rather than justice as such–becomes a promised reward of the desired transition. Instead of demanding justice, the subjects of transitional justice are expected to show patience. Patience, when treated as a virtue, presupposes that the ethical duty of neighbors is to assure each other that now is not the time for a historical reckoning. As an ideology, it presupposes that third parties may feel obliged to intervene if these assurances fail. From the perspective of a watching world, the real point of transitional justice is that it is not justice as such, but rather closure. Through trials, truth commissions, amnesties, and other techniques, it seeks to adjourn past history and to make new time.¹⁰ (Now that these fin-de-siècle techniques of transitional justice can be studied and compared, Germany after Auschwitz has become another “case,” as well as a paradigm of largely successful transition; see Sa’adeh.)

 

In the now-massive literature on “transitional justice,” fidelity to “Auschwitz” as the touchstone of radical Evil precludes the pursuit of any higher good through politics.

 

The upholders of ethics make the consensual identification of Evil depend upon the supposition of a radical Evil. Although the idea of a radical Evil can be traced back at least as far as Kant, its contemporary version is grounded systematically on . . . the Nazi extermination of the European Jews. . . . [I]t exemplifies radical Evil by pointing to that whose imitation or repetition must be prevented at all costs–or, more precisely: that whose non-repetition provides the norm for the judgement of all situations. . . . [T]he Nazi extermination is radical Evil in that it provides for our time the unique, unrivalled–and in this sense transcendent, or unsayable–measure of Evil pure and simple. . . . As a result, the extermination and the Nazis are both declared unthinkable, unsayable, without conceivable precedent or posterity–since they define the absolute form of Evil–yet they are constantly invoked, compared, used to schematize every circumstance in which one wants to produce, among opinions, an effect of the awareness [conscience] of evil–since the only way to access Evil in general is under the historical condition of radical Evil. (Badiou, Ethics 62-3)

 

 

This view is well-represented by the post-Holocaust restatement of humanitarian liberalism espoused by political theorists such as Judith Shklar and George Kateb who argue that the political pursuit of a higher good is itself the source of evil insofar as it makes us capable of justifying interpersonal cruelty that could eventually produce “an” Auschwitz.¹¹ The foundation of this view is what Alain Badiou, its leading critic, calls a “consensual self-evidence of Evil” (58)–that after Auschwitz we know it when we see it. By this he means that the incontrovertible evil of genocide holds the place of the all-too-contestable notion of the Good on which earlier, and arguably more innocent, ethical views had been based.

 

Badiou describes the main ethical thesis of post-Auschwitz humanitarianism as follows: “Evil is that from which the Good is derived. . . . ‘Human rights’ are rights to non-evil” (Ethics 9; and see Chapter 1 generally). The human rights that follow from this presumed consensus on what Evil looks like are as follows: “rights not to be offended or mistreated with respect to one’s life (the horrors of murder and execution), one’s body (the horrors of torture, cruelty and famine), or one’s cultural identity (the horrors of the humiliation of women, or minorities, etc.)” (9). Our presumed compassion for those who suffer these specific horrors provides the ethical foundation of a humanitarian politics that is constantly exposed to the fragility of empathy, indifference, and denial (see Cohen, States of Denial and Dean).

 

This version of ethics implies, of course, a politics of its own–a politics of victimhood (on which I have written elsewhere).¹² Before dealing with the politics of victimhood here, however, we need to address the centrality of genocide as the prime (irreducible) evil behind all others–the singular thing that must be made unthinkable for ethics to get underway.

 

Imagining Genocide

 

The imaginability of genocide arises from the moral psychology of place and race within the colonial project. In the words of Rebecca Solnit:

 

Race, this identification with an ethnicity also imagined as an origin, has for the last century tended to generate a kind of ethnic nationalism whose insistency on the inseparability of race and place is itself mystical. . . . Israel itself was founded on the idea that the legacy of blood entitled the Jews to a legacy of land . . . I’ve always been as much appalled as awestruck that a people . . . could remain so attached to an absent place of origin that everyplace else could be framed as a temporary exile, . . . no matter how long they stayed. Becoming native is a process of forgetting and embracing where you are. (114-15)

 

To understand the phenomenon, we can call upon Melanie Klein’s concept of “projective identification.”¹³ Klein’s idea is that the settler re-experiences his own aggression toward the native as fear of the native’s hostility toward him. In fearing the native’s “primitive” racism (which is already a response to colonization), the settler defends against guilt for displacing the native. By identifying himself as the object of his own feelings toward the native, the settler re-experiences them as feelings of racial antipathy on the part of the natives. In the dialectic of race and place, the role of the colonist is to think, “these people hate us because of our [. . .].” “Race” is the term of art that fills in the political blank: it acquires whatever biological, religious, linguistic, or cultural content is necessary to describe a difference between the settler and the native placeholder that precedes the settler’s occupation of the native’s place (Mamdani, “Race and Ethnicity” 4-8). The settler perfectly understands the depth of these ascribed feelings of racialized hatred, for they are merely his own original feelings projected onto others.

 

It should be noted that there are two imaginaries of genocide embedded in such an account of projective identification.¹⁴ The first is the genocide of the native against the settler–the racially-motivated “massacres” of innocents by savages that are the foundation of settler colonialist lore. The second is the revolt of the native against the settler. The unconscious moral logic of the colonial experience bases the settlers’ genocide against the native on the settlers’ repressed fear or fantasy of being subjected to genocidal actions by the native. In his now-classic Wretched of the Earth, Frantz Fanon theorized that in order to liberate himself from colonialism the (black) native must embrace this projected willingness to exterminate the (white) settler (see also Fanon, Black Skin, White Masks). Fanon urges the “good native” to embrace the “bad” identity that embodies the settler’s terror. Jean-Paul Sartre famously read this claim as the next stage in revolutionary consciousness, and saw the native’s will to fight the colonist to the death as a higher form of the totalizing dialectic of master and slave described by Hegel and Marx (see “Preface” to Fanon, The Wretched of the Earth).

 

Viewed from Lévinas’s perspective, as set forth above, however, Fanon’s argument is not that racially-based murder is justified as a condition of self-liberation. Fanon demonstrates, rather, that colonial subjugation–the problematic Da in the Dasein–is the conceptual root of genocide. For Lévinas, the “totalizing discourse” of white/black, master/slave, self/other is itself a formula for murder because, in their quest for mutual recognition, those who struggle do not acknowledge their prior lack-of-relation as mutually exterior occupants of the same ground (see the Preface to Totality and Infinity). In this respect, the willingness of the native to exterminate or expel the settler is simply a return-to-sender of the genocidal message of colonialism itself.

 

The point here is emphatically not that racialized citizens of settler colonialist states are actual or would-be génocidaires. The settler colonialist is not always, and almost never merely, a ruthless exploiter–and can also be a developer, a civilizer, an educator. To be any or all of these things, however, is entirely consistent with the possibility of being paranoid about one’s own status as successor to the “Native.” The settler’s question is, “how can we live among these savages without civilizing them?” The essence of Fanon’s argument is that living without the “savages” is always a conceivable option within colonial discourse that precedes (and to some extent informs) the project of “civilization,” and thus that living without the settler must also be imaginable for liberation to occur as an outcome of the totalizing project of colonialism–and presumably of any other totalizing project that focuses on the relations of race and place (blood and soil).

 

Writing both after Auschwitz and during an era of anti-colonial revolutions, Lévinas argues that all totalizing projects are grounded in imagining the death of the other–that is, murder. He includes here even the totalizing project that grounds ethics, as Richard Rorty does, on the shared qualities of all homo sapiens (and perhaps companion species) capable of conscious suffering.¹⁵ The American philosopher Hilary Putnam restates Lévinas’s concern as a concern about the vulnerability of the human rights culture to assertions of the “inhumanity” of other homo sapiens: “the danger in grounding ethics in the idea that we are all ‘fundamentally the same’ is that a door is opened for a Holocaust. One only has to believe that some people are not ‘really’ the same to destroy all the force of such a grounding” (35). At the pragmatic level, Rorty concedes “that everything turns on who counts as a fellow human being” (124)– indeed he stresses it–but the more fundamental claim made by Lévinas (and Putnam) is against the ethical assumption that arguments appealing to our shared humanity could count at all in ethical justifications of human rights.¹⁶ The meaning of Auschwitz, they suggest, is that ethics must now be based, not on a common humanity that we share, but rather on the mere fact of occupying common ground with those with whom we do not presume any (other) affinity or relationship. Thus conceived, Auschwitz reveals the limits of the ethical project that teaches us to treat the other under the aspect of the same. Ethics–the ethics that is not subordinate to politics–must now begin with the damage that our mere presence causes to others whom we displace, and whom we must treat as genuinely exterior to the “other” who inhabits our own mind as an outward projection of the “self.”

 

Lévinas’s critique of totalization is an ethical complement to Klein’s psychoanalytic account of projective identification, although he did not to my knowledge address this connection. Klein interpreted the moralized feelings that connect us with fellow humans as projections of our feelings toward the good and bad parts of ourselves: she showed how “bad” (demonized) others are also the threatening parts of the self that we externalize, and that “good” (idealized) others are also the parts of the self that we seek to protect from such internal threats of persecution. From this perspective, the phenomenology of interpsychic struggle–for example, the Hegelian struggle between Master and Slave–is also inextricably intrapsychic. Human rights idealism after Auschwitz would thus appear as a symptom of human rights paranoia after Auschwitz, an overidentification with our common humanity as a defense against the fear of being persecuted as inhuman. Klein believed that an authentic humanitarian ethics must begin with the acknowledgement of others as genuinely external to the “internal objects” that we project and introject as split-off parts of the self. What makes these proximate others exterior (we might say extrapsychic) is that they survive the damage caused by our presence and call forth from us a concern for the other that is experienced as a primary duty of repair (see Klein, Love 306-69 and Hinshelwood, Entry 10). Donald Winnicott goes further in defining the ethical “separation” necessary to distinguish the real externality of others from the internal objects whom we fantasmatically destroy or rescue through our “projective mechanisms” (90). He argues that the internal object

 

is always being destroyed. This destruction becomes the unconscious backcloth for love of a real object; that is, an object outside the area of the subject’s omnipotent control. . . . The destructiveness, plus the object’s survival of the destruction, places the object outside the area of objects set up by the subject’s projective mental mechanisms. (94)

 

An ethics based on the reality of separation (proximity as exteriority in Lévinas’s sense) would, thus, be inherently more stable than an ethics that relies on mechanisms of interpersonal identification, which are always fantasmatic and implicitly paranoid. Eric Santner takes this ethical view to what is, perhaps, its limit by describing it as “my answerability to my-neighbor-with-an-unconscious” who is, thus, “a stranger not only to me but also to him- or herself.” If this is, indeed, the basis of an ethics founded on separation, rather than on identification, then “the very opposition between ‘neighbor’ and ‘stranger’ begins to lose its force” (9, and see 23, 82).

 

To prevent the repetition of Auschwitz, according to Lévinas, we must face up to the mechanisms that Klein would call projective identification: “I am [unconsciously, Klein would say] responsible for the persecutions I undergo . . . since I am responsible for the responsibility of the other” (Lévinas, “Responsibility” 99). Although this ethical claim can be found throughout his work, Lévinas eventually grounds it on the observation that a desire to commit murder or genocide is intelligible only because we see ourselves either as its subject or as its object. The imaginable reversibility of subject and object (active or passive) has an ethical significance that Lévinas comes to call “substitution.” “The ego,” he says, “is a substitution” (“Substitution” 127). By this he means that “subjectivity no longer belongs to the order where the alternative of passivity and activity retains its meaning”; it follows that “the self, a hostage, is already substituted for the others” (118). On this view, every evil that we are capable of fearing–and now we must include even radical evil–is also something for which we are capable of wishing. We must ground ethics not in affinity or reciprocity, but in our prior responsibility toward those to whom we will relate only as neighbors–and whom we must treat as though our feelings toward them were merely projective. In a Lévinasian ethics of the neighbor, my responsibility not to kill is based on proximity alone.

 

It can thus be argued that the ethics of human rights “after Auschwitz” presupposes the simultaneous existence and repression of genocidal thoughts. This kind of argument is nothing new. Freud himself grounds mass (or group) psychology both on the wish to kill the father and on the repression of the memory of having already done so in one’s mind (that is, in unconscious fantasy). He argues that the foundation of the group is a memory that lies outside the realm of permissible thoughts in the form of a taboo.¹⁷ Subsequent Freudian interpretations of the social contract have evoked real and fantasmatic scenarios of regicide and fratricide (Brown 3-31). The question is whether the imagery of Auschwitz–which is also and indubitably something real–now also functions on a fantasmatic level within the global rhetoric of human rights in the way that the imagery of regicide functioned in discourses on the Rights of Man that followed the French Revolution (see Walzer and Hunt).

 

My general claim about the function of genocide in the global ethic of the neighbor is that it functions like Freud’s argument about the role of parricide in the ethics of the family. In the new global ethics of “never again,” however, the collectivity is not seen as a type of family, but as a type of neighborhood in which spatial rather than generational relations predominate. Like all foundational acts, genocide is constitutively outside the sovereign power that (from time to time) calls a group, even a “world community,” into being. The génocidaire is the quintessential criminal against humanity as such, the inhuman monster to whom “terrorists,” for example, must now be compared; genocide has become the morally incomparable act that is constantly subject to repetition. In fin-de-siècle human rights discourse, genocide becomes the wish that an imaginary sovereign power makes taboo–unthinkable because it is repressed, and for that very reason at the root of all our conscious fears.

 

The presumed unthinkability of genocide–the repression, not the absence, of the wish–is thus both the founding premise of the fin-de-siècle Human Rights Discourse and the stated goal of most human rights advocacy.¹⁸ The recollection of genocidal experiences from the victims’ standpoint, however, is the overt subject matter of many histories and of much science fiction.¹⁹ On its surface, this literature claims to warn us of the dangers of genocide so that we will fear and avoid them at all costs.²⁰ At a deeper level, however, the fear of genocidal victimhood and our enhanced imagination of it are also troubling. What does it really mean, after all, to imagine genocide, to fear it, and to avoid it at all costs? Is it not ultimately this political mindset that has made “thinkable” in the twentieth century the genocides of which some otherwise civilized nations have become capable? For them, the thinkability of ethnic cleansings and extermination has been a defense (by projection) against their heightened ability to imagine themselves as the objects of genocidal intent.²¹ As the world embarks on the twenty-first century, genocide has never been more thinkable–especially the genocide of which we may be victims. It has now become almost conventional to argue for the existence of genocide, for example in Darfur, by publishing photographs of dead bodies and daring the viewer to refuse empathy.²²

 

The thinkability of genocide as a defense against the fear of genocide is a disturbing point to acknowledge. To say that genocide is morally intelligible is not to say that it is now, or ever could have been, morally right; instead, it is to note that most genocides are not mere acts of inadvertence or insensitivity, but rather moments of intense moral concentration invoking high concepts like human rights and democracy. If we cannot imagine the logic of genocide (and how that logic employs our moral concepts), we will never understand how a human rights discourse (which may, for a period of time, seem well-established in places like Sarajevo) can dissolve into what commentators glibly describe as “primordial group hatreds,” and how that same discourse can later re-emerge as a self-conscious return to civilized values.²³

 

Democracy and Human Rights

 

With Hegelian hindsight, we should not be surprised that “never again” became the dominant ethical imperative of the fin de siècle. Much of the twentieth century was taken up with the claim that majority rule is really just a way to protect human rights in the usual case in which the majority legitimately fears being victimized by the minority. It appeared that a more general form of democratic theory would actually favor the principle of self-rule by potentially victimized people over the principle of majority rule in the abstract. According to this argument, it is the legitimate fear of victimization on the basis of ethno-national identity, rather than the relative number of people in the potentially-victimized group, that justifies the right of that group to the territorial rule of a “homeland.”

 

Although many twentieth-century thinkers held this view, it is most widely associated with Woodrow Wilson. Unlike other heirs to Jefferson who stress the relation between popular sovereignty and individual rights, Wilson focused on the relation between the state and the nation. States were created by sovereign “peoples,” he believed, who decided thereafter to impose limitations on the powers of the governments thus created. Liberalism might define the relation of ruler and ruled within a people, but nationalism–in this case ethno-nationalism–would create that people and define its boundaries.²⁴ If all nation-states functioned in world politics as the virtual representatives of their own “peoples” in diaspora, so Wilson’s logic goes, then each national state would protect its permanent minorities out of fear that members of its own “people” might suffer retaliation while living as minorities elsewhere.²⁵ As Wilson conceives it, the post-imperial relation between national and international politics is in effect a kind of hostage arrangement based on the tacit acknowledgment that the “peoples” of the world are already dispersed, and that their potential ingathering is a legal fiction needed to protect their rights wherever they might be.²⁶

 

At the level of political psychology, however, the “ingathering” of the group is far from fictitious–it is a necessary form of self-idealization that can be an effective defense against well-founded fears of persecution.²⁷ In Wilson’s terms, groups asserting protected minority status anywhere have to imagine themselves both as potential victims where they are and as potentially hegemonic somewhere else. To their current oppressors they thus become hypothetical threats (people who could do the same to “us”), thereby also allowing their continuing oppression to be rationalized on the grounds of self-defense.

 

Within a Wilsonian framework, the danger of ethno-national violence is, thus, an unavoidable structural feature of the interstate system itself. On the one hand, this danger is the national majority’s excuse for the repression of outsiders who live under the regime; on the other hand, that repression becomes a further reason for insurrection. Adding to these internal conflicts, nation-states based on victimhood feel entitled to use their sovereign status in the international community to protect co-nationals who live as minorities elsewhere. That is often what it means to say “Never Again.”

 

The obvious problem here is that any state created to allow a previously subjugated minority to rule in the name of former victims almost inevitably has permanent minorities of its own.²⁸ Therefore, the claim of victimhood to nationhood is as much a cause of victimization as it is a remedy. But if the point of demanding nationhood is to protect a people from further victimization, it follows that a state based on the promise of “never again” does not violate Wilsonian principles by resisting, at least up to a point, attempts at self-help by separatist minority groups that threaten to “strand” members of the present “majority” within a smaller state in which the present “minority” rules.

 

In a Wilsonian world in which international military interventions would be prohibited by agreement of the great powers, civil strife on both sides of an international border becomes the dominant and permissible form of permanent conflict. This was to be the price (if not the meaning) of “world peace.” From here, we can trace the roots of the racialized conception of democracy that characterizes post-imperial states: a conception of democracy in which the elimination of bodies–ethnic cleansing–becomes an alternative to the conversion of minds. It is such a world that the current politics of humanitarian intervention seeks to transcend using legal arguments that are still basically Wilsonian and ethical arguments that resound with the gravity of Auschwitz. It is, however, the Wilsonian system that presupposes and reproduces the very horrors that humanitarian intervention seeks to stop. This fundamental contradiction is not addressed by merely asserting, as many do today, that the ethical has priority over the political.

 

Democratic theory has never really traversed the difference between (1) democracy as a truth procedure (like the scientific method) in which individual minds are changed by the result,²⁹ and (2) democracy as a form of rule in which no minds are expected to change through the process itself. In this second conception of democracy, majority and minority identities are not produced by the actual vote; they pre-exist the vote, and are merely affirmed by it. This second conception of democracy has been thoroughly described by social scientists, but it is not well-theorized. To fill this theoretical gap, we must turn not to the forms of political thought modeled on interest aggregation in the market but rather to those specifically concerned with the moral psychology of victimhood. When the moral psychology of victimhood dominates the political sphere, the addition or subtraction of bodies becomes the essence of the democratic project. This addition and subtraction can take place by expelling bodies, by ignoring them or, in the worst case, by killing them.

 

There is little theoretical justification for abstract majority rule when we’re no longer in the business of persuading each other–when our votes are rooted in the fear of being victimized on the basis of a pre-existing identity. In these circumstances it becomes plausible to argue that doing justice to former victims is a more fundamental legitimation of political power after evil than majority rule itself. If this is true, the underlying justification for majority rule assumes that much of history consists of the victimization of large majorities by small (and originally feudal) minorities. According to this argument, the foundational principle of majority rule would not be popular sovereignty, but “never again.” In the aftermath of the genocide, so the argument goes, a guilty oppressor, whether it is the majority or not, can no longer assert its own interests as before. Henceforward, and for the indefinite future, it has no right not to have its interests subordinated to those of surviving victims. To have one’s interest subordinated to the interests of others is part of what it means to be ruled by them (see Elster).

 

Accepting as legitimate the subordination of one’s interests, and renouncing all pride in one’s national identity, is what it means, constitutionally, to live in a state of disgrace (Dalrymple). What, then, is the meaning of democracy where a formerly ruling group, perhaps a majority, has been disgraced by its role in prior injustice? Could the arguments that normally support majority rule here be used to justify specific forms of minority rule instead? These are the unanswered constitutional questions posed by an ethics of human rights that is also a politics of victimhood.

 

Victimhood and the Right to Rule

 

In the aftermath of radical evil, what does victimhood lack, and what should it want? Can a national self-rule be the sublimation of victimhood? And is overcoming victimhood what nations want?

 

The problem of Tutsi minority rule in post-genocide Rwanda illustrates the unresolved conflict between the Wilsonian theory of democratic rule and fidelity to the ethical meaning of Auschwitz. Even before becoming victims of genocide, Tutsis were frequently described as the Jews of Central Africa. Originally a pastoralist caste, they were dispersed throughout the region–unlike the cultivators (Hutus), who had customary roots in a tribal homeland. In the pre-colonial regime of Rwanda’s mwami (king), those who intermediated between the kingdom and the tribes were considered to be Tutsis, but these same individuals might have been considered Hutus if they acquired customary rights in a particular homeland. Prior to colonialism, the distinction between Hutu and Tutsi was not binary (either/or), and not totalizing in Lévinas’s sense.

 

It was not until Belgian colonial rule that the caste distinction between pastoralists and cultivators was redescribed as a colonial distinction between “natives” and “settlers.” The natives’ identity is based on place (they preceded the settlers as occupants the territory to be settled). In contrast, the settlers’ identity, insofar as it is translocal, can be said to be based on race. A race, unlike a tribe, was conceived by colonial rulers to be essentially migratory–it becomes aware of having origins because it also has a destination (see Mamdani, “Race and Ethnicity” and Solnit). The Belgian rulers of Rwanda thus described Tutsis as a migratory race of “Hamites,” a migratory race of “white” negroes, who had earlier settled on Hutu tribal lands Tutsi identity was thus racialized at the same time Hutu identity was ethnicized–the difference between the two indigenous groups was analogized to that between colonial settlers and native tribes, and Tutsis were, thus, conceived to be appropriate agents (and minor beneficiaries) of Belgian rule over Hutus. When Belgium’s rule of Rwanda was about to end, its plan to turn power over to the Tutsi race was blocked by a Hutu Revolution demanding majority rule. The ideology of “Hutu Power” embraced the Belgian view of Tutsis as a stateless race of settlers, and now sought to expel them as an alien elite that had always been parasitical on the Hutu majority and had become, more recently, the principal collaborator in colonial rule. At this point, an individual was considered to be either Tutsi or Hutu–once the distinction had been politicized (in Schmitt’s sense) one could not be both.³⁰

 

The genocide committed against Rwanda’s remaining Tutsis in 1994 occurred at the same time as an invasion by an army of Tutsi expellees who had lived as refugees in Uganda (see Mamdani, When Victims Become Killers chs. 6-7). Commentators differ about the extent to which the genocide was provoked by the invasion, and the extent to which the invasion was justified (at least in retrospect) by the need to rescue the Rwandan Tutsis who remained from the near certainty of genocidal massacre. With the benefit of hindsight, it is clear that no one else would have rescued the Tutsis who remained had the army of Tutsi refugees been held back at the Ugandan border, and also that fewer people would have been killed had no invasion been threatened.³¹ These facts can be used to argue that the Tutsi invasion was a failed Wilsonian strategy for protecting Tutsis within Rwanda or that it was an ethically required intervention to “interrupt Auschwitz.”

 

Both arguments support the self-description of Tutsi-ruled post-genocide Rwanda as a victim-state, consciously modeled on the state that might have been created for the Jews after the Holocaust if it had been carved out of Germany rather than developed in Palestine (see Mamdani, ch. 8). To grasp the meaning of this, imagine that the fears that Goebbels invoked as propaganda during World War II had been descriptively correct–that Germany faced invasion by a militarized form of international Jewry seeking to reverse the historic course of German nativism. This hypothetical scenario for understanding the Holocaust as a reaction by German “natives” against Jewish (and other) “settlers,” already adumbrated in Mein Kampf, comes close to the actual scenario in Rwanda on the eve of genocide.³² Assuming that this rationalization for a Holocaust must “never again” be condoned, the invasion of Tutsi exiles that triggered the genocide was justified as a humanitarian intervention to rescue Tutsi survivors using means that are supported, if not required, by international law. Thereafter, the history of genocide (and the fear of its repetition) becomes an ideology of post-traumatic rule, purporting to justify the suspension of the normal criteria of political judgment in the successor state. Tutsi minority rule in Rwanda is thus not justified as a form of racialized oppression any more than Jewish rule of post-War Germany would have been so justified. Why? Because the basis of the rule is not racial per se; rather it occurs through the transformation of racial identities into those of victim and perpetrator, a transformation that occurs in the foundational moment of the genocide itself.

 

This is analogous to arguing that surviving German Jewish victims of the Holocaust deserved to rule a defeated and disgraced Germany and that returning Jewish exiles were entitled to share that rule–perhaps in the name of the victims who did not survive or else in the name of the rescuers. The analogy with Rwanda brings out the pragmatic difficulty of basing claims for justice on Daniel Jonah Goldhagen’s broad (but contested) description of ordinary Germans as “Hitler’s willing executioners.” In Rwanda, a country of six million, an estimated three to four million Hutus did in fact directly participate in the murder of perhaps 800,000 Tutsis and Hutu resisters. The appellation “willing executioners” could plausibly be applied to much of the surviving adult Hutu population of the country. A Nuremberg-style punishment of all Rwandans who were personally responsible for genocidal actions would come so close in its effect to another, legally sanctioned, genocide that it would be difficult to distinguish from collective vengeance.

 

What victimhood demanded, instead, is the right to rule–or, at least, the right to have the state ruled in the victims’ name. The argument for victims’ rule, even if they were to rule as a minority, is that a state cannot live on after genocide as though the distribution of bodies within the majority and the minority were an untainted fact of biopolitics. In Rwanda today “justice” is the code-word for Tutsi minority rule, legitimated by the disgrace of the Hutu majority.

 

The dilemma of postgenocide Rwanda lies in the chasm that divides Hutu as a political majority from Tutsi as a political minority. While the minority demands justice, the majority calls for democracy. The two demands appear as irreconcilable, for the minority sees democracy as an agenda for completing the genocide, and the majority sees justice as a self-serving mask for fortifying minority power. (Mamdani 273)

 

In Mamdani’s account, however, the deeper choice is between a presumption of forgiveness on the one hand, and victims’ rule on the other. Rather than make this choice, post-genocide Rwanda claims to be an example of both. The journalist Philip Gourevitch describes the return of “a certain Girumuhatse” to share a house with the surviving members of the family he butchered during the 1994 genocide:

 

But why should survivors be asked to live next door to killers–or even, as happened in Girumuhatse’s house, under the same roof? Why put off confronting the problem? To keep things calm, General Kagame told me. (Gourevitch 308)

 

Behind this pragmatic avoidance of confrontation, however, lies the assumption that where everyone has sinned in either deed or wish, the only way forward is through an ethics of the neighbor.

 

To invoke an ethics of the neighbor in the aftermath of sin, outside commentators sometimes describe Rwanda in the terms used by St. Paul to describe the world. Rwanda is a place in which the difference between sins actually committed and sins of the heart is merely the difference between “could have” and “would have.” Some have argued that Rwanda is an ideal case for the Pauline solution of confession, forgiveness, and rebirth.³³ Forgiveness in Rwanda would, presumably, be based on recognizing that the fear of genocide makes committing genocide thinkable, and that in wish, if not in deed, all are sinners. In a Christian context, however, the sinners are already potentially forgiven. This is why they struggled then, and can now stop sinning.

 

But what could it possibly mean in a secular, constitutional context to believe that one is already potentially forgiven? It means, presumably, that one has not yet been judged, and may never be–that the resumption of useless suffering has been postponed. Unlike the Christian sinner who can be reborn, the secular survivor of radical evil–Auschwitz, Rwanda–is simply not yet dead. The “postponement” of death, as Lévinas calls it, is the gift of time (Totality and Infinity 224). Secular survivorship after Auschwitz does not make past suffering meaningful in the Pauline way, the way of theodicy, where the sinner is forgiven and the sin is, thus, redeemed (felix culpa). What Lévinasian survivors get is time that is always more time, an aftermath–time to apologize, to “correct the instant” and still be conscious of “the pain that is yet to come” (238). “To be temporal,” according to Lévinas, “is both to be for death and to still have time, to be against death” (235).

 

This describes the ethics of “Never Again,” which is, quite literally, a stand against repeating the past in the time that remains. It is the crime (and not the forgiveness) that has always already happened, and it is the repetition of violence/murder/genocide that makes it ethically traumatic. But what does it mean to fear the repetition of genocide (or of lesser traumatic events)?³⁴ If the aftermath of sin is a state of grace, the aftermath of evil is a state of disgrace. At its best (if such a term can apply) the survivors’ state described by Lévinas would be one of constant wakefulness based on the awareness that humanitarian responses almost always come too late, but are required nonetheless (see Cohen, Interrupting Auschwitz ch. 3). The same state of disgrace, however, can be more neutrally described as one of depressive hypervigilance, in which survivors in a common space spend the time they still have defending against their persecutory anxieties and well-founded fears.

 

Virtual Rule and the Right to Judge

 

In many ways post-genocide Rwanda is a prototypical state of disgrace in which it is also true that a sullen majority is ruled by returning exiles in the name of victorious victims.³⁵ They rule, as we have seen, in the name of justice–or perhaps in its stead. But what would it mean for former victims to rule justly over those who once oppressed them? This question is neither inherently unanswerable nor merely rhetorical–it is, and must be, addressed whenever courts or legislative bodies create institutions designed to remedy past injustice within a democratic framework. Only after radical evil, however, is it conceivable that a dominant group, even if it is a majority, has so grossly abused its right to rule that it must legitimately subordinate its interests to those of the former victims who now rule them. To say that this is conceivable, however, does not exempt victims’ rule from requirements of justice. In this case, we must ask whether forms of virtual rule, which are often attenuated cases of victim’s rule, could in principle be better suited to redressing bad history without reproducing it.

 

The post-slavery United States did not become Liberia–a country ruled by former slaves. Instead, its history of slavery resulted (eventually) in a body of anti-discrimination law. The constitutional origins of anti-discrimination law lie in the rights of U.S. citizens living out-of-state to be treated as well under the law as the in-state majority treats itself, and, hence, better than it is obliged to treat the federally unprotected local minority that lost out in the democratic process. Thus described, the individual protected by anti-discrimination law is virtually represented by the local majority–that individual has no rights that the local majority does not grant to itself, but can be denied no rights that the local majority does grant to itself. Extending the concepts of anti-discrimination law to the descendants of slaves limits the extent to which a white majority in America (while there is a white majority) may take only its own interests into account.³⁶ The limitation arises because anti-discrimination law will treat the ruling majority as if it were the virtual representative of the now constitutionally protected groups–“discrete and insular minorities” that do not rule, and yet may not be treated as ordinary electoral minorities in disregard of their particular histories of victimhood (see Ely, Brilmayer, and Shapiro).

 

Anti-discrimination law, a scheme that limits how majorities may rule the permanent minorities they once oppressed, is one end of a continuum of constitutional schemes that subject democratic processes to the claims of victimhood. Along this continuum lie schemes to adjust voting procedures and electoral constituencies in order to give constitutionally protected groups enhanced representation in the legislative process (see Guinier). Consociational Democracy (separate electorates) is another step toward political autonomy (see Lijphart), which would grant groups that fear victimization the right to rule themselves (and others?) through the territorial partition of an existing state. Then there is the type of right asserted in Rwanda: a group that fears future victimization asserts the right to rule directly over those who have perpetrated atrocity in the past. Another possibility, of course, would be the expulsion (repatriation? resettlement? extermination?) of the traumatized victim group–which suggests that our spectrum of possibilities may in fact come full circle in making the foundational atrocity conceivable once again.

 

Having come full circle, why not create a new national homeland for the victimized group? In the case of Israel, this could be viewed as a humane Wilsonian solution to the post-Holocaust refugee problem, or as a belated endorsement of the SS’s “Emigration Policy” that preceded the “Final Solution to the Jewish Question” and that led Adolf Eichmann to meet with an agent of the Haganah in Cairo. (On the Zionist side, it was at least clear that the pre-war persecution of German Jews could potentially accelerate their emigration to Palestine.³⁷) If the creation of Israel mooted the question of whether Jewish survivors of the Holocaust deserved to rule Germany, the new Jewish state itself raised the question of whether it was entitled to judge Germans for their crimes against Jews. Hannah Arendt’s treatment of the Eichmann trial focuses fundamentally on the issue of whether victims who do not seek the right to rule can nevertheless claim the right to judge. The capture and trial of Eichmann, she argued, was not merely the prosecution of an individual who had special responsibility for the Final Solution; it was a constitutive moment in the creation of Israel. Israel here asserted that a people that had overcome its victimhood with nationhood is uniquely entitled to judge the crime of genocide committed against it. Israel now stood, and stood alone, for the survival of all Jews as a people. It represented the victim as survivor, the victim as judge, the victim as avenger, the victim as sovereign.

 

Israel thus claimed the right to judge Eichmann from the standpoint of his victims themselves. The post-Holocaust sense of justice on which the trial was based proclaimed itself to be different from justice as impartiality. It was, rather, to be a form of justice based on the premise of “Never Again.” As Eichmann’s prosecutor, Israel stood as “The Seventh Million.” It spoke not for neutrality, but for the Six Million dead; it spoke as the remnant of world Jewry.³⁸ The trial aimed to transform the meaning of Nuremberg retrospectively from a victors’ justice, which was troubling enough to liberal legalists,³⁹ to a victims’ justice, which was more troubling still to a diasporic intellectual like Arendt, who came of age at a time that made her alert to the dangerous consequences of the Wilsonian view that, within an international system, nationhood was the answer to collective fears of victimhood.⁴⁰ Before departing to cover the trial, however, she also acknowledged to Karl Jaspers that “it was for the sake of these victims that Palestine became Israel” (415).

 

Arendt’s great work, The Origins of Totalitarianism, had been about how stateless peoples could subsequently be persecuted everywhere because they were sovereign nowhere. In the interwar period, she argued, blacks and Jews were principal victims of “racism” precisely because they represented stateless diasporas rather than localizable ethnic claims to self-determination. Arendt saw clearly that describing stateless peoples (Jews/Tutsis) as “races” had made genocide conceivable to movements and parties advocating the expulsion or direct elimination of natives by settlers or vice versa. The problem posed by the Eichmann trial, as Arendt describes it, is that the very logic under which Zionism was a fitting response to the Holocaust is based on the conceptual framework that had made genocide thinkable (see Arendt, Origins, Part II).

 

While Arendt believes that, ultimately, there is a legal and moral rationale for convicting Eichmann (Eichmann 278-9), she finds the project of building nationhood on the notion of the righteous victim to be essentially antithetical to the ideal of democratic citizenship as a way to produce a legitimately ruling majority through persuasion and cooperation. Once nationality becomes the dominant trope of victimhood, every group that claims to be a victim may use the term “nation” to claim virtual sovereignty, at least to the extent that it has immunity from being judged by its “other” and that it has a privileged right to judge itself. In Arendt’s view, Zionism now epitomized such claims: what had begun as a political critique of a cult of victimhood in religious Judaism had become the secular equivalent of such a cult–a nation grounded on survivorship in a place of refuge.

 

Justice, Peace, and Patience

 

It has become part of the moral history of the twentieth century that Jews, the paradigmatic victims of the Holocaust, can also be said to claim an ethic of the neighbor as their distinctive contribution to world political thought. The post-Holocaust thought of Lévinas, for example, articulates this ethic as a relation to a “face” rather than to a place.

 

One’s implementation in a landscape, one’s attachment to Place . . . is the very splitting of humanity into natives and strangers. . . . Technology does away with the privileges of this enrootedness and the related sense of exile. It . . . wrenches us out of . . . the superstitions surrounding Place. From this point on, an opportunity appears to us: to perceive men outside the situation in which they are placed, and let the human face shine in all its nudity. Socrates preferred the town, in which one meets people, to the countryside and trees. Judaism is the brother of the Socratic message. . . . It remained faithful in this way to the highest value. The Bible knows only a Holy Land, a fabulous land that spews forth the unjust, a land in which one does not put down roots without certain conditions. (Difficult Freedom 232-233)

 

Without belaboring the obvious tension suggested here between the message of Judaism, thus described, and political Zionism, it is clear that this quote privileges the position of the refugee over the claims of both settler and native, and treats the territory as a place of refuge harboring potential neighbors for whom bad history is always yet to come. The space of the neighbor (the neighborhood) is no longer a “situation” for which we share attachments; it is here mystified as a pure relationship of being in the presence of, and answerable to, another face. What makes this relationship quintessentially ethical, according to Lévinas, is that the neighbor does not approach us first with the political identify of friend or foe, and with the claim to be recognized accordingly. Rather, the neighbor’s first demand is placed upon us by pure proximity–not because we feel closer to our neighbor than to someone else, but because his proximity makes us answer for our responsibility to the more distant stranger for whom he also substitutes (see “Substitution”). In Lévinas’s ethic of the neighbor, “The proximity of the neighbor–the peace of proximity–is the responsibility of the ego for an other” (“Peace and Proximity” 167).

 

Proximity thus functions for Lévinas as a special case of distance–the case in which we must address our lack of any relationship to another human except the ethical one, which is exposure and nothing more.⁴¹ Not only is the neighbor someone whom we cannot really know: Lévinas believes (here following Frantz Rosensweig) that the neighbor comes before us as a stranger to himself in just the same sense that, in his presence, we too can no longer presume to know ourselves. Some Lacanians use the term “extimacy” to describe this non-relationship of humanitarian ethics, and distinguish the demands of pure proximity from the relations of closeness we call intimate.⁴² In this respect, Lévinas anticipates the recent thought of Giorgio Agamben, who asks us to “imagine two political communities insisting on the same region and in a condition of mutual exodus from each other.” In such an “aterritorial . . . space,” “the being-in-exodus of the citizen” would oppose itself to the limitations of the nation-state (Agamben, “Beyond Human Rights” 24-5). “The political survival of humankind is today thinkable,” Agamben goes on to say, “only in a world in which the spaces of states have been thus perforated and topologically deformed and in which the citizen has been able to recognize the refugee that he or she is” (26).

 

If Agamben now directly seizes on the ethical figure of the neighbor as refugee, it is still Lévinas who insists that in responding to each other as beings-in-exodus, our respective “stories” must not matter. The ethical point–for Lévinas the whole point–is that the neighbor is someone to whom we must respond merely because he is there. Our response, therefore, must not be to reproduce an historical narrative of our interaction: Which of us arrived first? Who must leave first? Which of us is “allergic,” and which is the allergen? We must, rather, respond to the neighbor’s need outside of history–we must, unavoidably, answer to his presence itself, even before deciding what to do.

 

The face of the other in its precariousness and defenselessness is for me at once the temptation to kill and the call to peace, the “You shall not kill.” The face which already accuses me makes me suspicious but already claims me and demands me. (167)

 

Precariousness and defenselessness are, of course, typical of the plight of refugees, but even more fundamentally they are the source of the dogma of the “sacredness” of human life on which human rights interventionism rests. As Agamben demonstrates, homo sacer in Roman Law refers originally to an exception from the prohibition on murder, the life that may be taken with impunity by either ruler or neighbor without having the religious significance of a sacrifice or a sacrilege:

 

Subtracting itself from the sanctioned form of both human and divine law . . . homo sacer . . . preserves the memory of the originary exclusion through which the political dimension was first constituted. . . . The sovereign sphere is the sphere in which it is permitted to kill without committing homicide and sacred life . . . is the life that has been captured in this sphere . . . . [T]he production of bare life is the originary activity of sovereignty. The sacredness of life, which is invoked today as an absolutely fundamental right in opposition to sovereign power, in fact originally expresses precisely both life’s subjection to a power over death and life’s irreparable exposure in the relation of abandonment. . . . [T]he sovereign and homo sacer present two symmetrical figures that have the same structure and are correlative: the sovereign is the one with respect to whom all men are potentially homines sacri, and homo sacer is the one with respect to whom all men act as sovereigns. . . . Life is sacred only insofar as it is taken into the . . . originary exception in which human life is included in the political order in being exposed to an unconditional capacity to be killed. (Homo Sacer 82-85)

 

Agamben here suggests that the asserted priority of ethics over politics, which is the kernel of the fin-de-siècle ideology of human rights interventionism, is itself symptomatic of a political condition in which precariousness and defenselessness are presupposed–and which humanitarian interventions themselves both mitigate and reproduce.⁴³

 

I believe that when ethics opposes itself to politics in this way (especially when it claims to be humanitarian) it should be seen politically as well. Politically, the humanitarian move in ethics constitutes a deliberate attempt to dehistoricize and decontextualize what may be a structural problem, so as to focus on the quality of interpersonal encounters occurring in relatively close proximity. Ethically, it is a refusal to mythologize human suffering by reconnecting it to religious sacrifice–or its modern secular equivalent, suffering on behalf of others.⁴⁴ When suffering becomes morally meaningful in this way, or must be made so through future action, then ethics may call for a continuation, or even a recommencement, of political struggle, and so we are back to politics once more.

 

I suggested early in this essay that the post-Cold-War assertions of the primacy of humanitarian ethics have effectively functioned as a spatializing move within global politics; our present discussion allows me to say more about how this occurs and what it means for aspirations of justice. The type of proximity that has ethical significance, according to Lévinas, is not spatial proximity alone, but rather what he calls the encounter with “exteriority.” His most important work, Totality and Infinity, is subtitled “an essay on exteriority,” and here and elsewhere, he makes clear that proximity as exteriority is not reducible to spatial contiguity. There must also be what he calls “non-coincidence,” which is modeled on the relationship of different moments in time. “Time signifies this always of non-coincidence, but also the always of the relationship . . . It is a distance that is also a proximity” (Time and the Other 32). The ethical move against politics, according to Lévinas, amounts to a “deformalization” of the dominant metaphor of time in which the past is “irreducible to a hypothetical present that it once was” and is replaced by “an immemorial past, signified without ever having been present” (“Diachrony and Representation” 170, 172). The past is essentially not present, both in the ordinary sense and because it signifies non-presence. Lévinas says that, in focusing on the present, as opposed to the “re-presentation” of the past, ethics effectively “leaves time” for devotion to the other (173, 175).

 

Time is the mode of reality of a separated being that has entered into relation with the Other. The space of time has to be taken as a point of departure. . . . The being, thus defined has its time at its disposal because it postpones violence. . . [it] seizes upon the time left it by its being against death. . . . Consciousness is resistance to violence. Human freedom resides in . . . the prevision of the violence imminent in the time that still remains. To be conscious is to have time. . . . To be free is to have time to forestall one’s own abdication under the threat of violence. (Totality and Infinity 232-7)

 

Late in life, Lévinas described his “essential theme” as the replacement of a formal conception of time (in which past, present, and future are separate, continuous and essentially alike) with an examination of the conditions under which the past disappears and the future becomes imminent. What constitutes, he asks, “the passation of the past, the presentification of the present, and the futurition of the future?” (“The Other” 233). From this question we can discern what relation his ethics of the neighbor has to the experience of space and time as understood, for example, by Kant. Instead of being an a priori background (or matrix) within which ethical experience becomes possible, time for Lévinas is created by ethics. The ultimate product of ethics is more time, the postponement of death and suffering for the sake of others, and not right action for its own sake. For Lévinas, the highest aim is peace, not justice in any sense that might require breaching peace in the neighborhood.

 

These differences between Lévinas and Kant are, I believe, prototypical of the difference between human rights discourse that purports to come “after Auschwitz” and earlier accounts of the Rights of Man. The metaphor of pastness is necessary to propagate the belief that genocide is now unthinkable, but for Lévinas, unlike for Kant, genocide could not become unthinkable in exactly the way that moving backward in time is unthinkable. Evil, in Lévinas, refers to a temporality of fearing others–a time of political and social struggle–that is adjourned by peace with one’s neighbor, which is a different kind of time (see Peace and Proximity 220-53 and Totality and Infinity 281-5).

 

Peace, according to Lévinas, is the paradigmatic ethical relation between One and an Other in proximity–between Two. In a sense well-illustrated by the story of Girumuhatse’s return to the dwelling of his victims, “proximity is a disturbance of rememberable time” (“Substitution” 89). As a relationship of pure exteriority between two neighbors, each of whom can never know the other’s inner life, peace is entirely different in its origin and demands from the political pursuit of justice:

 

Responsibility for the other human being is . . . anterior to every question. But how does responsibility obligate if a third party troubles this exteriority of the two where my subjection of the subject is subjection to the neighbor? The third party is other than the neighbor but also another neighbor, and also the neighbor of the other, and not simply their fellow. What am I to do? What have they already done to one another? . . . What, then, are the other and the third party with respect to one another? Birth of the question. (“Peace and Proximity” 168)

 

Lévinas’s answer is to acknowledge that politics (or any scene of the Three) involves comparison, reciprocity, and equality that lie outside of ethics–which is always about peace rather than justice, and presumes human incommensurability. By openly removing questions of justice that do not involve interpersonal cruelty from the field of ethics, Lévinas provides a substantive account of what remains. His ethic of the neighbor can thus be considered a necessary complement to the politics-without-redistribution which today’s humanitarian ethic largely presupposes. Although Lévinas himself was not opposed to economic or other aid that may relieve useless suffering, for him the duty to rescue comes first. His view remains the only positive ethical account we have of what it could mean to treat the Holocaust as prime evil that does not refer us back to a story about who did what to whom in some previous moment like the present.

 

It is, of course, possible to attack Lévinas using Carl Schmitt’s argument against the discourse of humanitarian intervention following the Treaty of Versailles: that it creates a casus belli against the forces of “inhumanity,” especially when they claim to be pursuing historical justice in ways that disturb the peace by treating the “other” as the “same” (Schmitt, The Concept of the Political 71). Suicide bombings would seem to be a paradigmatic example of this: encountering the other as a disguised human bomb would suggest that fear of her and fear for her are not as fundamentally distinct as Lévinas himself claims.⁴⁵ When we rescue the suicide bomber are we saving her or ourselves? And if we murder her instead, what becomes of us? Do we reveal ourselves, like those whom Lévinas condemns, to be more afraid of dying than of killing? What does it mean for her to be equally unafraid of both? And does her self-chosen death qualify her as a martyr or a monster, whether or not she succeeds in bringing innocent others to their deaths along with her? In certain political “neighborhoods,” Lévinas’s concept of the ultimately unknowable human face can be both ethical and awful in ways that reopen the possibility of a horrifying response.

 

The ethical temptation to treat suicide bombers as “inhumans” in human disguise applies a fortiori to the politics of third-party intervention raised at the beginning of this essay: when neighbors kill neighbors, whom do we rescue and whom do we attack? Is the third party in this situation just another neighbor? It is not clear that Lévinas would condone humanitarian intervention by force as what Ignatieff would call a “lesser evil,” but it is clear that for Lévinas suffering and even dying for others have ethical value for the person who undergoes them in a way that no other suffering does (“Useless Suffering” 94; see also Ignatieff, The Lesser Evil). He calls this value “patience,” a kind of morally valuable suffering that is the exception to his ethical condemnation of suffering in general.

 

This ultimate passivity which nonetheless turns into action and into hope, is patience–the passivity of undergoing, and yet mastery itself. In patience disengagement within engagement is effected. . . . Extreme passivity becomes extreme mastery. . . . thus alone does violence remain endurable in patience. It is produced only in a world where I can die as a result of someone and for someone. (Totality and Infinity 238-9)

 

Lévinas here speaks of patience in a sense that is more than narrowly philosophical. It is for him what makes otherwise useless suffering meaningful for a humanitarian intervener. For the intervener the ethical question is always one of patience: how long? Lévinas thus calls “the time of patience itself . . . the dimension of the political.” He says this because “in patience . . . the will is transported to a life against someone and for someone” (Totality and Infinity 240). Lévinas’s abhorrence of human suffering becomes ambiguous when it is undergone for moral reasons, such as rescuing the victims of atrocity or disaster or bringing suicide bombings to an end. The lesson that human rights discourse has drawn from its understanding of the Holocaust is both that suffering is meaningless when it is not for anyone and that sacrifices of those who rescue (at least to the extent of providing humanitarian aid) represents the “high-mindedness that is the honor of a still uncertain, still vacillating modernity, emerging at the end of a century of unutterable suffering.” Lévinas goes on to say,

 

The just suffering in me for the unjustifiable suffering of the other, opens suffering to the ethical perspective of the inter-human. In this perspective there is a radical difference between the suffering in the other, where it is unforgivable to me, solicits me and calls me, and suffering in me. (“Useless Suffering” 94)⁴⁶

 

It would here seem that for Lévinas the commitment to treat suffering as useless (and, thus, to reject any theodicy that justifies evil) is limited to the suffering of the second-person, the one whom we encounter face-to-face. Pain that is undergone in the first person can be ethically meaningful when it is experienced as a compassionate response to the call for aid, thus bridging the gap that might otherwise exist between patience and ethics. Ironically (or not), this ethically significant suffering for others also describes the interiority of a Lévinasian third party (the peacekeeper) who intervenes between the two in order to stop the repetition of history and to create (ex nihilo) more time.⁴⁷ For “the world community,” patience is what it means to put ethics ahead of politics.

 

Although few, if any, contemporary political actors are directly influenced by him, Lévinas provides the most experientially accurate description of liberal humanitarian politics after Auschwitz. This politics represents itself as a morally useful way of feeling bad because one always comes too late to help and it is always too soon to make a final judgment. This is in practice what it means to put ethics first after Auschwitz, and still engage in politics. It also, however, reveals the incoherence of an ethical view that puts the condemnation of cruelty before all else, an ethics grounded in the seemingly “incontestable” condemnation of human suffering as self-evident evil. This incoherence, as I have already suggested, arises from the extraction of the neighborhood as a space for humanitarian ethics out of a prior conception of sovereignty that is both political and theological. Schmitt understood implicitly that politics is not simply a matter of one’s own life or death; it is also the imperative to protect friends and countrymen from the enemies that endanger them, an imperative that gives meaning to one’s own patriotic suffering, even if it ends in death. The politically driven individual, according to Schmitt, is ultimately willing both to die and to kill for others–he is, thus, potentially both rescuer and murderer. For Schmitt, the essential truth of politics is that the ethical duty to rescue one who is in danger presupposes that there is another who can be legitimately attacked for endangerment. He thus famously declares it is “the Sovereign . . .who decides on the exception,” and this includes, he takes pains to stress, the exceptions to our compassion for the suffering of others (Political Theology 5). For Schmitt, there is always an enemy (real or imagined) when one comes to the aid of a friend; and always a friend (real or imagined) when one does violence to an enemy. Because my relations to a sovereign third are always prior to my direct relations of hospitality with or hostility for another, politics is presumed to come before ethics.

 

There is no one whom Lévinasian ethics opposes more than Schmitt–we have here the refugee versus the Nazi–yet their two views are structurally homologous. Both Schmitt and Lévinas would agree that politics arises in the space of the three, and ethics in the space of the two. Lévinas, however, merely suggests that the introduction of a third into the ethical space gives birth to new political questions about justice that do not in themselves eclipse the ethical problem of cruelty face-to-face. Schmitt, in his stress on the constitutive role of enmity in creating the space of friendship, never speaks to the face-to-face responsibilities friends have to each other–a topic stressed by his younger contemporary, Hannah Arendt, who was also primarily concerned with the political.⁴⁸

 

What is fundamentally common to Schmitt and Lévinas is their replacement of an Hegelian view of politics as a struggle for recognition arising from an originary battle-to-the-death with the view that the originary relationship is, rather, between rescuer and victim, always in the presumed presence of some third whose ethical position is unknowable. This is the core conceptual structure of humanitarian ethics (as opposed to both revolutionary and totalitarian ethics). It explains why the duty to rescue and the right to wage war are born together in the sovereign act that distinguishes the space of ethics from the purely political. At the end of a century dominated by the dialectic of revolution and counter-revolution, a turn to Lévinas and/or Schmitt can help us understand the post-Cold War linkage between the global and the local as at once a humanitarian relation between rescuers and victims and a political doctrine of pre-emptive third party intervention.

 

Fidelity, Justice, and the Value of Suffering

 

We have seen that in humanitarian ethics after Auschwitz, the duty of rescuers toward victims receives primacy over all claims based on a political good that purports to supersede such a duty. No one has gone further than Lévinas in exploring the implications of this shift for pre-existing notions of ethical responsibility in relation to the political, and no one has attacked humanitarian ethics for its implicitly Lévinasian core more pointedly than Badiou.

 

The essence of Badiou’s attack is that humanitarian ethics is nothing other than a politics–in fact, the politics of victimhood.

 

[This] . . . ethics subordinates the identification of [the universal human Subject] to the universal recognition of the evil that is done to him. Ethics thus defines man as a victim. It will be objected: ‘No! You are forgetting the active subject, the one that intervenes against barbarism! So let us be precise: man is the being who is capable of recognizing himself as a victim. (Ethics 10)

 

Badiou’s critique of the politics of victimhood is, first, that it implicitly reproduces the evils of imperialism in a humanitarian guise.

 

Who cannot see that this ethics which rests on the misery of the world hides, behind its victim-Man, the good-Man, the white-Man? Since the barbarity of the situation is considered only in terms of “human rights”–whereas in fact we are always dealing with a political situation. . . . Every intervention in the name of a civilization requires an initial contempt for the situation as a whole, including its victims. And this is why the reign of “ethics” coincides, after decades of courageous critiques of colonialism and imperialism, with today’s sordid self-satisfaction in the “West,” with the insistent argument according to which the misery of the Third World is the result of its own incompetence, its own inanity–in short, of its subhumanity. (13)

 

Two further objections, Badiou says, follow from this: one is that an ethics grounded in our direct recognition of evil through atrocity stories and the like tends to dismiss any positive conception of the Good as merely desensitizing us to the cruelties committed in its name; the other is that, by attributing Evil to our general insensitivity to the pain of others, humanitarian ethics “prevents itself from thinking the singularity of situations as such” (13-14). Beyond these criticisms, however, is a more profound point that goes to the heart of the Lévinasian view: Badiou argues that humanitarian ethics is “nihilist because its underlying conviction is that the only thing that can really happen to someone is death” (35). Humanitarian ethics thus oscillates, according to Badiou, between the implicit conservatism of Western beliefs about “the victimary essence of man” and a nearly pornographic fascination with the power to decide about seemingly exotic victims (because “we” can always intervene) who will die and who will not (34-9).

 

As a political critic of Lévinasian ethics, Badiou is in my opinion on the right track, but his ethical argument depends upon the claim that “something can really happen to someone” that matters more than death. He calls this ethically transformative happening within a “situation” an “event.” But Badiou’s formal definition of the “event” is not in itself illuminating, and may even be circular. What matters for his argument against humanitarian ethics is his substantive assertion that human suffering and death are not “events” in the ethically relevant sense of demanding a life lived in fidelity to their universal “truth.” Badiou’s point is partially correct insofar as my death is not an event in my life in this or any other sense–but there is no good reason why my own intense suffering or my exposure to the suffering or mass murder of others may not be an event that is ethically transformative of my life. Indeed, humanitarian ethics is based on the proposition that Auschwitz was precisely this kind of transformative event, and that nothing can be the same for humanity thereafter.

 

Contrary to Badiou’s assertion, Auschwitz as a trope of inhumanity can, and does, demand fidelity to the truth of what happened there. A subsequent “Politics of Memory” means nothing if it is not grounded on the ethical virtue of fidelity to that event. Auschwitz would not qualify as an “event” for Badiou because he thinks that (unlike the storming of the Bastille or the October Revolution) the “truth” of Auschwitz is not universal–it does not have the same significance for everyone.⁴⁹ This argument, however, rests on the assumption–ultimately empirical–that fidelity to Auschwitz gives special significance to the death of Jews (or any other victim group, such as Christian Poles and Roma who are also commemorated). Humanitarian ethics claims, rather, that the Holocaust now has the “universal” meaning embodied in the 1948 Genocide Convention, that genocide as such (the extermination of particular groups) should “never again” occur (see Lemkin and Power, “A Problem from Hell,” chs. 1-4). We have here, in other words, a standard Hegelian claim about the universal manifesting itself through the particular that is an apparent a counterexample to Badiou’s formal assertion that particular atrocities cannot attain the universal significance of ethical truth.

 

Badiou’s rejection of humanitarian ethics is, thus, implausible if it rests only on the claim that atrocity-events cannot take the form of universal ethical truths without the further distinction he draws between an ethical truth and what he regards as its “simulacrum” or “corruption.” For Badiou, Nazi genocide was no more an event than Nazism itself, which, he says, was merely a reaction to the genuine event of the Russian Revolution, and hence a simulacrum.⁵⁰ Fidelity to a simulacrum, according to Badiou, produces a singularity of terror, as opposed to the desirable militancy of universal truth.⁵¹

 

Badiou concedes, however, that “Nazi politics was not a truth process, but it was only in so far as it could be represented as such that it ‘seized’ the German situation” (66).⁵² He then goes on to concede that the Nazi seizure of power in 1933 was “formally indistinguishable from an event” (73, 117). In contrast to Nazi terror, Badiou regards Stalinist and Jacobin terror as “corruptions” of the genuine events of 1917 and 1789, respectively–a bit better than simulacra, but not much.

 

In resting his argument against humanitarian ethics on our ability (or his) to recognize directly the difference between a truth and simulacra or corruption, Badiou deliberately opens himself to the charge that a politics of fidelity to truth, now common to both Left and Right, was responsible for the cruelties of the twentieth century. Nevertheless, Badiou’s principal expositor, Peter Hallward, presents this as a virtue: Badiou deliberately opens himself to the charge that a politics of fidelity to truth, now common to both Left and Right, was responsible for the cruelties of the twentieth century. Nevertheless, Badiou’s principal expositor, Peter Hallward, presents this as a virtue:

 

Badiou is one of the very few contemporary thinkers prepared to accept the certainty of violence and the risk of disaster implicit in all genuine thought. . . . Since evil is something that happens to a truth or in proximity to truth, there can be no fail-safe defense against evil that does not foreclose the possibility of truth. (257, 264)

 

The essence of Badiou’s position is that, even after Auschwitz, there can be genuine events–revolutionary openings–and that serious political thought must allow for this possibility by placing political militancy ahead of all other ethical claims that the event calls forth. Yet Badiou’s formal definition of an “event” makes him no less dependent on subjective consensus than are his humanitarian opponents, who ground ethics on our ability to know an atrocity when we see it. Badiou’s account of fidelity to events as the ethics of political action adds little to what we ordinarily mean by “revolution,” as distinguishable, for example, from a reaction or a counterrevolution. To “keep on acting in fidelity to an event” is, thus, indistinguishable from conforming oneself to the possibility that revolution can occur, and thus militantly opposing the forces of reaction and counterrevolution by naming them as such (see Bensaid 94-105). This being said, Badiou’s conceptions of the “event” and of “truth” add nothing but a level of abstraction to our understanding of revolution, reaction and counterrevolution–and are not readily intelligible without relying on these notions.

 

Badiou’s particular notion of “fidelity” is, however, a genuine contribution to the ethics of revolutionary thought. Fidelity is typically dismissed by secularists ethics as the virtue that a convert (or “true believer”) claims instead of personal empathy or compassion. Badiou agrees with Lacan, however, that fidelity can be a virtue nonetheless, and that questions of fidelity, perseverance, and betrayal lie at the core of ethics.⁵³ For Lacan this ethical fidelity is to the Real of one’s desire, and thus involves a relation to others that exceeds the imagery and symbols through which conscious feelings, like compassion, are experienced. For Badiou the object of fidelity is not a desire but an event, which is not just a memory but rather something more like a revelation–a temporal interruption of logical relationships that binds the subject through belief (Badiou, “Eight Theses” 150). It seems to me undeniable, however, that some who practice the ethics of “Never Again” (and the associated “Politics of Memory “) do in fact claim the virtues associated with fidelity to an event so defined.⁵⁴ So Badiou’s account of fidelity is not in itself a reason to reject the Ethic of No-Evil in favor of the militant revolutionary ethics for which he calls. “Fidelity, ” as Badiou understands it, is the internal ethic associated with any militant politics, including the politics of rescuing victims from their foes under the humanitarian banner of putting ethics first.

 

The kernel of Badiou’s objection to humanitarian ethics lies neither in his formal account of what ethics is nor his embrace of fidelity as a virtue, but rather in his substantive claim that the suffering/martyrdom of the flesh is not an independent source of ethical value. The most sustained presentation of Badiou’s view occurs in his book on Saint Paul. Paul is here presented as the paradigm of ethical militancy based on a conversion event and faithful adherence to its truth. I am less concerned, however, with Badiou’s account of what fidelity to Christ meant for Paul, than with his account of the Christian event itself. The burden of Badiou’s argument is that, according to Paul, it was the resurrection and not the crucifixion that constitutes the universal “event” to which Christians maintain fidelity (see Badiou, Saint Paul, ch. 6). Why? Because death and suffering were old hat for mankind, but rebirth and eternal life were something new in the world and are now promised to all who believe:

 

For Paul himself . . . the event is not death, it is resurrection. . . . Suffering plays no role in Paul’s apologetic, not even in the case of Christ’s death. The weak, abject character of that death is certainly important for him, insofar as the treasure of the event . . . has to reside in an earthen vessel. But for Paul . . . the share of suffering is inevitable. . . . [I]n Paul there is certainly the Cross, but no path of the Cross. There is Calvary, but no ascent to Calvary . . . Paul’s preaching includes no masochistic propaganda extolling the virtues of suffering, no pathos of the crown of thorns, flagellations, oozing blood, or the gall-soaked sponge. . . . What constitutes the event in Christ is exclusively the Resurrection. (Saint Paul 66-8)

 

One sees what Badiou means about Paul–he was no Mel Gibson–and his fidelity to Christ has characteristics in common with Lenin’s fidelity to Marx in 1917 (7; see also Zizek, “Afterword: Lenin’s Choice”). Badiou, however, gives no good argument against interpreting Paul’s Christianity as the faith that Christ’s suffering and death atoned for the sins of mankind, an article of Christian faith which can be held quite separately from a belief in Christ’s bodily resurrection.⁵⁵

 

Although Badiou fails to demonstrate convincingly that Christ’s Passion, or, for that matter, Auschwitz, could not qualify (for purely formal reasons) as an event to which fidelity is possible, he does reopen the possibility that mass atrocities are not the only events that qualify, and that political revolutions (even or especially those that failed) might also be ethically transformative–not because of those who died, but because of the hopes for justice that were raised.

 

Does this mean that we must leave the argument here–as a choice between martyrdom and revolution, between an ethics of fear that Auschwitz will be repeated and one of hope for a future justice? Are we stuck at the present moment between the humanitarianism of Lévinas and Badiou’s radicalism, rooted in an extreme claim for the autonomy and primacy of politics?

 

If I thought this were our choice, I would reluctantly side with Badiou: my general preference is for action rather than patience; justice rather than peace; politics rather than ethics; and, perhaps, also for truth rather than feeling. But the most serious arguments that Badiou gives for his alternative to Lévinasian ethics are not themselves ethical, but rather mathematical. They concern the way that set theory represents the truth of the exception (“what happens”) within the ontological set of “what is” (see Badiou, “The Event as Trans-Being”). The ethical relevance Badiou draws from set theory is that truths of this kind can be added to languages and bodies as the raw subject matter of ethics. If ethics were concerned only with languages and bodies–meaning and pain–then ethics would be a matter of understanding others’ minds while rescuing their bodies; but because there are also truths, Badiou argues, ethics opens the possibility of fidelity to something more real than our present situation, and something that is constitutively outside it. This, of course, assumes that both ontology and politics precede ethics–that “what there is” is affected by “what happens” through subjective fidelity to the hope that there can be something more.

 

But Lévinas makes an ethical argument against all of these assumptions: What if Badiou’s fidelity to the event were to cause pain in the sense of useless suffering for the other? If insensitivity to that pain is the ultimate evil, then is this not an ethical argument against actions thought be consistent with the truth of an event such as the Russian Revolution, or May ’68? Is it ethically wrong to place the ontological truth of what happened then ahead of the feelings of others now? Why, ethically speaking, must we seek anything more?

 

A Lévinasian objection to Badiou would hold, I think, if physical suffering is the worst evil, save for the willingness to condone such suffering in others. We can, however, question the conception of ethics and human agency that presupposes, even after Auschwitz, that bodily pain and physical cruelty are the two worst things, unconditionally, and that ethics is about nothing more. What do suffering subjects lack and want that politics (and its accompanying fantasies) supply? How do we expect them to feel about themselves, and the rest of us, when these political fantasies take hold–and what are we, and they, permitted to do with such expectations? What are the specific ethical views of suffering and human agency that lie behind present-day humanitarian discourse, and what forms of politics do they allow and disallow? Answering these questions will allow us to say more about what is wrong with the moral psychology of victimhood, beyond observing that the pursuit of justice is missing from it at any level but that of face-to-face interactions.

 

91. First, however, we must question the generality of the core assumption behind all humanitarian ethics: that pain has no moral meaning for those who suffer it. In a brilliant article, the political anthropologist Talal Asad challenges the claim that, after Auschwitz, our primary ethical responsibility must be to alleviate pain and to avoid causing it. This view, he argues, denies agency to those who suffer pain–it assumes they do not suffer willingly–and invests agency in those who aid them. It denies the intelligibility and efficacy of a moral view in which pain (of certain kinds and at certain times) is actively sought as a way of achieving or representing moral virtue:

 

Christian and Islamic traditions have, in their different way, regarded suffering as the working through of worldly evil. For the suffering subject, not all pain is to be avoided; some pain must be actively endured if evil is to be transcended. (“Thinking” 92)

 

Asad’s point here brings us back to the moral imperative of “Never Again.” The humanitarian ethics that took root a half-century after Auschwitz repudiates, above all, the belief that human suffering has moral significance for those who undergo it, and therefore argues that we must not turn away. Although there are many other compelling reasons not to turn away when atrocities occur, the view that human suffering is the ultimate evil is not the right one. Moral agency, Asad suggests, is psychosomatic, in potentially good ways: it can induce states of bodily agony that saints, martyrs, and their acolytes regard as valuable achievements, and also (we might add) states of happiness (eudaimonia) that are at once mental and physical in a strong Socratic sense that removes the agony of death (see Vlastos 200-35). Even Lévinas acknowledges, as we have seen, the distinction between useless suffering and morally valuable suffering–between pain that is inflicted and pain that is actively sought on behalf of others, or as a way to improve or expiate one’s soul. The former can be understood through the post-Freudian concept of trauma–pain that may or may not be conscious when first suffered, and that may be repeated even when it is not remembered. It is primarily trauma (with its tendency to repetition) that is consciously experienced as happening again, and is, thus, the appropriate target of the imperative “Never Again.”

 

Morally significant pain–the pain of love, sacrifice, and even martyrdom–is better designated by the word “agony.” Agony may be no less intense than trauma, but it is never suffered unconsciously. Agony, moreover, is not something that is generally experienced by the sufferer or by bystanders to be happening again, but is something to be remembered and even honored as a moral singularity. Suffering agony (or religious passion) is generally considered to be morally transformative, and is sometimes actively sought. For this reason, stories of agony, the agony of saints and martyrs in particular, are considered to be exemplary, and sometimes (as in the passion of Christ) to serve as redemptive sacrifices on behalf of the community as a whole (pace Badiou’s interpretation of Paul).⁵⁶

 

Humanitarian ethics after Auschwitz reflects a cultural tendency to respond to all agony (whether moral or not) as though it were psychological trauma that becomes worse through the experience of repetition. This tendency severely truncates our own moral vocabulary in dealing with our feelings towards those whom we do and don’t aid, and makes us less and less capable of grasping the moral psychology of those who are capable of killing and dying for reasons of political theology. To make this point, however, we need not deny (with Lévinas) that events are morally compelling along with languages and bodies; nor need we deny (along with Badiou) that historical trauma can constitute events of a morally compelling kind, alongside revolutions. It is enough to say that physical suffering, the body in pain, is not an ethical absolute that renders moot political analysis and politically motivated action.

 

Once we stop using ethics as an evasion of politics, the ways in which the ethics of the neighbor are also a politics come into clear view. Thinking politically, we can decide when and whether to dehistoricize, to spatialize, and to localize broader problems–and when to rely on the compassion of the television-viewing public by presenting images of pain. We can also see once again that there is ethical virtue in struggle and not only in reconciliation; in action and not simply in patience; in justice and not only in peace. Finally, we can focus our appropriate concern with human suffering as much on the global forces that operate at a distance as on cruelties committed face-to-face.

 

Notes

 

The author is grateful to the University of California Humanities Research Institute for financial and other support, to Kenneth Reinhard for convening the group, and for the exceptionally helpful comments on earlier drafts of this paper (as well as the larger project of which it is a part) by the subgroup on “The Ethics and Politics of Proximity”: Rei Terada, Dana Cuff, and Eleanor Kaufman.

 

1. For distinguished recent contributions see Power, “A Problem From Hell,” and Ignatieff, Human Rights as Politics and Idolatry.

 

2. I here adapt a formulation from Badiou’s Languages of Worlds (forthcoming).

 

3. For recent examples see Card; Neiman; Glover; Copjec; Nino; Agamben, Remnants of Auschwitz; Cohen, Interrupting Auschwitz; and, most notably, Adorno.

 

4. The claim here is not that genocide arises only in periods of colonialism, but rather that the framework in which genocide becomes thinkable derives from the moral logic of colonialism.

 

5. For the relation between these two points of origin, see Seed.

 

6. For a recent discussion of the Haitian paradigm in the work of C.L.R. James, see Scott.

 

7. See Todorov, who puts the conquest of the New World in the context of the Reconquista of Spain and the Inquisition.

 

8. See Agamben, Homo Sacer for a critical genealogy of the present-day conception of the sacredness of life as the foundation of human rights. For the political implications of this development, see Rancière.

 

9. See Gross, Gourevitch, and Lindqvist, Exterminate the Brutes. On “exterminism” as both a policy and a fantasy, see Goldhagen, esp. parts I and VI.

 

10. See Hesse and Post. For a discussion of transitional justice following the U.S. Civil War, see Meister, “Forgiving and Forgetting.”

 

11. See Kateb. See also Shklar, “The Liberalism of Fear” and “Putting Cruelty First.” For a further discussion of Shklar’s argument, see Meister, “The Liberalism of Fear and the Counterrevolutionary Project.”

 

12. Cf. Badiou, Ethics 10ff and Meister, “Human Rights and the Politics of Victimhood.”

 

13. See Klein, “Mourning and its Relation to Manic-Depressive States” and “Some Reflections on the Oresteia.” See also Segal.

 

14. See Klein’s “Notes on Some Schizoid Mechanisms,” and “A Contribution to the Psycho-genesis of Manic-Depressive States.” See also entries 9, 11, and 13 in Hinshelwood’s Dictionary.

 

15. See Rorty for arguments grounding human rights on our subjectively contingent capacity to “feel for each other.”

 

16. “My awareness of my ethical obligation must not depend on any ‘gesture’ of claiming (literally or figuratively) to ‘comprehend’ the other” (Putnam 55, and see 41, 54).

17. Freud, Totem and Taboo 161; Group Psychology 57-146; Moses and Monotheism 1-138.

 

18. See Glover, Rummel, and Power, “Never Again” and “A Problem From Hell”. The concept of “genocide” itself was invented by legal scholar Raphaël Lemkin immediately after World War II, based on his seminal study of Nazi policies toward the populations of occupied countries.

 

19. Zizek, in Welcome to the Desert of the Real, discusses 9/11 in the context of such films as “Independence Day” and “The Matrix,” which prepared us at the level of fantasy to experience ourselves as the objects of destructive desire when the attacks actually occurred. His psychoanalytic point, not fully spelled out, is that “terror” is what we expected ourselves to feel in these circumstances–it was not the real trauma, but rather its fantasmatic symptom.

 

20. Certain genres of pornography also take a position of moral revulsion toward what is being shown. See Dean, ch. 1.

 

21. I leave aside the question of how widely political leaders who invoke such dangers are believed, or how openly they acknowledge the genocidal acts that are rationalized on such grounds.

 

22. On these conventions, see Sontag and Dean, ch. 3.

 

23. For a dissection of press accounts of ex-Yugoslavia in the 1990s, see Feher.

 

24. The Wilsonian antidote to a history of political victimization was nationhood–the right to be sovereign somewhere, even if it was somewhere else. His internationalism describes a system for protecting the sovereign coequality of self-determining “peoples.” “All peoples and nationalities” have a right, he said, “to live on equal terms of liberty and safety with one another, whether they be strong or weak” (Wilson 445f.).

 

25. Wilson’s view of the protection of minority rights in the international system is a variant of Marshallian federalism in which the local majority in a state becomes the virtual representatives of resident out-of-state minorities, thereby respecting on an equal basis their right to rule, albeit elsewhere. In Wilsonian internationalism, as distinct from Marshallian federalism, the main mechanisms for protecting individual human rights are political rather than judicial. Therefore, the principle of virtual representation has to be reversed. Instead of saying that foreign minorities are to be treated as well as the local majority treated itself, the implicit standard is the treatment that foreign majorities accord to their minorities. The link between Marshallian federalism and Wilsonian internationalism is further developed in Meister, “Sojourners and Survivors.” See also Meister, “The Logic and Legacy of Dred Scott.”

 

26. For discussions of the implementation of these ideas in the interwar period, see Claude and Maier.

 

27. “Well-founded fear of persecution” is the threshold condition for claims to political asylum under international law.

 

28. In the words of one scholar, “the effort of the state to become a nation aroused the determination of the nation to become a state” (Claude 9).

 

29. This view has been recently restated as a comprehensive theory of “deliberative democracy,” as distinguished from “aggregative democracy.” See Gutmann and Thompson, Why Deliberative Democracy? and Democracy and Disagreement. See also Koh and Slye. The standard rationale for majority rule as a technique of aggregative democracy is given in Sen, chs. 5 and 5*. For a balanced critique of both aggregative and deliberative conceptions of the common good, see Shapiro, chs. 1-2.

 

30. My account of Rwanda follows Mamdani’s. For a schematic version of his argument, see “Race and Ethnicity.”

 

31. For a discussion of the Clinton administration’s failure to act see Power’s “Bystanders to Genocide” and A Problem from Hell, ch. 10. The failures of the UN mission are described by its commander on the ground in Dallaire.

 

32. In the end, the policy of extermination did not involve popular mobilization. In the context of our overall argument, we should note that the techniques and concepts of the Holocaust were originally developed by German settler colonialism in Southwest Africa to exterminate the Herero natives. See Mamdani, When Victims Become Killers 10-13 and the sources cited therein.

 

33. See Tutu, ch. 11; for a secular version of this argument, see Mamdani, When Victims Become Killers 270-282. Mamdani points out that in Rwanda there was not the problem of ongoing beneficiaries that both South Africa and the U.S. faced, and so forgiveness would not stand in the way of redistribution. (Kagame, who commanded the invading Tutsi army, was then Vice-President of Tutsi-ruled Rwanda, and is now President.)

 

34. Are the murderous thoughts on which the politics of victimhood rests unconsciously directed, as Freud’s theory of depression suggests, against those who died the first time? And is the politics of “never again” really a way of saying “not yet” to their deaths? See Freud’s “Mourning and Melancholia.”

 

35. Was this outcome forestalled in South Africa just in the nick of time? In the 1980s a dystopic literature was produced by liberal white South Africans imagining what it would be like for disgraced whites to live in a post-revolutionary, black-ruled, country. See Gordimer. For a parable reflecting the actual experience of white South Africans in the post-apartheid 1990s, see Coetzee’s Disgrace, which confronts the possibility of confession without atonement.

 

36. For further development of these points, see Meister, “Sojourners and Survivors.”

 

37. See Höhne, chs. 13-14, esp. 333-9. This period in Eichmann’s life is well-described in Arendt’s Eichmann in Jerusalem 58-64.

 

38. These were the words of Eichmann’s prosecutor, Gideon Hausner. See Segev, ch. 6. For an account of how the trial and Arendt’s critique of it were received by Diaspora Jewry, see Novick, ch. 7.

 

39. See Shklar, Legalism 143-179, Kirchheimer, Bass (chs. 1 and 5), and Douglas.

 

40. The concerns are directly and clearly expressed in Arendt’s correspondence with Jaspers before, during, and after the trial. See Hannah Arendt/Karl Jaspers Correspondence. The most relevant letters are scattered over pp. 400-500.

 

41. This secularized description of the Jewish ethics of the neighbor really does make Jews responsible for all the suffering of humanity–but in a good way, and not because they have somehow benefited from the injustice done to other groups.

 

42. This conception of alterity as a relation with the other’s unconscious is proposed by Santner; see 9, 82. Santner does not, however, refer to the condition he describes as “extimacy.”

 

43. See Rieff, Part I, and Kennedy 13-35 and 296-316. The humanitarian response tends to be “lesser evil ethics.” See Ignatieff, The Lesser Evil.

 

44. “The wish to lend a sacrificial aura to the extermination of the Jews by means of the term ‘Holocaust’ was from this perspective an irresponsible historiographical blindness. The Jew living under Nazism is . . . a flagrant case of a homo sacer in the sense of a life that may be killed but not sacrificed. . . .The truth–which is difficult for victims to face, but which we must have the courage not to cover with sacrificial veils–is that the Jews were exterminated not in a mad and giant holocaust but exactly as Hitler had announced, ‘as lice,’ which is to say, as bare life” (Agamben, Homo Sacer 114).

 

45. The paradoxes in our ethical responses to suicide bombings are explored by Rose.

 

46. It is not entirely clear, by the time one comes to the following page, whether Lévinas is endorsing or caricaturing this view of the moral pain of third parties–the two interpretations are, perhaps, not mutually exclusive. In the footnote to this passage he explains: “This suffering in me is so radically mine that it cannot become the subject of any preaching. It is as suffering in me and not as suffering in general that welcome suffering–attested to in the spiritual tradition of humanity–can signify a true idea: the expiatory suffering of the just who suffers for others.”

 

47. In Lévinas’s secular theology, time is always created: it arises out of the ethically anterior relationship between the two and a Third who stands outside and suffers for their cruelty, but not from it.

 

48. See Arendt, The Human Condition 28-58; “Some Questions of Moral Philosophy”; and “Thinking and Moral Considerations.” Derrida fills the ethical lacunae in Schmitt’s concept of “friend” in The Politics of Friendship, chs. 4-6.

 

49. See Badiou, Ethics 72-77. Badiou’s alternative to “Ethics as non-Evil” is to define evils as the series of ordinary horrors that follow from pursuing with fidelity a non-truth as though it were a truth.

 

50. For Badiou’s discussions in English of the political “event” see Ethics, chs. 4-5. See also “The Event as Trans-Being” in Theoretical Writings 97-102, and Manifesto for Philosophy, ch. 8. See also Hallward, ch. 5.

 

51. This analysis is suggested in Badiou’s forthcoming Logics of Worlds.

 

52. For Badiou’s critique of the attempt to “radicalize” the evil of Hitler, see 62-7. His description of Marx as “an event for political thought” is on 69. He also describes the Cultural Revolution and May 1968 as events the fidelity to which produces “a truth” (42). In the unpublished manuscript of Logics of Worlds, he makes similar statements about Russia in 1917, German Spartacism, and even Spartacus himself.

 

53. “The only thing of which one can be guilty is having given ground relative to one’s desire” (Lacan 319).

 

54. See Power, “A Hero of Our Time.” Power here praises the ethics of Gen. Roméo Dallaire; her own unflinching reports on genocide display similar virtues.

 

55. Stress on the relation of Christ’s death to Jewish concepts of atonement is, in contrast, fundamental to Taubes.

 

56. For an account of the classical genre of spiritual biography in which the Gospels were written, see Hadas and Smith. See also Boyarin, Dying for God.

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Rei Terada

Departments of English and Comparative Literature
University of California, Irvine
terada@uci.edu

 

Ethics and Politics of Proximity reflects on the contemporary state of thought about proximate others, whether they be like or unlike oneself, neighbors, friends, rivals, or enemies. Coming from disparate disciplines (politics, literary studies, and architecture) and using heterogeneous principles, these essays by Robert Meister, Laura O’Connor, and Dana Cuff show that proximity is a testing ground for struggles between politics and ethics and for models of border cultures and shared space.¹ Proximity, the afterlife of approach, also retains the trace of time in spatial relations; no consciousness of proximity exists without at least a hypothesis of how one came to be near, whether one arrived before or after the other. Various discourses of proximity, however, may stress or repress temporal questions. In his essay for this issue, Robert Meister calls the “ethics of the neighbor” “a spatializing discourse within ethics, as distinct from a ‘temporalizing’ discourse that subordinates ethics to political rhetorics associated with memory and identity.”²Microinvestigations in the ethological field of “proxemics”–the study of such things as how close to one another we like to stand and speak–also reflect the always changing power relations between parties without necessarily offering a historical account of how these came to be, as Dana Cuff points out in her study of suburban architecture. In the uneasy territory of proximity, interactions that are not explicitly political must still be recognized or repressed as ambiguously so because of their place in a sequence of other exchanges.

 

Contemporary theory has been nervous about proximity. In the 1980s and early 1990s, critical theory and cultural studies often repeated that one should not identify too closely with the other. Too easy identification, by this logic, is said to fantasize harmony and mistranslate or appropriate the other’s communication.³ This seemingly self-critical suspicion of identification, however, may also flatter the self by attributing too much power to it. Arguably, it wishfully aggrandizes the self’s capacities in the mode of restraint. Shielding the autonomy of the other can turn into the comedy of cultural critics’ protecting their objects of study from a totalizing force that these same critics could never actually muster. In a redundant act of magical thinking, cultural theory was sometimes called on to safeguard differences even as those differences were posited as inevitable. Fifteen years later contemporary formulations of the ethics of proximity as opposed to its politics tend to take an even more radically self-subjugating form. Even as the stricture on identification remains largely in place, current schematizations of proximity often underestimate the difficulty of bearing with others, or masochistically embrace it. Contemporary ethics in the lineage of Lévinas figures the other as an overpowering given that makes assymetrical, ultimate demands; the subject endorses the pain of invasion as the very condition of subjectivity. Lévinas’s extreme version of responsibility at least has the merit of stressing the subject’s suffering. In Lacanian formulations, the suffering of self and other can be relegated to the realms of the imaginary. Eric Santner’s Psychotheology of Everyday Life mobilizes Franz Rosenzweig’s accounts of the banal heroism of life among one’s neighbors in order to suggest that each subject must bear the burden of the other’s unconscious. For Alain Badiou, the philosophy of Paul represents the possibility of overcoming the sectarian strife that Badiou attributes to over-attention to differences.⁴ Badiou and Slavoj Zizek give the Pauline equivalence of self and other a Lacanian twist, arguing that the relation of neighbor to self reflects the strangeness and externality of the self to itself. Nonetheless, Zizek insists, the “common void” in us and between us provides a basis for a reorganization of psycho-social life.⁵

 

These forms of proximity–upon me, too close to me, in me more than me–suggest a persistent lack of vocabulary for untraumatic relation.⁶ Santner’s position in particular is worth examining at greater length, since Santner understands the necessity of working through resistance to proximity. He shows how in The Star of Redemption Rosenzweig comes to view the repeated friction of small acts of communal involvement as the texture of love, and eventually compares the attitude Rosenzweig recommends with the analyst’s toward the analysand:

 

What Freud and Rosenzweig have done, then, is to elaborate the ethical relation introduced into the world by Judeo-Christian monotheism–love of God as love of neighbor–as the basis of a distinctly modern ethical conception: my ability to endure the proximity of the Other in their “moment of jouissance,” the demonic and undying singularity of their metaethical selfhood (in Freud’s view, it is perhaps only psychoanalysts who–at least ideally–embody this ethical attitude). To put it most simply, the Other to whom I am answerable has an unconscious, is the bearer of an irreducible and internal otherness, a locus of animation that belongs to no form of life. To cite Freud’s characterization of the Ratman, the face of the Other to whom I am answerable is one that in some form or another manifests a “horror at pleasure of his own of which he himself [is] unaware.” (82)

 

The phrase in parenthesis is crucial, since for Freud analysis is possible only because it is not simply a part of everyday life, and everyday life in the mode of the analyst’s hypothetically infinite patience would be cruel. Further, enduring another’s sexual horror as the type of neighbor relation in the love of God is frighteningly close to internalizing parental seduction. Jean Laplanche asks whether one might compare the sexualized messages of parents to children to the demands of God: “That God is enigmatic, that He compels one to translate, seems obvious in the entire Judaeo-Christian tradition of exegesis. Whether this enigma presupposes that the message is opaque to Himself is plainly a different question. Does God have an unconscious?” (191). Santner adduces Laplanche in order to argue that “every symbolic investiture” of personhood–beginning with the primal scene as unconscious display–produces a “kernel of ‘indignity’” about which we incline to be defensive, but toward which Rosenzweigian love may be open (84-85). Here as in Lévinas, the difficulties of proximity are fully acknowledged only to advocate even greater proximity. The subject is to be “release[d]” from its “labors to translate superegoic pressure into a meaningful communication/legislation” by the logic that working to escape the pressure only mires the subject more deeply (104). Although Freud and Laplanche might agree that escape fantasies can perpetuate the wrong kind of excitement, they do not, like Lacan and Zizek, lose their sense of outrage at psychic invasion and the rightfulness of one’s desire to escape it. The project of analyzing and undoing interpellated messages may be interminable, but still, according to Laplanche, “the development of the human individual is to be understood as an attempt to master, to translate, these enigmatic, traumatizing messages. . . . Analysis is first and foremost a method of deconstruction (ana-lysis), with the aim of clearing the way for a new construction, which is the task of the analysand” (165). This series of associations–from banal contact to parental seduction by God–suggests that the memory of psychic intrusion may lie behind our objection to the frictive presence of proximate others. “Being able to bear the institutions and the people we depend upon is called masochism,” Adam Phillips suggests (49).

 

It may be the case that relation is unsustainable, as Freud suspects in Civilization and Its Discontents, even as we survive it. If so, it is not clear what our attitude toward this state of affairs should be. I’d suggest simply that this question should be approached as much as possible without presuppositions and a priori moral obligations. We feel so guilty about having difficulty with fundamental sociality that we do not even know what we think before we impale ourselves on imagined inexorabilities that bear their own social and political consequences. Analysts are familiar with patients who rush to submit to imaginary laws just to end the discomfort of mixed feelings toward others and the pressures of choice. Ethics and politics could take a page from prosaic clinical literature and simply hold ambiguities in mind longer to see what they may be composed of.

 

The particular combinations of attraction and repulsion in proximate relations and the histories of conflict that create them should bear in some way on one’s responsibility to someone else. Even the best proximate relations contain particular knots of love-hate. The difference between working through with Freud and “going through the fantasy” with Lacan may be remaining alive to the contingent forces that produce these knots and coming up with the empiricist empathy to undo them at length.⁷ Although I don’t speak for the authors of these essays, as their reader I admire their taking the time to dwell in the details of proximate entanglements–the logics of victims’ and victors’ justice (Meister), the poetic forms of intimate ethnic rivalry (O’Connor), the disparate imaginary neighbors projected by architectural conventions and innovations (Cuff). Their unblinking descriptions of historical dilemmas help us understand the political and power relations that have made the ethics of proximity difficult to bear.

 

Notes

 

1. The essays by Meister and Cuff, as well as this preface, are products of “The Ethics of the Neighbor,” a seminar sponsored by the University of California Humanities Research Institute. The authors would like to thank Kenneth Reinhard, convener of the seminar, and David Theo Goldberg, Director of the Institute, for the opportunity to do this research.

 

2. See also Derrida’s comment on the figure of the neighbor in Rogues: Two Essays on Reason: “Perhaps in the discussion to follow I might be able to elaborate on a series of values most often associated with that of the brother: the values of the neighbor [prochain] (in the Christian sense), the fellow, the compeer or the like [semblable] (the enormous question of the like: I tried to argue in my seminar this year that pure ethics, if there is any, begins with the respectable dignity of the other as the absolute unlike, recognized and nonrecognizable, indeed as unrecognizable, beyond all knowledge, all cognition and all recognition: far from being the beginning of pure ethics, the neighbor as like or as resembling, as looking like, spells the end or the ruin of such an ethics, if there is any….)” (60).

 

3. A deconstructive version of the argument against losing the other through overcloseness occurs in Derrida’s Memoires for Paul de Man. This is the form in which I’ve found the argument most convincing.

 

4. Badiou’s Paul prescribes the redoubling of a local imperative into a universal one: “it is incumbent upon love to become law so that truth’s postevental universality can continuously inscribe itself in the world, rallying subjects to the path of life.” For Badiou, Paul’s ontology is empty because his Christianity is based on its most fabulous element, the Resurrection; Paul “knows that by holding fast to this point as real, one is unburdened of all the imaginary that surrounds it” (4-5). Badiou’s logic is a version of traditional metaphysics’ historical contempt for “merely empirical” experience figured as a burden.

 

5. See, for example, his gloss on Badiou in The Ticklish Subject, which phrases the foundational nature of the void in even more general terms: “There is no Order of Being as a positive ontologically consistent Whole: the false semblance of such an Order relies on the self-obliteration of the Act. In other words, the gap of the Act is not introduced into the Order of Being afterwards: it is there all the time as the condition that actually sustains every Order of Being” (238).

 

6. Perhaps untraumatic relation that respects the rights of the self is unpopular because it has too often been the domain of socially conservative theories of market force. Yet there is nothing necessary, and a great deal that is tense, about the connection of self-respect to capitalism.

 

7. For a defense of Freudian mourning pitched against Lacan, see Ricciardi.

Works Cited

 

• Badiou, Alain. Saint Paul: The Foundation of Universalism. 1997. Trans. Ray Brassier. Stanford: Stanford UP, 2003.
• Derrida, Jacques. Memoires for Paul de Man. Trans. Cecile Lindsay, Jonathan Culler, and Eduardo Cadava. New York: Columbia UP, 1986.
• — . Rogues: Two Essays on Reason. Trans. Pascale-Anne Brault and Michael Naas. Stanford: Stanford UP, 2004.
• Laplanche, Jean. “Interpretation between Determinism and Hermeneutics: A Restatement of the Problem.” Essays on Otherness. Trans. Philip Slotkin. London: Routledge, 1999. 138-165.
• —. “Seduction, Persecution, Revelation.” Essays on Otherness. Trans. Philip Slotkin. London: Routledge, 1999. 166-96.
• Phillips, Adam. The Beast in the Nursery: On Curiosity and Other Appetites. New York: Vintage, 1998.
• Ricciardi, Alessia. The Ends of Mourning: Psychoanalysis, Literature, Film. Stanford: Stanford UP, 2003.
• Santner, Eric. On The Psychotheology of Everyday Life: Reflections on Freud and Rosenzweig. Chicago: U of Chicago P, 2001.
• Zizek, Slavoj. The Ticklish Subject: The Absent Centre of Ontology. London: Verso, 1999.

 

Christopher Kocela

Department of English
Georgia State University
engcpk@langate.gsu.edu

 

Maurice Yacowar is right that The Sopranos “bears the critical analysis routinely accorded good literature, drama, and films” (19). Yet critical discussion of the program so far has not considered its interest in race. This is certainly not for lack of provocation. In almost every episode, Tony Soprano invents a new epithet for the racial “others” he encounters at work and at home. He curses out an African-American traffic cop as an “affirmative action cocksucker” (S3E5) and describes his daughter’s Black and Jewish boyfriend as a “Hasidic homeboy.”¹ Nor is Tony’s “racist retrograde fucking asshole personality,” to quote his daughter Meadow (S3E4), an anomaly in the series. Tony’s description of the police officer, in particular, reiterates sentiments about affirmative action and racial equality that circulate in the Soprano household during Meadow’s process of applying to college, which plays out during the entire second season of the series. One of the more memorable moments in that season is the scene in which Carmella Soprano offers Joan Cusamano, Secretary of the Georgetown University Alumni Association, a ricotta pie with pineapples in return for a letter of recommendation for Meadow. Neither Joan’s refusal to be threatened nor the fact that she has already written a letter for a “wonderful young Dominican boy from the projects” (S2E8) holds any sway with Carmella Soprano, who goes so far as to suggest a viable lie about the boy in the interest of promoting her daughter.² Although books and articles about the series have engaged claims, like those of Camille Paglia, that the show stereotypes Italian-Americans, there has been little effort to endow the construction of racial and ethnic difference in The Sopranos with the same degree of complexity accorded its treatment of gangster cinema, psychoanalysis, or gender.³Tony’s reactions to figures like the African-American police officer are far from simple. In light of his wealth and connections to highly placed civic officials, the irony of Tony’s claims about victimization and his use of affirmative action as a term to ground that victimization speak to the way in which he negotiates his status as both a privileged white subject and an ethnic victim. Scenes like this establish a subtext that runs throughout the series, engaging cultural anxieties about the representation of whiteness in a way that helps account for the show’s popularity.

 

A common assumption in “whiteness studies” is that in Western culture, those designated or able to pass as white experience whiteness as an unacknowledged system of privileges whose operation is difficult to recognize since whiteness appears, to them, as an “empty” cultural category. Hence to analyze the emergence and functioning of whiteness is to engage in a form of anti-racist practice.⁴ Recently, however, interventions in this field have taken aim at the notion that whiteness has ever been invisible, even to whites. In turn, some proponents of whiteness studies have begun to doubt their initial assumption that heightening white racial consciousness might help end racism.

 

Ruth Frankenburg and Mike Hill have been careful to register their own changing and conflicted relationship with the subject they helped popularize. In “The Mirage of Unmarked Whiteness” (2001), Frankenburg challenges the idea that she had advanced–that whiteness is invisible–by arguing that “the more one scrutinizes it . . . the more the notion of whiteness as an unmarked norm is revealed to be a mirage or indeed, to put it even more strongly, a white delusion” (73). According to Frankenburg, despite the prevailing opinion of most theorists of whiteness, white racial consciousness has actually been on the rise for some time in the United States owing to affirmative action and the challenges put to it in the late 1980s and the 1990s. Moreover, this new racial awareness denies a facile correlation between racial self-consciousness and anti-racist sentiment among white subjects. Analyzing interviews with whites from across the United States, Frankenburg finds that most interviewees, regardless of class or location, tend to see whiteness not as a system of privilege but of victimization. Her conclusion is that many whites now exhibit a more complex and contradictory understanding of whiteness than even its theorists tend to admit:

 

On one level white people were more conscious of themselves as white and more conscious of themselves as living and acting in a racialized world. But in these interviews, race consciousness did not correlate with antiracism. Rather, what I witnessed as I listened to these accounts was neither race cognizance nor color- and power-evasiveness, but rather a hybrid of the two, that which one might name "power-evasive race cognizance." . . . It is now possible to make two claims simultaneously. One is that African Americans and Latinos do not need the "handouts" of affirmative action because they are perfectly capable of achieving without help. The second is that when African Americans and Latinos do succeed alongside whites, this is not because of their own efforts and talents, but rather because of unfair assistance. (91)

 

Frankenburg’s observations lend weight to Hill’s recent analysis of the romanticized “white minority” that has come to obsess both the popular and academic imagination. Hill introduces his After Whiteness: Unmaking an American Majority, with an account of a trip to a 2002 conference of the American Renaissance–a group devoted to preserving the white race on the verge of its supposed collapse into minority status. Hill makes discomfiting comparisons between the “memory of whiteness” sought by this overtly racist group and the first popular surge of whiteness studies in the late 1990s, in which “particularizing whiteness as a normative historical fiction, combined with an under-interrogated desire to see that race on the margins, carried good professional and even political currency” (3). According to Hill, the study of whiteness will never be able to surmount the politically disturbing contradictions in which it is rooted and which, in its more naïve forms, it pins exclusively on mass culture (8). For that reason, the most responsible form of whiteness studies in Hill’s view is that which examines “how the white majority’s imagined move into the past is coordinated with its thoroughly agitated status in the present” (8). This amounts to a study of “after-whiteness,” which focuses not on the invisibility or unrepresentability of whiteness as such, but on the “various forms of misrecognition that now accompany the act of racial self-regard” (12).

 

In this essay I argue that The Sopranos interrogates the problem of white racial consciousness in keeping with the “after whiteness” theses developed by Frankenburg and Hill. Frankenburg’s notion of power-evasive race cognizance helps name and diagnose Tony and Carmella’s reactions to the African-American traffic cop and to Joan Cusamano. Their reactions recur in various forms throughout the series and help ground its portrayal of whiteness as an American fantasy whose psychological hold over the imagination depends on what Hill calls its “absent presence.”⁵ Through its complex treatment of Italian-American identity, The Sopranos simultaneously mourns and celebrates the advent of a lost white majority in the United States. In this it supports the claims of Valerie Babb and Matthew Frye Jacobson that television plays a foundational role in establishing whiteness as an American norm (Babb 44), but with an important qualification. Where an earlier program like Dragnet served to authorize the mainstream equation of “Caucasian” and “white” (Jacobson 97), in The Sopranos whiteness is a tool that profits a criminal if not entirely oppositional take on the American Way. The vehicle for this presentation is the show’s central protagonist, Tony Soprano, a character who is both deeply invested in, and in deep denial about, his status as a white male subject. Tony’s recurring panic attacks represent the racial anxiety which, in Kalpana Seshadri-Crooks’s Lacanian analysis, arises as the byproduct of the desire for whiteness in contemporary American culture. The promise held out by the show in the form of Tony’s on-again off-again therapy is that this anxiety can somehow be “cured”–a promise whose gradual tarnishing over the first five seasons of the series reflects the fading faith of those who have grown dubious about the political and theoretical goals of whiteness studies.

 

Talking to the Wrong White Man

 

In an interview for the DVD box set of The Sopranos Season One, director and creator David Chase attributes the uniqueness and appeal of the series to the fact that it tackles the domestic issues and psychological problems attached to being a crime boss. While the germ of the series, according to Chase, was the image of a mob boss undergoing psychoanalysis (a concept picked up the same year, apparently coincidentally, by the film Analyze This), the form of the show stemmed from Chase’s notion that the domestic life of the gangster was the only territory left for exploration at this point in the history of the genre. Whether or not Chase is correct about the show’s appeal, it is certainly the case that promotion of The Sopranos has consistently foregrounded Tony’s divided loyalties to family and business, from the series’ tag-line, “If one family doesn’t get him, the other will,” to the title of S5E1, “The Two Tonys.”⁶ Meanwhile, through numerous twists and turns in the series’ narrative (and the killing of major characters at regular intervals), Tony’s psychotherapy has remained the primary vehicle through which his divided loyalties come to light. In S1E7, Tony’s analyst, Jennifer Melfi, reads Tony’s frequent and debilitating panic attacks as evidence that he is afraid of losing his family. Despite sometimes violent reactions from her patient, Jennifer repeatedly identifies Tony’s desire to protect his family as the overriding, and paradoxical, motivation for his dangerous business practices.

 

By foregrounding Tony’s divided self and loyalties, The Sopranos calls attention to what Pellegrino D’Acierno calls the “double bind” of Italian-American identity. According to D’Acierno, Italian-American subjectivity is conventionally portrayed as split between a weak, “good” family and a strong, “bad” family, each defined through its relationship to the American Dream. The good family betrays itself and is left powerless by its assimilation to American culture and ideals, while the bad family prospers by interpreting the American Dream through organized crime. That these two families cannot be represented without each other is key to the dominant mythic narration of American culture. Accordingly, the most powerful examples of Italian-American cinema revise this mythic narrative, often by challenging the conventions of the gangster film as a cultural blueprint for Italian-American ethnicity. In D’Acierno’s view, Francis Coppola’s The Godfather trilogy disturbs the majoritarian framework through which Italian-American identity is constructed, creating hero-figures distanced from the audience by their obvious ethnicity. Even more powerfully, Martin Scorsese’s work occupies what D’Acierno calls “the strict position of the ethnic cinema: the cinema of ‘divided consciousness’ in which the ‘cursed part’–the secret wound of ethnicity–is displayed” (567). In films like Mean Streets, GoodFellas, and Casino, this wound of ethnicity is expressed through the destruction of the patriarchal order that grounds the mythic place of the strong Italian family. Where Coppola remains committed to a “cinema of fathers,” Scorsese’s films construct a “cinema of sons” in which the family is dissolved by the brutalities of ghetto life. Here authentic father figures come to be replaced by local mob bosses or weak godfathers who cannot provide the centering influence of a Don Corleone. By challenging the mythic narration that defines Italian-American identity, Scorsese’s films create an ethnic cinema which forces its audience to enter directly into the ruined lifeworld and language of its lost children.

 

The indebtedness of The Sopranos to the work of Coppola and especially of Scorsese has received ample critical attention. Much scholarly celebration of the show as an icon of postmodernism hinges on its nostalgic engagement with previous gangster films.⁷ But beyond the unprecedented attention paid by the series to the domestic side of Mafia life (a focus well-suited to its televisual medium), much of the uniqueness of The Sopranos resides in the way it interrogates the mythic two-family structure of Italian-American identity. If previous installments of the gangster genre sought to foreground the wound of Italian-American ethnicity, The Sopranos foregrounds and interrogates the (fantasmatic) wound of white racial identification that is the result of the Soprano family’s near-total assimilation into mainstream American culture. This “wound” is revealed in various forms of power-evasive race cognizance, such as Tony’s reaction to his speeding ticket, that are predicated on a perceived or threatened loss of a white majoritarian order. Unlike the very real demise of the Italian patriarchal order in Scorsese’s films, the passing of the white patriarchal order in The Sopranos is consistently portrayed as a fantasmatic loss–yet one with real effects for those who might mourn or celebrate it. The result, I suggest, is that The Sopranos sheds light on the political and economic stakes of perpetuating cultural fantasies of a lost white majority in contemporary U.S. culture.

 

For Mike Hill, the need to analyze fantasies of a post-white world derives from the fact that such fantasies have captured progressive and reactionary poles of the American cultural imaginary. Backed by statistical trends which appear to forecast a coming “white minority,” numerous groups–including academic multiculturalists, the Promise Keepers (a Christian men’s group), and the neofascist National Alliance–describe a post-white America in which the earlier black/white dichotomy of U.S. race relations gives way to a new multiethnic or post-ethnic reality. In these formulations, the civil rights movement of the 1950s and 60s is an important statistical and political benchmark, since the drive to promote models of racial and ethnic multiplicity is often made in the name of civil rights reforms and the decline (based on official reports like the U.S. census) in white identification since that time (39). Yet for Hill the promotion of a post-binaristic, post-white national imaginary is problematic given the statistical persistence of a clear non-white/white divide where income is concerned.⁸ Hill asks: “What happens to civil rights-inspired forms of racial identity in the post-binaristic future intimated here? The question is crucial, since the distribution of wealth is still stubbornly sutured to a recognizably race-divided social order” (35). Hill’s answer, which is also the central argument of his book, is that the new form of identity politics encouraged by proponents of post-whiteness violates the civil rights legacy (and the ideals of the liberal state) on which it appears to rely. The “post-white analytic” developed by Hill thus seeks to place under suspicion “the idea of racial self-recognition and to link the various forms of misrecognition that accompany that act to the terminal permutations of a waning liberal state” (9; 25).⁹

 

The Sopranos depicts a world in which Hill’s worst suspicions about the cultural fantasy of lost whiteness are borne out. In particular, the series frequently demonstrates how visions of a lost white majority are deliberately deployed in order to mask and perpetuate black/white economic boundaries. Several of the series’ subplots focus on the way whites manipulate nostalgia for a black and white model of U.S. race relations. Here references abound to the civil rights movement and its immediate legacy, the urban race riots of the late 1960s. In S4E7, Tony, Ralph Siforetto (one of Tony’s captains), and Assemblyman Zellman (a highly placed friend) meet in a sauna to discuss an urban housing development scam with one of Zellman’s African-American compatriots, Maurice. The business under negotiation involves the misuse of government funds designed to assist low-income, inner city families, a plan that leads to group recollections of an “earlier” period in U.S. race relations:

 

Zellman: "Summer of '67, we were both home on break. I'm interning at the state legislature and he [to Maurice]--what were you doing?"Maurice: “Uh…East Nook Food Co-op.”

 

Zellman: “Right. But come July–”

 

Tony: “The Newark riots.”

 

Ralph: “What a fuckin’ summer that was!”

 

Zellman: “Later that year Maurice and I helped organize one of the first black voting drives.”

 

Tony: “Maurice, uh, were you around for Anthony Imperiale? The ‘White Knight’?”

 

Maurice: “Around? Who you think he was fightin’ against? ”

 

Zellman: “‘Italian pride! Keep Newark white!’”

 

Maurice: "Aspiring Klansmen, some of those boys." (S4E7)

 

Invoking earlier, monolithic visions of whiteness in the form of Anthony Imperiale and the Ku Klux Klan, Tony and Zellman dissociate themselves from that past, calling attention to the “new” racial dynamics of a post-white world in which they and Maurice can discuss business in, of all places, a sauna. That neither Tony nor Zellman actually believes in the breakdown of a black/white racial binary is made evident later in the episode, however, when Tony instructs Zellman to hire blacks from one of Maurice’s “youth gang outreach programs” to clear out the crack houses they intend to buy. When Zellman asks Tony, “Why didn’t your guys roust ’em?” Tony responds ironically: “Oh, nice! Bunch of white guys settin’ off caps in the ghetto. That won’t attract any attention at all!” Tony’s response betrays his awareness of, and identification with, a majoritarian model of whiteness whose passing he had appeared to celebrate with Maurice. His desire not to call attention to the black/white racial binary also reveals the importance of remaining silent about the racial dynamics reinforced by his business practices–dynamics that become clear when Zellman is confronted outside one of his new properties by an African-American girl hoping for a “nice house.” In this episode, the absent presence of whiteness is expressed when privileged blacks and whites share profits at the expense of African-American children.¹⁰

 

The subplot of S2E2 focuses similarly on Tony’s resolution of a labor dispute between an Italian-American construction company and a group of disgruntled black joint-fitters. Early in the episode, a black preacher exhorts an angry mob of African-American workers to shut down one of Masserone Brothers’ construction sites. Amplified by a megaphone, the reverend’s voice plainly evokes that of Martin Luther King, Jr. and his message locates the outrage of his listeners in the broader context of labor discrimination against blacks:

 

The black man industrialized the North, but we're still fighting for jobs. Over twenty-five joint-fitters on this site, not a black man to be found! I'll tell you why. Black joint-fitters, like all black artisans, have been shut out of the unions, out of work while the white joint-fitter is filling his stomach! (S2E2)

 

Despite the reverend’s impassioned rhetoric, however, we soon learn that he is in cahoots with Tony, who has been commissioned by the construction company to break up the demonstration. A later scene depicts a brutal attack on the black workers by a horde of Tony’s men, who surprise their victims while the reverend engages and distracts them. In this episode, civil rights rhetoric is employed specifically to facilitate white-on-black violence. When Tony and the reverend meet at the end of the episode to divide up their profits, we witness once again a “post-white” world in which privileged black and white men share the profits of a business whose victims are exclusively African-American.¹¹

 

Tony’s ability to affirm or deny his whiteness, as the situation dictates, indicates the originality of The Sopranos‘ treatment of the gangster genre and its two-family myth of Italian-American identity. Where the difference between “good” and “bad” Italian families is traditionally established as a contrast between assimilation and poverty on the one hand and ethnic difference and criminal financial success on the other, Tony’s business endeavours challenge the distinction between good and bad families by demonstrating the instrumentality of Tony’s assimilated status–his whiteness–to his criminal activities. The fact that Tony profits by deflecting attention away from his whiteness implies a fundamental continuity between the white majority and the Mafia itself, in which membership is defined by silence or omerta. In this The Sopranos seconds the analytical work of early whiteness studies by revealing that white privilege is maintained through its invisibility, enforced through silence. At the same time, by breaking down a fundamental difference between good and bad families, the series also casts new light on the conventional “ethnic wound” of Italian-American identity. That wound derives from the complex and largely disavowed historical relationship between Italian-American ethnicity and whiteness itself. As numerous theorists have observed, Italian-American ethnicity serves as a privileged site for the investigation of whiteness in the United States. Italians, more than most other European immigrants, became classified as white only gradually, after enduring much racial discrimination.¹² In D’Acierno’s view, the long-established status of Italian-Americans as “atavistic Whites” explains why they continue to be constructed in popular film and television as “the Other who is not an Other,” a group “overdetermined with respect to both the majority and the other minorities” (618-19). But in The Sopranos, Tony’s ability to deploy images of a lost white majority for his own benefit demonstrates that his “wound” of ethnic difference also serves as a weapon against those more clearly marked by racial difference in contemporary American culture. The shift of focus away from the gangster’s Italian-American ethnicity to his white racial identification is particularly significant in light of the fact that, as Hill points out, it is the rise of ethnicity as a paradigm for identity that is most often singled out as proof of the end of the white majority.¹³ Through its treatment of Italian-American identity, The Sopranos suggests that the so-called post-white ethnicity, far from problematizing black/white racial boundaries, actually works to perpetuate them.

 

That the celebration of ethnic difference can serve as a smokescreen for the maintenance of whiteness is a central thesis of Jacobson’s Whiteness of a Different Color: European Immigrants and the Alchemy of Race. Jacobson describes the process of “becoming-Caucasian” as the main paradigm governing the experience of immigration and assimilation for European peoples in the twentieth-century United States.¹⁴ According to Jacobson, the scientific category of a “Caucasian race” emerges in the 1920s as a means of dissolving the racial distinctions among whites that had prevailed in the American cultural imaginary up to that time. An earlier era of anxiety over mass immigration had resulted in racial differentiation between Anglo-Saxons, Celts, Hebrews, Mediterraneans, and Slavs, among others; increased contact of Northern and Western American whites with a migrating African-American population after the turn of the century changed the racial dynamic of the country in a way that helped consolidate whiteness as a cultural and racial grouping. The gradual reconsolidation of whiteness received a significant boost during the civil rights movement of the 1950s and 1960s, which further polarized the organization of racial difference in the United States. As a result, the earlier racial distinctions among white groups tended not only to dissolve, but to be forgotten altogether with the advent of “ethnic” difference. As Jacobson writes,

 

ethnicity provided a paradigm for assimilation which erased race as a category of historical experience for European and some Near Eastern immigrants. Not only did these groups now belong to a unified Caucasian race, but race was deemed so irrelevant to who they were that it became something possessed only by "other" peoples. (110)

 

The white “ethnic revival” which emerges following the civil rights movement is, for Jacobson, the clearest symptom of the naturalization of whiteness as an unmarked racial category, whose invisibility and universality depends on historical amnesia about the process of becoming-Caucasian.¹⁵

 

The Sopranos treats white racial misrecognition most explicitly in S1E10, “A Hit is a Hit.” In this episode, Tony finds himself drawn to the country-club culture of his assimilated Italian-American neighbor, Dr. Cusamano, while also helping his Jewish business partner, Heche, fend off the potentially hostile advances of Massive Genius, an African-American hip-hop tycoon who charges that Heche’s record label in the 1950s took unfair advantage of African-American songwriters. Caught between the pull of the white suburban “mayonnaisers” on one side, and the demands of the black gangsta rapper on the other, Tony is forced to reflect on both family halves of his Italian-American identity. He is simultaneously the “last white ethnic” in the eyes of Cusamano and friends, eager to hear the ritual mysteries of the Mafia, and–from the perspective of Massive Genius–the “first White man, the one who defends turf and still has not lost his body to embourgeoisement” (D’Acierno 619). The episode culminates in two structurally similar scenes, both built around the interrogation of whiteness as a marker of racial and ethnic difference. The first is the sit-down between Massive Genius, Heche, Tony, and their respective crews, in which Massive presents his demand for $400,000 in royalties from F Note Records. Citing a study about the exploitation of African-Americans in the film industry, Massive justifies his claims by arguing that “injustices to blacks in the music business are far worse than even in Hollywood.” But Heche has very different ideas about his place, given his Jewish heritage, in the history of black exploitation. Backed by Tony, Heche tells Massive Genius: “You’re talking to the wrong white man, my friend. My people were the white man’s nigger when yours were still painting their faces and chasing zebras.” Heche’s response lays bare Tony’s habitual and strategic racial misrecognition. Heche in effect affirms and denies his status as a “white man” while obviating the issue of his personal guilt. Indeed, he does not deny his exploitation of the black songwriters (a fact he has already conceded to Tony four episodes earlier). Instead, Heche invokes the history of Jewish persecution as a shield against responsibility for any claims made against the white majority, a strategy that makes him the “wrong white man” in relation to Massive Genius’s claims for racial justice.

 

Heche’s racial misrecognition is mirrored in a parallel scene later in the episode. This time the sit-down is between Tony and Jennifer, and the point of contention is Tony’s resistance to the comfortable lifestyle of his Italian-American neighbors, the Cusamanos:

 

Tony: "My wife thinks I need to meet new people."Jennifer: “So?”

 

Tony: “Come on, you’re Italian, you understand. Guys like me were brought up to think that medigana are fucking bowlers. The truth is the average white man is no more boring than the millionth conversation over who should’ve won, Marciano or Ali.”

 

Jennifer: “So am I to understand that you don’t consider yourself white?”

 

Tony: “I don’t mean white like Caucasian. I mean a white man, like our friend Cusamano. How he’s Italian but he’s a medigon. He’s what my old man would’ve called a Wonder Bread wop. You know, he eats his Sunday gravy out of a jar.”

 

Tony’s distinction between “Caucasian” and “white man” speaks directly to Jacobson’s thesis regarding the history of becoming-Caucasian in the United States. The fact that Tony mentions and then refuses to consider his status as Caucasian (“I don’t mean white like Caucasian”) replays the cultural forgetting of becoming-Caucasian that makes whiteness appear a natural racial category. Moreover, Tony’s invocation of the medigon reinforces Jacobson’s notion that the discourse of ethnicity diverts attention from the historical process of becoming-Caucasian. The appeal to ethnic rather than racial difference helps maintain silence about just who it is who benefits from post-white cultural fantasies. In The Sopranos, however, the economic victors are always clear: Massive Genius and his black songwriters never get their money. Scorsese creates an ethnic cinema in which the breakdown of the Italian patriarchal order signals the doom of its lost sons; The Sopranos, in contrast, predicates the success of the “wrong white men” on manipulated fantasies of whiteness. We do not learn from The Sopranos the language of ethnic sons deprived of their Italian godfathers, but the language of racial misrecognition spoken by sons whose lost white fathers were never really their own.

 

Whatever Happened to Gary Cooper?

 

By subtly interrogating the relationship between Italian-American ethnicity and white racial consciousness, The Sopranos agrees with the aims of recent academic studies such as Joseph P. Cosco’s Imagining Italians and Guglielmo and Salerno’s Are Italians White?, which build on the work of Roediger and Jacobson. These texts revisit the historical construction of Italian-American identity through the lens of whiteness, examining the details of becoming-Caucasian for Italians and the reasons for the later denial and forgetting of that process. Jennifer Guglielmo’s introduction to Are Italians White? begins with this point: “Italians were not always white, and the loss of this memory is one of the tragedies of racism in America” (1). Thomas Guglielmo’s chapter in the same volume concludes that “Italian Americans’ whiteness . . . was their single most powerful asset in the ‘New World’; it gave them countless advantages over ‘nonwhites’ in housing, jobs, schools, politics, and virtually every other meaningful area of life. Without appreciating this fact, one has no hope of fully understanding Italian American history” (42-43). Cosco’s text concludes with a chapter entitled “The Fight for Whiteness,” which likewise addresses the need to attend to the history of Italian-Americans as white Americans. But while The Sopranos anticipates and lends weight to these cultural and historical studies, the series also speaks, through its emphasis on Tony’s psychotherapy, to the unconscious and symbolic structure of white racial identification. The psychoanalytic framework through which we learn so much about Tony encourages us to see his problems and anxieties as symptomatic not only of the complexities that attend Italian-American whiteness, but of whiteness in general.

 

In this regard The Sopranos supports the Lacanian model of race developed by Kalpana Seshadri-Crooks. According to Seshadri-Crooks, race is a “structure of relations, a signifying chain that through a process of inclusions and exclusions constitutes a pattern for organizing human difference” (4). Within the structure of this signifying chain, raced subjects come to inhabit symbolic positions such as “black,” “Asian,” or “white” based on their relationship to a master signifier, Whiteness. In its function as master signifier, Whiteness holds out the (always unfulfilled) promise of wholeness to the split subject of racial difference. The symbolic logic of race is, on this reading, akin to (and based on) that of sexual difference in the Lacanian framework. But there is a crucial difference between racial and sexual difference, according to Seshadri-Crooks. Although racial difference depends upon sexual difference for its effects (20), race is not a fantasy fundamental to the subject. Whiteness, unlike the “missing signifier” of sexual difference, is purely historical and cultural (21), designating no absence or lack in the Real. Moreover, Whiteness as a master signifier is readily visible; indeed, our subjective investment in racial difference stems from its visibility, and from the fact that this visibility appears to bespeak biological essence (21). It is because of its visibility that race, much more so than class or ethnicity, withstands deconstructive and historicizing attempts to dismantle it. At the same time, it is also the visibility of race that can lead to racial anxiety when the subject unconsciously recognizes the false nature of the promises held out by Whiteness. Seshadri-Crooks describes racial anxiety as the foreclosure of desire in Lacanian terms:

 

Anxiety is an effect, according to Lacan, that appears when there is no possibility of desire, when there is a "lack of a lack." . . . The objet a that race produces is a lethal object, its own disavowed historicity, produced out of the lack of a lack--a phobic object that tries to make the barred Other, the desire of the symbolic, exist. This phobic objet a I suggest is localized as the pre-discursive mark on the surface of the body. The effect of "nature" that race produces emerges from its anxiety, its disavowal of its own historicity. This is the peculiarity of race which is neither in the Real, like sex, nor wholly discursive, like class or ethnicity. (45-46)

 

Faced with the realization that Whiteness offers no possibility for desire, the raced subject experiences anxiety as the recognition of the false nature of a fantasy in which he or she nonetheless continues to believe.

 

Though Seshadri-Crooks takes pains to distinguish her Lacanian analysis from the historicizing efforts of whiteness studies, her theory helps explain the “thoroughly agitated status” (Hill 8) of white racial identification in an age where whiteness itself is constructed as a lost object of desire. Like Hill, Seshadri-Crooks is critical of the liberal consensus that encourages celebration of racial and ethnic difference; but where Hill casts suspicion on the forms of misrecognition that structure racial self-awareness, Seshadri-Crooks criticizes the celebrators of difference for contributing to the illusion that race can ever be a “neutral description of human difference” (8). She attacks, in particular, the notion that promoting and recognizing difference can counteract racism. According to Seshadri-Crooks, the current vogue for difference depends on the implicit distinction between a neutral “ontology” of race and a discriminatory epistemology or logic of racism. To maintain this distinction is to participate in the social reification of race as a fundamental, and inevitable, precondition for attaining subjectivity:

 

Modern civil society engages in such reification because ultimately its desire is to keep the dialectic between races alive. It must thus prohibit what it terms "racism" in order to prevent the annihilation not so much of the "inferior" races but of the system of race itself. (9)

 

In this light, contemporary fantasies about the end of whiteness are particularly symptomatic of the desire for Whiteness that is exhibited, according to Seshadri-Crooks, in racist and anti-racist discourses alike. Hill, analyzing the relationship between post-white cultural fantasies and contemporary fears about the demise of the traditional family, finds that the same desire to recognize and repair white masculine identity drives the efforts of groups (like the Promise Keepers and the neofascist National Alliance, respectively) that publicly embrace and revile America’s new multiracial reality (80). Hill devotes considerable attention to the Promise Keepers and their rallying cry for a multiracial awareness that will fill what one prominent author of the movement calls the “father-shaped void inside a man” (98).¹⁶ According to Hill, the group promulgates its post-white sensibility as an antidote for the failure to live up to traditional masculine ideals:

 

For PK, racialized self-consciousness prefigures the recovery of an anguished father whose shortcomings are experienced as the absence of his own dad. . . . PK atones for the failures of masculinity not (or not primarily) by getting the patriarchal contract right, but by dumping whiteness in the name of a recuperated sense of manhood in a vacuous multicultural zone. The "wound of masculinity" is perceptible by a self-conscious turn to whiteness as something, rather like the father, that was never really there. (98-99)

 

Although Hill explicitly denies the applicability of Seshadri-Crooks’s work to the forms of post-white racial consciousness he examines, I propose that a psychoanalytic account of race as driven by the longing for a master signifier of Whiteness is precisely what is needed to account for the fact that, in a group like the Promise Keepers, “white masculine difference is achieved . . . when color is the father” (Hill 100). The Lacanian model developed by Seshadri-Crooks provides the tools for understanding race as a symbolic system which “derives its power not from socially constructed ideologies, but from the dynamic interplay between the family as a socially regulated institution, and biology as the site of essences and inheritances” (17-18). So long as they reify or fail to interrogate that relationship, visions of a multiracial world after whiteness will inevitably express the fantasies of subjects who are after Whiteness in the sense of desiring the wholeness promised them by the system of race.

 

In The Sopranos Tony consistently longs for a lost master signifier of Whiteness. That white racial Name-of-the-Father is Gary Cooper, whose absent presence hovers over Tony’s therapeutic sessions with Jennifer from the pilot episode onward. It is Gary Cooper’s image as “the strong, silent type” that Tony invokes repeatedly in order to express his sense of failed American and masculine ideals–ideals most shamefully betrayed by Tony’s own disabling panic attacks and the confessional therapy required to cure them.¹⁷ For Tony, Gary Cooper is the ultimate model of self-sufficiency, a man who “did what he had to do” without help or guidance. Tony’s nostalgia for Cooper’s silence in particular establishes him as an image of wholeness and Being outside language, in keeping with the fantasy structure of Whiteness described by Seshadri-Crooks. The foreclosure of Tony’s desire for this lost white father helps explain Tony’s panic attacks as expressions of racial anxiety, in which he comes unconsciously to recognize the disavowed historicity of his own whiteness.

 

The most instructive example of Tony’s racial anxiety is found in S3E2, when Tony comes face to face with Meadow’s half-Jewish, half-African-American boyfriend, Noah Tanenbaum. This is the only episode to date that begins with the after-effects of one of Tony’s panic attacks. As the scene fades up on the Soprano kitchen, the camera finds Tony unconscious on the floor, a plate of gabagool partially unwrapped beside him. When Carmella comes in and attempts to revive him, his first words, “Uncle Ben,” return us to an earlier meeting with his daughter’s boyfriend. That meeting focuses on Tony’s interrogation of Noah’s racial and ethnic heritage, conducted while Meadow is out of earshot. After learning Noah’s mixed racial identity, Tony asks:

 

Tony: "But on your application to Columbia, you didn't check Jewish, did you?"Noah: “No, they can’t ask about religious affiliation.”

 

Tony: “What’d you check?”

 

Noah: “African-American.”

 

Tony: “So we do understand each other here…”

 

Noah: “What’s your problem?”

 

Tony: “I think you know what my problem is. … See I’ve got business associates who are black, and they don’t want my son with their daughters and I don’t want their sons with mine.”

 

Before Meadow returns, Tony tells Noah to stop seeing his daughter, provoking a defiant “Fuck you!” from the young man. After Noah and Meadow have gone, Tony goes to the kitchen for a snack, and it is while removing items from the fridge and cupboard that he spots a box of Uncle Ben’s converted rice and collapses. There is much in this opening scene that recalls “A Hit is a Hit” and its portrayal of white racial misrecognition. The Uncle Ben’s reference recalls Christopher Moltisanti’s first words, at the start of that episode, to a black member of Massive’s crew, while Noah’s Jewish and African-American identity redraws the lines of racial and ethnic difference set down in the confrontation between Heche and the hip-hop star.¹⁸ Yet where Tony and Heche, in that earlier episode, were able to deploy racial misrecognition to their own advantage, Tony’s decision to spotlight Noah’s status as racial other leads him to defend the black/white racial boundary he had elsewhere sought to obscure. Following Seshadri-Crooks, the impetus for this defence is Noah’s visibility as a representation of the post-white, multiracial world Tony exploits to conduct so much of his business. Invoking racial difference in order to police family boundaries, Tony discovers the foreclosure of his own desire for the master signifier, Whiteness, through the unconscious recognition that he has become the “lost” white father. This moment of becoming repeats what Seshadri-Crooks calls the “disavowed historicity” of one’s symbolic construction as a raced subject. In Jacobson’s terms, Tony experiences the full weight of his historical becoming-Caucasian as racial anxiety which manifests itself a few moments later, in the form of the panic attack he suffers on seeing the Uncle Ben’s box.¹⁹

 

Yet if Tony’s panic attacks are amenable to psychoanalytic interpretation of this kind, Tony’s own psychoanalyst consistently fails to see the racial motivations for his anxiety. Two episodes later, Jennifer explains Tony’s collapse by focusing on the gabagool that he removes from the refrigerator just before the attack. Although Tony tells Jennifer about his “frank conversation with Buckwheat,” and although he identifies, when prompted, the last thing he saw before the attack (“I saw a box of Uncle Ben’s rice–boom!”), Jennifer establishes a connection between food, sex, and violence that derives from much earlier experiences in Tony’s childhood. According to Jennifer, sliced meat and sexual violence became psychically intertwined for Tony the moment he saw his father chop off the pinky-finger of the neighborhood butcher for failing to pay a debt.²⁰

 

This is by no means the only time when Jennifer ignores the racial context of Tony’s attacks. Jennifer’s reading of the gabagool reinforces, through its reductionism, the explanation for Tony’s attacks she proffers as early as S1E7. In this episode, the audience sees Tony’s discovery of his father’s business through a series of flashbacks. Jennifer is only interested in those points in the flashbacks that establish the relationship between Tony and his mother. Livia’s threat that she will stick a fork in Tony’s eye if he keeps pestering her about Christmas presents represents, for Jennifer, the symbolic origin of Tony’s castration-anxiety. This anxiety is heightened later when Tony overhears Livia threatening his father that she will smother their children if he tries to leave the Mafia. In Jennifer’s reading, the therapeutic breakthrough is the connection established by these memories between Tony’s fear of castration and his fear of losing his family: “When you first started therapy, you said that you had this dream–about those ducks. They flew away with your penis; it was a bad omen that something was going to happen in your family. Is this the terrible thing?” (S1E7). Equating “loss of the penis” with “loss of the family,” Jennifer reads Tony’s panic attacks as the result of exaggerated castration anxiety.

 

Yet what any attentive viewing of Tony’s flashbacks cannot fail to register is the fact that every domestic scene is framed by racial conflict or by the threat of such conflict. Long before the childhood scene in which Livia threatens to stick a fork in Tony’s eye, her first threat–in fact the first words she speaks to Tony during the flashback–is a warning that if he fails to catch the bus he will have to walk to school through the “colored neighborhood” (S1E7). Later, the “castration” scene itself unfolds while the television in the living room shows the Newark race riots just then taking place. And later still, when Tony steals out from his hiding place in the trunk of his father’s car to investigate his activities at the amusement park, he is accosted and threatened by three African-American boys for throwing a candy wrapper on the sidewalk. He is only saved from being beaten by the sudden arrival of the police, who scare the boys away when they raid the amusement park in search of Tony’s father and his crew. As Tony watches his father and crew forcibly removed from the amusement park, one of the gang members asks sarcastically why the police aren’t arresting the “moulinyans,” since “they’re the ones burning down Newark.” If Jennifer’s penetration into Tony’s childhood reveals fear of castration and a Medea mother to have caused his panic attacks, the flashbacks into Tony’s past suggest that racial anxiety is equally influential.

 

Given that Tony is going to therapy because of his panic attacks, it is particularly significant that Jennifer fails consistently to recognize their racial motivations.²¹ Her reductive interpretations throw into bold relief the complexity of the series’ treatment of racial misrecognition and post-white cultural fantasies. On one level, her failure calls attention to the way whiteness consistently flies under a sophisticated analytical radar. At the same time, The Sopranos does not, I think, simply condemn Jennifer’s Oedipal approach, nor does it lead one to support Hill’s view that a Lacanian model of race is incapable of addressing post-white cultural fantasies. Hill contends that the racial anxiety described by Seshadri-Crooks defies historical variation and therefore cannot account for an era in which “white men are willing to give way to others” (243n19).²² But Hill’s objection, which depends on his assumption that “Whiteness as a ‘master signifier’ needs nominally ‘white’ people to operate” (243n9), ignores (as his earlier analysis did not) what happens when white people “give way” to a post-white future. For while it may be true that Whiteness depends upon the continued visibility of white people, there is nothing in Seshadri-Crooks’s model to suggest that white visibility does not change over time. On the contrary, it would seem obvious that the master-signifier of Whiteness, which is “of purely cultural and historical origin” (Seshadri-Crooks 4), must itself evolve in order to account for the changing definitions of what it means to be “white,” “Caucasian,” “black,” etc., as detailed by Jacobson and others. Moreover, the relationship between the master signifier of Whiteness and the visibility of “nominally white people” must be complicated, particularly given the links Hill establishes between the cultivation of post-white sensibilities and the desires of disenfranchised white men (like the Promise Keepers) for a “masculine familial outcome” (100). Hill assumes that all white men understand “family” in the same way, but that is not the case, as the history of Italian-American identity and its mythic narration in popular culture and cinema show. In this framework, I suggest that the picture of Freudian analysis painted by The Sopranos is illuminating not because it shows how resistant “ethnic sons” like Tony are to psychotherapy, but because it foregrounds Jennifer’s misidentification of Tony’s symbolic father. Tony’s panic attacks, like the desire for Whiteness itself, will persist without a concerted effort to “trouble the relation of the subject to the master signifier” (Seshadri-Crooks 35). In the context of the series, that means trying to answer Tony’s most persistent question: “Whatever happened to Gary Cooper?”

 

Jennifer never takes up this question. She comes closest when she presses Tony for an ethical accounting of his criminal activities in S2E9. Tony responds with a textbook recitation of the two family myth of Italian-American identity, in which the criminal activities of the bad family are justified by the need to resist assimilation:

 

Tony: "When America opened the floodgates and let all us Italians in, what do you think they were doing it for? ... The Carnegies and the Rockefellers, they needed worker bees and there we were. But some of us didn't want to swarm around their hive and lose who we were. We wanted to stay Italian and preserve the things that meant something to us: honor, and family, and loyalty. ... Now we weren't educated like the Americans, but we had the balls to take what we wanted. And those other fucks, the J.P. Morgans, they were crooks and killers too, but that was the business, right? The American way." Jennifer: "That might all be true. But what do poor Italian immigrants have to do with you and what happens every morning when you step out of bed?"

 

Chris Messenger criticizes Jennifer’s “majoritarian question” for inappropriately affirming a “universalized American doxa” (267). According to Messenger, “Melfi’s native response could be used to block African American grievances at their historical and racial root in a favor of a universal ‘Americanness’ or to counter views on affirmative action” (268). But Jennifer’s response could be used in this way only if valid distinctions between the history of African-American and Italian-American discrimination in the United States were ignored–distinctions that The Sopranos takes pains to foreground repeatedly.²⁴ The import of Jennifer’s question is not that it severs Tony’s ties to his ethnic past, but that it challenges him to see the relationship he strategically denies between himself and those white fathers–the Carnegies, Rockefellers, and Morgans–with whom he shares more than a criminal interpretation of the “American way.” Implying a specifically racial continuity between Tony and these lost white fathers, Jennifer challenges Tony to discover that his economic success as a “made man” in American culture is inseparable from his status as a made white man. But Jennifer does not push for an answer here, and Tony is allowed to be silent about his white racial identification. The result is that Tony’s relationship to the master signifier of Whiteness goes unchallenged.

 

The effects of this relationship are nowhere more evident than in “Christopher” (S4E3), an episode devoted to the ironies of America’s post-white fantasies of itself. In this episode Tony is repeatedly harried by his consigliere, Sylvio, to help discredit Native American protestors who want to stop the Newark Columbus Day parade on historical and racial grounds. Fed up with the righteous posturing of his crew members, Tony finally takes a stand on racial and ethnic difference in the name of Gary Cooper:

 

Tony: "Gary Cooper, there was an American. The strong, silent type. He did what he had to do. ... And did he complain? Did he say, 'Oh, I come from this poor Texas Irish illiterate background or whatever the fuck, so leave me the fuck out of it, because my people got fucked over?' ...Sylvio: “Gary Cooper, the real Gary Cooper, or anybody named Cooper never suffered like the Italians. Medigon like him, they fucked everybody else–the Italians, the Polacks, the blacks.”

 

Tony: "If he was a medigon around nowadays he'd be a member of some victims group--the fundamentalist Christians, the abused cowboys, the gays, whatever the fuck. ... Let me ask you something. All the good things you got in your life, did they come to you because you're Calabrese? I'll tell you the answer. The answer is no. ... You got it 'cause you're you, 'cause you're smart, cause you're whatever the fuck. Where the fuck is our self-esteem? That shit doesn't come from Columbus or The Godfather or Chef-fuckin'-Boy-Ardee."

 

Shifting attention away from historical injustice and ethnicity to the comforts of Sylvio’s life, Tony’s response is indebted to Jennifer’s earlier question, “What do poor Italian immigrants have to do with you?” But Tony calls up the spectre of white racial identification only to pass over it immediately in his celebration of an unraced, universal subjectivity. It is this fantasy of wholeness which, according to Seshadri-Crooks, is the enduring special effect of Whiteness. It is also this illusion that structures Tony’s strategies of racial misrecognition and his disabling bouts of racial anxiety. The ease with which Tony believes in a coherent, continuous identity despite his recurring panic attacks and losses of consciousness shows how hard it is to shake loose of subjective investment in prominent cultural signifiers of whiteness. Indeed, by virtue of his ability to employ fantasies of lost whiteness for his own ends while remaining painfully subject to the overmastering fantasy of racial differentiation through familial narratives, Tony Soprano himself stands as one of the most culturally visible signifiers of white masculinity in the “post-white” era.

 

To its credit, The Sopranos encourages analysis of whiteness while offering no simple resolution to the contradictions it entails. Jennifer pronounces Tony cured of his panic attacks late in Season Four; but in “Unidentified Black Males” (S5E9) the attacks have returned and Jennifer is as blind as ever to their racial motivation. In its refusal to make good on the promise of a solution to Tony’s problem, the series reflects the false nature of whiteness as a fantasy of wholeness. At the same time, The Sopranos testifies to the enduring desire for whiteness that characterizes contemporary multiracial America. In an age in which whiteness has come to signify, for many, either a void or absence or a disadvantage relative to other ethnic and racial groups, the popularity of the series and its chief protagonist suggests its own answer to the question, “Whatever happened to Gary Cooper?” The answer is that he is alive and well, though not quite as strong or silent as he used to be.

Notes

 

Thanks to Randy Malamud for his encouraging words about this piece when I was considering abandoning it. Thanks also to the anonymous reviewers of PMC for their helpful suggestions.

 

1. Please note my shorthand method for referring to specific episodes in the series: S3E5 means Season Three, Episode Five.

 

2. Meadow shares the general Soprano attitude toward affirmative action, despite the good fight she puts up against Tony over her boyfriend, Noah, in Season Three (a point to which I will return later). In “The Happy Wanderer” (S2E6), Meadow and a friend muse over the injustice of a fellow student’s early acceptance to Wesleyan University. When her friend attributes the acceptance to the girl’s racial heritage, Meadow complains, “Please, I’m blacker than her mother.” Her friend replies, “Yeah, well, you should’ve mentioned that on your application.”

 

3. Paglia’s complaints about the series as a “buffoonish caricature” of Italian-Americans can be found in the online articles cited hereafter. For a much more detailed treatment of stereotyping in The Sopranos, see Orban.

 

4. Whiteness studies is too broad and diverse a field to be adequately summarized here. My brief discussion is indebted to the editors of The Making and Unmaking of Whiteness, who introduce their volume by listing various tropes that have guided contemporary studies of whiteness. The first and most prevalent of these tropes is presented under the heading, “Whiteness is Invisible and Unmarked” (10). Another way of introducing whiteness studies is to call attention to its various politically and methodologically differentiated “schools.” Among these, the New Abolitionists claim the most radical anti-racist program, encouraging the study of whiteness so as to destroy it. Two self-identified members of this group, Vron Ware and Les Back, criticize the sometimes “banal” academic effort merely to describe whiteness without challenging it: “For us it is impossible to separate the act of writing about whiteness from a political project that involves not simply the fight against racism, but also an attack on the very notion of race and obstinate resilience of racial identities” (2). In her summary of the history of whiteness studies, Mason Stokes contrasts the New Abolitionist position (represented most powerfully by David Roediger’s Toward the Abolition of Whiteness) with the “progressive” school of thought developed by Kincheloe and Steinberg, which aims at the “reconceptualization of white identity” (24) rather than at its abolition. For Stokes, both schools are guilty of “naïve utopianism” (184), and would best be supplanted with a critical approach to whiteness that seeks to unsettle and disturb rather than to repair or destroy whiteness (191).

 

5. To take the most immediate example, consider the subplot of “Another Toothpick” (S3E5), the episode in which Tony is ticketed by the black cop. After receiving the ticket, Tony is so incensed that he asks one of his highly placed friends, Assemblyman Zellman, to have the cop demoted. Zellman obliges; but when Tony later finds the officer working at a landscaping store, his guilt leads him to reverse his earlier request. Zellman puts the wheels in motion to restore the officer’s former position and calls Tony to report on his progress. In the meantime, however, Tony has learned that Meadow’s bicycle was stolen by a “black guy” from the neighborhood around Columbia University, and his attitude toward the cop changes again. He tells Zellman, “Fuck him. Cocksucker got what he deserved.” Even then Tony’s guilt is not quieted, however, and the end of the episode finds him back at the landscaping store, offering the man an exorbitant gratuity he does not accept. The final shot of the episode shows Tony standing alone with a handful of money in a crowd of white stone fountains.

 

6. Joanne Lacey’s speculative study of The Sopranos‘ appeal to male audiences suggests that the domestic angle, while certainly part of the series’ draw, is by no means the chief reason for its popularity, at least outside the U.S. Though Lacey interviews only British men for her study, her findings indicate that it is the series’ “stylistic signifiers” of Americanness (suits, cars, mob speak, geographical locations) that lure men to the show (99). Similarly, Dawn Johnston’s analysis of the Canadian reaction to The Sopranos–aired uncensored in Canada on CTV, a mainstream television network–suggests that it is the lack of familiarity or “un-Canadian-ness” of the show that accounts for its “ferocious and tenacious” following there (41).

 

7. The obsessiveness with which The Sopranos engages the cinematic past embodied in the work of Coppola and Scorsese, in particular, has been one of the most talked-about aspects of the series. For Auster, “The Sopranos underscores the continued validity and contemporary relevance of the gangster genre” (15). In David Pattie’s reading of the series as a “postmodern Mafia tale,” Scorsese’s work forms the repressed unconscious of Tony Soprano and his crew, who attempt to deny the lesson of Mean Streets and Casino that allegiance to the Mafia and its antiquated codes cannot give meaning to their lives (144). And Nochimson reads The Sopranos as “the unmasking of the heretofore thickly disguised emotional subtext of gangster stories” (3) that characterizes not only the work of Coppola and Scorsese, but much earlier films like Little Caesar (1930) and Public Enemy (1931). The self-reflexivity and postmodernism of the series has been explained through other, non-cinematic frameworks as well. Lance Strate reads Sopranoland’s spatial rearrangement of New Jersey landmarks as an example of the “postmodern scene” variously described by Jameson, Baudrillard, and McLuhan (193). Steven Hayward and Andrew Biro argue that the appeal of Tony Soprano, “our postmodern, farcical Godfather,” resides in his tireless engagement with the contradictions of late capitalism (212). And Rogers, Epstein, and Reeves rely on David Harvey’s discussion of postmodernity as a period of “flexible accumulation” to argue that HBO’s marketing of The Sopranos signifies a third era in the relationship between TV and the American economy, in which “the digital revolution in distribution is again transforming what it means to watch television” (43).

 

8. Citing census statistics found in Valladao, Hill writes: “While it may be politically advantageous (and empirically accurate) to reject the racially binaristic thinking of the 1960s civil rights era, it is nevertheless the case that blacks remain the poorest racial minority in the United States per capita, with annual incomes 20 percent below that of Latinos, and 45 percent below that of whites” (34).

 

9. It is important to distinguish this absent presence from the “invisibility” thesis regarding the earliest stages of work on whiteness. As Hill points out, the object is no longer to reveal the existence of whiteness once thought to be invisible, but rather now to interrogate the form of conscious–but contradictory–white racial identification that attends the current fascination with the “loss” of a white majority.

 

10. Zellman later confesses to Maurice: “Sometimes I feel like I should be punished.” This wish comes true for Zellman at the end of the episode, when Tony beats him ruthlessly for dating his former girlfriend, Irina. Tony, on the other hand, evinces no regret about what he has done. Quite the contrary, he takes his son, Anthony Jr., on a tour of his new property holdings that brings them into confrontation with some African-American drug-dealers. Schooling his son in race relations, Tony playfully throws out racial and sexual slurs until he and Anthony are forced to leave at gunpoint. Anthony’s amused comment as they drive away (“So that’s a crack ho!”) shows what he has learned from the encounter.

 

11. Other references to the Civil Rights movement establish its importance, for the Soprano family, as a “lost” signifier of a more orderly past. Late in Season One, Tony, disturbed by Meadow’s frank discussion of sex at the breakfast table, halts her dialogue by shouting: “Out there it’s the 1990s, but in here it’s 1954!” (S1E11). That Tony points to the year of Brown vs. Board of Education as a defense against having to face his daughter’s sexuality becomes particularly important in Season Three, when Meadow brings home her African-American boyfriend, Noah Tanenbaum. In a more recent episode, Tony’s sister Janice strategically employs nostalgia for the Civil Rights movement to win the good graces of an African-American woman in her anger management class. Janice succeeds only in revealing her current racial fears:

 

I come from a biased family, but I was different. I put all my faith and my hopes into the Civil Rights movement. I left home and I marched. And for what? So they can ride around in their SUVs blasting that rap shit? And you can't say anything 'cause they might have guns? (S5E10)

 

12. David Roediger examines this historical development in his foundational text, The Wages of Whiteness. See also Frankenburg, White Women 37-38), Bernardi (xxi-xxii), and Jacobson, Cosco, and Guglielmo and Salerno, whose contributions are discussed below.

 

13. Hill’s analysis, based on Davis’s Magical Urbanism, focuses primarily on Hispanic ethnicity that “functions as a kind of interdivisional racial buffer between black and white” (32).

 

14. Jacobson’s book is regarded as the most comprehensive account of the development of whiteness as a racial and epistemological category in the United States. In it, Jacobson describes the history of whiteness in America in terms of three “great epochs.” The first of these is inaugurated by the American naturalization law of 1790, which limited naturalized citizenship to “free white persons,” or those capable of “self-government.” The second begins some fifty years later, when the original, “over-inclusive” law was revised to stem the tide of less-than-desirable (yet still “white”) immigrants. This period is defined by its creation of a series of distinct and scientifically-determined white races with an attendant hierarchy that ranked Anglo-Saxon and Irish whiteness on opposite ends of the scale of social desirability. Finally, the third epoch, defined by the process of “becoming-Caucasian,” takes shape in the 1920s in response to new, more restrictive legislation governing immigration, and to the mass migration of African-Americans to the American North and West. This era is marked by the gradual dissolution and “forgetting” of the earlier hierarchy of white races. In place of that scientific model, the new concept of “ethnicity” emerges as the preferred method of distinguishing cultural differences among whites, while race becomes the province solely of black or “nonwhite” groups (7-14).

 

15. The frequency with which The Sopranos refers to the civil rights era is doubly appropriate. For while visions of a post-white America look to the civil rights movement as the final flowering of the black/white racial binary, Jacobson identifies the same era as that in which the whiteness of groups like Italian-Americans, previously thought to inhabit a “middle ground in the racial order”, is most firmly established (62). According to Jacobson, “non-Anglo-Saxon immigrants and their children were perhaps the first beneficiaries of the modern civil rights movement, in that the movement helped confer upon them a newly consolidated status as Caucasians in a political setting where that meant–and continues to mean–a great deal” (272). Jacobson’s analysis has spawned several recent studies of the relationship between whiteness and Italian-American identity, most notably Cosco’s Imagining Italians and Guglielmo and Salerno’s edited volume, Are Italians White? Both texts support Jacobson’s thesis that the shaping of Italian-American ethnicity took place alongside, but also helped to mask, the acquisition of white power and privilege by Italian immigrants in the United States. Guglielmo locates the historical enfranchisement of Italian-American whiteness as early as the turn of the twentieth century, at which point, “for all of the racial prejudice and discrimination that Italians faced in these early years, they were still generally accepted as white and reaped the many rewards that came with this status” (36).

 

16. This suggestive phrase, appropriated and developed by Hill, is originally found in Means 54.

 

17. Santo offers the best discussion of Tony’s relationship to masculine ideals. Particularly interesting is Santo’s discussion of the way in which Tony’s body image, both powerful and overweight, contradicts American middle-class standards (78-80).

 

18. In S1E10, Christopher and his girlfriend Adriana first meet Massive Genius while standing in line at a burger joint. When approached by one of Massive’s crew members, Christopher quips, “Why’d they send you over? I asked for a burger, not converted rice.”

 

19. The point is underscored again later in the same episode, when Meadow helps Anthony Jr. with his essay on Robert Frost’s “Stopping By Woods on a Snowy Evening.” When Meadow tells Anthony that the snow of the poem “symbolizes cold, endless white, endless nothing, death,” AJ responds: “I thought black was death.” “White too,” says Meadow.

 

20. Jennifer’s analytical strategy here is in keeping with the methods she uses frequently to keep her therapy sessions with Tony “focused.” One of her earliest prohibitions is that, for legal reasons, Tony must refrain from discussing the criminal details of his “Family” life–a rule that, as Gabbard points out, is in strict violation of the psychoanalytic rule of free association (6). The net effect, throughout the course of Tony’s treatment, is that Tony’s anxieties, and Jennifer’s explanation of them, repeatedly boil down any extraneous “social” material to the problems of Tony’s domestic life.

 

21. Other flashbacks to Tony’s past also reveal the significance of racial difference–particularly the black/white boundary–to Tony’s sense of guilt. S3E10 is devoted to Tony’s guilt over the killing of Pussy Bompinsiero at the end of Season 2. In this episode Tony mulls over numerous points at which he suspected Pussy may have been wearing the FBI wire that necessitated his murder. The episode opens with a flashback to 1995, during which Tony and friends watch the end of the OJ Simpson trial. A recent episode, S5E9, focuses on the return of Tony’s panic attacks after a long period (a dozen or more episodes) during which he appeared to be cured of his anxiety. Significantly titled “Unidentified Black Males,” this episode is structured around the way in which Tony and several of his cronies use racist images of black men as scapegoats for their criminal successes and failures. When Tony confesses to Jennifer that he once lied about having been attacked by black men in order to conceal one of his panic attacks, Jennifer again overlooks the racial context and explains Tony’s attacks solely in terms of guilt over the imprisonment of his cousin (played by Steve Buscemi).

 

22. Deleuzians may point out that Jennifer’s therapy exemplifies the way in which psychoanalysis always reduces social desiring-production to the domestic triangle of Daddy-Mommy-Me. Jennifer’s Oedipalization of Tony’s ducks, her projection of castration onto the psychic terrain, and her authoritative announcement of his mother’s malady (“I say…”) enact the various interpretive and procedural crimes of which Deleuze and Guattari accuse psychoanalysis in Anti-Oedipus. In A Thousand Plateaus, Deleuze and Guattari describe a process of “becoming-minoritarian” in which the deterritorializing flow of a subject’s desire leads him or her away from a “major identity,” defined as that of “white man” or “adult male” (291). They specifically name the “mob groups of the United States” as one of those aggregates in society that, by virtue of their “nondenumerable” relation to the State, are particularly ripe for becoming-minoritarian (288).

 

23. This is the second objection Hill raises against Seshadri-Crooks. The first (even less convincing to my mind) is that her model “provides no basis on which to describe the interactions . . . between differently colored or multiracial groups” (243n19). But the signifying chain of racial subject positions described by Seshadri-Crooks seems designed to account for just such interactions.

 

24. S4E3 crystallizes the difference emphasized elsewhere in the series between Italian-American and African-American history. Carmella turns on the television in time to catch an episode of the daytime talk show, Montel, evidently dedicated to racial and ethnic pluralism in the U.S. Montel, the show’s African-American host, observes that “each community” has had to suffer economically for the “experiment that is the United States.” Phil, a spokesperson for Italian-American community, agrees:

 

Phil: Take my grandparents, two simple people from Sicily, who braved the perilous middle passage--Montel: Whoa–middle passage? That’s a term for the slave trade.

 

Spokesperson: Montel, the Italian people in this country also suffered discrimination–

 

Montel: Earth to Phil! We're talking three hundred years of slavery here!

 

Works Cited

 

• Auster, Albert. “The Sopranos: The Gangster Redux.” Lavery 10-15.
• Babb, Valerie. Whiteness Visible: The Meaning of Whiteness in American Literature and Culture. New York: New York UP, 1998.
• Bernardi, Daniel. “Introduction.” Classic Hollywood, Classic Whiteness. Minneapolis: U of Minnesota P, 2001. xiii-xxvi.
• Chase, David. “Peter Bogdanovich Interviews David Chase.” The Sopranos: The Complete First Season. DVD. HBO-Time-Warner, 2000.
• Cosco, Joseph P. Imagining Italians: The Clash of Romance and Race in American Perceptions, 1880-1910. Albany: SUNY P, 2003.
• D’Acierno, Pellegrino. “Cinema Paradiso.” The Italian American Heritage: A Companion to Literature and the Arts. New York: Garland, 1999. 563-690.
• Davis, Mike. Magical Urbanism: Latinos Reinvent the U.S. City. London: Verso, 2000.
• Deleuze, Gilles, and Felix Guattari. Anti-Oedipus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia. Trans. Robert Hurley, Mark Seem, and Helen R. Lane. Minneapolis: U of Minnesota P, 1983.
• —. A Thousand Plateaus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia. Trans. Brian Massumi. Minneapolis: U of Minnesota P, 1987.
• Frankenburg, Ruth. “The Mirage of Unmarked Whiteness.” The Making and Unmaking of Whiteness. Eds. Birgit Brander Rasmussen, Eric Klineberg, Irene J. Nexica, and Matt Wray. Durham: Duke UP, 2001. 72-96.
• —. White Women, Race Matters. Minneapolis: U of Minnesota P, 1993.
• Gabbard, Glen O. The Psychology of The Sopranos: Love, Death, Desire, and Betrayal in America’s Favorite Gangster Family. New York: Basic, 2002.
• Guglielmo, Jennifer, and Salvatore Salerno, eds. Are Italians White? How Race is Made in America. New York: Routledge, 2003.
• Hayward, Steven, and Andrew Biro. “The Eighteenth Brumaire of Tony Soprano.” Lavery 203-14.
• Hill, Mike. After Whiteness: Unmaking an American Majority. New York: New York UP, 2004.
• Johnston, Dawn Elizabeth B. “Way North of New Jersey: A Canadian Experience of The Sopranos.” Lavery 32-41.
• Kincheloe, Joe L., and Shirley R. Steinberg. “Addressing the Crisis of Whiteness: Reconfiguring White Identity in a Pedagogy of Whiteness.” White Reign: Deploying Whiteness in America. Ed. Joe L. Kincheloe, Shirley R. Steinberg, Nelson M. Rodriguez, and Ronald E. Chennault. New York: St. Martin’s, 1998. 3-29.
• Lacey, Joanne. “One for the Boys? The Sopranos and Its Male British Audience.” Lavery 95-108.
• Lavery, David, ed. This Thing of Ours: Investigating The Sopranos. New York: Columbia UP, 2002.
• Means, Patrick. Men’s Secret Wars. Grand Rapids: Revell, 2000.
• Messenger, Chris. The Godfather and American Culture: How the Corleones Became “Our Gang.” Albany: SUNY P, 2002.
• Nochimson, Martha P. “Waddaya Lookin’ At? Re-reading the Gangster Genre Through ‘The Sopranos.’” Film Quarterly 56.2 (2003): 2-13.
• Orban, Clara. “Stereotyping in The Sopranos.” VIA: Voices in Italian Americana 12.1 (2001): 35-56.
• Paglia, Camille. “The Energy Mess and Fascist Fays.” Salon 23 May 2001. <http://www.salon.com/people/col/pagl/2001/05/23/oil/index2.html>.
• —. “Feinstein for President, Buchanan for Emperor.” Salon 27 Oct. 1999. <http://www.salon.com/people/col/pagl/1999/10/27/paglia1027/index.html>.
• Pattie, David. “Mobbed Up: The Sopranos and the Modern Gangster Film.” Lavery 135-45.
• Rasmussen, Birgit Brander, Irene J. Nexica, Eric Klinenberg, and Matt Wray, eds. The Making and Unmaking of Whiteness. Durham: Duke UP, 2001.
• Roediger, David R. The Wages of Whiteness: Race and the Making of the American Working Class. 1991. New York: Verso, 1999.
• Rogers, Mark C., Michael Epstein, and Jimmie L. Reeves. “The Sopranos as HBO Brand Equity: The Art of Commerce in the Age of Digital Reproduction.” Lavery 42-57.
• Santo, Avi. “‘Fat Fuck! Why don’t you take a look in the mirror?’: Weight, Body Image, and Masculinity in The Sopranos.” Lavery 72-94.
• Seshadri-Crooks, Kalpana. Desiring Whiteness: A Lacanian Analysis of Race. New York: Routledge, 2000.
• Stokes, Mason. The Color of Sex: Whiteness, Heterosexuality, and Fictions of White Supremacy. Durham: Duke UP, 2001.
• Strate, Lance. “No(rth Jersey) Sense of Place: The Cultural Geography (and Media Ecology) of The Sopranos.” Lavery 178-94.
• Valladao, Alfredo G.A. The Twenty-First Century Will Be American. London: Verso, 1996.
• Ware, Vron and Les Back. Out of Whiteness: Color, Politics and Culture. Chicago: U of Chicago P, 2002.
• Yacowar, Maurice. The Sopranos on the Couch: Analyzing Television’s Greatest Series. New York: Continuum, 2002.

 

Steven Helmling

Department of English
University of Delaware
helmling@udel.edu

 

As was already pointed out in Dialectic of Enlightenment, strict positivism crosses over into the feeblemindedness of the artistically insensible, the successfully castrated. The narrow-minded wisdom that sorts out feeling from knowing and rubs its hands together when it finds the two balanced is–as trivialities sometimes are–the caricature of a situation that over the centuries of the division of labor has inscribed this division in subjectivity. Yet feeling and understanding are not absolutely different in the human disposition and remain dependent even in their dividedness. The forms of reaction that are subsumed under the concept of feeling become futile enclaves of sentimentality as soon as they seal themselves off from their relation to thought and turn a blind eye to truth; thought, however, approaches tautology when it shrinks from the sublimation of the mimetic comportment. The fatal separation of the two came about historically and is revocable. . . . Ultimately, aesthetic comportment is to be defined as the capacity to shudder, as if goose bumps were the first aesthetic image. What later came to be called subjectivity, freeing itself from the blind anxiety of the shudder, is at the same time the shudder’s own development; life in the subject is nothing but what shudders, the reaction to the total spell that transcends the spell. Consciousness without shudder is reified consciousness. That shudder which subjectivity stirs without yet being subjectivity is the act of being touched by the other. Aesthetic comportment assimilates itself to that other rather than subordinating it. Such a constitutive relation of the subject to objectivity in aesthetic comportment joins eros and knowledge.

 

–Theodor Adorno, Aesthetic Theory 331

 
The 1944 “Introduction” to Dialectic of Enlightenment announces the book’s indictment of “enlightenment,” that it has abdicated “[die] Arbeit des Begriffs” (Horkheimer and Adorno, Dialektik 14). The German phrase–a Hegelian chestnut–is Englished as “the labor of conceptualization” in John Cumming’s 1972 translation (xiv), and as “the work of concepts” by Edmund Jephcott in 2002 (Jephcott xvii).¹ Together the two translations show, as neither can by itself, the stretch of the German, which suggests both the work that concepts do, and the labor that making ourselves conscious of the problematics of the concept–“thinking about thought” (Cumming 25), “to ‘think thinking’” (Jephcott 19)–imposes on us. “The concept” is too diffuse and ubiquitous a theme in Adorno to treat here. It evokes the mind’s engagement at once with the world and (à la Hegel) with its own self-consciousness in that engagement; for Adorno, the “labor of the concept” is an imperative from first to last. I want to test the premise that for Adorno, complementary to the project of thinking about thinking–“the concept”–is an effort or struggle that I will call “the work of affects” or “the labor of affectualization.” Horkheimer and Adorno thematize this labor in their “excursus” on Odysseus and the Sirens, as a founding myth of what Adorno consistently denounces as “ataraxia“–a culture-wide affective discipline, or repression, which grounds the instrumental “domination of [external] nature” in an internalized, instrumentalizing domination of affect itself. “The need to lend a voice to suffering,” writes Adorno, “is the condition of all truth,” a premise that rejoins affect and concept, feeling and thinking, to enact Adorno’s protest against the separation of these categories–these domains of experience–in Western culture (Negative Dialectics 17-8). For Adorno, “the labor of the concept” itself involves laboring to uncover, focus, articulate, and express its properly affective elements, however repressed or distorted, fetishized or reified. Affect must be completed, “rescued,”² even redeemed, by being concretized in the labor of, in the Hegelian formula, “apprehending it as thought”; likewise, thought–the labor of the concept–must suffer the ordeal through which alone thinking may be apprehended as feeling. Adorno urges that to “think thinking” obliges us to think our feeling, to feel our thinking–and (what our traumatic history has perhaps most inhibited in us) to feel our feeling as well.

 

This essay explores Adorno’s “labor of affectualization” both as theorized in his arguments and as performed in his writing practice–in the modernist and self-conscious way, to adapt Gertrude Stein, that his writing is written. A touchstone throughout will be Adorno’s chief model and counter- or cautionary example, the “optimistic” authorial carriage of Hegel, whose utopian promise Adorno’s “unhappy [critical] consciousness” would reinscribe under the rubric of the “broken promise.” I hope to enlarge our sense of the function or “effect” of “style” (to call it that) in Adorno’s critical project, with reference to other figures (Hegel, Marx, Nietzsche, Weber, Freud, Heidegger) that can be “constellated” usefully with it. I conclude with a look at the 1944 “Introduction” to Dialectic of Enlightenment, in which the deliberate “difficulty” of the book is thematized as motivated by the difficulties, both intellectual and emotional, of its historical occasion (enlightenment’s calamitous devolution into the barbarism of World War Two). I also read the book’s first chapter, which enacts the program (both critical and affective) for which the “Introduction” serves as manifesto. The larger aim is to describe, evoke, and, in ways other commentators on Adorno seem to me to have missed, to account for the sheer power and voltage of Adorno’s critical output, in which thinking and writing–and feeling–seethe, and in their agitation impel each other to levels of force quite unlike anything to be found in the work of anyone else.

 

Aesthesis and Anaesthesis

 

Adorno’s desire to “rescue” repressed affect finds perhaps its most extreme test, a sort of limit-case, in a 1959 lecture in which Adorno speaks feelingly of “the emotional force of Kant’s Critique of Pure Reason” (30). Most readers today, I wager, will raise eyebrows at this characterization. It was apropos of Kant, after all, that Terry Eagleton joked that in the tradition of philosophical aesthetics, “the aesthetic might more accurately be described as an anaesthetic” (196)–and indeed Adorno himself characterizes Kant’s aesthetics elsewhere as “a castrated hedonism, desire without desire” (Aesthetic Theory 11). Adorno’s Kant anticipates that “heroism of modern life” (the black-suited bourgeoisie assisting in stoic dispassion, “not breaking up its lines to weep,” nor even presuming to expect a speaking role, at the funeral of its own passional energies) to which Baudelaire paid the back-handed compliment of an uncharacteristically muted mockery. Kant’s “emotional force,” that is to say, partakes of that struggle against emotion and feeling that Dialectic of Enlightenment traces back to the episode of the Sirens in the Odyssey. Eagleton’s “anesthetic” notwithstanding, for Adorno, Kant’s “emotional force” lies in the ineradicable felt force of the agon itself, the drive for “domination” of emotion and affect, given that the reified norm, in Adorno’s indignant indictment, typically cedes the victory to numbness not only in advance, but also in principle.

 

Adorno’s project is heavily invested in an ambition to undo this anaesthesis or (Adorno’s own frequent protest-word) “ataraxia“–that is, to redeem the numbness programmatized in modern, bourgeois, enlightenment projects, whether aesthetic or scientific; or, if “redeem” seems too messianic, to “rescue” (Adorno’s own word) for “critical” and “conceptual” purpose the affective force normatively repressed in our culture’s sundering of thought and feeling. This is an ambition emphatically not to be realized by simply adding an “effect,” lending atmospherics to the substance of an argument, much less the adrenaline jolts of a moralized ressentiment. Adorno evokes the “emotional force of Kant’s Critique of Pure Reason” to prepare for the broader stipulation, a page later, that “the same, the identical theses may have completely different meanings within the general parameters, the general emotional thrust of a given philosophy” (Kant’s Critique 31). Which is to say that the “emotional thrust,” the affect and cathexis, of an argument are not some merely epiphenomenal froth upon a putatively substantive content or “theses” that might as well (or better) be considered dispassionately. No, Adorno here states explicitly that the content, the “theses,” bear different meanings according to the argument’s “emotional thrust”: the affective cathexis of the text thereby becomes determinative, even constitutive, of the text’s “meanings.” Thus the programmatic dispassion of critique generically stands revealed and indicted as an ideology, “an imaginary” conquest of fear, another instance of that “anaesthesis” or “ataraxia” that Dialectic of Enlightenment laments as an impoverishing entailment of our civilization, a bourgeois “coldness” (Minima Moralia 26), from Homer’s Sirens to Baudelaire’s “modern heroism” and beyond. If I risk putting this in tones that may seem a bit overwrought, it’s to underline the point that Adorno here renders explicit a program, for critique at large and for his own critical practice in particular, that his writing everywhere enacts.

 

Adorno protests the analytic disjunction or (his code-word) chorismos (Greek for “separation”) of sciences, knowledges, discourses. He aims to rejoin these discourses dialectically in configurations or “constellations” whose transgression against positivist habits of categorization is much of their heteroclite, fish-and-fowl, apples-and-oranges point. For modern purposes, the milestone of enlightened chorismos is Kant, whose intervention in the “contest of faculties” was meant to produce a ceasefire, a disengagement of the combatants–in Kant’s time, philosophy and theology. Kant’s covert motive was that philosophy displace theology as arbiter among the disciplines, but his overt proposal was that the warring faculties agree to disagree: they were separate discourses, exercising different kinds of “Reason” on different, non-overlapping, problems. The outcome was not what Kant had hoped for: while philosophy and religion were engrossed in their “contest,” the real power was passing to the empirical sciences and their new, and (Adorno thought) fatally narrow canons of truth and fact. This disaster–how enlightenment thinking neutralized, indeed, reversed its own radical potential–is what Adorno meant by “the dialectic of enlightenment.” The “contest of faculties” was protracted and often covert, but as time passed the outcome was increasingly clear. For the losers (philosophy, religion, and art), the defeat was sweetened by a sequestration that allowed each of them to reign in its own highly circumscribed domain. This “enlightenment” regime tolerates aesthetic discourses as specialized disciplines on condition that they moderate or renounce their claim to “truth”; by the same token, the truth-discourses of science offer as condition (almost as guarantee) of their “truth”-value their principled refusal of any affective voltage. Implicit in this compact is that “affect” as such is without truth-value: is even, indeed, an obstacle to truth. Adorno assails these ideological premises constantly, and he ends his career, in Aesthetic Theory, with his most sustained effort to valorize art’s claim to being a kind of “truth-discourse”–in part by stipulating the conditions under which art achieves truth, in part by so reconfiguring the question that one puzzles to remember how art can ever have seemed not “true.”

 

Aesthetic Theory labors to redeem the aesthetic by undoing the chorismos of thought and feeling that has deprived art of philosophical efficacy. Indeed, the most insistent theme of the book’s vast ensemble of theme-and-variations is that art and philosophy are phases of a continuous activity; neither is valid without the other; they need each other; they complete each other. Adorno is tireless in urging that the restoration of critical force to art involves the “labor of the concept”; but he is pretty tight-lipped about the complementary program, of restoring to philosophy (and critique, theory, science: to what he wants to restore as “truth-discourses”) something of the affective or aesthetic charge or cathexis they only illusorily renounce in any case. This reticence raises two embarrassments I want to acknowledge here. The smaller one is that Adorno’s reticence about affect produces, absent argued discriminations from him, some slippage in my account between “affect” and such terms as “feeling,” “cathexis,” and “suffering.” On this I can only beg your forebearance, and hope my speculations earn their keep. The other embarrassment is more substantial: if Adorno means to “rescue” affect, then why is “affect,” as a theme, so repressed in his work? Why isn’t he more explicit about it? The answer I’d most like to give is that Adorno counts on the high affective voltages of his writing to make the point, as if coming right out and saying it would be a gaffe on the order of explaining why a joke is funny. Modernism generally plays down affect, in ways sometimes to be read as a kind of (mock-) ataraxia (Céline), sometimes as a kind of restraint (e.g., “impersonality”) meant actually to heighten affect, but generally as a refusal or critique of the excesses of so much nineteenth-century art (academic painting, Chopin, Wagner–too many examples). Adorno shares in that critique, and I would say his work risks an emotionalism that most tight-lipped moderns refuse. I suppose, too, that Adorno shied away from making the case explicitly for fear of its being mis-taken to mean that philosophy is a “merely subjective” expression, that is, “aesthetic” in precisely the diminished senses that Adorno means to protest and redeem in his dialectical reinvention of it in Aesthetic Theory. Adorno regularly protests against the “merely subjective” gambit, as a reductive psychologism; in Adorno’s own account of the subject/object relation, there is no such thing as the “merely subjective” because the very condition of subjectivity is its dialectical engagement with the objective. (For Adorno, “the concept” is the function of this engagement, the medium or mediation of the subject’s dialectic with the objective.)

 

In any case, the implication of the affects in the “truth-discourses” is ubiquitous in Adorno–for example in his surprisingly frequent assimilations of philosophy (et al.) to music: in the very title of Philosophy of Modern Music; in the resonances with Hegel in the Beethoven fragments (see any of the numerous references in the book’s Index); and in quotations like this one, from the early (1932) essay, “On the Social Situation of Music”:

 

Music will be better, the more deeply it is able to express–in the antinomies of its own formal language–theexigency of the social condition and to call for change through the coded language of suffering. . . . The task of music as art thus enters into a parallel relationship to the task of social theory. . . . solutions offered by music in this process stand equal to theories. (Essays on Music 393)

 

But the premise is put more globally in many places–as in this, from the late (1961) essay, “Opinion Delusion Society”:

 

The moment called cathexis in psychology, thought’s affective investment in the object, is not extrinsic to thought, not merely psychological, but rather the condition of its truth. Where cathexis atrophies, intelligence becomes stultified. (Critical Models 109)

 

Or, as he writes elsewhere, “the need to lend a voice to suffering is the condition of all truth” (Negative Dialectics 17-8). And in what is undoubtedly his most-remembered utterance–“To write poetry after Auschwitz is barbaric” (Prisms 34)–Adorno might seem to limit the argument, by citing an atrocity that threatens to beggar all affect, indeed, all expression–which would have to mean, all critique as well. For surely Adorno’s anxiety about poetry after Auschwitz encompasses anxiety about the continuance of critique and philosophy after Auschwitz as well–a way of putting it that helps uncover the utopian wishfulness in the famous assertion that “philosophy lives on because the moment to realize it was missed” (Negative Dialectics3). But those who deplore what they take to be the hair-shirt defeatism or melodramatizing “unhappy consciousness” of the “after-Auschwitz” remark would do well to ponder Adorno’s own comment a decade and a half later:

 

I once said that after Auschwitz one could no longer write poetry, and that gave rise to a discussion I did not anticipate . . . [I]t is in the nature of philosophy–and everything I write is, unavoidably, philosophy, even if it is not concerned with so-called philosophical themes–that nothing is meant quite literally. Philosophy always relates to tendencies and does not consist of statements of fact. . . . it could equally well be said . . . that [after Auschwitz] one must write poems, in keeping with Hegel’s statement in his Aesthetics that as long as there is an awareness of suffering among human beings there must also be art as the objective form of that awareness. . . . [The question whether one can write poetry after Auschwitz should rather be] the question whether one can live after Auschwitz. . . . [I]n one of the most important plays of Sartre . . . a young resistance fighter who is subjected to torture . . . [asks] whether or why one should live in a world in which one is beaten until one’s bones are smashed. Since it concerns the possibility of any affirmation of life, this question cannot be evaded. And I would think that any thought which is not measured by this standard, which does not assimilate it theoretically, simply pushes aside at the outset that which thought should address–so that it really cannot be called a thought at all. (Metaphysics 110-1; cf. Negative Dialectics 362)

 

This passage brings together a number of themes I want to foreground here: the evocation of high ambition, or vocation, or doom (“everything I write is, unavoidably, philosophy”); the adviso that in philosophy “nothing is meant quite literally”; the rootedness of art and philosophy alike in “an awareness of suffering,” and in the duty to objectify (in the Hegelian sense) that suffering; the ultimate question of “the possibility of any affirmation of life,” tellingly evoked by way of Sartre, rather than the (at the time) more fashionable, certainly more affectively subdued, mot on suicide from Camus’s Myth of Sisyphus. And indissociable from these thematics is the affect that the passage mobilizes on behalf of that thematics–mobilizes, or indeed communicates, and I mean “communicate” in the sense not of transmission from sender to receiver, but of a making-common, of communion, between writer and reader, and in that sense the evocation of “an objective form” of “that awareness [of suffering among human beings].”

 

Adorno’s writing, indeed, in the largest sense, his project, involves an affective investment–that “labor of affectualization,” or “work of affects”–and to that extent his project is something like “aesthetic” in the radically enlarged senses of Adorno’s own Aesthetic Theory. Adorno’s aesthesis is quite the reverse of the glamorous “strong pessimism” and “tragic” ecstasies in which Nietzsche affects to find art’s “redemption by illusion.” All such exaltations of strength and tragic heroism Adorno disdains as “imaginary consolations”; his own ideation tends rather to abjection–and not as the elective asceticism so (ambivalently) conjured by Nietzsche, but as the traumatic burden imposed on us by history, a burden of anguishes in which critique inevitably participates, which it can only attempt, however impossibly, to “work through”:

 

Unquestionably, one who submits to the dialectical discipline has to pay dearly in the qualitative variety of experience. Still, in the administered world the impoverishment of experience by dialectics, which outrages healthy opinion, proves appropriate to the monotony of that world. Its agony is the world’s agony raised to a concept. (Negative Dialectics 6)

 

The concept of agony must be, must be concretized as, must be made (in the writing, in the reading) agonizing–and agonistic. If Wittgenstein famously sneered that the concept of sugar is not sweet, Adorno consistently retorts, in effect, that the concept of suffering ought surely to hurt. Indeed, given the implication of sugar in the development of the Atlantic slave trade, the American plantation system, the development of banking, credit, and other fiduciary devices in the inauguration of capitalism, I would expect Adorno to urge that the concept of sugar must be very bitter indeed to the critical intelligence that is mindful to “constellate” the concept, including the brutal history, with the sensual and quotidian spatio-temporality of your mocha latte. The proposition that “the concept of sugar is not sweet” is true only in a trivial (and trivializing) sense; “agony raised to a concept” can only be a lie if in the raising conceptualization makes itself into an analgesic against the agony. The very phrase protests the habit of thinking that conceptualization “raises” painful material above (away from) suffering: on the contrary, in Adorno the agony is what “the concept” raises itself to.

 

“Agony Raised to a Concept”

 

Hence, in “lending a voice to suffering,” critique itself must be painful. We might call this Adorno’s “after-Auschwitz” imperative, with the stipulation that in Adorno’s work this critical affect long pre-dates Auschwitz–not to mention that two of Adorno’s most poignant books (Minima Moralia and Dialectic of Enlightenment) were composed, literally, “during-Auschwitz.” Dialectic of Enlightenment scorns the official optimisms and triumphalisms of modernity’s ideological cheerleaders–from the “revolutionary” scenario of the Stalinist left through the meliorist grand narrative of liberalism to the apocalyptic fantasias of fascism–since it was in pursuit of these diversely ideological happy endings that so much horror was unleashed. Whatever their other conflicts, it was the policy of all three camps that the needs of morale-management (propaganda) must cast critical questioning and truth-telling of any kind as “defeatism” and “pessimism”–reminder enough that critical “unhappy consciousness” like Adorno’s was, in his own lifetime, quite the reverse of ivory-tower indulgence. In the context of this optimism/pessimism force-field, Adorno’s citation of Hegel as advocate for an awareness of human suffering is telling, because it was Hegel’s “optimism” as much as Marx’s that underwrote the official optimism of Soviet Marxist-Leninism. For many, especially after the War, Hegel’s sanguine view of human history seemed, especially in light of Hegel’s professional success post-1816, a “false consciousness” or worse, a Panglossian dishonesty. Adorno often chides Hegel on not dissimilar grounds (“the guaranteed paths to redemption [are] sublimated magic practices” [Jephcott 18]); the Right Hegelians did, after all, have a case.³

 

I think it’s fair to say that every critique or reservation Adorno mounts of Hegel involves this issue: the ideological delusions, the imaginary consolations, the false consciousness, the bourgeois “coldness” (Minima Moralia 26) of Hegel’s “happy consciousness.”⁴ There is for Adorno a “darker” Hegel–a Hegel of repressed-always-returning “unhappy consciousness”–and Hegelian precept and Hegelian example figure everywhere in Adorno’s work. The vocation of the concept, the dialectic, mediation, contradiction, negation; the imperative to rethink historically the un- or trans-historical Platonic-Aristotelian “hypostases” of hallowed philosophical tradition; the deconstruction (if you’ll permit the anachronism) of the hallowed metaphysical binary of appearance and reality, noumenon and phenomenon; the insistence on the philosophical dignity of the latter (that phenomena have, contra Plato, a “logos” and that there is, in consequence, a phenomeno-logy): these and many other Hegelian motives attest to Adorno’s large investment in Hegel. Not for nothing does Adorno observe, in one of the Beethoven fragments (#24): “In a similar sense to that in which there is only Hegelian philosophy, in the history of western music there is only Beethoven” (Beethoven 10).

 

For Adorno as for Hegel, philosophy/critique is no ivory-tower exercise for a “disinterested” elite, but rather a labor in the service of humankind. Both write in the long “physician to an age” tradition, which makes “unhappy consciousness” part of the illness to be cured: this is the programmatic impulse registered in the serenity of Hegel’s own textual voice, which has so often seemed to the politically conscious unduly “optimistic”–as if Hegel looked on the horrors of the French Revolution and the Napoleonic wars with a smile of unflappable composure. Adorno’s concern lest such textual effect, or affect, be taken as a merely “subjective” expression of the author has its analogue in Hegel’s own cautions about the solicitations of “unhappy consciousness.” Hegel, we should remember, writes in the historical moment when “happiness” first became charged with political and social meanings and emotions. Thomas Jefferson made its pursuit an inalienable human right in an age when Rousseau, Lessing, Schiller, Wordsworth and many others dared imagine a “sentimental” or “aesthetic education” in which the promise of cultivated pleasures would supplant corporal punishment as incentive to learning, indeed, to self-making. (Compare the crucial role Hegel assigns in the Phenomenology to Bildung, between “ethics” [Sittlichkeit] and “morality” [Moralität].) It was after all the age of Schiller’s “play,” of his Ode “An Freude” so stirringly set to music by Beethoven (and now the anthem of the European Union), of the utopian visions of Fourier, Saint Simon, Robert Owen. For these and other figures of the great Revolutionary age, the thrilling prospect here was of “happiness” (or the pursuit of it) as a collective, popular, democratic endowment or “right”–no longer the elite privilege exclusive to those fortunate enough to be philosophers, as it was for Plato, Aristotle, the Stoics, Epicureans, and after (for all of whom eudaimonia was, again, a pursuit heavily invested in dispassion).

 

Hegel of course knows that happiness, especially collective human happiness, is easier said than done: how, in an age of revolutionary and counterrevolutionary violence, to keep from despairing over your morning newspaper–this is precisely the problem with which Hegel grapples in the famous “slaughterbench of history” passage in his 1830 lectures on The Philosophy of World History. Hegel doesn’t merely own that history is a nightmare; his further aim is to prescribe for the demoralization that historical consciousness entails. Hegel notes first the simplest defense-mechanism–self-congratulation on having escaped the carnage:

 

we draw back from the intolerable disgust with which these sorrowful reflections threaten us, into the more agreeable environment of our individual life–the Present formed by our private aims and interests. In short we retreat into the selfishness that stands on the quiet shore, and thence enjoy in safety the distant spectacle of “wrecks confusedly hurled.” (21)

 

But the other temptation, the more dangerous one, Hegel seems to imply, anticipating Nietzsche, is ostentatious despair of the breast-beating and hand-wringing sort. Such “sentimentalities” (as Hegel calls them) can become self-perpetuating, for

 

it is not the interest of such sentimentalities, really to rise above those depressing emotions; and to solve the enigmas of Providence which the considerations that occasioned them, present. It is essential to their character to find a gloomy satisfaction in the empty and fruitless sublimities of that negative result. (21; see also 34-5)

 

Only Terry Eagleton still chides Adorno’s “during-Auschwitz” despair as “defeatism,” but to many others today it can still seem to be precisely such a kind of critical “unhappy consciousness”: at best a merely personal whining, at worst a kind of moral Pecksniffery, in either case a source of (Hegel) “gloomy satisfactions” that can become compulsive or addictive in the fashion most recently theorized (“Enjoy your symptom!”) in Slavoj Zizek’s ingenious reinventions of Lacan, or protested in accents of Nietzschean brio in the “kynicism” of Peter Sloterdijk. Adorno, as it happens, anticipates these very objections in a fragment in Minima Moralia (written contemporaneously with Dialectic of Enlightenment, in the last year of World War Two):

 

Subjective reflection, even if critically alerted to itself, has something sentimental and anachronistic about it: something of a lament over the course of the world, a lament to be rejected not for its good faith, but because the lamenting subject threatens to become arrested in its condition and so to fulfill in its turn the law of the world’s course. Fidelity to one’s own state of consciousness and experience is forever in temptation of lapsing into infidelity, by denying the insight that transcends the individual and calls his substance by its name. (16; on the following page the “name” is spelled out: “society is essentially the substance of the individual.”)

 

I take “good faith” here to be ironic: Adorno is accusing “such sentimentalities” (as Hegel calls them) of something very like a Sartrean “mauvaise foi,” a moralized or psychologized version of Rousseau’s “amour-propre,” a (dubiously) “good faith” that Adorno wants to turn, like a Nietzsche in reverse, into a “bad conscience.” What gives critical “unhappy consciousness” its validity is that it belongs to “the matter at hand,” and to the critique of it, not merely to the subjectivity of the critic.

 

Some qualifications are necessary here: Hegel posits “unhappy consciousness” (Phenomenology 111-38) to diagnose precisely the sort of moral addiction or compulsion outlined above. He presents it as coincident historically with the advent of Christianity in the Mediterranean world, and as confluent with Greco-Roman Skepticism and Stoicism. For Hegel, “unhappy consciousness” expresses a relation to some “beyond” that is inaccessible in this world; it thus assumes an “abstract negation” of this-worldly attachments, and of the very possibility of this-worldly happiness as such. For this specific but chronic historical-spiritual disorder, Hegel believes that the fullness of history has, in the modern age, at last enabled a philosophical remedy, which the Phenomenology prescribes: a critical self-consciousness that will redeem the promise of this-worldly happiness by the practice of “determinate negation.” Hegel distinguishes between the two kinds of negation, “abstract” versus “determinate”: “abstract negation” is negation wholesale, allowing for no discriminations of quality; it thus enjoys the all-or-nothing force of merely quantitative judgment, and entoils itself in all the regressions of “bad infinity”–a formula anticipating the Thanatos of the implacably punitive super-ego diagnosed by Freud. “Determinate negation,” by contrast, is qualitative: it negates (criticizes) some particular state of things, and with a particular concept of some better state of things to replace or “sublate” it. “Determinate negation” thereby contributes to the coming-into-existence of a better world.

 

The later Hegel was wont (as his younger self was not) to portray this process in providential Christian terms. Christianity originated in the “abstract” (or “symbolic”) and Asiatic consciousness of ancient Judaism, but by virtue of its long and shaping experience in Western history–the Hellenization that assimilated it with art and philosophy, the Romanization that politicized it and accommodated it to the needs of statecraft, and the Germanization that suffused it with the spirit, even the libido, of freedom–Christianity so evolved as to realize, in modern times, the qualitative fulfillment or “incarnation” of what had originally been its merely “abstract” promise: the realization, from the Asiatic premise that “one is free,” through the classical aristocracy of “some are free,” to the democratic ideal emerging in the revolutionary events of Hegel’s own lifetime that “all are free,” that the state should represent all citizens.

 

To the extent that Hegel intends “unhappy consciousness” as a diagnosis or symptomatics of a malaise specific to the mood or mode of “abstract negation,” it might seem exactly the wrong phrase to apply to the textual effect or affect of Adorno’s critical project, which always seeks to “objectify” its claims, to refuse any construction of them as “merely subjective.” But the passage just quoted makes clear that the distinction between “subject” and “object” is one that Adorno’s writing practice, no less than his arguments in such essays as “On Subject and Object” (Critical Models 245-58), effectively refutes–for the passage not only diagnoses the malaise in question, but confesses its own infection as well. “The lamenting subject” suffers this malaise or “unhappy consciousness” will he or nill he–“even if [especially if?] critically alerted to [him]self.” Where Hegel proposed a rationale for overcoming “unhappy consciousness” and attempted to realize it as an effect or affect in his philosophical writing, Adorno more conflictedly insists that the despair of the critic cannot and should not be so complacently “overcome” in the critique: it is stuff and substance of “the matter in hand,” of the problems critique addresses. To claim to have transcended or “sublated” “unhappy consciousness” is for Adorno a false consciousness, “an imaginary solution to a real contradiction.”

 

Hegel’s “Happy Consciousness”?

 

For Adorno, clearly, the premise of Hegel’s “optimism” is generally circulated too simple-mindedly. In every chapter of the Phenomenology, after all, the human race, groping after happiness, relapses into ironically inventive and original new forms of “unhappy consciousness.” Indeed, the narrative of Hegel’s Phenomenology is scarcely less insistent than the Bible itself that moral misery is both chronic and productive for humankind, from Genesis 3’s access of shaming knowledge, or knowledge-as-shame, to Paul’s “I had not known lust, except the law had said, Thou shalt not covet” (Rom. 7:7), and John of Patmos’s “Revelation” of the fury of divine vengeance. In the Bible, “consciousness” is regularly projected as both effect and cause of pain, fear, suffering and anguish of spirit–“For in much wisdom is much grief; and he that increaseth knowledge increaseth sorrow” (Eccles. 1:18). Greco-Roman culture does the same, from the tears of Achilles and Priam, the family curse driving the Oresteia, and the fated suffering of Oedipus to the lachrymae rerum of Vergil. Greek philosophy projected a relief from such suffering, and in the narrative of Hegel’s Phenomenology, “Reason” makes its “first, and therefore imperfect, appearance” with “the beyond” of the “supersensible world” (87-8), a passage allegorizing the advent, in Socrates and Plato, of the high philosophic tradition. The elite subculture of ancient Greek “philosophy” was strongly invested in overcoming affective unhappiness, and often philosophy seems virtually “identifiable” with eudaimonia, a “happiness” whose condition is liberation not merely from unhappy affects, but from affect as such. In the Plato-and-Aristotle tradition, affect itself is unhappy, and the eudaimonia of the philosophers is projected precisely as antidote or narcotic (Eagleton’s “anaesthetic”) against the vagaries of affect rather than as a redemption of happiness in any affective sense.

 

Viewed through the historical lens of Hegelian “unhappy consciousness,” the Greek discovery of what Hegel calls “the supersensible” appears as too complacently oriented to the apatheia of “the beyond”; on Hegel’s showing, not until Christianity humanized the transcendent as “God” incarnate, and abjected itself before this God as a slave before its master, could unhappiness provide “Reason” with its proper (because at last duly cathected) challenge, that of overcoming unhappiness and abjection as such. Greek “Reason” was de-anthropomorphized; it could not thus appear as “master” in relation to the philosopher-“slave”; only as projected in human form can God, or “Reason,” inspire the kind of unhappiness that becomes consciousness in the first place. To say that in Hegel’s Phenomenology it is Reason that incarnates itself in human form is to indicate Hegel’s most fundamental reinscription of Christianity. “Reason is the slave of the passions”: Hume’s aphorism, read Hegel-wise, may illuminate my point here, stipulating of course that “the passions” are the unhappy ones. Hegel projects “Reason” as the slave destined, in abjection to the master, first to conceive and finally to attain an “independent [and “happy”] self-consciousness” that the master will never know. Try to project this allegory onto the Greek philosophical tradition, and you get a notably chillier picture: something like Plato’s Republic, with the philosophers as “guardians” in serene service to Logos itself as represented by, but precisely not personified or incarnated in, the philosopher-king, spinning the ideological fictions necessary to keep the benighted populace happily in the dark of the benignly ideological cave. Not for Plato and Aristotle, elite beneficiaries–“masters”–of a “some are free” society, any consciousness or idealization of the self as slave. Only in Diotima’s allegory of love in the Symposium does ancient Greek “philosophy” approach an abjected self-idealization, and an “unhappy consciousness” that is dynamic and productive, because affective, in anything like Hegel’s way.⁵ How telling that its name should be “love.”

 

So much, on Hegel’s showing, for “the first, and therefore imperfect appearance of Reason.” By contrast, at the close of the “unhappy consciousness” section, Hegel stages for “Reason” a more consequential second coming. The closing paragraph dramatizes the unhappy consciousness’s search for “relief from its misery” (Phenomenology 137); its very last sentence announces the advent to consciousness of “the idea of Reason.” What immediately follows, the next unit of the text, is the section (about a fifth of the Phenomenology ) called “Reason.” In the “unhappy consciousness” section, the alienations of “the beyond” are entoiled in early Christianity’s abjected sense of sin and guilt ([Spirit’s]”action . . . remains pitiable, its enjoyment remains pain” [138]), and the search for a “relief” from such “miseries” involves the “sublation” of such antithetical categories as action and obedience, guilt and forgiveness, particular self-surrender and universal will, by the ministrations of a “mediator,” a word whose antithetical connotations for a Protestant (Christ/priest) Hegel leaves in play, evidently to register the ambivalence of the Christian legacy. The driving force in Hegel’s narrative is “the negative,” the “unrest” and “counterthrust” associated with the not-at-all Platonic/Aristotelian theme of “freedom”: markers of Hegel’s determination to portray the very conflictedness of his World-Spirit history–and the affective no less than the logical extremity of its painful contradictions–as the agonizing but creative ordeal from which “the idea of Reason” first emerges in a form sufficiently “dialectical” to meet (or inaugurate) the challenges of the human story that Hegel wants to tell. Only as incited by affect (“unhappy consciousness”) does (Hegelian) “Reason” effectively enter, and change, history.

 

The Hegelian grand narrative projects the fulfillments of Spirit as still far off, as “not yet,” and so qualifies Hegel’s supposed “optimism.” The “slaughterbench of history” passage amply attests to Hegel’s own “mental torture” at the state of the world, the misery against which the “optimism” of his writing, style as well as substance, attempts something like an exorcism, a performativity in the spirit of “fake-it-till-you-make-it,” a veritable therapy for the Weltgeist at large, anticipating “joyful sciences” from Nietzsche and William James’s “healthy-mindedness” to Wilhelm Reich, Norman O. Brown, and the self-esteem or “recovery” movement of today. One of Hegel’s own most striking ideograms (or “constellations”) for this project is reserved for the climactic lines that conclude the Phenomenology where the “Calvary of absolute Spirit” is juxtaposed to the secularized image of the sacramental chalice of communion from Schiller’s “Ode to Friendship” (493; for shrewd comment on Hegel’s misquotations of the Schiller, see Kojève 165-8). Here what Hegel had called in the 1802 “Faith and Knowledge” “the speculative Good Friday, which used to be [considered] historical” (qtd. in Kaufmann 100), meets, if not quite a speculative Easter, at least a speculative chalice of the wine that, for Hegel, should not merely betoken, but should actually be the communion of Spirit with, or better, as Human Consciousness, Reason, and Spirit as such. The Cross first, then the Resurrection: this Christian ur-narrativization of the evil/good, damned/saved binary re-enacts itself in Hegel’s paradigmatic assumption that happy consciousness can only be–and eventually will be–wrested from the unhappy kind. This is the ordeal Hegel calls “the labor and the suffering of the negative,” an ordeal he pictures, indeed, as Spirit’s harrowing descent into hell, to own or become death itself, to risk its “utter dismemberment” as the necessary condition of “finding itself”:

 

this is the tremendous power of the negative; it is the energy of thought, of the pure “I.” Death, if that is what we want to call this non-actuality, is of all things the most dreadful, and to hold fast what is dead requires the greatest strength. . . . But the life of Spirit is not the life that shrinks from death and keeps itself untouched by devastation, but rather the life that endures it and maintains itself in it. It wins its truth only when, in utter dismemberment, it finds itself. . . . Spirit is this power only by looking the negative in the face, and tarrying with it. This tarrying with the negative is the magical power that converts it into being. This power is identical with what we earlier called the Subject. (Phenomenology 19)

 

Spirit’s near-death experience lends itself to our thematics of the “labor of affects”: overcoming ataraxia in a liberation or re-animation of affect, as fundamental to, even constitutive of Spirit’s project, and its eventual reward–a project proleptic of many nineteenth- and twentieth-century reinventions of heroism as a psychological quest-ordeal, from Wordsworth and Coleridge, Baudelaire (“Voyage à Cythère”), Browning’s “Dark Tower” to Eliot’s The Waste Land, from the sensationalisms of Delacroix and Géricault to Nietzsche’s “strong pessimism” and Wagner’s grandiose dooms, to Freud (Everyman an Oedipus of anguishing self-inquiry) and Mann and Valéry. And, of course, Adorno. Any such list risks silliness, but it seems to me that Hegel’s supposed “optimism” has too long obscured his place in the range of figurations and applications of “tarrying with the negative.”

 

Diagnosticians of Critique

 

“Unhappy consciousness,” then, is a chronic human problem, something like, if not a “human nature,” then a chronic foible of our “species-being.” But there is a more (so to speak) parochial manifestation of the problem, the “unhappy consciousness” very specifically of critique. Adorno indicts critique for shirking the “labor of the concept” with a plangency, an “unhappy consciousness” palpable and audible in the very tone and voice of his prose, in a way to forbid the forgiving thought that critique’s fault has been merely a kind of laziness, or stupidity; the further premise that the labor of conceptualization implies also a “labor of affectualization” evokes deficits more morally cathected, deficits of honesty and of courage as well. It is a prominent theme in Dialectic of Enlightenment that “enlightenment” congratulates itself for its courage in facing a demythologized world stripped of the comforts of traditional illusions, but has proven itself to be motivated, no less than “myth” itself, by a drive to master and/or deny “fear,” to achieve an “imaginary” comfort or self-assurance in face of a world more complicated and threatening than enlightenment thereby dares to acknowledge.

 

Hegel makes similar observations, though (usually) more as satiric jabs at common-sense philosophizing than as Adorno’s lamentation over culture-wide pathologies. Hegel, indeed, diagnoses every possible reason for what we might call a “resistance to philosophy”–fear of a death-like “loss” of the self in “doubt and despair” (Phenomenology 18-20, 49-51), “shame” at confronting the intellectual challenge and the “alien authority” of the new (35), “the conceit that will not argue” (41), narcissistic “enjoyment” in (or fixation on) one’s own unwittingly tautological “explanations” (94, 101). The one obstacle that does not occur to Hegel is the reader’s potential intellectual incapacity: Hegel writes not only as a writer/thinker utterly undaunted by the prodigious complexities his inquiry generates for itself, but as if in entire confidence that any reader not debilitated by the moral deficits just mentioned will be fully capable of following where Hegel leads. (I will confess to moments of thinking this the most extravagantly utopian of Hegel’s many dizzying “optimisms.”) When Hegel notes that “a fear of falling into error sets up a mistrust of Science,” he is referring to the enlightenment program, since Bacon and Descartes, of arriving at truth by eliminating all error and illusion: a skeptical, Occam’s-razor approach predicated on the hope that when error has been pared away, the remainder will be truth. But Hegel advises that we should “mistrust this very mistrust”:

 

Should we not be concerned as to whether this fear of error is not just the error itself? Indeed this fear takes something–a great deal in fact–for granted as truth . . . [e.g.,] certain ideas about cognition as an instrument and as a medium, and assumes that there is a difference between ourselves and this cognition. Above all, it presupposes that the Absolute stands on one side and cognition on the other, independent and separated from it, and yet is something real; or in other words, it presupposes that cognition which, since it is excluded from the Absolute, is surely outside of the truth as well, is nevertheless true, an assumption whereby what calls itself fear of error reveals itself rather as fear of the truth. (Phenomenology 47)

 

Hegel goes on to diagnose what appears as merely intellectual error in psychological terms, as a vanity and insecurity vitiating the intellectual courage of the inquirer. (Hegel becomes something of a psychologist of the foibles specific to intellectuals, an impulse and an interest Adorno continues.) Hegel indicts this unwitting “fear of the truth” as rationalizing an “incapacity of Science,” as indeed “intended to ward off Science itself, and constitute an empty appearance of knowing.” What Hegel calls “natural consciousness” (empiricism, that is, “sense certainty” elevating itself to a scientific claim) resists the “path” of the Notion (a.k.a. “the labor of the concept”) because “the realization of the Notion, counts for it [natural consciousness] as the loss of its own self” (Phenomenology 49). “The road can therefore be regarded as the pathway of doubt, or more precisely as the way of despair”–shades here of “tarrying with the negative” (19)–and “natural consciousness,” economizing its experiential investments to maximize pleasure and minimize pain, shrinks from the discomforts of such a path. But for Hegel, this despair and doubt are part of the “necessary progression and interconnection of the forms of the unreal [“natural”] consciousness [that] will by itself bring to pass the completion of the series” (50). Hegel goes on to outline, in effect, a therapy of Geist in its struggles with such despair and doubt, with the “anxiety” that attends them, with the “sentimentality” that resorts to a wishful optimism or eudaemonism against them, with the “conceit” that will tempt Geist to fortify its “vanity” in the face of such threats of “loss of self.” Hegel ends with the promise that the “unrest” of thought will eventually overcome the “inertia” these despairs produce, to renew the quest for truth or “the Absolute” (51-3).

 

For Adorno, Hegel’s concluding promise rings false because Hegel speaks as if it were not a “broken promise” in the here-and-now world. Hegel’s genial and confident tone, in effect, belittles the resistance to philosophy–as if to laugh us out of our intellectual timidity–and offers its own brio as, so to speak, a down-payment on the world-historical promise of eventual redemption and happy consciousness. By contrast, Adorno, most of all in Dialectic of Enlightenment, means to frighten us into new awareness: not only of our very real peril, in the age of industrialized total war, but of the numbness and despair with which we have so far confronted it–or rather, contrived not to confront it. What Hegel satirizes as merely local or personal resistances or failures within the discipline of philosophical inquiry, Adorno diagnoses as a culture-wide pathology, whose lethal potential is all too evident in the age of Auschwitz and Hiroshima.

 

Fear and Enlightenment

 

The relevant response to that lethal potential is fear. In Dialectic of Enlightenment, fear is both a key theme and an overarching effect. In Adorno’s philosophical and critical tradition, fear, among the principal components of “unhappy consciousness,” has held a special, even a rather glamorous, place. In Hegel’s master/slave narrative, the “struggle for recognition” surmounts nature only if life is at stake in the struggle. For the slave who buys life at the cost of bondage, the trauma of mortal fear in combat remains the necessary condition of the subsequent achievement of “independence,” “self-consciousness,” and an instigating conception of “being-for-self.” Nietzsche similarly finds an authenticating experience of “pure terror,” “original pain,” and the like as the sine qua non of (just what wimpy modernity has closed its eyes to) “tragedy”; absent such experiences of terror, there arises (has already arisen) what Francis Fukuyama calls, following Kojève’s famous splenetic “end of history” footnote (158-62, n6), the “last man” problem: the fear that, should utopia ever arrive, humankind, delivered at last from all mortal challenges, will devolve into a thumb-sucking limbo of material complacency and moral insignificance. This anxiety motivates the conflicted attachment of so many to violence, as a guarantee (in ways René Girard diagnoses) of the values lost upon the “last man.” To be sure, anxieties lest the revolution happen non-violently would seem to be overblown. But the prospect that revolution might banish suffering and unhappiness altogether arouses ambivalence. Even Marx, in the most utopian of the 1844 manuscripts, the section called “Private Property and Communism,” avows that come the revolution, not all suffering will end, but only the “alienated” kind: “for suffering, apprehended humanly, is an enjoyment of self in man” (87). We need our fear, to make ourselves heroic.

 

Further ideological uses of a glamorized fear also figure in the more individualized inflections of these themes running from Kierkegaard to Heidegger and early Sartre, in which fear is the guarantor of spiritual maturity and courage, a sort of macho philosophique, an openness of the self to moral extremities of fear and anxiety, refusal or innocence of which would be inauthenticity or “mauvaise foi.” In Kierkegaard, although the “religious” is the valorized other of the merely “aesthetic” life–Kierkegaard’s version of the “last man” vacuity–the political itself appears as, categorically, aesthetic: an evasion of the more challenging fears and tremblings that Kierkegaard projects as the exclusive (why not say) “enjoyments” of the most authentically lived life. Similarly in Heidegger, a courageous “being-towards-death” individuates and valorizes the existential Dasein against the massed, faceless, inauthentic “they” (“das Man“); compare Lacan’s grammatologized and historicized version of the story of the devolution of “modern man” from subject-“je” into object-“moi.” Adorno was prescient in complaining that such rhetorics resonated all too readily with the political vulgarizations of the cheerleaders for Thanatos (“Viva la muerte!”) and the SS Übermenschen flouting death’s-head insignia, encouraged by Himmler in explicitly Nietzschean language (“self-overcoming,” etc.) to withstand the urgings of conscience that would impede them in their heroic task of massacring the innocents.

 

For Adorno, by contrast, “the goal of the revolution is the elimination of anxiety. That is why we need not fear the former, and need not ontologize the latter” (Complete Correspondence 131). For me, indeed, one of the most attractive things about Adorno is his visceral refusal of any such glamorization of fear, not least because the “violence” of which some intellectuals speak so grandiosely is often merely figurative–indeed, sheerly “imaginary.” Hegel’s “tarrying with the negative” (“to hold fast what is dead requires the greatest strength”) becomes in Adorno the more muted formula, “the embittering part of dialectics” (Negative Dialectics 151). Not for him the accents of Zarathustrian bravado, snook heroically cocked at the void. Adorno is more like Freud (and, with qualifications, Marx) in conceiving fear as a humiliation, a non-elective ordeal imposed on us by the brutality of our historical circumstances, a suffering that may or may not elicit heroism from some of the sufferers, but that is sure to damage and debase, not to ennoble, most of its victims. Like Freud, Adorno distrusts rhetorics that align the experience of fear with moral grandeur or spiritual profit, including those, like the “last man” anxiety, that put the case negatively. For Adorno, indeed, to posit the debasement of the “last man” as an argument against utopia would be ideological delusion: as if the “last man” deprivations weren’t already epidemic in the nightmare of our “administered world.” The motive Adorno most readily shares with Lacan, though Adorno’s moral plangency is at the farthest possible remove from Lacan’s knowing Schadenfreude, would be precisely his alarm at the masochistic human addiction to misery, to sentimentalizing rhetorics of amor fati, to the problematic neatly summarized by Zizek’s sarcastic injunction “Enjoy your symptom!” and instantiated by Kierkegaard, Nietzsche, Heidegger, and Kojève). Like Lacan, again, Adorno aligns this “weakening of the ego” with a “neutralization of sex,” a “desexualization of sexuality” (Critical Models 72-5) that oddly joins Marcuse’s “repressive desublimation” with de Rougemont’s extension of the Nietzschean “last man” lament to Eros. About the administered world’s “castrated hedonism, desire without desire,” Adorno’s diagnosis would be very much the Lacanian shake of the head at having given way on desire (Aesthetic Theory 11). (One recalls here Weber’s “iron cage,” “sensualists without heart,” etc., in the peroration to The Protestant Ethic.)

 

So Adorno affects no pose, à la Kierkegaard, Nietzsche, and Heidegger, of facing down the abyss from which the rest of us cower away in denial; nor, on the other hand, does he make as if to smile it away, as Hegel does. If Adorno’s critical “unhappy consciousness” avoids the Scylla of Hegelian “optimism,” it equally steers clear of the Charybdis of (self-regardingly) “strong pessimism[s]” of the anti-utopian type so often mobilized in critiques of modernity. Adorno’s anxieties about modernity are not Huxleyan, but Orwellian, conjuring not the pampered “last man” whom Nietzsche so haughtily disdains, but rather the brutalized “administered subject” whose abasement before the domination of a “rationalized” world is achieved at the price of a “weakening of the ego” to produce the ironically named “authoritarian personality,” disciplined and conditioned in the regimes of the workplace and the routines of commodified pleasure as managed by the culture industry, a colonizing and exploiting appropriation, “for others,” of all “spirit,” of all subjecthood.

 

The 1944 “Introduction”

 

Written during the darkest days of World War Two, while Horkheimer and Adorno were refugees in the U.S., the Dialectic of Enlightenment manifests the “unhappy consciousness of critique” as a deliberate cathexis of fear in writing. Keeping the date of composition in mind–late 1943 to early 1944: “during Auschwitz”–the book aims to arouse the fear narcotized in enlightenment chorismos, the “division of labor” which assigns feeling and thinking to different agencies (art and science) to the detriment of both. (“The narrow-minded wisdom that sorts out feeling from knowing and rubs its hands together when it finds the two balanced is–as trivialities sometimes are–the caricature of a situation that over the centuries of the division of labor has inscribed this division in subjectivity” [Aesthetic Theory 331]). Horkheimer and Adorno project the ataraxia that enlightenment makes programmatic as foundational to the “dialectic of enlightenment” the book means to diagnose. Later in his career, Adorno frequently avowed the ambition to “rescue” this or that ambition, program, or value that modernity is in danger of forgetting; the project of excavating the “emotional force” of Kant’s philosophy (above) is an example, but it is a dim echo of the much more urgent, larger-stakes effort in Dialectic of Enlightenment to reawaken the energy of terror against which the enlightenment has deludedly, compulsively numbed itself. Fear is not merely the “textual effect” or affect of Dialectic of Enlightenment, but also the “motivation” of its thematic or indeed thetic burden, announced in the book’s opening sentences:

 

Enlightenment, understood in the widest sense as the advance of thought, has always aimed at liberating human beings from fear and installing them as masters. Yet the wholly enlightened earth is radiant with triumphant calamity. Enlightenment’s program was the disenchantment of the world. It wanted to dispel myths, to overthrow fantasy with knowledge. (Jephcott 1)

 

The book will go on to argue–or I had better say, to evoke, agitatedly, breathlessly, and reiteratively, in a way to enact its thematic of the deadlock or “standstill” that has reversed the developed world’s “progress” into “regress”–that so far from having “liberated [ourselves] from fear,” our very fear of fear, our anxious repression of our cultural and historical anxieties, has left us enslaved to fear every bit as much as the primitive trapped in the cycle of compulsive rituals that palliate the terror of human impotence in a terrifying world. Enlightenment prides itself on having escaped that cycle, but this very pride has become an illusion and a denial, a “sympathetic magic” against dreads cognate with those that entrap the primitive; the devolution of philosophy into positivism and technology has made of “scientific method” a denial of the unknown, an ethos that assimilates the unknown to the known, the new and the different to the “same old same old.”

 

Hence our aborted “enlightenment,” “triumphant calamity,” progress reverting to barbarism, in obedience to an as-if fated “compulsion to repeat.” Hence “the curse of irresistible progress is irresistible regression” (Jephcott 28). The fear of fear itself has driven enlightenment to an illusory exorcism of fear, made this impulse its analgesic, its will to deny, in short, its “imaginary victory” over fear, a freedom from fear the more delusional, and (therefore) the more compulsive, the more terror threatens to engulf it. The social and other dislocations of modernization produced turmoil because the new is frightening–and it’s a collective reflex in societies engulfed by rapid development to try to master collective fear by refusing the new. Whatever affronts or perplexes or challenges enlightenment’s canons of domestication arouses “fear,” which enlightenment promptly and preemptively represses. “The cause of enlightenment’s relapse into mythology is to be sought . . . in the fear of truth which petrifies enlightenment itself” (Jephcott xvi).

 

What the book argues about fear, repression, and the anxiety of the new, it also enacts in the writing. Against the backdrop of World War Two, the contrast of Horkheimer and Adorno’s authorial carriage with Freud’s is a useful handle. Freud’s “stoic” composure–the shocking disclosures delivered in tones of measured calm; the outrages to common sense and morals rendered only the more stinging for the lucidity of the delivery; the scandalized “resistances” to his work which Freud anticipates, and serenely takes as confirmation of it–all this is at the furthest remove from Dialectic of Enlightenment, whose prose is overwrought, urgent, and (often) recklessly obscure. And deliberately, self-consciously so, as we can read in the book’s 1944 “Introduction,” a manifesto in justification of the book’s obscurity and difficulty. The argument evokes and coordinates three axes of “difficulty,” each motivating, and motivated by, the others: the psychological difficulty of our traumatic history, past, present, and future; the intellectual difficulty of the philosophic-critical tradition whose materials the argument mobilizes; and the darkly enigmatic carriage of the self-consciously, deliberately difficult prose style of Dialectic of Enlightenment itself.

 

Dated “May 1944,” just days before the allied landings in Normandy, and reprinted without change in subsequent editions and translations, the “Introduction” insists that the “difficulties” of the text are not to be set aside, that they are bone and blood of the book’s argument and intended effect, indeed, of its project and its problem: that they are “motivated,” programmatic, in ways the authors outline, “make thematic,” in the “Introduction” itself. If the text proper enacts or performs–the mot juste here is suffers–the difficulties of “the matter in hand,” the “Introduction” more explicitly reflects on them, and thus initiates the challenge of the text. From almost the opening sentence, the difficulties of the project are foregrounded:

 

The further we proceeded with the task the more we became aware of a mismatch between it and our own capabilities. What we had set out to do was nothing less than to explain why humanity, instead of entering a truly human state, is sinking into a new kind of barbarism. We underestimated the difficulty of dealing with the subject . . . . (Jephcott xiv)

 

The echo of Rousseau’s famous lament–“man,” born free, lives everywhere in chains–announces an attempt “to explain why” this should be so; the following sentence similarly conjures with the eleventh thesis on Feuerbach in a way to suggest, Marx’s provocation notwithstanding, that “interpreting” the world is quite difficult enough, even in default of changing it, and assumes (what Marx can only rhetorically have seemed to question) that there is continuity, not antithesis, between interpreting the world and changing it. In any case, “consciousness” is not a problem Horkheimer and Adorno are prepared to dismiss:

 

We underestimated the difficulty of dealing with the subject because we still placed too much trust in contemporary consciousness. While we had noted for many years that, in the operations of modern science, the major discoveries are paid for with an increasing decline of theoretical education, we nevertheless believed that we could follow those operations to the extent of limiting our work primarily to a critique or a continuation of specialist theories. Our work was to adhere, at least thematically, to the traditional disciplines: sociology, psychology, and epistemology. The fragments we have collected here show, however, that we had to abandon that trust. . . . in the present collapse of bourgeois civilization, not only the operations but the purpose of science have become dubious. The tireless self-destruction of enlightenment hypocritically celebrated by implacable fascists and implemented by pliable experts in humanity compels thought to forbid itself the last remaining innocence regarding the habits and tendencies of the Zeitgeist. (Jephcott xiv)

 

What had initially looked to be a set of “specialist” problems (“sociology, psychology, and epistemology”) turns out to challenge “philosophy” itself–and to challenge it not only on its wonted ground of “theoretical” awareness but also, more radically, on the higher-stakes ground of politics, culture, science, and the very fate of civilization, grounds on which philosophy has wanted to maintain a detached “innocence” that, Horkheimer and Adorno charge, even the most willfully “innocent” can no longer pretend is tenable. The urgency of the crisis is to be read in the very texture, the very “fragmentary” quality, of the text we are about to read: we might have expected that the move from specialist disciplines to the discipline of disciplines, philosophy, would entail an integration and comprehensiveness denied the specialisms (or rather, that the specialisms renounce on principle); instead, Horkheimer and Adorno’s “philosophical” effort to overcome the fragmentation of intellectual culture can itself yield only “fragments.” In the context of 1944, a phrase like “the tireless self-destruction of enlightenment” might have suggested images from front pages and newsreels of bombed-out cities, whole cultures reduced to rubble, to “fragments.” As we’ll see, Horkheimer and Adorno diagnose enlightenment as a rapaciously “analytic” (that is, atomizing, separating, distinction-making) habit or drive, or driven-ness, of thought that has already, in the name of science, fragmented the field of intellectual labor from within. Enlightenment’s divvying-up of disciplinary turf, modernity’s settlement of the “contest of faculties” thematized by Kant, this “innocence,” this renunciation of the larger, integrated, theoretically aware or “self-conscious” view that opens itself to the largest problems of the culture, is a large part of the problem, a major symptom–indeed, the pathology itself–of the “dialectic of enlightenment” Horkheimer and Adorno aim to diagnose and to prescribe for.

 

The effort “to explain why” the world is in such dire straits obliges philosophy to overcome its wonted (ideological) “innocence,” to estrange or defamiliarize habits of thinking and of language long since turned ideological:

 

If public life has reached a state in which thought is being turned inescapably into a commodity and language into a celebration of the commodity, the attempt to trace the sources of this degradation must refuse obedience to the current linguistic and intellectual demands before it is rendered entirely futile by the consequence of those demands for world history. (Jephcott xiv-xv)

 

This seems a very “period” modernist or avant-garde disavowal of received conventions, but also a warning–for “even the most honorable reformer who recommends renewal in threadbare language reinforces the existing order he seeks to break by taking over its worn-out categorial apparatus and the pernicious power-philosophy lying behind it” (Jephcott xvii). Renewal of our debased language will involve expression and thinking, will contravene conventional cultural “demands” that are both “linguistic and intellectual”; the antinomy long dominant in Western critical discourses between the “textual” and the “thetic” is to be collapsed, even something like “deconstructed,” not only in the argued theory but even more in the self-consciously difficult writing practice of Dialectic of Enlightenment.

 

But in dissenting from “current linguistic and intellectual demands” here, Dialectic of Enlightenment declares a crucial difference from (even implies a critique of) avant-gardism as usual, for in the modern arts, the search for new and uncorrupted expressive means typically identifies the “concept,” generically, as the enemy, and mobilizes against it in the name of the “concrete” particular, whose redemptive quidditas or “authenticity” the familiarizations of intellect have allegedly habituated and debased. (This axiomatic–why not call it an “ideology”?–replicates itself, of course, in many philosophical texts, and hence some of the Frankfurt School’s particular “existentialist” bêtes noirs, e.g., Heidegger, Jaspers, Scheler.) The twentieth-century arts, too, want to reclaim “truth,” but usually by circumventing the very conceptuality Horkheimer and Adorno set in place as a sine qua non of their project and conceiving “truth” aesthetically, as “immediate [that is, unmediated] experience.” From the Hegelian viewpoint of Horkheimer and Adorno, “mediation” simply is “the labor of the concept”; its repudiation, in the arts as in the empirical sciences, is itself an important symptom (Adorno’s frequent name for it is “nominalism”) of the predicament of modernity–that is, of the “dialectic of enlightenment”–that their book means to expose and indict. And redeem or “rescue,” in large measure, again, by the “labor of the affects,” that is, affectualizing “the labor of the concept” itself.

 

“Mythic Fear Turned Radical”

 

I want now to risk a very lengthy quotation that will display these difficulties, and a few new ones, together. It is one of the many projections in Dialectic of Enlightenment of the arc from prehistory to the present, from animism to enlightenment, and it enacts the “progress/regress” motif in the paradoxical gesture of a narrative whose point is to enact the failure of its own progress, to display the inextricability of progress and regression even at the risk of seeming to identify terms whose non-identity would seem to be the very condition of “dialectic” itself. So we have a thematic burden carried less in the details of what the sentences state or argue, than in the formal character of a passage that conducts itself as a quasi- or (even) pseudo-narrative. Crucially, the theme–the failure of progress, the regression to primitive unreason–is charged with dread by reason of the very cryptic-ness of its strange oracular utterance, its broad-brush laying about with complex and loaded terminologies whose meanings or connotations are not clarified or delimited, and above all its rhythm, its air of driven and breathless haste:

 

The murky, undivided entity worshipped as the principle of mana at the earliest known stages of humanity lived on in the bright world of the Greek religion. Primal and undifferentiated, it is everything unknown and alien; it is that which transcends the bounds of experience, the part of things which is more than their immediately perceived existence. What the primitive experiences as supernatural is not a spiritual substance in contradistinction to the material world but the complex concatenation of nature in contrast to its individual link. The cry of terror called forth by the unfamiliar becomes its name. It fixes the transcendence of the unknown in relation to the known, permanently linking horror to holiness. The doubling of nature into appearance and essence, effect and force, made possible by myth no less than by science, springs from human fear, the expression of which becomes its explanation. This does not mean that the soul is transposed into nature, as psychologism would have us believe; mana, the moving spirit, is not a projection but the echo of the real preponderance of nature in the weak psyches of primitive people. The split between animate and inanimate, the assigning of demons and deities to certain specific places, arises from this preanimism. Even the division of subject and object is prefigured in it. If the tree is addressed no longer as simply a tree but as evidence of something else, a location of mana, language expresses the contradiction that it is at the same time itself and something other than itself, identical and not identical. Through the deity speech is transformed from tautology into language. The concept, usually defined as the unity of the features of what it subsumes, was rather, from the first, a product of dialectical thinking, in which each thing is what it is only by becoming what it is not. This was the primal form of the objectifying definition, in which concept and thing became separate, the same definition which was already far advanced in the Homeric epic and trips over its own excesses in modern positive science. But this dialectic remains powerless as long as it emerges from the cry of terror, which is the doubling, the mere tautology of terror itself. The gods cannot take away fear from human beings, the petrified cries of whom they bear as their names. Humans believe themselves free of fear when there is no longer anything unknown. This has determined the path of demythologization, of enlightenment, which equates the living with the nonliving as myth had equated the nonliving with the living. Enlightenment is mythical fear radicalized. The pure immanence of positivism, its ultimate product, is nothing other than a form of universal taboo. Nothing is allowed to remain outside, since the mere idea of the “outside” is the real source of fear. (Jephcott 10-11)

 

This passage illustrates the fundamental–and entirely deliberate–narrative contradiction of Dialectic of Enlightenment, for the momentum of the passage, its energy or, so to speak, body-language as one reads, is narrative–we are reading a story–and yet it is a rum question at the close what, if anything, has been narrated. The passage ends much as it began–enlightenment ends where animism began–in fearful denial of the new or the “outside”; here as elsewhere, what is narrated is the failure of the narrative to achieve narrativity, that is, to accomplish the development, to unfold the new, which would be the sine qua non of narrative, the crucial change or “event” (outcome), the indispensable thing-to-be-narrated in the first place. The burden of this (specifically narrative) “performative contradiction” is that “the curse of irresistible progress is irresistible regression” (Jephcott 28)–and the non-transitive steady-state syntax of that sentence, subject and predicate joined by the present-tense copula, could stand as emblem of just what the narrative’s progress/regress enacts, or rather prevents being enacted. A particularly cryptic crux is the word “tautology,” here anticipating Adorno’s later assault on “identity thinking.” In the passage, “tautology” is not, to be sure, simply identifiable with “identity,” but acts as something like the surrogate of identity–of the retro- or primary identity of the origin (arché), not of the ultimate identity (telos) of the “Absolute.” As actant, in other words, “tautology” appears here as the fated antagonist of “language,” of “separation,” of apprehension of “the Other,” of non-identity, and of “dialectical thinking” itself: at the recurrence of “fear,” all achieved differences relapse, as if in obedience to the downward pull of a gravitational field, back to the ground of “tautology” again.

 

But Horkheimer and Adorno want to preserve the Hegelian narrative as well as to cancel it; hence, near the middle of the passage, the agitating appearance of “language,” “concept,” and “dialectic” come onstage and momentarily seem, as narrative actants, capable of breaching the closure of “tautology,” the regime from animism to enlightenment, and of enabling a truly narrative movement of change. “Tautology” figures as their nemesis, the ruin of all that they would seem to promise. From the primitive awe of the spirit-name and its “linking horror to holiness,” the mere utterance of which becomes “expression” and then “explanation,” there arises a rudimentary anticipation of “the division of subject and object,” and hence the very Hegelian sense that “language expresses the contradiction that it is at the same time itself and something other than itself, identical and not identical. . . . [thus] speech is transformed from tautology into language.” It is as much from the interaction of these terms as from any extant notion we might have of their meaning that we infer what “tautology,” “language,” “dialectic,” and so on, connote here, what role they play in the “night of the world” drama unfolding on the page.

 

We note the entry here of “contradiction,” a key term in Frankfurt School discourses, and of the problematic of “identity/non-identity” Adorno will later elaborate in Negative Dialectics. In this passage, the next term to agitate the text is “dialectic” itself, here staged as the condition of a redemption of the “concept” from its demotion to “the unity of the features of what it subsumes,” a nominalist formulation that reduces the “concept” to a mere enabling fiction. Against such nominalist dismissals of “the concept,” the text goes on to retroject what Adorno elsewhere calls “the kinetic force of [the] concept” (Philosophy of Modern Music 26) as Hegel “dialectically” reimagined it, back into antiquity, asserting that the concept “was . . . from the first, a product of dialectical thinking, in which each thing is what it is only by becoming what it is not.” The language of “dialectic” and “becoming” here summons the highest Hegelian vocation of the concept and of philosophy, which sets what can be thought against, and as the critique or “negation” of, what merely is, as a volitional element in the temporal stream (or narrative) of “becoming.” Having introduced the terminology, and the promise, of the dialectic, the passage now reverts to program, to stage the miscarriage of that promise: for “this dialectic remains powerless as long as it emerges from the cry of terror, which is the doubling, the mere tautology of terror itself.” (“Emerges from”: enlightenment may suppose it has surmounted the primal terror, but it has merely repressed it, and thus, unconsciously, prolonged it.) The passage then moves to enlightenment, which seeks to escape the “tautology of terror” by “demythologization,” by a systematic conquest of the source of fear, the unknown, and its conversion to knowledge–but this impotent dialectic continues despite itself, and unwittingly, to “duplicate” the “tautology of terror” rather than to undo it.

 

That some such reversal or catastrophe befalls the enlightenment program, the general drift of the passage makes clear–though neither narratively nor, so to speak, syllogistically, is the exact course of this miscarriage spelled out. Rather there follows a sequence of problematic assertions, and oddly it is in the more obscure of these that the extent and irony of the failure emerge most clearly–in, for instance, the most challenging sentence here, which is also the shortest: “Enlightenment is mythical fear radicalized” (Jephcott 11). It happens this is a sentence (“Aufklärung ist die radikal gewordene, mythische Angst” [Horkheimer and Adorno, Dialektik 32]) that I prefer in Cumming’s translation: “Enlightenment is mythic fear turned radical” (16). Both translations preserve the etymological and other connotations of “radikal” in the German, but that buzzword makes harder rather than easier the question of what the sentence might mean. For the politically left reader Horkheimer and Adorno address, the first connotations of “turned radical” would be of progress, of “radicalization” as a desirable conversion or development: something has advanced from a complacent, muddled superficiality, has been “made conscious,” has been made political: radicalized. So far, the sentence might be read as endorsing the very ideology of enlightenment that, the context makes clear, the authors are in fact attacking.

 

Another first-take reading, not incompatible with the first, might read “radicalized” or “turned radical” to suggest something like an eruption or explosion of mythic fear, as if announcing a sudden and transforming release of affects hitherto repressed and held in check–and of course the sudden unblocking of long-repressed energies is a familiar figure for revolution. But again, context counsels otherwise–the “universal taboo” is clearly a universal repression–so “radicalized” or “turned radical” clearly must mean something else: must mean, indeed, virtually the opposite: must mean something like, “enlightenment is primordial fear precisely not bursting up into expression from below, but on the contrary driven downward, back to the fundamental, to the roots.” “Radicalized,” in short, might mean “repressed”–the reverse of its usual connotation. The most apposite model I can adduce here is Freud’s account of trauma in section IV of Beyond the Pleasure Principle, according to which frightening stimuli “invade” the sensorium, which responds with a defensive “hypercathexis” the paradoxical aim of which is to achieve an “anticathexis,” by means of which the floods of overwhelming stimuli can be “mastered” and “bound,” and rendered thus “quiescent.” (Freud is elaborating here the “compulsion to repeat”–a model whose pertinence to Dialectic of Enlightenment seems the more compelling for going unmentioned by the authors.)

 

And yet, having worked through the twists and turns above, not “cancelled” but “preserved” in all this conflictedness of suggestion and connotation against context and larger thought-rhythms, there persists some residue, some still-utopian potential, of the first reading: that enlightenment is indeed, or may somehow again be, a radicalization of mythic fear in the sense projected in the “labor of affectualization,” in effect the program of Dialectic of Enlightenment itself: to awaken the fear, terror, angst, dread that “the dialectic of enlightenment” has so far narcotized and repressed, and draw from the jolting accesses of affect thereby released a newly radicalizing energy that will make of “the unhappy consciousness of critique” an engine of advance and of the new, rather than a pitfall, a syndrome–an ataraxia–of defeat and repetition.

 

This “and yet,” I want to argue, is the “dialectical” condition and/or effect of Adorno’s so affective and affecting prose. His challenge is as much moral and emotional as intellectual: as much about confronting fear–as immediate affect, as mediated concept, as meta-fear: the fear of fear itself–as about meeting the interpretive and cognitive challenges of a tough text in the daunting tradition of Hegel-and-Marx and after. This text, both in the writing and in the reading, enacts or suffers what it argues: the imperative labor of facing, in thought and in feeling, the Angst that has paralyzed thought and feeling both. The difficulty of the prose is meant to inflict this Angst on the reader, this “labor and suffering of the negative.” But–“and yet”–it is meant to agitate as well anxiety’s antithetical or dialectical other, hope–however unemphatic in the argument, however merely implicit in the movement, of the text.

 

Most of my description here has made Dialectic of Enlightenment sound like a very despairing book–extravagantly, floridly despairing. It is indeed a text answering to Harold Bloom’s fine formulation, “an achieved anxiety” (96). But of course Horkheimer and Adorno do not mean to incite affects of fear for their own sake; that would be “mimesis” of the merely ideological kind–mere “repetition” of “symptom,” not critical negation. On the contrary, their “immanent critique” intends a “working-through” that must begin by making the traumas and anxieties of World War Two available to consciousness, even at the cost of terror, as indispensable prerequisite to any breach of the paralyzing captivity in which modern consciousness has languished. Adorno intimates as much in an unwontedly straightforward passage from a 1967 essay, originally a radio talk, called “Education after Auschwitz”:

 

anxiety must not be repressed. When anxiety is not repressed, when one permits oneself to have, in fact, all the anxiety that this [after-Auschwitz] reality warrants, then precisely by doing that, much of the destructive effect of unconscious and displaced anxiety will probably disappear. (Critical Models 198)

 

Hence the paradoxical “textual effect” (or affect) of Dialectic of Enlightenment, that what might seem Horkheimer and Adorno’s ne plus ultra of despair nevertheless achieves a kind of “relief” in what seems at first merely to repeat the very affects from which relief is sought. Only after an evocation of the pain and fear that have paralyzed us can there be any release of affective energies whose freeing might augur possibilities more hopeful: that there remain potentials of consciousness (thought and feeling, agony and concept, eros and knowledge)–potentials, in short, of critique–still to be mobilized. The critical is not yet–“not yet”–the utopian, nor is the promise (Stendhal’s promesse du bonheur) quite vouchsafed, let alone realized, its “broken”-ness repaired. Nevertheless, for all its extremities of Angst and terror, Dialectic of Enlightenment manages to arouse hopes that Freud or Weber would dismiss with a sadder-but-wiser shake of the head.

 

Critique and/as Utopia

 

I want to close with further consideration of how this happens–this “labor of affectualization,” this dialectical transubstantiation of despair into something like hope. The example above derived “hope” as something like a negatively stated motif inferable from what looks to be on its face a very dark passage indeed. I want now to locate such effects in, and ascribe them to, the compositional form or rhythm of Horkheimer and Adorno’s text: in the climax of chapter 1 of Dialectic of Enlightenment. We have been looking so far at passages from that program chapter of the book, passages–“Enlightenment is mythic fear turned radical,” e.g.–that have evoked the evil, the “triumphant calamity,” of the “dialectic of enlightenment.” For more than three quarters of its length, the chapter has diagnosed the “repression” of fear under whose pall enlightenment has sleep-walked into terror and evoked the fear itself to undo that repression. At a determinate point (we will look at it shortly) the text introduces, then prosecutes, its case for the necessity of critique–“thought” itself–as the only possible relief of our predicament. But from this sanguine argument, I want to elicit something more elusive: what I might call an intimation of the utopian, or (perhaps better) a “utopia-effect,” that is less argued in the book’s propositional content or logic (the Bilderverbot against picturing utopia remains in force), than enacted in its verbal energy, and even more in the book’s larger structural rhythms, its “through-composition,” to inflect the musical term with some of the connotations Adorno’s usage lends it, what he elsewhere calls the “agency of form” (Notes on Literature 114).

 

The peroration, in the very last paragraphs of the chapter, reprises the motif of “thought” and its agency here evoked as “revolutionary imagination” and “unyielding theory”:

 

The suspension of the concept, whether done in the name of progress or of culture, which had both long since formed a secret alliance against truth, gave free rein to the lie. In a world which merely verified recorded evidence and preserved thought, debased to the achievement of great minds, as a kind of superannuated headline, the lie was no longer distinguishable from a truth neutralized as cultural heritage. But to recognize power even within thought itself as unreconciled nature would be to relax the necessity which even socialism, in a concession to reactionary common sense, prematurely confirmed as eternal. In declaring necessity the sole basis of the future and banishing mind, in the best idealist fashion, to the far pinnacle of the superstructure, socialism clung all too desperately to the heritage of bourgeois philosophy. The relationship of necessity to the realm of freedom was therefore treated as merely quantitative, mechanical, while nature, posited as wholly alien, as in the earliest mythology, became totalitarian, absorbing socialism along with freedom. By sacrificing thought, which in its reified form as mathematics, machinery, organization, avenges itself on a humanity forgetful of it, enlightenment forfeited its own realization. By subjecting everything particular to its discipline, it left the uncomprehended whole free to rebound as mastery over things against the life and consciousness of human beings. But a true praxis capable of overturning the status quo depends on theory’s refusal to yield to the oblivion in which society allows thought to ossify. It is not the material preconditions of fulfillment, unfettered technology as such, which make fulfillment uncertain. That is the argument of sociologists who are trying to devise yet another antidote, even a collectivist one, in order to control that antidote. The fault lies in a social context which induces blindness. The mythical scientific respect of peoples for the given reality, which they themselves constantly create, finally becomes itself a positive fact, a fortress before which even the revolutionary imagination feels shamed as utopianism, and degenerates to a compliant trust in the objective tendency of history. As the instrument of this adaptation, as a mere assemblage of means, enlightenment is as destructive as its Romantic enemies claim. It will only fulfill itself if it forswears its last complicity with them and dares to abolish the false absolute, the principle of blind power. The spirit of such unyielding theory would be able to turn back from its goal even the spirit of pitiless progress. Its herald, Bacon, dreamed of the many things “which kings with their treasure cannot buy, nor with their force command, [of which] their spials and intelligencers can give no news.” Just as he wished, those things have been given to the bourgeois, the enlightened heirs of the kings. In multiplying violence through the mediation of the market, the bourgeois economy has also multiplied its things and its forces to the point where not merely kings or even the bourgeoisie are sufficient to administrate them: all human beings are needed. From the power of things they finally learn to forgo power. Enlightenment consummates and abolishes itself when the closest practical objectives reveal themselves to be the most distant goal already attained, and the lands of which “their spials and intelligencers can give no news”–that is, nature misunderstood by masterful science–are remembered as those of origin. Today, when Bacon’s utopia, in which “we should command nature in action,” has been fulfilled on a telluric scale, the essence of the compulsion which he ascribed to unmastered nature is becoming apparent. It was power itself. Knowledge, in which, for Bacon, “the sovereignty of man” unquestionably lay hidden, can now devote itself to dissolving that power. But in face of this possibility enlightenment, in the service of the present, is turning itself into an outright deception of the masses. (Jephcott 32-4)

 

At the top of this final paragraph there is some wordplay in the German (Indem er für alle Zukunft die Notwendigkeit zur Basis erhob und den Geist auf gut idealistich zur höchsten Spitze depravierte, hielt er das Erbe der bürgerlichen Philosophie allzu krampfhaft fest [Horkheimer and Adorno, Dialektik 58]) that is better captured in the Cumming than in the Jephcott translation: “By elevating necessity to the status of the basis for all time to come, and by idealistically degrading the spirit for ever to the very apex, socialism held on all too surely to the legacy of bourgeois philosophy” (41). The play of “basis” and “apex” indicts equally both the “realism” of bourgeois self-preservation and the materialism of “official” Marxist-Leninism, and does so most dazzlingly by way of its witty (geistreich) reversal of the usual terms of the figure: bourgeois and socialist thought alike have “elevated” necessity to the “basis,” and “degraded” spirit (Geist) to the “apex.” For good measure, Horkheimer and Adorno characterize this officially “materialist” gesture of Stalinist orthodoxy as “idealist.” Consciousness as volatile as that seems almost to revoke its own “unhappiness” by sheer force of its wit: or at least, putting thus in play (or standing on its head) the cliché pyramid-image for the tired materialism/idealism shibboleth, such wit twists materialism’s all-too-righteous and literal-minded tail.

 

Still, utopian consciousness isn’t given its head; these critical gestures are checked throughout by the reassertion of our ideological condition (turning now to the Jephcott translation): “By subjecting everything to its discipline, [enlightenment] left the uncomprehended whole free to rebound as mastery over things against the life and consciousness of human beings.” But the reversion works both ways, in what had by now begun to manifest as a regular rhythm of ideological condition alternating with revolutionary possibility: “But a true praxis capable of overturning the status quo depends on theory’s refusal to yield to the oblivion in which society allows thought to ossify.”

 

This prose enacts the unremitting agon of a heroically “unyielding theory” against the powers of what the passage licenses us to call “domination uncomprehended”: in the passage’s own terms, the agon is against “the suspension of the concept”; in the Hegelian terms Horkheimer and Adorno evoke throughout, their struggle is for a renewal of “der Arbeit des Begriffs,” the “labor of the concept.” But “the oblivion in which society allows thought to ossify” is a deficit not merely of intellect, but of feeling as well: ataraxia, apathy, anaesthesis, asceticism, “coldness,” Odysseus roped to the mast, the rowers with ears deliberately, technologically deafened against song. The passage fuses concept and affect when it includes diagnosis of the affects, and of the disease or debilitated psychology or “learned helplessness” of the affects, that its own dialectical “labor” means to “work through,” redeem, overcome. Horkheimer and Adorno seek to adapt categories of individual psychological analysis to the domain of the social; more audaciously than Freud–here their alignment is rather with Hegel–they also mean to prescribe, for the social psychology of the “damaged life,” a “labor of concept and affect” that offers some deliverance from “unhappy consciousness.” As in Hegel there is the premise that “unhappy consciousness” results when people are alienated from their own powers and creations, which they can no longer recognize as their own (“the mythical scientific respect of peoples for the given reality, which they themselves constantly create”): resentment against what we take to be an externally “given reality” becomes at once shame at our impotence to change it and guilt at our debilitated desire to do so. In Horkheimer and Adorno’s social diagnostic, “guilt” is not the irredeemable liability with which wisdom resigns itself to (at best) merely coping; rather, “the fault lies in a context which induces blindness,” in a resignation to complicity in collective miseries that paralyzes the very energies that might undo the self-perpetuating structure of collective injury. “That might undo”: sounds utopian? It can sound no other way, in an “administered world” in which we have guiltily relinquished our power, in which our deluded guilt converts our Promethean potentialities into self-contempt and abjected, defeated passivity before “the way it is”: what Fredric Jameson, following Gunther Anders, calls the “Promethean shame” (315). This is an abjection cognate with that which Horkheimer and Adorno decry above, in which “even the revolutionary imagination feels shamed as utopianism, and degenerates to a compliant trust in the objective tendency of history.”

 

In the energy of Horkheimer and Adorno’s prose, there is a “making conscious” as much affective as conceptual. “Consciousness without shudder,” we have quoted Adorno as saying, “is reified consciousness.” The implication is that unreified consciousness, full subjectivity, involves affect as well as cognition. If consciousness ensued (as in Hegel) from mere perception and sensation–of “shudder,” for example–“What later came to be called subjectivity, freeing itself from the blind anxiety of the shudder, is at the same time the shudder’s own development; life in the subject is nothing but what shudders, the reaction to the total spell that transcends the spell” (Aesthetic Theory 331). In this “self-transcending” work Adorno sees something very different from Aristotelian catharsis, prototype of the instrumentalization of affects whose culmination is the culture industry. Adorno opposes catharsis, if that would mean simply the neutralization of affect, the de-cathexis of what had been cathected: as he says elsewhere, “[Aristotelian] catharsis is a purging action directed against the affects and an ally of repression” (238). In Adorno’s model, the “shudder” persists in, indeed it simply is, “the reaction to the total spell that transcends the spell. ” It is both the spell and its transcendence. Just such casting-and-transcending of the “spell” under which enlightenment has lain numbed is the textual effect I have wanted to elicit in Adorno–a “labor and suffering of the negative” that “joins eros and knowledge” (331), affect and concept, and not merely evokes, but enacts, what such labor, sufficiently impassioned, can actually make of “the unhappy consciousness of critique.”

 

Notes

 

1. Citations of the Cumming translation of Dialectic of Enlightenment appear hereafter as “Cumming”; citations of the Jephcott translation appear hereafter as “Jephcott.” Note here also a recent translation of “Excursus I” of Dialectic of Enlightenment: “Odysseus or Myth and Enlightenment,” translated and with an introduction by Robert Hullot-Kentor, in New German Critique 56 (Spring-Summer 1992): 101-42.

 

2. On the motif of “rescue” (“Rettung“) in Adorno, see Rolf Tiedemann’s note in Kant’s Critique 239 n4.

 

3.

 

Hegel’s conception of life was so philosophical that conservatism, revolution, and restoration, each in its turn, finds its justification in it. On this point the socialist Engels and the conservative historian Treitschke are in agreement; for both recognize that the formula of the identity of the rational and the real could be invoked equally by all political opinions and parties, which differ from one another, not as to this common formula, but in determining what is the rational and real, and what is the irrational and unreal . . . All the wings of the Hegelian school variously participated in the revolution of the nineteenth century, and especially in that of 1848. It was even two Hegelians who wrote in that year the vigorous Communist Manifesto. But the formula common to all of them was not an empty label; it stood for the fact that the Jacobinism and crude naturalism of the century of the “enlightenment” were henceforth ended, and that all men of all political parties had learned from Hegel the meaning of true political sense. (Croce, What is Living 67)

 

Contrast Croce’s dry irony in those final words with the affective extremity driving the theme in Dialectic of Enlightenment.

 

4. For Hegel as a philosopher of happiness, see Forster 11-125.

 

5. At this point I intended to insert a qualification to the effect that my account here of “Reason” as a sort of narrative actant would apply only to the Phenomenology, and not to Reason’s profile elsewhere in Hegel; I meant to cite in particular the notorious Panglossian aphorism–“What is rational is actual, and what is actual is rational”–from the opening of the Philosophy of Right and Hegel’s response to outraged critics of it in the Encyclopedia Logic 6 and 7–but imagine my surprise to find, in both places, asides on Greek Philosophy confirming my hunch (see Philosophy of Right 10 and Encyclopedia Logic 28-31).

 

Works Cited

 

Works by Adorno

• Adorno, Theodor W. Aesthetic Theory.Trans. Robert Hullot-Kentor. Minneapolis: U of Minnesota P, 1997.
• —. Beethoven: The Philosophy of Music. Trans. Edmund Jephcott. Ed. Rolf Tiedemann. Stanford: Stanford UP, 1998.
• —. The Complete Correspondence, 1928-1940. Trans. Nicholas Walker. Ed. Henri Lonitz. Cambridge: Harvard UP, 1999.
• —. Critical Models. Trans. Henry W. Pickford. New York: Columbia UP, 1998.
• —. Essays on Music. Ed. Richard Leppert. Berkeley: U of California P, 2002.
• —. Kant’s Critique of Pure Reason. Trans. Rodney Livingstone. Ed. Rolf Teidemann. Stanford: Stanford UP, 2001.
• —. Metaphysics. Trans. Edmund Jephcott. Ed. Rolf Teidemann. Stanford: Stanford UP, 2000.
• —. Minima Moralia. Trans. E. F. N. Jephcott. London: Verso, 1974.
• —. Negative Dialectics. Trans. E. B. Ashton. New York: Continuum, 1973.
• —. Notes on Literature. Vol. 2. Trans. Shierry Weber Nicholson. New York: Columbia UP, 1992.
• —. Philosophy of Modern Music. Trans. Anne G. Mitchell and Wesley V. Blomster. New York: Continuum, 1994.
• —. Prisms. Trans. Samuel and Shierry Weber. Cambridge: MIT P, 1981.
• Horkheimer, Max, and Theodor W. Adorno. Dialectic of Enlightenment. Trans. John Cumming. New York: Continuum, 1972.
• —. Dialectic of Enlightenment. Trans. Edmund Jephcott. Stanford: Stanford UP, 2002.
• —. Dialektik der Aufklärung. Gesammelte Schriften. Vol. 3. Theodor W. Adorno. Ed. Rolf Tiedemann. Frankfurt: Suhrkamp, 1996.

Other Works Cited

• Bloom, Harold. The Anxiety of Influence. New York: Oxford UP, 1973.
• Croce, Benedetto. What is Living and What is Dead in the Philosophy of Hegel. Trans. Douglas Ainslee. London: Macmillan, 1915.
• Eagleton, Terry. The Ideology of the Aesthetic. Oxford: Blackwell, 1990.
• Forster, Michael N. Hegel’s Idea of a Phenomenology of Spirit. Chicago: U of Illinois P, 1998.
• Freud, Sigmund. Beyond the Pleasure Principle. Trans. James Strachey. Norton: New York, 1961.
• Hegel, G. W. F. The Encyclopedia Logic: Part I. Trans. T. F. Geraets, W. A. Suchting, and H. S. Harris. Indianapolis: Hackett, 1991.
• —. Phenomenology of Spirit. Trans. A. V. Wallace. Oxford: Oxford UP, 1977.
• —. Philosophy of History. Trans. J. Sibree. Buffalo: Prometheus Books, 1991.
• —. Philosophy of Right. Trans. T. M. Knox. London: Oxford UP, 1952.
• Jameson, Fredric. Postmodernism, Or, The Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism. Durham: Duke UP, 1991.
• Kaufmann, Walter. Hegel: Reinterpretation, Texts, Commentary. Doubleday: Garden City, 1965.
• Kojève, Alexandre. Introduction to the Reading of Hegel. Trans. Raymond Queneau. Ithaca: Cornell UP, 1980.
• Marx, Karl, and Friedrich Engels. The Marx-Engels Reader. Ed. Robert C. Tucker. 2nd ed. Norton: New York, 1978.
• Weber, Max. The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism. Trans. Talcott Parsons. Scribner’s: New York, 1958.

 

Søren Pold

Multimedia Studies and Comparative Literature
University of Aarhus
pold@multimedia.au.dk

 

Until now, digital arts have largely been understood to belong in traditional genres or forms of art: we are said to have electronic literature, net.art, or electronic, techno music. Sometimes interesting discussions have arisen concerning the very ontology of digital art, and questions such as whether net.art should be seen within the tradition of the visual arts or as a form of literature connecting it to the different traditions and questions regulating these arts.¹While it is not my intent to disconnect digital art from traditional art, or to argue for the irrelevance of the traditional forms of art, I will in the following establish the interface as an aesthetic and critical framework for digital art.

 

The interface is the basic aesthetic form of digital art. Just as literature has predominantly taken place in and around books, and painting has explored the canvas, the interface is now a central aesthetic form conveying digital information of all kinds. This circumstance is simultaneously trivial, provocative, and far-reaching–trivial because the production, reproduction, distribution and reception of digital art increasingly take place at an interface;² provocative because it means that we should start seeing the interface as an aesthetic form in itself that offers a new way to understand digital art in its various guises, rather than as a functional tool for making art (and doing other things); and, finally, far-reaching in providing us with the possibility of discussing contemporary reality and culture as an interface culture.

 

In what follows I pursue these three lines of thought in order to outline the interface as an aesthetic form. I start by taking a brief look at the explorations of the interface undertaken in the fields of engineering and computer science in order to sketch out the traditions that dominate the design, functionality, and cultural conceptions of the interface. In these traditions, realism is the keyword–not a realism found in aesthetic tradition, but a realism that stems from the pragmatic urge in engineering to deal with the physical world. I then confront this realism with aesthetic realism and the question of how digital artworks can be seen as a reflection on and reaction to this. Finally, I analyze a computer game (Max Payne), a net.art game modification (Jodi’s SOD), and a software artwork (Auto-Illustrator) to show how they engage with the interface and what they make us see through and in it.

 

The Engineered Image

 

The graphical user interface (GUI) as we know it does not stem from an aesthetic tradition, but from an engineering tradition that has paradoxically tried to get rid of it. Until recently it has largely been understood in technical terms and developed in engineering laboratories. Important starting points were Ivan Sutherland’s first graphical, interactive interface in Sketchpad (1963), Douglas Engelbart’s Online System NLS (1968), which introduced information windows and direct manipulation via a mouse, and Alan Kay’s development of the desktop metaphor and overlapping windows.³

 

Human-Computer Interaction (HCI) research continues this engineering tradition. From the beginning, HCI aimed to increase the “user-friendliness” and “transparency” of the interface and over the years has involved cognitive sciences, psychology, ethnographic fieldwork, participatory design, etc. A leading usability expert, Don Norman, explains the desire to eliminate the interface in “Why Interfaces Don’t Work”:

 

The real problem with the interface is that it is an interface. Interfaces get in the way. I don’t want to focus my energies on an interface. I want to focus on the job. . . . An interface is an obstacle: it stands between a person and the system being used. . . . If I were to have my way, we would not see computer interfaces. In fact, we would not see computers: both the interface and the computer would be invisible, subservient to the task the person was attempting to accomplish. (209, 219)⁴

 

Making the interface, its expression, and materiality more functional and transparent has been key to interface design and the accompanying academic discipline, HCI. In the broader cultural and social understanding of the computer, the tendency has been to understand the interface as transparent, preferably invisible, in order to produce a mimetic model of the task one is working on.⁵ Interfaces should be intuitive and user friendly, should not “get in the way” or otherwise be evident or disturbing. This has led to development of the ideals of direct manipulation and the WYSIWYG (What You See Is What You Get) slogan for the GUI, which became a leading sales argument for the Apple Macintosh from the mid-1980s.⁶ Perhaps the apotheosis of the transparent, invisible interface was Virtual Reality (VR), which was widely believed to be the next interface paradigm from the mid-1980s to about the mid-1990s, when it gradually lost steam. In the dominant perceptions of VR, the interface should be all encompassing and three-dimensional, and the user should be surrounded by an immersive, total simulation. The interface would thus simultaneously disappear and become totalized. Currently, some researchers in the field believe that the future of the interface lies in pervasive computing and augmented reality, envisioned as a new version of the all-encompassing interface, while others have more modest expectations.

 

The Realisms of the Interface

 

If the computer and the interface really had become truly invisible and transparent, computers would mingle almost seamlessly with the world as we know it–perhaps making it a bit “smarter.” If this were true, digital technologies would probably not have any paradigmatic effect on culture and aesthetics since they would not make a marked difference, but of course reality has proven otherwise, and we can now begin to acknowledge the massive cultural and aesthetic impact of digital technologies. It is my view that we can acknowledge this impact through digital art: how the interface changes what and how we see, how we experience and interact with reality, and how this reality is reconfigured through the computer. Digital art in general shows us the role of the interface and the significance of the interface as an aesthetic, cultural, and ideological object. Through reflexive and self-reflexive moments and strategies, digital art foregrounds the interface in ways that traditional software normally does not. Consequently, digital art becomes an important witness to the changes the computer has brought and is still bringing to our societies. Digital art and aesthetics can also help inform the HCI research field with regards to cultural and aesthetic aspects of the GUI.⁷

 

In Interface Culture (1997), Steven Johnson argues that the interface is the most important cultural form of our time, comparing it to postmodern cultural and aesthetic forms. Johnson argues that we live in an interface culture, and that the shift from analogue to digital is “as much cultural and imaginative as it is technological and economic” (40). Lev Manovich develops this idea with his notion of the cultural interface, and artists, conferences, journals, and designers have started taking up the interface and its cultural, aesthetic impact.⁸

 

What is an interface? The purpose of the interface is to represent the data, the dataflow, and data structures of the computer to the human senses, while simultaneously setting up a frame for human input and interaction and translating this input back into the machine. Interfaces have many different manifestations and the interface is generally a dynamic form, a dynamic representation of the changing states of the data or software and of the user’s interaction. Consequently, the interface is not a static, material object. Still it is materialized, visualized, and has the effect of a (dynamic) representational form. In this way, digital art corrects the ideal of transparency. Instead of focusing only on functionality and effects, digital art explores the materiality and cultural effects of the interface’s representationality. What are the representational languages of the interface, how does it work as text, image, sound, space and so forth, and what are the cultural effects, for instance, of the way it reconfigures the visual, textual or auditory? How does the interface reconfigure aesthetics and what does it do to representation, communication, and, in continuation of this, the social and the political? These are all important questions regarding the aesthetics of the interface, but one should not leave out the engineering roots of the interface, both in order to understand the full context and consequences of interface art and in order to see how digital art can feed back into its development. Therefore, postmodern and poststructuralist aesthetic theories should be balanced with the pragmatic realism of the engineers.

 

Interfaces are often implemented as window screens with keyboards and mice, the so-called WIMP devices (Window Icons Menus and Pointers), but other information displays and interaction devices are of course possible, from different interface designs to different input and output devices such as VR helmets and gloves, the ambient displays and devices imagined within the domains of hybrid architecture, ubiquitous computing, augmented reality, pervasive computing, and so on. The interface aims to give us insight into the machine and its dataflow and can thus be understood as a realistic representation along the lines of the engineering tradition outlined above. It is most likely the predominant form of realism in contemporary culture, both conceptually and stylistically; however, it is far from naïve realism. As Johnson writes,

 

put simply, the importance of interface design revolves around this apparent paradox: we live in a society that is increasingly shaped by events in cyberspace, and yet cyberspace remains, for all practical purposes, invisible, outside our perceptual grasp. Our only access to this parallel universe of zeros and ones runs through the conduit of the computer interface, which means that the most dynamic and innovative region of the modern world reveals itself to us only through the anonymous middlemen of interface design. (19)

 

This suggests a different understanding of the interface’s realism than is suggested by the transparency ideal and WYSIWYG. The interface is, as suggested by the quotation from Johnson, rooted in an active and dialectical relationship between reality and representation, the interface entering in front of–or perhaps more correctly instead of–an increasingly invisible reality.⁹ Here we are closer to aesthetic realism–for instance, literary realism, which is not based on a naïve mimetic faith in the possibility of reproducing or depicting reality, but rather on a loss of immediate reality with the rise of urbanity, capitalism, and modern media. Consequently, aesthetic realism in broad terms represents an active and constructive reaction to a heterogeneous, mediated, complex, and symbolic reality.¹⁰

 

The interface aims to visualise invisible data. It is a new kind of image originating in an engineering tradition and can be understood as an extension of instruments like radar and scientific tools, which do not represent any analogue image of reality but rather sheer data.¹¹ As formulated by Scott deLahunta, the interface is “more information than likeness; more measurement than representation.” Consequently, realism is the dominant representational mode of the interface, even though it is a complex, informational, and postmodern realism.¹² In the following, I shall point out three rather different kinds of interface realism: illusionistic, media, and functional realism. They are not mutually exclusive but are often coextensive and combined–for example, as layers in the same interface. The realist agenda is set by the engineering tradition; I will discuss how the three artworks reflect this realism from three different perspectives. Consequently, I shall argue that these artworks offer a realist perspective, even though at least some of them might not look traditionally realistic at first glance.

 

Illusionistic Realism: First-Person Shooter

 

Illusionistic realism drives the computer game industry and the demand for improved resolution and graphics, more realistic scenery, and better sound cards. In addition, the interfaces of computer games have developed toward a real-time generated 3D space, which is often seen from the perspective of the player and/or his or her avatar in the game. Since Wolfenstein 3D (1992) and Doom (1993), the First-Person Shooter (FPS) genre has developed into the Third-Person Shooter sub-genre, in which the avatar becomes a character with a personal story and a fictional perspective.

 

The FPS perspective is in certain respects the apotheosis of the illusionistic interface. It derives from simulations and VR in its enactment of “the subjective, point-of-view aesthetics that our culture has come to associate with new media in general” (Bolter and Grusin 77). As Bolter and Grusin say, the representation strives toward immediacy.¹³ The FPS not only inherits the visual perspective, but also the ideologies that come with VR, which can be described as a super-individualized and apparently omnipotent linear perspective–a visualization of the bourgeois free individual.

 

Traditionally, the FPS perspective is determined by the shooting range of impressive, phallic guns. The player perceives and interacts through oversized guns whose gendered implications are obvious. Indeed, the FPS genre can be said to overstate and in some cases even invert the ideal of the free bourgeois individual; one striking example of this is the gridlocked noir detective of the computer game Max Payne (2001)–a game marketed as “realism to the max.”¹⁴ However, the illusionism of the game is gradually reversed to offer an experience of mediated perception.

 

The game’s narration starts at the very ending, and the player has to struggle for hours to reconstruct the plot in order to return successfully to this ending. As is typical of the genre, the main character and player-avatar, Max Payne, is caught in a stratified maze controlled by drug lords and corrupt police, and only a combination of clever tactics and desperate shooting will get him out, after which he is trapped in the next level. The player is caught in a space and a plot that are clearly controlled by others–by the mobsters and the urban spaces on the level of the plot and by the cybernetic game engine on the structural level.¹⁵ In this sense the cyber-noir narrative of Max Payne is a reversal of the ideals of interactivity as a way of setting the user free and giving him or her control.

 

A closer analysis of Max Payne supports this view, which I shall elaborate in order to show how the experience of the interface is also a narrative experience. Max Payne seems almost like a comment to the heated discussion around the functioning of narrative in computer games.¹⁶ As mentioned, the game starts at the ending, and the player has to move back in story time in order to (re)construct the plot.¹⁷ The plot follows classical Aristotelian or Hollywood standards with three acts–a beginning, middle, and end–a point of no return, and increasing narrative tension. The story–and the game play–appears at first to be about exploring, enacting, and reconstructing a plot that is static, in the past tense, linear, and prescripted. Already through this immediate first level of the narrative it becomes clear that the game does not aim to fulfill the notions of interactivity. In any case, the player does not interactively control the plot; rather the game only allows the user to investigate and carry out an already firmly established plot. Just as the game inverts the ideologies of mastery and the sovereign individual inherent in the first-person perspective, it also runs counter to the libertarian notion that interactivity empowers the user. Rather than controlling the story, the player is trapped by the plot.

 

The narrative serves more or less as a frame or motivation for the game play, but this is not all it does. Already in the third chapter of part one, a second meta-narrative layer is introduced. We know the ending and we are also quickly introduced to the usual clichés of Hollywood narration: the sudden destruction of the family idyll, the strong narrative conflict–even the weather is horrible in order to emphasize the sinister setting. In this sense we are less primarily engaged in the narrative; instead, the game designates the narrative as a cliché. All the signs of Hollywood narrative in an extreme, clichéd,noir version get thicker and thicker until they more or less get in the way, in the sense that they point toward narrative structure in general rather than support a particular narrative. In chapter three we are told that we are now “past the point of no return,” and the construction of the narrative is consequently laid out so explicitly that the game could easily be interpreted as a self-conscious intervention in the ongoing debate about the roles of narrative in computer games. Narrative becomes an effect to which the game alludes self-consciously and which it puts on but does not fulfill in the deep Aristotelian way imagined by the proponents of interactive narrative, such as Janet Murray. Instead narrative is only a surface or skin; it does not attempt to become hegemonic or to account for and relate to all aspects of the game, but, like postmodern novels and cinema, it alludes to narrative, quotes it, and deconstructs it, without fully enacting it. If narrative is a grand master-scheme that secures coherence, Max Payne at once enacts and challenges it.

 

Hence, the game engages a meta-narrative that is explicitly conscious of its noir genre, even pointing out intertextual references: chapter three is called “Playing it Bogart” and other later references include “Noir York City.” Max Payne describes himself as someone who “had taken on the role of the mythic detective, Bogart as Marlowe, or as Sam Spade going after the Maltese Falcon.” Indeed, the main character, Max Payne, slowly reveals himself as just a narrational character–a role or a function in the narrative–which is highlighted by the symbolism of his name. Already in the beginning we are told to go back “to the night the pain started,” and in chapter three Max Payne enters a hotel “playing it Bogart,” while the “cheap mobster punks” there make fun of his name (“it’s the pain in the butt” and “pain to the max!”). It is no coincidence that Max Payne inherits a noir style, which from its outset was a media hybrid. Already in the noir cinema and novels of Raymond Chandler, noir was clearly a media hybrid of filmed novels and cinematic literature often set in a thoroughly cinematographic Los Angeles.¹⁸

 

Through the overt character of the noir detective Max Payne we enter into what can be seen as the third level of the narrative, which is the mediated story or the story of mediated perception and recognition. Here we are closer to the story level, the game play, and how it mediates between the plot and the telling of the story. First we recognize the role that media such as newspapers, radio, and television play in creating a bridge between the plot and the story. Through various news clips we discover that the police are chasing Max Payne. Second, it is obvious that Max Payne is often hindered in seeing and sensing by darkness, fire, dream sequences, or drugs, which point out the mediated perception of the FPS by exaggerating the normal navigational difficulties.

 

In this story of mediated perception, Max Payne is our senses, and he can endure a maximum amount of pain (if we just remember to grab some pain killers on the way), though his pain is only mediated by a red bar in the interface and narrated by his voice and through his frequent deaths–the ultimate failure of the story, after which the player has to reload a saved game and start the scene again. This mediation of Payne’s pain demonstrates the very perspective of the FPS game, at once mediated and illusionistic. The beginning of the third act, where Max Payne is drugged, shows this particularly, since the perspective is strangely widened and the movements slow down–defamiliarizing effects which emphasize and therefore demonstrate the machinery of the normal game perspective or interface.¹⁹

 

The interface thus supports and becomes an important part of the story of mediated perception. The apparent immediacy of the illusionistic FPS interface is gradually but effectively turned into a hypermediated experience through the difficulties of navigating and seeing in the space of the game. This hypermediated experience is addressed explicitly in the first chapter of part three. In a graphic novel sequence in the drugged beginning of the third act, Max Payne first realizes that he is a character in a graphic novel and, in a strange, defamiliarizing repetition, that he is nothing but an avatar in a computer game: “Weapon statistics hanging in the air, glimpsed out of the corner of my eye. Endless repetition of the act of shooting, time slowing down to show off my moves. The paranoid feel of someone controlling my every step. I was in a computer game.”

 

Figure 1: Max Payne Deconstructing the Illusionism Screenshot taken from the video game Max Payne. Max Payne is a trademark of Rockstar Games, Inc. ©2001 Rockstar Games, Inc. All rights reserved.

 

Like the noir genre in general, Max Payne performs, as the Los Angeles-based cultural historian Norman M. Klein says, a “transformational grammar,” turning the utopian notions it enacts into their opposites (80). Consequently, we should categorize Max Payne as illusionistic media realism–realism that simultaneously engages in illusion and is a self-reflexive exploration of its own representational techniques and media. Max Payne is more than illusion. One gradually sees the media, techniques, aesthetics, and genres of the game in a process whereby it, though still engaging in illusion, gradually reveals itself as a self-reflexive and genre-conscious art form.

 

Media Realism–Murder in the Museum

 

The multimedia computer was introduced at the beginning of the 1990s as the result of an almost iconophilic belief in the power of “natural,” “universal,” and “intuitive” images. The advent of net.art can be regarded as a reaction to the iconophilia of the computer industry–as some sort of digital iconoclasm. Jodi, one of the pioneering groups of net.artists (recently the first net.artist to be canonized by a retrospective gallery exhibition[20]) is constantly aiming at demystifying the images on the screen through their works, showing the codes behind the screen and revealing the normally hidden flow of codes that the user interaction causes. In what often look like beautiful crashes, they show the symbolic and coded flipside to the interface.[21]

 

Figure 2: Jodi’s Sod Image used with permission of the artist.

 

Since the year 2000, Jodi has made a series of game modifications. If the mediated and hypermediated quality of Max Payne comes into view gradually through its illusionistic interface, Jodi’s FPS game modifications focus directly on the mediation–so much so that it is sometimes hardly possible to see the game at all. In one of their first games, Sod, the usual dungeons from the FPS classics Wolfenstein and Doom are changed to abstract white rooms, with geometric figures and patterns instead of Nazis and monsters.[22] “Murder in the museum” is what one could call their modification of the classical FPS to the white cube of the museum. The walls have been stripped of their textures, and what turn out to be doors between the various rooms look like one of the major works of abstract art, Malévic’s Black Square. The player is located in a suprematist, black-and-white art museum with a finger on the trigger. It is possible to navigate this abstract space, though it is impossible to see the walls; sometimes they are actually transparent. The basic FPS characteristics are still intact–the player navigates spaces and attacks or is attacked by enemies (appearing as two triangles)–but the experience is rather different from that of more traditional games. Jodi has dropped the illusionistic texture, thereby emphasizing that both space and interaction are based on abstract codes, algorithmic structures, and cybernetic interaction.

 

In the case of Sod, reducing the computer game to geometry and algorithms comments on the illusionism in traditional games. However, it can also be seen as a comment on the debate about the value of computer games, a debate that recalls the conservative resistance to comic strips, rock ‘n’ roll, youth culture, and so forth. Sod is Wolfenstein stripped of its Nazi violence, turned into abstract art and placed in a “safe” context: the art museum. It is the computer game as “Art.” In this way Sod mocks the art world and high art; Jodi’s ironic modification also pays homage to computer games and gaming culture. Jodi do not turn their backs on popular game culture, but rather explore it, investigating its form and tactics; they do not stay in an autonomous art-related medium, but rather turn the aesthetics of the computer into art.

 

Figure 3: Jodi’s A-X Image used with permission of the artist.

 

After Sod, Jodi made Untitled Game, a series of abstract computer games based on Quake, another classic FPS.[23] The series ranges from games taking place in an abstract system of coordinates, flickering moiré interfaces, glitch-like remixes of the original game to games that simply print the code controlling the interface on the screen instead of executing it. All these games can be considered critiques of the naïve illusionism that governs much of the computer graphics and computer games industries. But perhaps what is more interesting is how they demonstrate the elements of the interface, strip off the texture, and show the abstract geometry of digital space–how they demonstrate the materiality and mediality of the interface. The players often lose their orientation, but in turn they are given a unique experience of an abstract, modern, informational, and cybernetic space, an experience which in many ways gets closer to the computer and the functioning of the interface by creating a distance to the illusion. Jodi’s games point toward a sort of computer game that goes beyond the illusionistic, uses the interface as an instrument, and plays with its materiality. The interface, contrary to much HCI wisdom, does get in the way and become an obstacle–in fact, the interface is the experience and what you see is what you get!

 

Media realism in net.art is often dominated by formal investigations; nevertheless, it is still realism in the sense that it deals with perception and sensation at the interface, though from a starting point directly opposed to the illusionistic realism described above. Whereas illusionistic realism starts with our senses and with the way sensation has been addressed in earlier media such as the cinema, and then collides with the forms and potential of the interface, media realism starts with the medium and then tries to show how it collides with our senses, knowledge, cultural forms, and expectations.

 

Functional Realism–Don’t Push this Button

 

Besides the visual dimensions of illusionary realism and media realism, there is another, more active dimension of realism that becomes especially important for computer users.[24] Functional realism in HCI regards the computer and its software as tools, as something “ready to hand.”[25] This functional perspective has produced software we use every day without thinking consciously about it. In general, usability engineering is about designing interfaces so we can use them instead of focusing on them. With functional realism we are perhaps closer to the engineering heart of HCI than with the more cultural and entertainment-related illusionistic realism. Functional realism is about control and functionality rather than illusion and immersion.

 

Frieder Nake, one of the pioneers of computer graphics, perceives the computer as an instrumental medium that we use as a tool while communicating with it as a medium. This constant shifting between the instrumental use and the communicational and representational functions of the medium is inherent to most computer applications. Even computer games and net.art have an instrumental dimension related to navigation, interaction, and functions such as “save,” “open,” or “print.” Functional software tools also have representational dimensions, often as an intrinsic part of the very metaphor(s) behind the software design.

 

It would be easy to dismiss the functional dimension of the computer as irrelevant to art and aesthetics, or to take belief in the power of representations for naïve realism–a belief that aesthetic theory routinely deconstructs. Still, functional realism is part of the computer interface, of its conceptualization, its visual aesthetics, and our understanding of it. Following Nake’s concept of the instrumental medium, we can see the computer as a new kind of machine that mediates the instrumental or functional and functionalizes the representational medium. This dual quality is turned into a standard mode of expression–for example, in digital images on the web and in multimedia that, besides their representational character, are embedded with hidden buttons, objects, and scripts.

 

The functional interface and the functions of software have been investigated in art-related projects, especially in the emerging genre of software art. Digital artists have of course always used software, but in continuation of net.art’s media-realistic investigation into the very medium of the networked computer, digital artists have started working with software as an artistic medium. According to Cramer, software as an art form has some roots in conceptual art and early experimental software development. In 1970 the art critic Jack Burnham curated an exhibition called “Software” that included both conceptual art and experimental software. Cramer claims that this was the first conceptual art show, but it also included a prototype of Ted Nelson’s hypertext system, “Xanadu,” apparently the first public demonstration of hypertext. In both software art and conceptual art, the artist primarily creates the frame for an artwork, the concept. However, in software art, the concept (programming) includes both notation and execution–in other words, both the concept and its potential implementation (see Cramer, “Concepts, Notations, Software, Art”).[26]

 

Besides having roots in conceptual art and literature, software art is a development of tendencies within net.art.[27] Artistic web pages were first executed in ordinary browsers like Netscape and Internet Explorer; around 1997 net.artists started to include in their artistic work the software that showed their pages. Some net.artists started working with web browsers, an early and significant example being I/O/D’s The Web Stalker, which has had several successors.[28] Software art is already established through annual festivals like the Read_Me festival curated by Olga Goriunova and Alexei Shulgin.

 

One of software art’s groundbreaking works is Adrian Ward’s Auto-Illustrator (2000-2003), which investigates how software as an apparently functional tool also serves as a representational structure that influences culture, aesthetics, and art.[29] Auto-Illustrator demonstrates how the instrumental is also mediated, according to Nake’s understanding of the computer as an instrumental medium. It is a complete and fully functional drawing program that uses generative algorithms to draw autonomously as it responds to interaction with the user. In one feature, the user places a number of “bugs” on a drawing and adjusts their parameters while they draw autonomously. When the user draws circles, squares, and lines, she or he also turns out to cooperate with the software, which instead draws childish faces, childish houses, and twisted lines, respectively, according to adjustable parameters. In addition, the drawing can be manipulated, as in traditional drawing software, by a number of filters and plug-ins, but here these have their own autonomous will. For example, some filters such as “generate instant results” or those called “nq297p” create objects according to quasi-random generative procedures.[30]

 

Figure 4: Adrian Ward’s Signwave Auto-illustrator Image used with permission of Adrian Ward, <www.auto-illustrator.com>.

 

Auto-Illustrator is not radically different from ordinary software, since it uses the standard control interface of the modern GUI. It originated as a parody of Adobe interfaces from Illustrator and Photoshop. Ward explicitly criticizes the radically different interfaces so often seen in digital artworks for being as beside the point: “I want to express myself using the medium of consumer-based application software, which is why Auto-Illustrator doesn’t have a radical interface” (118). Auto-Illustrator follows the standard user interface guidelines, and even its strangest functions appear as tools and filters, like those found in more traditional software. Auto-Illustrator demonstrates an alternative to the way functionality is dressed up as a mere tool in ordinary software. It suggests that functionality includes all kinds of aesthetic and representational choices that are normally hidden under the tool metaphor. It demonstrates the representational character of the instrumental, and that the artist working with specific software has severely limited his or her potential for expression, but it also points out that mainstream software is limited in its potential for creativity because it has to stay within the range of the tool metaphor.

 

Auto-Illustrator paves the way for a discussion of the ways the tool works as a representational and aesthetic structure, a discussion that potentially reconfigures the whole field around artist, tool, and artwork. As Ward expresses it, “if a plug-in can be authored that reproduces that trendy graphical effect that everybody loves, how does this impact upon the role of the graphic designer, and thus how does one treat the software that produced the design? Who is the designer? The user, or the author of the code?”[31] In this way, Auto-Illustrator questions the implied perceptions in ordinary software of the user as the active artist/author and of the software itself as a passive tool. In digital art, specific software and software-hardware combinations play an enormous role–imagine digital photography without Photoshop, electronic music without Steinberg’s Cubase or the products of Roland, hyperfiction without Eastgate’s Storyspace, or multimedia without Hypercard, Director, or Flash. This software conceptualizes the user and the material with which users work.[32]

 

Auto-Illustrator challenges the traditional conceptualizations of user, object, and software. The user is normally conceptualized as active and in control, but could just as well–and perhaps often more in line with the actual truth–be conceptualized as reactive and partly controlled, as in many computer games, where the interface is more opaque and difficult to control. The material with which the user works is most often metaphorized as something well-known and relatively stable–for instance, paper, a photograph, a canvas–but could also be more dynamic, algorithmic, cybernetic, and emergent, as in Auto-Illustrator or browser art such as The Web Stalker or Feed. And, finally, the software, which often stages itself as passive, supportive, and neutral, could instead be active, interfering, and creative. This may be what qualifies Auto-Illustrator as an artwork.

 

In the “preferences” palette, one can find the very button that best expresses the intention of Auto-Illustrator. The “preferences” palette is perhaps the most sacred place on the interface (apart from the “deep level” of code which is “behind” the interface and thus normally not visible). Through the “preferences,” “settings,” or “control panels,” it is possible to manipulate the very staging of the interface–its colors, language, interaction menus, file handling, warning messages, and so on. It is here that one is allowed to personalize the software and change passwords, here that the author or producers of the software to some extent make the staging of the interface explicit. The preferences section is a small peephole into the backstage area, but it is also where the relations between author, software, and user are defined, though of course within strict limits. It is not possible to change everything, and often one cannot find the setting that controls an annoying feature one wants to change.

 

In Auto-Illustrator, apart from actually choosing “annoying mode” or choosing to “mess up palettes” in the “interface” section of the “preferences” palette, it is possible to enter the “psychosis” section, where the “Important–Don’t push this button” button is located. Here Auto-Illustrator addresses the very ontology of software interfaces. By choosing “Psychosis” the user is already well out of line, and, in fact, the “Don’t push this button” button highlights the normally repressed schism between the functional-instrumental and the mediated in Nake’s definition. What is often a repression of the representational and mediated nature in traditional software interfaces is turned into an expressive psychosis here.

 

Figure 5: Preferences Palette in Signwave Auto-Illustrator Image used with permission of Adrian Ward, <www.auto-illustrator.com>.

 

Focusing on this button helps clarify the schism of the instrumental medium. A button indicates a functional control, by means of which something well defined and predictable will happen; the fact that it is often rendered in 3D simulates a physical, mechanical cause-and-effect relationship. Of course, we know that the button is in fact a symbolic representation and as such a mediation of a functional expression, but we nevertheless see and interpret it as something that triggers a function. It is a software simulation of a function, but normally this simulation does not point toward its representational character, but acts as if the function were natural or mechanical in a straight cause-and-effect relation. Yet it is anything but this: it is conventional, coded, arbitrary, and representational, and as such also related to the cultural. As manufacturers of technological consumer goods from cars and hi-fi equipment to computer hardware and software know, buttons have aesthetic qualities and respond to a desire to push them. This could be a desire for control, but perhaps it is also and primarily a tactical desire. Buttons and knobs are supposed to feel good–one can even read car reviews that criticize the buttons and controls of cars for their cheap “plastic” feel. In Auto-Illustrator this button’s desire to be pushed is paradoxically heightened and pinpointed by the text “Don’t push this button.” One could say that by its apparent denial of functional purpose the button tempts our desire for the functional experience of tactical control and mastery–a strong ingredient in the aesthetics of the interface, even when denied.

 

When the button is pushed, functional realism is cancelled and the interface is itself turned into something that resembles an opaque net.artwork. Text in palettes is turned into gibberish code, windows are moving and sounds are beeping, and the clear distinction between the data and the program, which is necessary in order to sustain the illusion of functional software, is cancelled.[33] This button delineates a borderline between the functional interface and modernist representational aesthetics. Here a new critical, functional art arises within the instrumental medium of the computer–not as an optimistic compromise but as a rupture between two clashing modes: the representational mode of art and the functional interface. When pushed, the rupture is radicalized, the schism is turned into sheer psychosis, the functional into pure art. Consequently, one should not push this button, because it destroys the delicate balance between the functional and the representational in Auto-Illustrator, between seeing its interface as a tool and as a “pure” representational art form.[34]

 

What are the aesthetical, cultural, and ideological ramifications of functional aesthetics? How does it influence our experience and perception, and what does it do to the arts?[35] The very object of the artwork is once again questioned by such artistic experiments. How does the artwork actually work in a political and cultural economy? The myth of the autonomous work of art is increasingly difficult to sustain–a fact which also makes digital art, net.art and software art somewhat difficult to discuss and sell, though Auto-Illustrator has chosen to use the contested model of proprietary software, and sells licenses to the software.[36] Functional realism as demonstrated by Auto-Illustrator critically highlights central issues in the GUI and in the computer as an instrumental medium. It is about functional changes in the media, aesthetics, and the arts–and about changes in the very concept of functionality itself.

 

The Realisms of the Interface

 

I have maintained that the interface should be regarded as a cultural and aesthetic form with its own art–digital art that goes under the names of net.art, software art, computer games–but I could have included electronic literature that deals with relations between the code and the interface or between the work, the text and the network. A good example of the former is <www.0100101110101101.org>, of the latter Christophe Bruno’s <www.iterature.com>. In addition, questions about cultural aspects of the interface are also raised in contemporary techno-culture and techno music, notably in genres like laptop music. For example, the musician Markus Popp argues that we should understand music as software, in terms of the software processes used to produce it (Popp).

 

Furthermore, I have discussed contemporary realism, since realism is important to the industry, HCI research, and broad cultural conceptions of the computer. I have pointed out that there is more than one realism, that realism is not only naïve illusionism, nor can it be reduced to What You See Is What You Get. As I have argued, one actually sees different things through these different perspectives, although they are clearly related and cannot be fully isolated. Furthermore, my three categories of realism aim beyond the safe borders of the autonomous artwork: illusionistic realism aims beyond pure representation toward immersive simulation, media realism beyond the visual surface toward the imperceptible and unreadable code, and functional realism beyond the artwork as self-contained and disinterested toward a functional aesthetics of the instrumental medium.

 

Realism is ultimately about seeing and reaching reality–a reality that is not something alien “out there” but that consists of media and to a certain extent is constructed with the use of media. This construction of reality through media is both conceptual, as when media functions as models of understanding reality, and directly physical, as when media becomes embedded in the infrastructure of postmodern reality.[37] In its most stringent form, realism puts the very concepts of art and the real at risk simultaneously, so it is encouraging that some of the heated discussions of computer games, net.art and software art have concerned how–or if–one should look at this as art. What are the boundaries of net.art and software art? This discussion has been given impetus by the awarding in 1999 of the Ars Electronica’s Golden Nica prize to the open source operating system Linux in the category of net.art.[38] But when dealing with the interface from a realistic perspective, perhaps the most pressing questions are where the interface is, what it looks like, and how and what it makes us see. Is the interface a moving target we are hunting down in dark corridors of first-person shooters? Is it the opaque digital materiality of Jodi’s game modifications? Or is it hidden in the playful interaction of Auto-Illustrator?

 

Part of the answer is that the interface is a continually developing forms for functional and artistic practices, a moving target artists will keep following and exploring, just as artists have explored the canvas or writers the codex. The materiality of the interface is gradually being rendered visible, readable, audible, navigable, and so forth. Interface aesthetics contributes most to the development of the interface by making sure that it does not become “invisible,” transparent, “subservient to the task,” as Don Norman claimed in 1990, that it does “get in the way” and is explored as a form, a language, an aesthetics. Interfaces are made for interaction and thus keep adjusting to accommodate actual users and uses. For this reason we can never fully grasp the interface as a form, but are compelled to pursue its various and ever-changing appearances.

 

Notes

 

This article is the product of discussions and research carried out with Lars Kiel Bertelsen and Olav W. Bertelsen and has benefited from discussions at the occasions where it has been presented. Stacey M. Cozart has helped with linguistic corrections. Thanks also for extremely valuable comments and corrections from reviewers at PMC, which have helped improve this article.

 

1. In visual arts, questions concerning the art institution and its connections to museology are important, while from a literary perspective questions concerning writing versus code and the functions of authors and readers are important. For the museology perspective, see Dietz. For the literary perspective, see Cramer, “Free Software as Collaborative Text” and “Software Art.” I have explored the literary perspective in several Danish articles and in “Writing the Scripted Spaces.” Within the field of computer games, heated discussions have arisen around the relevance of a narratological approach versus an emerging ludological approach to computer games, the latter aiming at establishing the computer game as an art form of its own.

 

2. There are many combinations of analogue and digital techniques, where parts of the work–its production, storage, distribution, and modes of reception–still take analogue forms, even though other parts are digitized. Furthermore, and perhaps more importantly, differences exist between the ways digital techniques have influenced the ontology and cultural economy of artworks, even within a particular art form. Consider for example the differences between commercial pop/rock and techno music: the digital has only slowly led to substantial changes in most mainstream musical forms, whereas in techno and dj-culture the very ontology of the musical work has changed.

 

3. The development of hypertext and hypermedia should be mentioned, notably the work of Vannevar Bush and Ted Nelson. See Wardrip-Fruin and Montfort, which collects many of the key historical texts.

 

4. Madsen has used this quotation in her interesting attempt to consider the interface as an art form.

 

5. See, for instance, Laurel.

 

6. See, for instance, Macintosh Human Interface Guidelines, chapter 1, on Direct Manipulation, WYSIWYG and metaphors; a new version for Aqua can be found at <http://developer.apple.com/techpubs/macosx/Essentials/AquaHIGuidelines/>. See also Schneidermann, 485-498, in Wardrip-Fruin and Montfort.

 

7. See e.g. Bertelsen and Pold.

 

8. A current example is Switch 18, “Interface: Software as Cultural Production”; see <http://switch.sjsu.edu/nextswitch/switch_engine/front/front.php?cat=44>.

 

9. Latour and Hermant theorize and document how modern urban reality becomes increasingly invisible, though it is continuously visualized.

 

10. See, for instance, “Panoramic Realism,” my article on the realism of Honoré de Balzac. Johnson compares the interface as a cognitive map to “the great metropolitan narratives of the nineteenth-century novel,” though he mainly compares it with Dickens (18).

 

11. Cf. both Manovich and Elkins.

 

12. Johnson is referring to the interface as a postmodern media form which inherits characteristics such as intertextuality, eclecticism, and fragmentation, but the interface is also variously opposed to general notions of the postmodern. At least it suggests a strong technological, functional, and instrumental dimension of the general postmodern culture. Still, it is interesting to re-read one of the defining articles of the postmodern, Fredric Jameson’s “Postmodernism, or, the Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism,” in light of the interface. Jameson hesitatingly illustrates the postmodern by “the distorting and fragmenting reflexions of one enormous glass surface to the other” with explicit reference to the dominant role of computers and reproduction in postmodernity (79). The year Jameson published his article (1984), Apple released its first Mac OS. Perhaps this “convergence of contemporary critical theory and technology”–to repeat the subtitle of George P. Landow’s Hypertext–offers the possibility to update and reconfigure our notions of the postmodern.

 

13. The dichotomy of immediacy and hypermediacy was set up and developed by Bolter and Grusin (1999). See 78-84 for a summary of the criticism of linear perspective in the tradition deriving from Panofsky.

 

14. Max Payne was a huge success for the game development company Remedy, based in Espoo, Finland. A sequel, Max Payne 2: The Fall of Max Payne, was released in 2003.

 

15. On tactical and strategic ways of being in space, see de Certeau, especially XLIV ff. and 139 ff.

 

16. See, for instance, Aarseth, Juul, and Ryan. Aarseth and Juul are leading opponents of the general academic trend of discussing games as narratives. Instead they emphasize the ludic ontology of games, pointing to the importance of game-play, choice, and ergodics and quests. While they have a point in criticizing narrative hegemony as it is carried out, for instance, in the ideal of “interactive fiction/story” and in many narratological game analyses, Ryan articulates a more balanced (though also critical) version of narrative traits in digital media.

 

17. The game is explicit about this construction. The internal first-person narrator, Max Payne, states that “this is how it ended,” and later says that “to make any kind of sense of it I need to go back three years . . . Back to when the pain started.”

 

18. This is especially explicit in Chandler’s The Little Sister.

 

19. In addition, the game interface itself remediates other media to a large extent, and it is thus a perfect example of Manovich’s cultural interface category (62-115)–the plot is largely told through a photo realistic graphic novel complete with frames and text bubbles. The game play is, as in many other computer games, interrupted by cinematic sequences using montage and spectacular camera movements, but the game play is itself inherently cinematic in nature. Basically one sees the scenery through a camera behind and above the avatar, but there are also cinematic effects that can be enabled by the player. In particular, the “bullet-time” and “shoot-dodging” slow-motion effects are important for the player’s tactics.

 

20. An exhibition complete with a printed catalogue, in which Cramer argues that “if the contemporary art system were not fixated on displays–whether of opulent visuals or of political correctness–and on material objects to be sold, Jodi might be recognized as the most important artists of our time” (Baumgärtel and Büro).

 

21. See, for example, the net.artworks at <http://404.jodi.org> and <http://oss.jodi.org>, especially the executable files that can be downloaded.

 

22. Sod is a modification of Wolfenstein 3D; it is available from <http://sod.jodi.org>.

 

23. On the culture of making new levels of and versions or modifications to an original game engine, see Trippi and Huhtamo.

 

24. It is not entirely new to claim a connection between representation and outward action in realism and realistic theories such as speech-act theory and some aspects of dialectic materialism and so on.

 

25. Heidegger distinguished between objects that are “ready to hand” and “present at hand,” the former functioning seamlessly as tools (like a hammer) withdrawn into the activities in which one is engaged–a distinction that has played an important role in HCI through Winograd and Flores’s introduction in 1986 (cf. Dourish).

 

26. The “Software” exhibition is documented with a reprint of the original catalogue in Wardrip-Fruin and Montfort, 247-257.

 

27. Cramer follows Henry Flynt in arguing that “concept art is a kind of art of which the material is language,” and consequently that “software can be seen and read as literature.”

 

28. The Web Stalker can be downloaded from <http://bak.spc.org/iod/>. Other examples of browser artworks are Mark Napier’s Feed, Riot and Shredder (<http://potatoland.org/>), and Maciej Wisniewski’s Netomat (<http://www.netomat.net/>).

 

29. Auto-Illustrator won the Transmediale 2001 price for Artistic Software and received an honorary mention at Ars Electronica in 2001. At the time of writing, the current version is 1.2 (Windows).

 

30. Filters work through plug-ins that can be written and installed independently by the user or by a third-party producer.

 

31. See “About Auto-Illustrator” in the documentation that comes with Auto-Illustrator 1.2. For example, in Adobe Photoshop there are filters that more or less automatically create painterly effects or glass mosaics from a given image. Auto-Illustrator also demonstratively criticizes the pointlessness of many of the automated effects. A good example is the mocking “stupid and pointless” filter in Auto-Illustrator, which in fact does nothing at all and takes a long time doing it.

 

32. See Albert, who discusses the author function in Auto-Illustrator. He also discusses the way traditional net.art interposes between media producers and media consumers, while software art interposes between software producers and media producers, thus higher up in the chain of production: “the most influential position is clearly that of the software programmer, and the most obvious point for intervention is there, between the software producer and the media producer.”

 

33. Other net.artworks that reflect this aesthetic include works by Jodi, especially the OSS series of software that can be downloaded from <oss.jodi.org>.

 

34. See also Albert’s re-phrasing of Mathew Fuller’s “not-just-art” concept, a concept Fuller developed for I/O/D’s Web Stalker, and that Albert argues is more fitting to Auto-Illustrator. Fuller writes about Web Stalker as not-just-art in the sense that “it can only come into occurrence by being not just itself. It has to be used” (43).

 

35. When my five-year-old son sees an image on a computer screen he clicks on it like a maniac in order to enter or execute it. By default he sees digital images as interfaces with hidden links and functionality in addition to seeing them as representations.

 

36. Even here it uses the medium of consumer-based application software, as Ward has pointed out, and not a radical alternative such as the open source model, though parts of Auto-Illustrator such as the plug-ins are in fact quite open and invite co-authorship.

 

37. Embedded computers and media are currently discussed within the research fields of pervasive computing, augmented reality, mobile handheld devices, etc. However, our urban environment is not media saturated exclusively because of future technologies. See e.g. Latour and Hermant.

 

38. Among others, the net.artist and software art curator Alexei Shulgin has argued against seeing Linux as art, claiming that it is functional software while net.art is non-functional, an argument Cramer rightly rejects as “late-romanticist” in “Free Software as Collaborative Text.” See also the discussion on the Nettime Mailing Lists after the prize was awarded under the thread “Linux wins Prix Ars due to MICROSOFT INTERVENTION.” The pressing question seems to be whether art can embrace the functional dimensions of software or whether art has to be dysfunctional in order to maintain a critical distance.

 

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• Huhtamo, Erkki. “Game Patch–The Son of Scratch.” Switch 12 (July 1999). <http://switch.sjsu.edu/nextswitch/switch_engine/front/front.php?artc=119>.
• Jameson, Fredric. “Postmodernism, or, The Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism.” New Left Review 146 (Jul-Aug 1984): 53-93.
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