POSTMODERN CULTURE

Category: Volume 16 – Number 2 – January 2006

  • Notices

     

     

     

    Volume 16, Number 2
    January, 2006

     

     

     

  • Globalizing William S. Burroughs

    David Banash

    Department of English & Journalism
    Western Illinois University
    D-Banash@wiu.edu

     

    Review of: Schneiderman, Davis and Philip Walsh, Retaking the Universe: William S. Burroughs in the Age of Globalization. London: Pluto, 2004.

     

    Imagining the work of William S. Burroughs through emerging theories of globalization promises to keep an extraordinary and difficult body of multimedia excesses and provocations relevant for the new millennium. Davis Schneiderman and Philip Walsh have assembled an intriguing group of contributors, bringing together both established Burroughs scholars and many new voices, both critical and creative. In their introduction, Schneiderman and Walsh describe the aims and urgencies of this anthology:

     

    These authors attack their material with enough energy to infuse the cogent issue–literary explication that moves beyond its own rarefied limits–with vital connections that present Burroughs’s work as a “blueprint” for identifying and resisting the immanent control mechanisms of global capital. Additionally, the editors come to this collection as children of Bretton Woods, of IMF and World Bank “structural adjustment” policies, of ballooning world debt, of globalizing “junk culture,” of a rapidly unfolding new imperialism, and a symbolic culture dominated by the logic of the commercial logo. (2)

     

    Hinting at the theoretical investments of the contributors, Schneiderman and Davis argue that “a key debate within globalization theory concerns the connection between globalization and ‘(post)modernity’” (3).

     

    Jennie Skerl emphasizes the postmodern perspective in the “Forward.” She offers a concise but compelling reception history of Burroughs criticism. While readers and critics in the 1950s saw Burroughs as “a spiritual hero of an underground movement,” supporters and detractors of the 1960s argued the moral status of his work, yet both agreed that he was an apt reflection of a “sick society” (xi). After his popular reception by both academics and youth subcultures in the 1970s, the critics of the 1980s found in Burroughs a poststructuralist sensibility, for he seemed to be working through the same questions about language, power, and identity important to French theory. In the 1990s, critics Timothy S. Murphy and Jamie Russell “attempted comprehensive overviews” (xii) that situate Burroughs in the broad context of modernity. For Skerl, Retaking the Universe resolves at least one debate: “what is striking to this reader is the general agreement among authors in this collection that Burroughs’s moral and political position is clear: he opposes the sociopolitical control systems of late capitalism in the era of globalization, and his writing is a form of resistance” (xiii). What is perhaps even more interesting is just what globalization seems to mean to these Burroughs scholars. Skerl offers a concise formulation: “The essays in this volume read Burroughs within the context of theories about globalization and resistance. This perspective emphasizes Burroughs’s analysis of control systems, especially his theories of word and image control” (xiii). In essence, globalization means mediation. There are some interesting stakes in this perspective, for postmodern theory has been called into question often most adroitly by postcolonial critics who doubt its applicability to fraught questions of nation, gender, and capital. The Burroughs scholars in this collection seem poised to reanimate postmodern obsessions with media and representation in compelling ways made possible through the techniques and vocabularies of Burroughs, who always wrote from his global experience as an expatriate criminal.

     

    “Theoretical Dispositions” is the first of three sections in the book, and, as the editors explain, it links “Burroughs’s articulation of global control systems that emerged in the post-World War II era with the dominant strands of twentieth century theory” (7). One might think that Burroughs’s major reception has been by readers so deeply invested in theory that this should be taken for granted. In a sense, this section provides a strong overview of Burroughs’s reception by academic critics of the past twenty years, especially in the first essay, “Shift Coordinate Points: William S. Burroughs and Contemporary Theory” by Allen Hibbard. As Hibbard notes, “Burroughs will continue to be a prime target of whatever new forms of the [theory] virus lie waiting to be born” (27). Timothy S. Murphy, perhaps the most influential of the newest generation of Burroughs scholars, contributes “Exposing the Reality Film: William S. Burroughs Among the Situationists.” He has discovered documents that put Burroughs in touch with marginal Situationists and suggest that Burroughs may have been influenced by Situationist analysis and practice, especially in works like The Electronic Revolution. This is particularly telling, because one of the oddest facts about Burroughs is his seeming expatriate insulation from the intellectuals and artists of the countries he inhabited, aside from other expatriate Americans or anglophones of one stripe or another. Murphy, however, suggests that this picture of Burroughs might be wrong and that his connections, at least as a reader and correspondent, demand further investigation.

     

    Editor Philip Walsh’s “Reactivating the Dialectic of Enlightenment: Burroughs as a Critical Theorist” examines the similarities between Burroughs and the Frankfurt School. Walsh situates Burroughs more centrally among twentieth-century critics of capital and power. He also carefully underscores how Burroughs is both critical of “the core elements of Western culture” (71) while remaining deeply entangled in them. Jason Morelyle’s “Speculating Freedom: Addiction, Control and Rescriptive Subjectivity in the Work of William S. Burroughs” offers an interesting reading of Burroughs’s addiction metaphors and their connections to the poststructuralist critique of control societies, especially in the work of Michel Foucault. Finally, Jon Longhi contexualizes Burroughs in the historical avant-garde, and he argues persuasively that we would do well to think of Burroughs as part of that tradition in this short but provocative essay.

     

    “Writing, Sign, Instrument: Language and Technology” is the heart of the book, both literally and figuratively. It is this group of essays that justifies the title of the anthology. These writers make a persuasive case that Burroughs offers a compelling account of globalization through his practice as a writer. The section begins with an essay by Anthony Enns entitled “Burroughs’s Writing Machines,” in which he makes fascinating connections between typewriters and globalization. For instance, writing about the Yage Letters he argues that Burroughs’s obsession with world cultures from the ancient Maya to practicing shamans reveals a “desire to achieve a primitive, pre-literate state . . . [that] later manifested itself in his manipulations of media technology” (95). In “Totally Wired: Prepare Your Affidavits of Explanation,” Edward Desautels provides a critical-creative investigation of web technologies and globalization in the style pioneered by Steven Shaviro’s Doom Patrols. Here, a ghostly agent Burroughs transmits a faint signal from the other side, reporting on the dangers of an increasingly wired world. In “New World Ordure: Burroughs, Globalization, and the Grotesque,” Dennis McDaniel makes a bold claim: “Burroughs, as well as other artists of the grotesque, challenge globalization by reducing or eliminating the exchange value of its commodities” (145). In essence, the clean, orderly world of commodity culture cannot tolerate the grotesque, making this an effective aesthetic of resistance. Editor Davis Schneiderman contributes “Nothing Hear Now but the Recordings: Burroughs’s ‘Double Resonance.’” He suggests that Burroughs’s use of space, especially in his work with sound recording, “finds connection with the political struggles characterizing the emerging global economic order, where ‘all nature has become capital, or at least has become subject to capital’” (147). Just as globalization has changed what space means, so Burroughs provides new ways to think about that space through his use of media technologies. While Schneiderman emphasizes recording technologies, Jamie Russell offers us “Guerilla Conditions: Burroughs, Gysin and Balch Go to the Movies.” Here again, Burroughs as a media experimenter helps to develop critiques of globalizing media: “Burroughs, Gysin and Balch’s experimental cinema outlined in the 1960s might well be more important than ever before in alerting us to the realities of the new global order and teaching us how to resist it” (163). The final essay of this section is Oliver Harris’s “Cutting Up Politics.” Harris provides a comprehensive overview of Burroughs’s cut-up techniques and argues that Burroughs was unsure, in retrospect, if cut-ups were effective: “From first to last, there is standoff between the claims for the methods’ prophetic and performative power, an equivocation about the productivity of cut-ups as tools of war in ‘a deadly struggle’ that may or may not have existed” (176). Harris argues that Burroughs was drawn to cut-ups because he could offer cutting-up as a technique to others. The success or failure of cut-up resistance depended not on Burroughs alone, but on others taking up the technique. However, as Harris goes on to point out, it may well be that like any other technique, cut-ups too require a master craftsman, and if so, they aren’t the revolutionary weapons Burroughs hoped they would become. As the last essay in this section, it seems that Harris is challenging the other contributors, asking us to think about how these revolutionary claims might be realized as either aesthetic or practical political interventions.

     

    The final section, “Alternatives: Realities and Resistances,” contains some of the most inventive writing in the book, but it doesn’t offer the coherent perspective of the first two sections. Schneiderman and Walsh explain that these final essays “investigate the possibilities that arise from such combinations of production and theory–through magic, violence, laughter, and excess,” which is to say they cover much diverse and interesting ground (8). The section begins with the welcome reprint of John Vernon’s “The Map and the Machine,” from his book The Garden and the Map. This erudite and comprehensive essay situates Burroughs in relation to the radical modernism of the historical avant-garde, and its arguments are grounded in the precise and exhaustive close reading that Burroughs’s work demands and too seldom receives. Ron Roberts’s “The High Priest and the Great Beast at The Place of Dead Roads makes interesting connections between Aleister Crowley and Burroughs. Out of this emerges one of the bolder positions on Burroughs articulated in the book: “both writers . . . play with rightist ideas–militarism, eugenics and genocide–as necessary steps in establishing an alternative future: that is, a society free of shits and control freaks and based on a respect for individual freedoms” (237). Yet Roberts isn’t particularly troubled by this, ascribing it to just another aspect of “their outrageous lives and works” (238). Roberta Fornari provides a careful close reading of Burroughs’s film script in “A Camera on Violence: Reality and Fiction in Blade Runner, a Movie.” This article is particularly interesting for its careful history of the script’s creation, and for a sensitive reading of its themes of terror and violence. Fornai makes the defensible claim that the clearer narrative of Blade Runner “provides an unusual showcasing of Burroughs’s political engagements” (241). Katharine Streip mobilizes genre theory in “William S. Burroughs, Laughter and the Avant-Garde.” Reading his texts in terms of classic comedy rather than satire or avant-garde experiment, she writes that “humor within Burroughs’s work can be read as a social practice and as a formal and performative strategy, a way to explore boundaries” (259). The final piece, “Lemurian Time War,” is a fictional pastiche of Burroughsian excess, paranoia, and lemur obsession, reminding us that Burroughs always invites his audience to take up his tools and give it a try themselves. The diverse viewpoints of these authors make this section of the anthology interesting, though they don’t engage globalization as their primary theme.

     

    While Burroughs might be a bridge for media theorists to the global, this reader is left to wonder if this might not be a one-way street. One might well wish for a companion anthology of scholars with significant investments in the global geography and history that Burroughs inhabited as an expatriate in Morocco, Mexico, South America, and Europe. Does Burroughs speak to such scholars as a resistant, liberatory intellectual? For instance, is his obsession with figures such as Hassin i Sabbah relevant to these readers? In essence, are Burroughs’s usefulness and reception largely limited to Anglophone, postmodernist insiders? Most troubling, while the authors in this collection, as Skerl notes, have few qualms about Burroughs’s force as an author of liberation, one wonders if the a more diverse range of scholars would reach the same conclusion. In one respect, that is the real strength and challenge of this book, for its unabashed, polemical position demands a response, especially from those who might be thinking a great deal about globalization but not so much about the strange works of William S. Burroughs. This anthology argues that Burroughs provides critical vocabularies and perspectives on globalization, and thus we can hope that it will inaugurate new conversations with new readers of his singular works.

     

  • Building Pictures: Hiroshi Sugimoto on Visual Culture

    Patrick Query

    English Department
    Loyola University, Chicago
    pquery@luc.edu

     

    Review of: Hiroshi Sugimoto, Architecture. Chicago Museum of Contemporary Art. 22 February-2 June 2003.

     

    Figure 1
    Figure 1: World Trade Center, 1997.
    Hiroshi Sugimoto
    Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden, Smithsonian Institution
    Joseph H. Hirshhorn Purchase Fund, 2004

     

    One of the most useful points Nicholas Mirzoeff makes in An Introduction to Visual Culture is that visual culture has permeated and saturated our “everyday life.” He uses that very phrase over half-a-dozen times in his introduction to describe the most productive ways of conceiving of visual culture as a phenomenon and as a discipline. Unfortunately, Mirzoeff’s idea of everyday life leaves out most of what constitutes lived experience; his conviction that “modern life takes place onscreen” leads him to limit his understanding of modern life to those aspects of it which are the products of modern visual technologies: cameras, digital imaging, virtual reality, and the like.

     

    If it is true that the visual “is not just a part of everyday life, it is everyday life,” then surely it extends well beyond mechanically orchestrated moments of seeing. Indeed, Mirzoeff allows that “visual culture directs our attention away from structured, formal viewing settings like the cinema and art gallery to the centrality of visual experience in everyday life.” Still, in his model, this diffuse visual experience is limited by other structures, those concerned with the technological production of images. Although “most of our visual experience takes place aside from . . . formally structured moments of looking,” Mirzoeff describes the generalized visual culture he envisions in surprisingly narrow terms:

     

    A painting may be noticed on a book jacket or in an advert, television is consumed as a part of domestic life rather than as the sole activity of the viewer, and films are as likely to be seen on video, in an aeroplane or on cable as in a traditional cinema. . . . [V]isual culture prioritize[s] the everyday experience of the visual from the snapshot to the VCR and even the blockbuster art exhibition.

     

    It becomes apparent that what Mirzoeff means by the “visual” is actually the representational, the virtual, or as W.J.T. Mitchell says, the “pictorial” (11). A film shown in many media is an illustration not of the saturation of modern life by the visual but of what Lisa Cartwright calls “media convergence,” a concept with real implications for visual culture but not a definition of it (7).

     

    As Paul Jay has rightly pointed out, what Mirzoeff calls visual culture might more accurately be termed “screen culture,” since it has almost entirely to do with the machinery of image production and distribution, not with visual experience more broadly. For Jay, the most appropriate use of “visual culture” would include a host of “everyday, even banal objects and signs” that contribute to the visuality of experience. These would include anything from architecture and interior design to “landscaping, advertising . . . store fronts, monuments, and built spaces.” For Jay, to emerge from the dim subway and be struck by the stark light and sheer verticality of a downtown Chicago street would constitute an experience of visual culture. Likewise, one might participate in visual culture by meandering through Rome’s “maze of small, winding streets” while noting its “dizzying interplay of historical periods and vernacular styles.”

     

    One does not need to be looking through or into a camera to be within visual culture. Certainly images of all kinds, particularly the mechanically reproduced, have complicated and enriched our notion of how culture is visual, but to limit the discussion of visual culture to a discussion of visual technology would be missing a great opportunity to glean even more meaning from what happens when we look. DVDs, films, snapshots, advertisements all have a necessary place in visual culture, but they do not contain it entirely. The need to develop a vigorous visual culture studies encourages us patiently to observe all the visual forms and surfaces of life and to ask how the perception of these is informed, not just by culture but also by visuality itself. Regardless of its status, or lack thereof, as the subject of an organized academic discipline, visual culture exists for our contemplation. In many instances, it exists in our contemplation, by which I mean we are within visual culture whenever we choose to notice it, since it is constituted both by modern subjectivity and by the world of objects. Photographer Hiroshi Sugimoto is one of those who have chosen to be within visual culture.

     

    All the technological factors Mirzoeff emphasizes have created a cultural situation that emphasizes a visual response to the world. The meaningful possibilities of such a response, though, have always depended at least as much on the kind of deliberate meditation on the visual that drives Sugimoto as on our technological apparatuses of looking. Sugimoto’s work, particularly his recent series, Architecture, provides a useful commentary on the status of the visual in contemporary culture and begins to suggest some of the most promising paths a vital visual culture studies might take in the future. Among these are the contestation of “class, gender, sexual and racialized identities,” but Sugimoto’s work asks us to pause before too quickly limiting our idea of visual culture studies to the terms and assumptions of its relative, cultural studies. The pictures in Architecture hint at just how much is there in the “everyday” experience of the visual. Sugimoto has created hundreds of meta-images, the kind that are attractive to visual culture studies and that have made artists like Cindy Sherman and Chuck Close important to it. Consider, for instance, Sugimoto’s earlier series, Portraits, photographs of wax representations of famous persons. The wax models themselves were often based on paintings, so Portraits gives us an experience of image as simulacrum par excellence. Another series, Theaters, also dwells on the representation of representations. These are black-and-white photos of the interiors of classic movie theaters, exposed for the duration of a film actually being shown. The result of a full-length motion picture reduced to a still image is a blank but bright screen and a ghostly but detailed theater interior; this series provides a fascinating look at the relationship of the two media to a viewer, to time, and to one another. Sugimoto’s is a conceptual art, but it is also an essentially minimalist one. His compositions are spare, his basic forms uncomplicated. Even as his images offer highly sophisticated commentary on the modern experience of looking, they are all produced using the most basic photographic equipment: all his pictures are shot with a nineteenth-century box camera.

     

    Even if the viewer is not familiar with or interested in the concept behind the work, “there is pleasure in the images,” as Arthur Lazere says. This is at least in part the fortuitous result of selecting famous people, classic movie houses, and avant-garde modernist architecture as the subjects of the photographs. However, another recent Sugimoto series, Seascapes, offers very little of this kind of content-based information. These pictures, which from even a short distance appear only as horizontal dark and light halves, are often compared to the paintings of Mark Rothko because of the resolute simplicity of their form. Although knowledge of Sugimoto’s technique (long exposures of sea-and-sky horizons from around the world) and purpose (his preoccupation with the temporality of what is usually thought of as a timeless view) adds depth to the images, the pleasure they provide is intensely visual. Apart from the titles (providing location and date) of the individual seascapes or a close examination of their few distinguishable details, they encourage a fairly pure satisfaction in visual forms themselves.

     

    A similar process of formalist reduction is at work in Architecture. One of the first things one notices about these buildings is that they are isolated from their contexts. As a result of camera angle and of blurring, each structure is made to loom up in all its stark particularity as though out of nothing. In an ironic twist, the viewer ends up contemplating the structure for its lack of detail; shapes emerge as ideas sketched on a napkin. His own intention, says Sugimoto, is “to recreate the imaginative visions of the architecture before the architect built the building, so I can trace back the original vision from the finished product.” This is the source Rebecca Wober aptly calls “the architect’s inspiration, the untested dream.” Such a notion, that the physical building is but one in a series of its realities, including its existence in the mind of an imagining subject and the eye of a viewer, makes Sugimoto’s work relevant to the study of visual culture. So does the idea that a photographer, as well, if not better, than the architect, can cause the object to stand as its imagined self. To depict actual buildings (and dams, and bridges) as though they were internal images is to draw photographer and gallery viewer across some of the key dividing lines assumed to exist in the practical experiences of both architecture and the visual more broadly.

     

    Along with this heightening of the imaginative content of architecture comes a pronounced concern for the conditions of spectatorship. Another effect of the blurring in Sugimoto’s images is to call attention to the process of seeing. If we were to observe the same buildings in perfect clarity and/or in color, could we get the same sense of their form? Sugimoto’s suggestion is that we could not. As Jonathan Jones observes,

     

    we are made vividly aware of the spatial extension, the weight of the building. Sugimoto’s photographs have the presence of real architecture–equivalents to the experience of looking at a building, walking round it, trying to grasp it in your mind . . . as if Sugimoto’s camera were feeling with an extended hand, running its fingers over the surfaces. Stripped of their setting, the city streets or suburban settings lost in blur and shadow, with no sign of human beings, these might be architectural models.

     

    The implication is that these photos have the paradoxical effect of bringing the viewer closer to the, dare one say, unmediated experience of the object itself. By placing such pressure on sight as the medium of transmission, the images force visuality to reveal some of its secrets. For Sugimoto, those secrets seem to point less in the direction of an endless deconstruction of visuality, a postmodernist exultation in sheer multiplicity, than to raise the idea of the truth of the object.

     

    If that interpretation, coupled with Sugimoto’s fascination with the austere architectural monuments of high modernism, raises the suspicion of a kind of aesthetic essentialism, the artist seems unapologetic. “Usually a photographer sees something and tries to capture it,” he says, “but in my case I just see it in my head and then the technical process is how to make it happen in the real world.” For visual culture studies, these sentiments are perfectly timely. Could a photographer any better articulate the complete reversal of traditional notions of photographic representation? Witness also the meticulousness with which Sugimoto orchestrates the viewer’s experience. The strange point of view many of the Architecture photos posit is akin to a technique of Edward Hopper’s, placing the implied viewer at odd angles in order to make both familiar objects and the habitual act of looking seem strange. Sugimoto’s viewer is likewise held in a defamiliarizing stance relative to structures already defamiliarized by the aforementioned blurring and decontextualization.

     

    The aesthetic of the gallery defies the viewer to break out of this state of suspension. Although the visual rewards of moving about the gallery are plentiful, the viewer, no matter how he or she moves, can’t force the images to reveal more than they offer freely. Standing farther than “normal” viewing distance from one of the Architecture photographs further distorts its object. Approach the photograph and the object disappears altogether as glare, shadow, and shine. It dissolves, a term often used to describe Sugimoto’s effects. Furthermore, the gallery layout repeats the aesthetic of the pictures themselves. Its colors, all silvers and shades of gray, seem to extend the picture space into the room. In the case of “Temple of Dendera,” the photographic ceiling mirrors almost exactly the gallery ceiling in Chicago’s Museum of Contemporary Art. The stern gray monoliths on which the pictures are mounted reinforce the formalism of Sugimoto’s various edifices, and vice versa.

     

    This layering provides a valuable commentary on the relation of architecture to visual culture. First, the installation puts pressure on distinctions we might make between the organized viewing situation inside the museum and the supposedly less managed variety of looking that goes on outside. The gallery design simulates an urban cityscape; the experience of standing among the edifices is akin to standing on, say, a downtown Chicago corner. The design brings the city inside the museum, in a sense. What is even more interesting is that, by extension, Sugimoto’s artwork brings the museum out into the city as well. One can’t help, upon exiting the museum, but tilt one’s head into various positions and gaze at the surrounding structures as though they, too, were part of Architecture: Sugimoto’s art tells us that they already are. Although his representations of buildings are the occasion that prompts a reevaluation of our practices of looking at them, we don’t need a representation if, in fact, we treat everyday sights as representations.

     

    Timothy Mitchell has pointed out the same process at work in nineteenth-century Orientalist exhibitions in Europe. Here, he argues, “the uncertainty of what seemed, at first, the clear distinction between the simulated and the real” was both a draw and a shock for visitors (300). While Architecture does not go all the way toward making the real indistinguishable from the exhibition, it is clearly arranged with at least a wink in that direction. At the 1867 Paris exhibition, Mitchell explains, “it was not always easy to tell where the exhibition ended and the world itself began” (300). Heading home, patrons were often confronted with an “extended exhibition [which] continued to present itself as a series of mere representations, representing a reality beyond” (300). The carefully orchestrated division between the reality of the Paris streets and the simulated reality within the exhibits was confounded by a human subjectivity conditioned more and more to treat all visual experience as representation, not reality. Sugimoto’s subject is not the exotic, but his work raises issues similar to those described by Mitchell. The differences between the philosophy of Architecture and that of the Orientalist displays are not as pronounced as they might seem at first. Part of Architecture‘s power is that it isolates pieces of the everyday before a viewer to make them appear alien, just as Egyptian artifacts placed behind velvet ropes radiated the exotic for nineteenth-century Parisians. The great works of high modernism are hardly “everyday,” and the choice of these may only be what Lazere sees as the artist hedging his bets. Even so, structures like these are everyday in our visual culture. Structures recognized by the average viewer are mixed with the residue of previously viewed images of them. In contemporary visual culture, the structures have become more familiar as images than as concrete-and-steel objects. As images, not as edifices, they have their deepest meaning for most of the modern world. It seems clear, though, that Sugimoto’s camera could cause almost any technically undistinguished built structure to rise up as the haunting shadow of an interior vision. The photographer and the viewer, perhaps even more than the architect, have that power in a culture so visual that we look at real buildings as though they were pictures.

     

    The emotional and conceptual leaps Architecture encourages speak directly to visual culture’s radical re-imagination of reality. For all of its resonance in the personal unconscious, in the play of images on the subject’s interior screens, the exhibit does not attempt to hide the fact that it is happening in photography. As Jones notes, it is these images’ photographic insight that opens up the buildings’ material specificity. Architecture is not only a visual medium. One can participate in architecture, can use it, be in it, can experience it with or without the aid of its visual component. Sugimoto’s work seems to argue that in our profoundly visual culture, the images of a building, its representations, come closer to what is true about it than, say, scaling it or walking its hallways.

     

    Still, the situation is not that easily reducible. One factor that complicates this idea of visual as opposed to physical truth is the work’s serialization and physical means of display. Architecture, after all, is not one image or even thirty images in one picture plane, but a large scale installation requiring both time and movement to inspect. It is a further replication of the modern city that one must walk up and down Architecture‘s “streets” and turn their corners to take in the full range of images. The exhibit might alternatively have been curated with, say, all the photos on the room’s four walls, so that a viewer could take them in by standing centrally and turning in place, which would have imitated a different kind of city looking, one that minimizes the body’s consequence. Instead, the arrangement maintains the role of the body in spectatorship, even as the individual images downplay it. Human beings are completely absent from the photographs. Not one human arm, face, or foot appears in Architecture. There is thus a palpable tension between the gallery’s built space and the photos it houses, a tension that seems to forestall a dive into an utterly visual experience devoid of the body. If Architecture threatens to render the human body irrelevant, the museum installation is there to rescue it.

     

    That play between the material and the immaterial is, however, at work also within the individual image. Although it is inconspicuously situated within the installment, “World Trade Center” speaks to the contemporary viewer with a unique directness, so much so that it would not be a stretch to see the entire display as a meditation on September 11, 2001. It speaks quietly and with a stillness that evokes Maya Lin’s Vietnam Veteran’s Memorial. Indeed, seen next to this image, the entire series comes to seem memorial in nature. The gray gallery monoliths resemble tombstones as much as skyscrapers, and people are surprisingly quiet around the pictures, which seem to discourage talk. Although only one of the thirty pictured structures is no longer standing, Sugimoto’s decision to include the exception obliges the viewer to respond to the series at least partly in its terms. Because “World Trade Center” is not otherwise distinguished from the others, one feels that the memorialization extends proleptically to all of these structures; perhaps that is what critics mean by “timeless”: these images take the viewer to a time outside the objects’ physical existence.

     

    Yet to look at “World Trade Center” is also to be impressed by the sense of the Towers’ physical presence in space. Sugimoto’s towers loom large and heavy in their environment. They dwarf the surrounding structures and are skirted by early morning fog and still water, tangible reminders of the specific gravity they held as objects. If on one level they appear dreamlike, on another they are all too materially present. Even as the image beckons the viewer into the thin shimmering world of pure visuality, it fixes him or her in the material world with an almost overwhelming sense of weight and space, a sensation heightened, no doubt, by the unavoidable recollection of the towers’ collapse. We may indeed live in a world that privileges the image over the physical reality–a condition that the proliferation of images of the World Trade Center towers after their disappearance illustrated in a way that the standing buildings themselves never could–but Architecture tacitly warns against denying built things their place in the visual drama of everyday life.

     

    In Hiroshi Sugimoto’s photography, the world’s architectural skin is the screen onto which the imagination of form is projected. It is also the comparatively stable background against which the other images with which visual culture studies is so much concerned–billboards, movies, television programs, digital and virtual media–flash and signify. The harder one looks at that background, though, the less solid it becomes. The study of visual culture should broaden its gaze to include this built, this everyday world, and Sugimoto’s work offers us a chance to look in that direction.

     

    Notes

     

    This essay is based on several visits to the exhibition of Sugimoto’s Architecture series at the Chicago Museum of Contemporary Art (22 Feb-2 June 2003). The series was most recently exhibited in the United States at the Fraenkel Gallery in San Francisco, 4 Dec-31 Jan. 2004, and in Europe at the Galerie Daniel Templon in Paris 10 Sept.-23 Oct. 2004.

     

    Works Cited

     

     

  • The New Imperialism, or the Economic Logic of Late Postmodernism

    Allan Borst

    Department of English
    University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign
    borst@uiuc.edu

     

    Review of: David Harvey, The New Imperialism. Oxford: Oxford UP, 2003.

     

    In The New Imperialism, David Harvey demonstrates once again the adaptability and durability of a critical theory that grafts geography onto cultural studies and historical materialism. In publishing his Clarendon Lectures delivered in February 2003 at Oxford University, Harvey sets out to rethink the “-ism” par excellence, capitalism, in the context of the complex series of cultural, military, political, and economic enterprises currently warming the globe. Harvey’s project, prompted by the current amplification of U.S. imperialist initiatives, convincingly targets “the deeper transformations occurring beneath all the surface turbulence and volatility” in order to understand and respond to contemporary global conditions (1).

     

    Given the avalanche of books like Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri’s Empire (2000) and Multitude (2004), Thomas Friedman’s The Lexus and the Olive Tree (2000), David Korton’s When Corporations Rule the World (2001), George Soros’s George Soros on Globalization (2002), Joseph Stiglitz’s Globalization and Its Discontents (2002), Noam Chomsky’s Hegemony or Survival (2003), Ellen Meiskins Wood’s Empire of Capital (2003), and Amy Chua’s World on Fire (2003), globalization, empire, and imperialism now serve as the buzzwords of a vocabulary common to academics and public intellectuals. While Harvey’s book does deploy these cultural keywords, part of the distinction of The New Imperialism comes from its difference from the now-generic trends of the globalization studies canon. Unlike Stiglitz and Chua, Harvey appears less interested in engaging or reproducing discussions of World Bank and IMF politics and avoids lengthy case studies of the residuum and fallout from Cold War economic and military policies. Harvey also resists the broad historical narratives and genealogies of empire already detailed in books by Meiskins Wood and others. Even though Harvey acknowledges the need for a different global strategy, the theoretical panache of The New Imperialism generates power by prizing a more rigorous Marxist economic and geographical critique over the somewhat fast and loose energy found in Hardt and Negri’s Empire.

     

    Nonetheless, before Harvey can focus on the “deeper transformations” churning beneath the surface of globalization, he frames his work within popular globalization debates in both the first and the final (fifth) chapter. The first chapter’s survey of the conundrums of Middle East oil politics produces surprising arguments that anticipate Harvey’s interest in deeper transformations by considering the immediacy of George W. Bush’s global policies through a nuanced Bush-post-Clinton understanding of American empire. In a claim indebted to the cultural work he performs in The Condition of Postmodernity (1990), Harvey explains, “different and sometimes rival conceptions of empire can even become internalized in the same space” (5). In the space of American politics, a Clinton-based neo-liberalism seemingly rivals the more recent Bush-led neo-conservativism. But Harvey deflates much of the Democratic and political left nostalgia for Clinton-era global policy by arguing that “the only difference between the Clinton years and now is that the mask has come off and bellicosity has displaced a certain reticence, in part because of the post-9/11 atmosphere within the United States that makes overt and unilateral military action more politically acceptable” (22). While Harvey’s brief introductory engagement with mainstream American intellectuals’ version of globalization fails to demonstrate his true grit, it underlines the book’s overall emphasis on the United States as the primary determining force in global politics. Indeed, although Harvey often tries to situate his book within the broad terms of globalization studies, his talent is not, in style, tone, or argument, that of the public intellectual. Those readers already familiar with Harvey’s oeuvre and its notable blend of structural Marxism, historical materialism, and geography may want to skip right to the middle three chapters where the heart of his argument flourishes. Afterward, consult the robust bibliography and the helpful list, “Further Reading,” in order to fill in the gaps between Harvey and the broader globalization field.

     

    The book’s identity takes its shape and its major contributions are made once Harvey establishes his concept of “capitalist imperialism.” The basic assertion is that if the United States is the new imperialism, then this imperialism is in turn a specifically capitalist one. According to Harvey’s diagnosis of current global trends, this new imperialism marks

     

    a contradictory fusion of "the politics of state and empire" (imperialism as a distinctively political project on the part of actors whose power is based in command of a territory and a capacity to mobilize its human and natural resources towards political, economic, and military ends) and "the molecular processes of capital accumulation in space and time" (imperialism as a diffuse political-economic process in space and time in which command over and use of capital takes primacy). (26)

     

    This complex definition clearly echoes the claims of Harvey’s earlier books, especially The Limits to Capital (1982), The Condition of Postmodernity, and Spaces of Capital (2001). Consequently, the new imperialism epitomizes Harvey’s long-developing thesis that adjoins a capitalist state apparatus with the ideological and geographical construction of space and time. These often contradictory, always dialectical impulses and motivations that push the state or the capitalist market toward one agenda or another are as crucial to Harvey’s argument as they are problematic for global stability.

     

    That Harvey identifies the United States as the centrifuge of globalization is not surprising, nor is the association of the United States with an empire or imperial power. But Harvey overtly rejects claims found in other globalization scholarship that suggest that capitalism is the mere handmaiden of U.S. state power or vice versa. Initially, these rejections appear to achieve a clever sleight-of-hand and reveal Harvey’s wariness of an either/or logic. “Capitalist imperialism” is not about capitalism or the state setting the imperial agenda. Instead, Harvey considers the neo-liberal U.S. empire to be a product of capitalism and the state simultaneously vying for control. Employing the mix of geography and Marxist criticism that he calls “historical-geographical materialism” (1), Harvey claims that most discussions of capitalism and state hegemony perform oversimplified misreadings of the global order. Harvey’s book suggests that what the United States has been doing around the globe should be subordinated to how these military, political, and economic maneuvers have been and continue to be made if we are to understand the “new imperialism.” While Harvey acknowledges the widely reported examples of Halliburton and other corporations directly interacting with and profiting from U.S. global affairs, he asserts that a happy and cooperative alliance between power-hungry politicians and profiteering capitalists does not exist as it appears. Some popular versions of the happy alliance claim argue that the state makes an initial foray into a new region, usually through military intervention and then capitalism follows with a stabilizing marketplace as the supposed seed of a nascent democracy. A widely accepted alternative happy alliance theory contends that capitalism opens new markets first and then opens a door for the state through trade agreements, treaties, and other mechanisms such as the World Bank or WTO, thus preserving the profitable new market. While these scenarios dominate much of the thinking about globalization and empire, Harvey argues that they also overlook the “outright antagonism” (29) between the state and capitalism:

     

    The fundamental point is to see the territorial and the capitalist logics of power as distinct from each other. Yet it is also undeniable that the two logics intertwine in complex and sometimes contradictory ways. The literature on imperialism and empire too often assumes an easy accord between them: that the political-economic processes are guided by the strategies of state and empire and that states and empires always operate out of capitalistic motivations. (29)

     

    In short, Harvey highlights the overlooked fact that the alliance between politicians and capitalists manages a balance of state power and capitalism that is always already unstable. This inherent instability always threatens to transform the state and capitalism into their own gravediggers.

     

    In an era of globalization and new imperialism, the postmodern transition from Fordism to flexible accumulation that Harvey discusses in The Condition of Postmodernity and elsewhere has become exaggerated to extreme levels. By understanding accumulation as a manipulation of space and time, Harvey explains the workings of a state that must sustain capitalist disparities over space in order to increase both profit and power. The United States as new imperialism has seemingly mastered the techniques of flexible accumulation by undermining the stable experience of time and space, replacing such political and economic experience with the ephemeral, the disjointed, the contingent. As flexible accumulation applies to globalization, both capitalism and the state generate geographical sites of ostensibly uneven development in order to juggle the forces of competition and monopoly. As Harvey claims, “the aggregate effect is . . . that capitalism perpetually seeks to create a geographical landscape to facilitate its activities at one point in time only to have to destroy it and build a wholly different landscape at a later point in time to accommodate its perpetual thirst for endless capital accumulation” (101). For Harvey, capitalist imperialism survives through this mutual maintenance of geographical “asymmetries” (97) in political strength and capitalist accumulation.

     

    The intrinsic imbalance of capitalist imperialism’s exploitation of asymmetries is the underlying “logic of power” responsible for the readily visible problems of globalization and empire (104). At any time one of two classical Marxist crises hovers over this vulnerable condition of capitalist imperialism. Either the markets overreach their limits through overaccumulation and thereby damage the economic integrity of the state, or the state’s empire-building initiatives overreach levels of sustainable control and render the supposed free markets defunct. As Harvey sees it, “if capital does not or cannot move, . . . then overaccumulated capital stands to be devalued directly through the onset of a deflationary recession or depression” (116). The success of capitalist imperialism relies on the joint efforts of capitalism and the state constantly to manage these potential crises and debacles.

     

    Harvey claims that the solution and, in fact, the modus operandi of capitalist imperialism exists in the “spatio-temporal fix” (115). Because of the flexible accumulation in capitalist markets and flexible state and military-run occupations, the spatio-temporal fix solves the crisis of asymmetries by deferment vis-à-vis geographical expansion. Markets and monies are literally moved into new regions where capital can be easily absorbed and labor surpluses quickly and cheaply accommodated. Instead of dealing with the overaccumulation tied to a particular geographical space, capitalist imperialism diverts this excess as best it can into new geographies of trade, by closing markets, sites of production and consumption, and then forcing open these same markets and monopolies in new territories. Harvey argues that “if the surpluses of capital and of labour power exist within a given territory (such as a nation-state or a region) and cannot be absorbed internally (either by geographical adjustments or social expenditures) then they must be sent elsewhere to find a fresh terrain for their profitable realization if they are not to be devalued” (117). If Harvey is correct, the geographical expansion of U.S. power and capital is not ordered or organized by traditionally spatial empire building, but instead attempts to manage the counterpuntal and dialectical logic of the marketplace. In other words, the new imperialism avoids collapse by expanding according to the viability of markets in different areas of the globe, rather than simply becoming affixed to the commodity values, labor power, and resources of a particular geography.

     

    The resonance between his description of the strategies of U.S. capitalist imperialism and Harvey’s earlier writings on flexible accumulation’s tendencies toward contingency and the ephemeral is further amplified when The New Imperialism factors finance capitalism into the spatio-temporal fix. The sinister twist of finance capitalism emerges out of what Harvey calls “accumulation by dispossession” (145). Finance capitalism, because of its liminal, almost anti-geographical properties, manipulates market values, interest rates, exchange rates and so forth, essentially generating money with money instead of through production. All the while, this process deals in hot money and vulture capitalism to exploit and destroy the local and regional markets it infects, as was evident in the East Asian financial markets of the late 1990s. Harvey explains: “An unholy alliance between state powers and the predatory aspects of finance capitalism forms the cutting edge of ‘vulture capitalism’ that is as much about cannibalistic practices and forced devaluations as it is about achieving harmonious global development” (136). Not only does finance capitalism “dispossess” the markets it infiltrates, but it also potentially dispossesses its own proponents. Finance capitalism’s cannibalism resides in the quick-fix mentality that ultimately profits only investing elites and yet constantly threatens to implode. At the same time, finance capitalism undercuts the stability of the state and production-oriented capitalism. Hence, Harvey’s theories offer explanations not only of foreign resistance to U.S. global policy in the form of terrorism and other means, but also of the growing disenfranchisement of American middle- and lower-class citizens.

     

    Considering the disagreeable nature of finance capitalism for those outside of the profiteering elite, Harvey suggests that U.S. capitalist imperialism has shifted its hegemonic global influence away from consent and directly toward coercion. By evaluating the last thirty years of U.S. foreign policy in terms of a Gramscian understanding of hegemony that moves dialectically between consent and coercion, Harvey contends that the growing world distrust of and resentment toward U.S. spatio-temporal fixes now renders consent impossible for U.S. imperial strategy. Harvey asserts: “It is in this context that we see the Bush administration looking to flex military muscle as the only clear absolute power it has left . . . . Control over oil supplies provides a convenient means to counter any power shift–both economic and military–threatened within the global economy” (77). As with the war in Iraq, the Bush administration’s claims of support and consent on behalf of the Iraqi people are increasingly questionable. Harvey argues that until the U.S. willingly scales back its search for external spatio-temporal fixes and commits to solving internally its own economic and political conundrums, U.S. global hegemony will take the form of coercion.

     

    At the end of The New Imperialism, Harvey offers the possibility of a U.S. and European Union directed “New Deal” program that extends it reach globally. “This means liberating the logic of capital circulation and accumulation from its neo-liberal chains, reformulating state power along much more interventionist and redistributive lines, curbing the speculative powers of finance capital, and decentralizing or democratically controlling the overwhelming power of oligopolies and monopolies” (209). While this admittedly hypothetical project sounds logical, Harvey’s proposal shifts tremendous power to the state–a very optimistic enterprise considering the well-established and continuing tradition of neo-liberal privatization and deregulation. Given the strength of transnational corporations and the military-industrial complex, this power shift constitutes an unlikely reconfiguration of the current global order that would rely on a suddenly benevolent state and surprisingly acquiescent capitalists. Furthermore, Harvey’s plan suggests a new system of global governance that would likely produce new geographical and economic asymmetries or exacerbate existing ones. Throughout The New Imperialism, Harvey provides a salient account of pressing questions about globalization and empire, while offering convincing answers through the concept of capitalist imperialism. Moreover, this book operates like an epilogue to Harvey’s earlier texts, particularly The Condition of Postmodernity and Spaces of Capital. The updated discussions of spatial fixes and capitalist accumulation across space reflect the anticipatory nature of Harvey’s earlier efforts. When read as a companion to these earlier texts, The New Imperialism testifies to the endurance of Harvey’s theoretical methodology and its conclusions, while opening up the possibility of extending these earlier arguments, particularly those about the political-economic structures of postmodernism. While postmodern theories of cultural play, self-reflexivity, and performativity have largely been put aside by globalization studies, Harvey’s historical-geographical materialist account of postmodernity still holds considerable currency in the evaluation of capitalist imperialism. Harvey wrote in The Condition of Postmodernity of the “sea-change” in cultural and political forms that signals the budding of postmodernity: “But these changes, when set against the basic rules of capitalistic accumulation, appear more as shifts in surface appearance rather than as signs of the emergence of some entirely new postcapitalist or even postindustrial society” (vii). Perhaps, then, it is enough to say the new imperialism is the economic logic of late postmodernism.

     

  • Hard, Dry Eyes and Eyes That Weep: Vision and Ethics in Levinas and Derrida

    Chloé Taylor

    Department of Philosophy
    University of Toronto
    chloe.taylor@utoronto.ca

     

    In Totality and Infinity, Emmanuel Levinas opposes the Greek interest in aesthetics, luminosity, and the plastic form to the rejection of the image in Hebraic philosophy and ethics. Christianity, in making the Word flesh, repeats the Greek desire for the visible, the artistically manifested need to see God, in contradistinction to Judaism, in which God is heard rather than seen, manifesting Himself in language, both aural and written, rather than in form. Levinas thus follows the Hebraic tradition in describing the ethical relation as taking place in a face-to-face encounter with the other which is nevertheless a “manifestation of the face over and beyond form,” occurring in language rather than in sight (Totality and Infinity 61 [66]).1 Levinas explains: “Form–incessantly betraying its own manifestation, congealing into plastic form, for it is adequate to the same–alienates the exteriority of the other” (Totality and Infinity 61 [66]). To encounter the other as a face is to encounter her in her absolute alterity from myself, to be faced by her as unthematizable, escaping all my attempts to understand and thus to assimilate her. The face makes it impossible for me to reduce the other to myself, to my ideas of her, to my theories, categories, and knowledge. Since form betrays the other, for Levinas, the face of ethics is not the face whose form we take in with our eyes. On the contrary, the way we look at (and also touch2) faces is said to foreclose ethics: “The face is present in its refusal to be contained. In this sense it cannot be comprehended, that is, encompassed. It is neither seen nor touched–for in visual or tactile sensation the identity of the I envelops the alterity of the object, which becomes precisely a content” (Totality and Infinity211 [194]).

     

    In works such as “Violence and Metaphysics” and “The Principle of Reason: The University in the Eyes of its Pupils,” Jacques Derrida, like Levinas, frequently associates vision with an imposition of sameness on the other, and thus as violent in terms of the philosophy of difference which he shares with Levinas and feminist writers such as Hélène Cixous.3 This essay argues that blindness becomes a trope for Levinasian ethicality in works by Derrida such as Memoirs of the Blind and Specters of Marx. On the one hand, therefore, this essay explores the ways in which Levinas and Derrida take up a similarly negative understanding of the relationship between visuality and ethics, giving rise to an ethics of blindness. On the other hand, it argues that vision is not entirely rejected by either philosopher, but that a recognition of other, less violent ways of seeing, and a more positive conception of the ethical potential of vision, co-exist with Levinas’s and Derrida’s more explicit critiques of vision. Finally, this essay expands upon the latter, more positive conception of vision to be found in the writings of both Levinas and Derrida, or the possibilities of a visionary ethics.

     

    The Violence of Vision

     

    The “face” of ethics, according to Levinas, occurs in discourse rather than in visual form. While seeing the other entails enveloping her into the same, language “slices” through this knowledge that vision imposes: “Speech cuts across vision” (“La parole tranche sur la vision”) (Totality and Infinity 212 [195]). The slicing of language divides or differentiates the other from me. Discourse, like vision, may try to thematize the other, but while vision succeeds, the other can always evade the categorizations of language, slip behind the Said, remain a Saying, even in silence: “Words are said, be it only by the silence kept, whose weight acknowledges this evasion of the Other” (Totality and Infinity 212 [195]). The other, an interlocutor, can engage with me in language, while she cannot respond in a similar way to having been seen. While being seen is simply an absorption of the other to which she cannot answer, she may always avoid similar absorption in the case of discourse. According to Levinas, in language the self and other enter into a relation in which difference is established and cannot be overcome, even if only because of the weight of the other’s silence upon me.

     

    In “Violence and Metaphysics,” Derrida focuses on Levinas’s critique of the visual metaphor in Greco-Christian philosophy. Specifically, Derrida draws out the manners in which Levinas describes the interconnected concepts of vision, sun, light, and truth as functioning to abolish the otherness of the face-to-face or ethical relation in the works of philosophers from Plato to Heidegger. Derrida describes Levinas’s first book, Théorie de l’intuition dans la phénoménologie de Husserl, as a first attempt at developing “a philosophical discourse against light” (126 [85]), and against the pre-determining gaze which this light allows. In this work, “the imperialism of theoria already bothered Levinas. More than any other philosophy, phenomenology, in the wake of Plato, was to be struck with light” (126 [85]). In phenomenological philosophy, for Levinas, vision pre-determines the other who is seen, not allowing her to appear in her otherness as she may do in language. As Derrida observes, Levinas raises an even stronger critique later against Heidegger, who is described as continuing to write within “a Greco-Platonic tradition under the surveillance of the agency of the glance and the metaphor of light . . . light, unveiling, comprehension or precomprehension” (“Violence and Metaphysics” 131 [88]). Vision already assumes an understanding of the other, for Levinas, and this pre-understanding prior to the visual encounter is forced onto the other in a violent unveiling within the clearing of light. The critique which Derrida describes Levinas as directing at the history of philosophy, and at Husserl and Heidegger in particular, is that through its search for the light of Being and of phenomena, it abolishes difference and imposes the One and the Same on the other. Greco-phenomenological philosophy creates

     

    a world of light and of unity, a “philosophy of a world of light, a world without time.” In this heliopolitics, “the social ideal will be sought in an ideal of fusion . . . the subject . . . losing himself in a collective representation, in a common ideal . . . . It is the collectivity which says “us,” and which, turned toward the intelligible sun, toward the truth, experience, the other at his side and not face to face with him . . . . Miteinandersein also remains the collectivity of the with.” (“Violence and Metaphysics” 134 [90])

     

    In his final summation of Levinas’s critique of visuality and of heliological philosophy, Derrida writes

     

    therefore, there is a soliloquy of reason and a solitude of light. Incapable of respecting the Being and meaning of the other, phenomenology and ontology would be philosophies of violence. Through them, the entire philosophical tradition, in its meaning and at bottom, would make common cause with oppression and with the totalitarianism of the same. The ancient clandestine friendship between light and power, the ancient complicity between theoretical objectivity and technico-political possession . . . . To see and to know, to have and to will, unfold only within the oppressive and luminous identity of the same. (“Violence and Metaphysics” 136 [91-2])

     

    In contrast, in Totality and Infinity, as Derrida describes this work, Levinas theorizes the face as “appearing” in language and not only to vision, as a “certain non-light” which counteracts the violence of visuality (“Violence and Metaphysics” 126 [85]).

     

    In A Thousand Plateaus, Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari discuss faces and faciality as neutralizing and de-individualizing rather than as other and unique: “Faces are not basically individual; they define zones of frequency or probability, delimit a field that neutralizes in advance any expressions or connections unamenable to the appropriate significations” (168). According to Deleuze and Guattari, the “abstract machine of faciality” produces faces, and these faces are not encountered in their alterity but are rather always in a dichotomized relation to the same. The face “is White Man himself, with his broad white cheeks and the black hole of his eyes. The face is Christ. The face is the typical European” (176). The face, for Deleuze and Guattari, is the face of the average white European man, and this face is taken as the standard from which to measure deviation within a racist system: “If the face is in fact Christ, in other words, your average ordinary White Man, then the first deviances, the first divergence-types, are racial: yellow man, black man, men in the second or third category . . . . They must be Christianized, in other words, facialized” (178). While for Levinas the face is exteriority and alterity, for Deleuze and Guattari facialization

     

    never abides alterity (it's a Jew, it's an Arab, it's a negro, it's a lunatic . . . ). From the viewpoint of racism, there is no exterior, there are no people on the outside . . . Racism never detects the particles of the other; it propagates waves of sameness until those who resist identification have been wiped out. (178)

     

    Despite the striking differences in the manners in which Levinas and Deleuze and Guattari understand the face, Levinas might in fact agree with Deleuze and Guattari in so far as the latter are discussing a visualized face. While Levinas emphasizes that the face of which he is writing is not the physiognomic or visually encountered face, facialization for Deleuze and Guattari functions through vision: the Christ-face, for instance, is said to have been “exploited” through visual art, through the paintings of the Middle Ages and Renaissance. For Deleuze and Guattari, this neutral “Bunker-face,” which has been reproduced in visual media and is encountered with the eyes, must be “destroyed, dismantled” and “escape[d],” and, citing Henry Miller, this can be done by cutting off vision, shutting the eyes: “I no longer look into the eyes of the woman I hold in my arms . . . My eyes are useless, for they render back only the image of the known . . . Therefore I close my ears, my eyes, my mouth” (A Thousand Plateaus 171). In so far as this is a material, visually encountered face, and not the face of transcendence, Levinas might agree that it needs to be escaped since, for Levinas, when it is the eyes which encounter the other’s face, Miller is apt in saying that “they render back only the image of the known,” that is a representation of the same, the expected, the pre-understood, allowing no surprise or alterity. The face which Levinas is describing, in contrast, is a face which will always allow for surprise. This face is an encounter with the Other as other, and, as described in Totality and Infinity, it is not discovered through the eyes, and is not mediated through visuality or through visual art.

     

    Despite this negative account of the role of vision in our meeting the other, Levinas has chosen “the face” to encapsulate a great deal of his ethical philosophy, and it seems that it functions well for this purpose precisely because it corresponds to the way we frequently experience faces through vision, encountering with our eyes the expressiveness and difference of faces, perceiving them not only as objects of our own gazes but as the site of the other’s eyes. Faces strike and evade us, frustrate us with their secrets, are unthematizably complex, inaccessible beneath our gaze. As Sartre notes in his discussion of the other’s gaze, faces disconcert us, decentralize and alienate the world from us, precisely because they make us recognize the independence and inaccessibility of the other’s subjectivity. Faces make us aware of our inability to grasp the other, the impossibility of knowing what she thinks of us, of knowing what the familiar–now unfamiliar–world (and we in it) is for her. Although there have been tragic and violent attempts throughout history to categorize individuals by facial as well as body types, and although Deleuze and Guattari are correct that the visually-encountered, physiognomic face is submitted to dichotomizing norms, it is also true that we are fascinated by looking at faces in their singularity, and it is often the sight of faces that arrests us, haunts us, moves us to ethical action, pity, compassion, forgiveness, aid, and love. This must at least partly explain why Levinas chooses the face as the shorthand term for his complex understanding of alterity, and why it can convince others of his claims. It would seem, then, that Levinas takes advantage of the compellingness of the visual metaphor of the face, the meaning it holds for us as such, and yet denies that it functions in vision in fact.

     

    Although I will complexify this reading below, it appears–and has been widely accepted–that Levinas equates seeing and knowing (sa/voir), “knowledge or vision” (Totality and Infinity 212 [195]), and, as Derrida points out, also equates savoir and voir with avoir, with a possessing or pre-possessing of the other such that she is subsumed within the grasp of the knowing or seeing subject. According to such a reading, it would follow that for Levinas we never see without knowing, never look in wonder. We are never spellbound, fascinated, bewildered, paralyzed or surprised by that upon which we gaze. We are never absorbed by what we look at rather than engaged in the absorption of it. We never respond to what we see rather than imposing our knowledge on it. We never have our expectations thwarted by sight. We never see difference, we only see the same, the same as ourselves or the same as our expectations of the other, which is thus allowed to be no other. It is never the seen, therefore, which is active upon our sight, or sight is never passive before the one looked upon, who never acts upon our eyes.

     

    With respect to Levinas’s alternative to vision, language, it seems that although Levinas is right in acknowledging silence as discursive, in Totality and Infinity he too readily accepts silence as response enough, or too hastily assumes that difference will always be able to interrupt the relation between subject and other through discourse. We may question whether it is sufficient to say that the other can always respond in such a way that she will be responded to in language, since silence itself is a response that weighs on her interlocutor, or whether we need more of an account of the functionings of power in discourse, the distribution of access to language, the effects of this distribution such that certain others can respond in language proper while others may only respond in silence. There are no forms of discourse explored by Levinas to which the other cannot respond, to which the possibility of an other response is foreclosed by the discourse itself.4 Silence is presumed to be heard, is thought to always weigh on me as an evasion of my themes, and Levinas does not theorize the manners in which I can all too easily not hear the other’s silence, or can interpret her silence as submission to or agreement with what I have said, that she may be forgotten in her quietude, and thus that silence may not function as an interruption of the Said. We may ask, therefore, whether this is enough of an account of the ways that silence may all too easily be taken as agreement with and adhesion to the same. Indeed, we need an account of how both language and silence may cut (tranche) to do violence, to silence, and not only to divide into an ethics of alterity. Levinas appears to have too readily dismissed vision as an imposition of knowledge on the other, while language has been too hastily accepted as evading such inflictions, as always permitting response. In fact, both vision and discourse function in some cases as impositions of knowledge, power, and sameness on the other, but both may function otherwise, as when the other’s speech or silence is heard and responded to, or when sight absorbs, surprises, awes and bewilders the seeing subject, rather than simply absorbing what she sees and hears.

     

    Whatever the limitations of this discussion of language, Levinas’s understanding of vision is, at least, more complex than his most definitive statements on the subject would lead us to believe. In a late interview, “On Obliteration,” Levinas again discusses the face in terms of vision, but now in positive terms. He is responding to a series of sculptures by Sacha Sosno, several of which represent heads with the faces “obliterated” by geometrical shapes. Here Levinas says that

     

    there are different ways of being a face. Without mouth, eyes or nose, an arm or a hand by Rodin is already a face. But the napes of the necks of those people who wait in line at the entrance gate of the Lubyanka prison in Moscow–in order to deliver letters or packages to parents or friends arrested by the GPU, as we find in Vasily Grossman’s Life and Destiny–those napes which still express anguish, anxiety and tears to the people who see them, are obliterated faces, though in a very different manner. (38)

     

    It is clear from his example of the line-ups outside the Lubyanka prison that Levinas is here willing to consider the ethical experience of the face in visual terms–“those napes which still express anguish, anxiety and tears to the people who see them”–and to acknowledge more than one form of vision. From the example of Rodin’s sculpted hands, it is also clear that, despite his earlier consignment of art to the Said, Levinas is willing to think about works of visual art as having a face, a face that we see. In a way that is interesting in terms of the discussion of weeping below, Levinas also describes the face, in this case the nape of the neck, as expressing tears.

     

    David Michael Levin has repeatedly considered Levinas’s complex understanding of vision, most exhaustively in The Philosopher’s Gaze. Taking a very different stance towards “blindness” and the narrowing of our human, lidded eyes than, as shall be seen, Derrida does in Memoirs of the Blind, Levin dedicates this book to the “remembrance of centuries of victims brought by inhumanity and cultural blindness, by eyes narrowed in brutal lust, rage, and hate, into depths of pain and suffering–or to even darker cruelties engraved in dust and ashes.” Like Derrida, Levin takes an interest in Diderot’s writing on blindness, but cites a very different passage: while Derrida will focus on Diderot’s writing of a love letter blind (Memoirs 101), Levin cites Diderot’s suspicion that those who do not see may consequently be impaired in their abilities to feel:

     

    What difference is there to a blind person between a man urinating and a man bleeding to death without speaking? Do we ourselves not cease to feel compassion when distance or the smallness of the object produces the same effect on us as lack of sight does on the blind? Thus do all our virtues depend on our way of apprehending things and on the degree to which external objects affect us . . . . I feel quite sure that were it not for fear of punishment, many people would have fewer qualms at killing a man who was far enough away to appear no larger than a swallow than in butchering a steer with their own hands. And if we feel compassion for a horse in pain though we can crush an ant without a second thought, are these actions not governed by the same principle? (Philosopher’s Gaze 4-5)

     

    However dubious Diderot’s generalizations about the capacity for compassion in blind persons,5 this passage may have something to say to us today, at a moment when we have available to us ways of killing and enforcing poverty “blindly,” or upon vast numbers of sentient beings at a great distance, thus avoiding looking upon the sufferings that we cause: we now place slaughterhouses outside of our cities,6 we exploit child and adult laborers in poverty-stricken countries, and we engage in modern forms of warfare that do not require soldiers to see the people they kill. Violence today is facilitated by our blindness, by our no longer needing to meet our victims face-to-face. Significantly, if we resist denying the relevance of visuality in the face-to-face encounter, we can fruitfully use a Levinasian theory of ethics to consider the grounds of possibility of modern forms of violence.

     

    In citing Diderot, and throughout his writings on vision, Levin is arguing for vision’s significance to our humanity and to our capacity for compassion and ethics. If we are to speak of compassion in the philosophy of Levinas, it is necessary to understand it as a passive suffering for the other without identification, a substitution which would not entail understanding or being-with, which is not Miteinandersein. Compassion, for Levinas, must be a response to the other’s suffering as other than one’s own, a suffering-for and not a suffering-with, or a passivity which avoids subsuming the other into the same. Levinas writes, “the extreme passivity of ‘incarnation’–being exposed to illness, suffering, to death is to be exposed to compassion” (Otherwise than Being 139n12 [195n12]). Following Levin, I would thus be arguing that one may be passively exposed to the other’s suffering through the visual encounter, and as such be exposed to compassion as an encounter with alterity. Compassionate substitution as such would not abolish the other’s otherness, and would not claim to actively grasp that suffering or to understand, but would be a passive ethical response.

     

    Levin notes that the philosopher has long been a figure who does not look and who thus avoids this form of compassionate suffering. The philosopher is one who talks and writes, turns his eyes towards his books and thoughts, closes his eyes to contemplate, shutting them upon the anguish around him. Even philosophers such as Plato who have emphasized vision most often spoke of the “eye of the intellect” rather than of the seeing eye, and Democritus put out the latter to “see” with the former. At first glance, then, Derrida and Levinas, in their preference for language over and against vision, may not be novel in their philosophical approach to vision, nor even particularly Hebraic, but rather follow a tradition of philosophers averting their eyes. Yet Levin finds many passages in which Levinas depends on vision for his understanding of ethics, and argues that Levinas’s understanding that the visuality of his language is merely metaphoric is not, cannot, and should not be consistently maintained. Noting that Levinas argues that the face “is not a form offered to serene perception,” Levin asks, “why must perception be understood as serene, or contemplative?” and notes that it is not so in the phenomenologies of Heidegger and of Merleau-Ponty (Philosopher’s Gaze 267). Questioning whether vision must also be active, an imposition upon or absorption of the other, Levin finds moments in Levinas’s philosophy in which vision is understood as “passive” and as “subjection,”7 and notes that in the “Preface” to Totality and Infinity ethics is described as an “optics” (Philosopher’s Gaze 50, 259). Levin argues further that the consistent decisions on Levinas’s part to use visual metaphors to describe the encounter with the other–the “shimmer of infinity,” for instance–are diminished if they are not understood visually. Levin asks: “does Levinas risk more than paradox, more than he supposes, when he withdraws infinity absolutely from the visible–when, for the sake of the ethical relation, he takes the ‘metaphysical’ experience of the other entirely out of the visible, out of sight, rather than extending it from the visible into the invisible?” (Philosopher’s Gaze 259). Later he asks: “but doesn’t this withdrawal of the face from visibility and sight also risk withdrawing from ethics all that might have been gained for it by introducing the face and the face-to-face relation into the discussion?” (265).

     

    Levin suggests that Levinas sometimes recognizes that vision functions ethically, otherwise than as philosophers, including Levinas himself, have frequently assumed. For Levin, it is these other ways of seeing that need to be further developed, and not sight that must be rejected tout court. He cites T. S. Eliot’s confession, “I see the eyes but not the tears/ This is my affliction,” and it seems that this distinction may capture for Levin the two manners of seeing in question: a seeing that does not see tears, and a seeing that sees tears, and that perhaps sees through or in tears as well. Levinas has most often assumed the seeing eye that does not see tears, and that would not shed tears in response to what it sees, that imposes and absorbs rather than being passively struck by the other and her suffering. At other moments, however, and in his consistent use of visual metaphors to describe the ethical encounter, Levinas is developing new ways of thinking about seeing, and thus new ways of seeing in language and in history, ones that depend on an understanding of the second way of seeing, an ethically responsive seeing, a seeing of tears.

     

    Returning to “Violence and Metaphysics,” it is important to note that even while drawing out Levinas’s critique of heliological philosophy, Derrida stresses the manner in which vision itself is given to us through language, and thus that the problematic features of vision are problems not intrinsic to the sense of sight but rather embedded in metaphysical discourse. It is not so simple a matter, therefore, as positing language as an ethical alternative to seeing, for sight only comes to us through its discursive constructions. As such, if we wish to change the violent ways in which we see, we must first change the language of vision. In particular, Derrida highlights the metaphorical sense in which Levinas is speaking of vision and light, or the manner in which the seeing that Levinas describes as violent is not characteristic of the sense of sight per se, nor even of sight as we need necessarily experience it, but is rather the manner in which sight as we practice and think it has been given to us by the Greek metaphysical tradition. As such, Derrida makes clear that it is “the heliological metaphor” which is in question (136 [92]). This metaphor has functioned as an “alibi,” Derrida argues, or, in so far as we believe in the literalness of the metaphor, we “innocentize” oppression, we “turn our gazes away” from the violence, and thus, in a sense, the metaphor of light allows us to not see, or prevents us from seeing otherwise than as the metaphor allows: this light in language blinds us and prevents us from seeing the other as she is and from responding to her oppression. As such, Derrida argues that Levinas is not really advocating blindness rather than sight, but is “denouncing the blindness of theoretism” as a metaphysically constructed way of seeing which does not allow us to see the other (“Violence and Metaphysics” 130 [87]). Levinas does not describe a natural history of a sensation, but the history of an experience mediated by language.

     

    Nevertheless, as Derrida goes on to say, there is no history except that which occurs through language, and Borges is right when he says that “perhaps universal history is but the history of several metaphors,” metaphors amongst which the example of light is predominant and inescapable. Indeed, Derrida notes that Levinas himself does not escape the use of this metaphor: “Who will ever dominate it, who will ever pronounce its meaning without first being pronounced by it? What language will ever escape it? How, for example, will the metaphysics of the face as the epiphany of the other free itself of light?” (“Violence and Metaphysics” 137 [92]). The nudity of the other is itself described by Levinas in terms of visuality and manifestation, as epiphany, or, as Levin has noted, as the “shimmer of infinity.” As Derrida describes it, “the nudity of the face of the other–this epiphany of a certain non-light before which all violence is to be quieted and disarmed–will still have to be exposed to a certain enlightenment” (“Violence and Metaphysics” 126 [85]).

     

    There is hence no escaping the metaphors of vision, light, enlightenment, and manifestation, and it must therefore be a transformation of that metaphor which Levinas would enact in his writing, or the first steps towards the theorization of other ways of seeing which he is taking, even if by all appearances, or in a more self-conscious way, he seems to be rejecting vision and light altogether. As such, on this more nuanced reading, which may or may not have been Levinas’s own, it is not non-vision which would be sought by Levinas, for, in Derrida’s words, “light perhaps has no opposite; if it does, it is certainly not night” (“Violence and Metaphysics” 137 [92]). It cannot be darkness and blindness that Levinas would prefer to vision and light, but, as Derrida stresses, a form of seeing which is other than that which the Greco-Christian tradition of philosophy has inscribed in language and history, what Levin calls a “postmetaphysical vision.”8

     

    While Derrida makes it clear, then, that the vision in question is metaphorical, that it is but a “technico-political” alibi, as we have seen he suggests that this metaphor is never entirely escapable in its determination of how we see and understand sight. If this is an inescapable metaphor, the only solution to its violence is to transform it, “modifying only the same metaphor and choosing the best light.” Derrida cites Borges again: “perhaps universal history is but the history of the diverse intonations of several metaphors” (137 [92]). One is tempted to think that a transformed metaphor that rethinks without escaping light could be moonlight, a gentler, more obscure and mysterious light than the penetrating rays of the philosopher’s sun which expose, burn, and may blind the eyes, preventing real seeing. For Derrida, whatever form of light this may be, it is

     

    not a community without light, not a blindfolded synagogue, but a community anterior to Platonic light . . . . Only the other, the totally other, can be manifested as what it is before the shared truth, within a certain nonmanifestation and a certain absence. (“Violence and Metaphysics” 135 [91])

     

    Not escaping the language of light, Levinas, in his use of words such as “epiphany” and “shimmering,” is choosing the best light, is modifying the metaphor to render it less violent and more ethical. For Levinas it is precisely through language that we can escape the violence of vision as language has produced it, and thus, according to a Levinasian reading of vision that Levinas himself may or may not have intended, it is through language that the experience of light will be, not avoided, but transformed.

     

    Despite this more nuanced account of vision in Levinas to be found in Levin’s work and in Derrida’s “Violence and Metaphysics,” as shall be seen in the following section, it is the more explicit account of sight that is most often taken as Levinas’s final word on vision, and that, it would seem, has at times “guided” or at least been repeated by Derrida in his self-avowed blindness.9 Despite his careful reading of Levinas, Derrida will at times himself suggest a voluntary blinding, a closing and turning away of the eyes in order to avoid the vicissitudes of vision that he and Levinas describe. Although in “Violence and Metaphysics” Derrida argues that the solution to the violence of light cannot be a simple rejection of vision for language, in later works he states that we need to shut our eyes in order to open our ears.

     

    An Ethics of Blindness and an Ethics of Tears

     

    Because the face, for Levinas, at least on the most obvious reading, is not seen, and the face-to-face encounter occurs otherwise than through the gaze, it is immediately appropriate that Derrida would see the blindman as an ethical figure, for all of the blindman’s encounters with others must occur without seeing their form.10 In Specters of Marx and Memoirs of the Blind, Derrida considers positions of blindness in terms that, for Levinas, describe ethical relations. A particular form of blindness described in Specters of Marx and Echographies of television is the “visor effect,” the situation in which “we do not see who looks at us” (Specters 7). For Derrida, the most dramatic example of such a scenerio of a-reciprocal vision occurs in hauntings:

     

    The specter is not simply this visible invisible that I can see, it is someone who watches or concerns me without any possible reciprocity, and who therefore makes the law when I am blind, blind by situation. The specter enjoys the right of absolute inspection. He is the right of inspection itself. (Echographies 137 [121])

     

    The “right of inspection” (“droit de regard“) is described earlier in Echographies as “the right to control and surveillance” (42 [34]). This right to see, control, and survey is evoked as a specifically masculine form of power: “the right to penetrate a ‘public’ or ‘private’ space, the right to ‘introduce’ the eye and all these optical prostheses . . . into the ‘home’ of the other [il s’agisse du droit de pénétrer dans un espace ‘public’ ou ‘privé’, d’y faire ‘entrer,’ dans le ‘chez-soi’ de l’autre]” (Echographies 42 [34]). This phallic vision infiltrates into the intimate spaces of others either through the use of the eye itself or through prosthetic devices such as surveillance cameras, and, as shall be seen, Derrida describes the feminized, blind, and a-reciprocal submission to this masculine gaze in ethical terms.

     

    In Specters of Marx Derrida uses the example of the ghost of Hamlet’s father to describe the “visor effect,” for the Danish specter wears a helmet through which he can see those whom he haunts without their being able to see him. The visor

     

    lets one see nothing of the spectral body, but at the level of the head and beneath the visor, it permits the so-called-father to see and to speak. Some slits are cut into it and adjusted so as to permit him to see without being seen, but to speak in order to be heard. The helmet, like the visor, did not merely offer protection: it topped off the coat of arms and indicated the chief’s authority, like the blazon of his nobility. (Specters 8)

     

    The masculine, a-reciprocal penetration of the “right of inspection” is described by Derrida as paternal, indicative of the specter’s authority, his right to speak and to be heard. Specters are presented by Derrida as having (and indeed as being) the “droit de regard” in so far as they see us, haunt us, even while we cannot look back, with an optical right which entails all other rights (Echographies 42).

     

    As Derrida describes it, we sense specters, feel them, feel their gazes, and even to some degree see them through this sensation of touch, while they remain intangible, ungraspable, and invisible. This “furtive and ungraspable visibility of the invisible” is presented by Derrida as

     

    the tangible intangibility of a proper body without flesh, but still the body of someone as someone other. And of someone other that we will not hasten to determine as self, subject, person, consciousness, spirit, and so forth . . . . This spectral someone other looks at us, we feel ourselves being looked at by it, outside of any synchrony, even before and beyond any look on our part, according to an absolute anteriority . . . and asymmetry, according to an absolutely unmasterable disproportion . . . . To feel ourselves seen by a look which it will always be impossible to cross, that is the visor effect . . . . Since we do not see the one who sees us, and who makes the law, who delivers the injunction . . . we cannot identify it in all certainty, we must fall back on its voice. An essentially blind submission to his secret. (Specters 7)

     

    In Totality and Infinity, as we have seen, Levinas writes that in the ethical encounter the other is neither seen nor touched (211). In Derrida’s description of being haunted by a specter, of this “blind submission to his secret,” the other is once again neither seen nor touched, although we sense the visual relation, that we are being seen, not through our own vision but through feeling, “we feel ourselves seen,” even while the other remains ungraspable and intangible. Unable to grasp or to see the other, in the spectral encounter as in the ethical encounter for Levinas, we respond to the ghost without being able to abolish his alterity. We realize that the ghost is other without “hasten[ing] to determine” him. We are unable even to categorize him as a self or as a subject, as a consciousness or person, and as such he remains radically unthematizable. As with the Levinasian ethical relation, the haunting of a specter is also asymmetrical in power, for the ghost has the power to penetrate ocularly and bodily into our private spaces, to see and to speak and to be heard and to command, even as we cannot see or grasp this bodily form, and must answer blindly. We are thus asymmetrically submitted to the other, we are vulnerable and exposed, and this submission takes place in language: with specters, according to Derrida, we submit to the other’s voice. We must learn to speak to ghosts, which is not to command them–Derrida notes Horatio’s inability to speak to ghosts when he “imperiously” “charges” and “conjures” the specter of Hamlet’s father. Derrida writes, “as theoreticians or witnesses, spectators, observers, and intellectuals, scholars believe that looking is sufficient. Therefore, they are not always in the most competent position to do what is necessary: speak to the specter” (Specters 11). Looking is once more opposed to language or to speaking, and it is the blind submission to language which is required in the ethical relation, and the absence of sight on the subject’s part which gives rise to its possibility.

     

    In multiple ways we have seen that Derrida chooses to explore the haunting of the self in terms that evoke the ethical relation in Levinas, a relation in which the face-to-face encounter is an a-reciprocal response to an elevated other whose alterity I cannot subsume or grasp, which I cannot reduce through vision, touch, or knowledge, and which takes place in language and commands me, in response to which I must listen and speak. The feminized position of being blind in the presence of masculinized and authoritative other, of being unable to return a specifically patriarchal and “male gaze,” of being forced to respond to another through language even while the linguistic exchange must take place on the other’s terms–which Sartre and a quite a few feminists might describe as a hell of other people (if we were only able to thematize the ghost as such)–is thus presented by Derrida as the condition under which an encounter with alterity–a feminized ethics, for Levinas–may occur.

     

    In Memoirs of the Blind Derrida presents an even more sustained discussion of the blindman as an ethical figure in Levinasian terms. Derrida describes the blindman as necessarily “exposed, naked, offered up to the gaze and to the hand, indeed to the manipulations of the other–he is also a subject deceived . . . . The other can take advantage of him [L’autre peut abuser de lui]” (97 [94]). This emphasis on the blindman’s openness to potential abuse is similar to Levinas’s description of the self’s exposure, her nudity before the other, and of the suffering she undergoes at the other’s hands. As Levinas acknowledges, “I can be exploited” (Otherwise than Being 93 [55]). Similarly, while Levinas describes the self as a prisoner in his own skin, unable to get out of the skin to identify with the other, Derrida emphasizes the manner in which blindness is experienced as a “walling in” or being walled [murée] into one’s own body, cut off from others and the world (Memoirs 45-6, 120). This is not “the bad solitude of solidity and self-identity” that represses ethical transcendence, or the solitude that “does not appear to itself to be solitude, because it is the solitude of totality and opacity” of which Derrida writes in “Violence and Metaphysics” (135 [91]), but the solitude of unfulfillable obsession for the other, of substitution without identification, of love without possession or knowledge. Levinas writes of the subject as strangled within the restriction of its own epidermal barrier as it longs for the other: “accused in its skin, too tight for its skin,” “as it were stuffed with itself, suffocating under itself, insufficiently open,” suffering “constriction in one’s skin”, “backed up against itself, in itself because without any recourse in anything, in itself like in its skin . . . and obsessed by the others” (Otherwise than Being 106, 110-112). This subject’s heart is “beating dully against the walls of [its own] skin,” but unable to break free. For Derrida, the blindman’s very eyes, like the skin for Levinas, become similarly isolating prison walls: “The confinement of the blind man can thus isolate him behind . . . hard walls,” “these leaden walls” (46 [40]). Derrida cites Rilke’s Die Blinde, who says, “Ich bin von allem verlassen–/ Ich bin eine Insel” and “Ich bin eine Insel und allein,” while Derrida’s own mother, dying with cataracts “veiling” her eyes is, like die Blinde, described by Derrida as having “eyes walled up [vermauerten Augen] [les yeux emmurés]” (Memoirs 45-6 [40]).

     

    While the blindman’s vulnerability and exposure to abuse from the other, as well as his “walled-in” state which severs him in pain from the other, place him initially in the role (in Levinasian terms) of the self, Derrida also describes the vulnerability of the blindman in terms that situate him as the other. He is described, for instance, as evoking an ethical response from the self, in his imploration for a guiding hand. Derrida writes that “the theme of drawings of the blind is, before all else, the hand” (Memoirs 12 [4]). The blindman is almost inevitably represented in art with arms outstretched, his hand preceding him tentatively, imploringly, as he is obliged to venture in the world, exposed and at risk. The outstretched hands, Derrida writes, “do not seek anything in particular; they implore the other, the other hand, the helping or charitable hand, the hand of the other who promises them sight” (Memoirs 12 [6]). In the autobiographical essay, “Savoir,” upon which Derrida would comment at length in the co-authored Veils, Hélène Cixous describes her own “blindness” or myopia in similarly ethical terms. In a manner which Derrida appreciates, Cixous mourns the loss of her blindness through laser surgery. Like Derrida, who sees the blindman’s step as hesitant, while the seeing person is too sure, too certain, or too knowing, imposing his vision on the world, Cixous associates myopia or blindness with hesitation–“I shall always hesitate. I shall not leave my people. I belong to the people of those who do not see” (“Savoir” 13)–and thus relates sight, like Derrida, to an all too certain step, to an irresponsible knowing.

     

    In the final pages of Memoirs, Derrida describes weeping as a form of blindness which is the “truth” of the eyes, its most human function.11 He writes,

     

    now if tears come to the eyes, if they well up in them, and if they can also veil sight, perhaps they reveal, in the very course of experience, in this coursing of water, an essence of the eye, of man’s eye, in any case, the eye understood in the anthropo-theological space of the sacred allegory. Deep down, deep down inside, the eye would be destined not to see but to weep. For at the very moment they veil sight, tears would unveil what is proper to the eye. And what they cause to surge up out of forgetfulness, there where the gaze or look looks after it, keeps it in reserve, would be nothing less than al_theia, the truth of the eyes, whose ultimate destination they would thereby reveal: to have imploration rather than vision in sight, to address prayer, love, joy, or sadness rather than a look or gaze. Even before it illuminates, revelation is the moment of the “tears of joy.”(Memoirs 125 [126])

     

     

    Weeping, as opposed to seeing, is the supreme function of human eyes for Derrida because, while other animals can see, only humans cry with their eyes (of course, while Derrida does not note this, other animals do cry and respond to the suffering of human and animal others vocally).12 As Derrida also observes, while not all humans can see, all humans, including the blind, can weep. Derrida notes that in representation it is most often women who weep, as in the representations of Mary and other women at the cross13, and so exemplary blindness, like that of the subject encountering the “visor effect” or the a-reciprocal gaze, is thus culturally feminine, as is ethics for Levinas. In Totality and Infinity, the feminine is related to the receptive or welcoming domesticity of ethics, while in Otherwise than Being or Beyond Essence ethics is associated with maternity. We may think once more of Mary’s tears.

     

    Some years before Memoirs of the Blind, in “The Principle of Reason: The University in the Eyes of its Pupils,” Derrida compares human eyes to those of animals, recalling Aristotle’s distinction between animals with “hard, dry eyes” and those with eyelids. Hard, dry eyes, can never shut but must always see, while lidded eyes can blink, close, retreat from vision. In this essay Derrida argues that sight or knowledge (sa/voir) is insufficient, and that we, and the institute of the university in particular, need to privilege not (or not only) the eye, but also the ear, and thus to “shut our eyes in order to be better listeners” (4). As we have seen, Derrida argues in Specters of Marx that scholars are the least well equipped to speak with specters, because they rely excessively on seeing/knowing (sa/voir); in “The Principle of Reason” Derrida once more characterizes the university as predominantly ocular. It is imperative, therefore, that scholars learn to take advantage of being the sorts of animals with lidded eyes, in order not merely to see and know, but to listen and learn: “Opening the eyes to know, closing them–or at least listening–in order to know how to learn and to learn how to know” (5). Derrida asks if, figuratively speaking, the university, that institute of knowledge, must not “close its eyes or narrow its outlook . . . . Shutting off sight in order to learn,” and insists that the university must not be a dry-eyed or sclerophthalmic animal. Of such animals he writes, “what is terrifying about an animal with hard eyes and a dry glance is that it always sees” (5). He describes the sclerophthalmic animal as “endowed” with “hard eyes permanently open to a nature that he is to dominate, to rape if necessary, by fixing it in front of himself, or by swooping down on it like a bird of prey” (10). A human being, on the other hand, “can lower the sheath, adjust the diaphragm, narrow his sight, the better to listen, remember, and learn” (10) Derrida associates knowing with seeing, while learning requires hearing, and a figurative or literal shutting of the eyes. Here again the assumptions arise that vision can only be violent and never responsive, can only be about knowledge, an imposition of knowledge on the other, a swooping down like a bird of prey, a rape, rather than a way to learn, a way in which pre-conceived knowledge is confounded, and an imposition on us to which we unwillingly respond. We may pause and recall here, however, Levin’s dedication to The Philosopher’s Gaze, in which he refers to “eyes narrowed in brutal lust, rage, and hate” and to “cultural blindness,” and thus think twice about Derrida’s account of the virtues of the lids of human eyes.

     

    Strangely, this discussion of hard, dry eyes foreshadows Derrida’s own medical experience, a few years later, as he describes it in Memoirs, in which a facial paralysis prevented him from shutting his eye, and hence from attending his first scheduled appointment at the Louvre. Derrida suddenly found himself a sclerophthalmic animal, the terrifying “bird of prey” he had described in his earlier essay. He portrays himself in this period: “the left side of the face stiffened, the left eye transfixed and horrible to behold in a mirror . . . the eyelid no longer closing normally: a loss of the ‘wink’ or ‘blink,’ therefore, this moment of blindness that ensures sight its breath” (Memoirs 38 [32]). It was when Derrida could blink again that, grateful to have once more the respite of blindness, he went to the Louvre and chose to organize his exhibition around the theme of the closed eye. Like his friend and sometimes co-author Hélène Cixous, who has said “I am always trying to write with my eyes closed” (“Appendix” 146), Derrida emphasizes that he wrote sections of Memoirs of the Blind blindly, in the dark or looking away from the page. Although he does not raise again the discussion of hard and dry-eyed animals, animals that are never blind, it is of interest that he now discusses blindness in terms of tears, of eyes wet and soft with sorrow.

     

    Derrida concludes his book on blindness with the citation of Marvell’s poem, “Eyes and Tears,” the concluding line of which is “these weeping eyes, those seeing tears.” Derrida’s interlocutor asks, “tears that see . . . . Do you believe?” and Derrida answers, “I don’t know, one has to believe” (129). Here, Derrida’s “step” is hesitant, like that of the blindman or the myopic Cixous; he does not know, and he considers tears that see, and wishes to believe in this vision. Yet, unlike Marvell, Derrida’s discussion of tears has not been of tears that see, nor of eyes in tears which see, but of tears which blind, and of other forms of blindness, of eyes which do not see. It is significant that wet, soft eyes are not blind eyes, and that we can see through tears, and see tears. We see while in tears, and see others in tears, and cry because of what we see. Vision is not blinded by tears, but rather may respond in tears, tears which blur without fully obscuring, veil with transparent matter. Seeing in tears is thus an example of the way in which sight may be confused, unknowing, and thus not always an imposition of knowledge on the object of the gaze. Because we cry at what we see, and cry involuntarily, crying is an instance of sight which is passive, a response to the object of the gaze acting upon the eyes, an example of another way of seeing other than that which has dominated Western metaphysics.

     

    Derrida illustrates his discussion of tears with an image of a woman at the cross who, weeping, covers her eyes with her hands in the gesture of the blindman, and yet we may think of ways of weeping in which the eyes are not covered, closed, or blinded. Levin, in a chapter of The Opening of Vision entitled “Crying for a Vision,” conceives of seeing, and seeing in tears specifically, not as a form of knowing but of learning. His aim is to “to reintegrate the perceptivity of crying into the larger process of vision, letting it show itself as a moment of extremely important learning.” Unlike Derrida, he sees tears not as blinding the eyes, but as enabling them to see in an ethical manner. He elaborates: “With the crying, I began to see, briefly, and with pain. Only with the crying, only then, does vision begin” (Opening of Vision 172):

     

    our eyes are not only articulate organs of sight; they are also the emotionally expressive organs of crying . . . . Is it merely an accidental or contingent fact that the eyes are capable of crying as well as seeing? Or is crying in the most intimate, most closely touching relationship to seeing? . . . What is the ontological significance of crying as a mode of visionary being? (PAGE ##?)

     

    Like Derrida, Levin notes that only human beings cry with their eyes, and thus that crying may well be what makes our eyes specifically human. Unlike Derrida, however, for Levin crying is also what makes our vision human, rather than blinding that vision. Here it is not a matter of “imploration rather than vision” (Memoirs125 [126]), but of vision which implores and responds to imploration. Levin argues that crying may “ennoble” vision in the human sphere, the sphere of ethics, and that the absence of the ability to shed tears may be what “marks off the inhuman.” This inability describes the Nazi commandant and his victim, neither of whom could cry, having been dehumanized in very different ways. Levin writes:

     

    by the “inhuman” I mean the monstrous and the inwardly dead: the Nazi commandant, for example, and his victim, the Jew, locked into a dance of death, neither one, curiously, able to shed a tear: for different reasons, their eyes are dry, empty, hollow. What we have seen, we who are alive today, of human cruelty and evil demands that we give thought to this capacity for crying and examine, looking into ourselves, the nature–or character–of its relation to vision. What does this capacity make visible? What is its truth? What is the truth it sees? What does it know as a “speech” of our nature? How does it guide our vision? (PAGE ##)

     

    The comparison of tears to speech is interesting in that we are able to think of the eyes (and eyes in tears) as ears, and also as mouths, as speaking to the other in “words” that oral language may not contain or allow, and as a way of responding, of hearing and answering, which is again both extra-linguistic and an other form of speech. Levinas, once more, is thus too quick in his opposition of vision and language, of vision as an imposition of sameness and speech as an opening to alterity, because tears can be words, words spoken, words responding to, and also, like writing, words seen.

     

    While, unlike Derrida, Levin does not elaborate on the cultural or stereotypical femininity of tears, he notes that seeing objectively, objectifyingly, with wide, dry eyes, in the manner which philosophy (and feminism) has almost always conceived of vision, with the “right of inspection” or “droit de regard,” is perhaps to see, and to see vision, through “masculine” eyes.14 Arguably this talk of “masculinity” and “femininity” in Levinas, Derrida, and Levin raises problems from a feminist perspective,15 but if I am to follow Levinas, Derrida, and Levin for a moment, I would argue that if there can be a transformation of the metaphor of vision and light, if we can conceive of a more “feminine” visuality, then it would be a mistake to separate vision from ethics entirely, or to give vision only to the other in the ethical relation (as in the visor effect). This, however, is what Levinas and Derrida seem at least frequently to have done. Despite some ambivalence, and some self-consciousness of the metaphorical status of what is being rejected, they nevertheless hastily accept vision as an exclusively “masculine” sense organ and deficient as such from the perspective of a “feminine” ethics, rather than explicitly exploring the possibilities of new light-metaphors, of a “feminine” vision–a “feminine” vision which, in fact, like its exemplary capacity to cry, is simply human. Ethical vision as I am here theorizing it is not therefore opposed to the sight of men, but to the hard, dry-eyed sight of Derrida’s sclerophthalmic animals. One way of thinking about this ethical vision is through a consideration of the capacity of human eyes to cry.

     

    Conclusions: Looking Away and Looking Again

     

    In Memoirs of the Blind, Derrida discusses Edgar Allan Poe’s “The Oval Portrait,” in which an artist is so intent on knowing his wife that he keeps her in a room for days to examine her and reproduce exactly what he sees (Memoirs 41). He grasps her form, captures her image, and hence possesses her with literally breath-taking lifelikeness on canvas. This intense being gazed-upon causes the sitter to fall dead at the moment her husband completes her portrait. Indeed, she has been quietly dying with each of her husband’s glances. Despite his intense looking, the artist had not noticed his wife’s growing pallor, the manner in which her face had been slowly robbed of its color as he placed it on canvas. The artist had gazed upon his wife knowingly, but without visually encountering the alterity of her from his knowledge, of encroaching death. The wife ceases to exist as a separate person from her husband and his art at the moment he has known the last detail of her, and thus her alterity is extinguished through his scrutinizing gaze. Although Derrida does not note this, it is remarkable that when the eyes of the narrator of “The Oval Portrait” first fall upon this violent picture, his reaction is to close his eyes. Such is the understanding of vision most often assumed by Levinas and Derrida, in which voir is savoir and avoir, and s/a/voir is violence, and what we ought to do is shut our eyes. I have suggested, however, that perhaps this way of seeing is not sa-voir, but son-voir, or rather sans-voir, a “masculine” seeing which goes without seeing, without allowing to see and to be seen, and without responding to the seen. An other way of seeing, however, a less culturally “masculine,” less active, less violent seeing, a moonlit-seeing perhaps, is suggested by Derrida’s own reading of Levinas’s critique of vision when he suggests that Levinas is not arguing for “a community without light, not a blindfolded synagogue,” but for a non-neutral, non-Platonic light, and a new way of seeing in the light of which “the totally other . . . can be manifested as what it is” (“Violence and Metaphysics” 135 [91]). As Levin notes, and as Derrida comes close to seeing in Memoirs, this would be a culturally “feminine” but in fact specifically human way of seeing, a seeing in tears.16

     

    Interestingly, just as Levinas’s explicit rejection of vision from ethical relations can and has been nuanced to show an understanding of the manners in which vision may in fact respond to the other, or can give rise to an ethical encounter rather than abolish its possibility, on a few occasions in his writings, beyond realizing that the language of vision can be transformed, Derrida goes so far as to attribute to vision as we already experience it a more positive and ethical function, and theorizes “voir et savoir” as “incommensurables” (Echographies 131).17 It is with these moments in Derrida’s work that I would like to conclude.

     

    First, it can be noted that in his description of the ethical response to the blindman, Derrida assumes that I respond to the blindman’s outstretched hand because I see the sight of him which moves me, and thus respond, am responsible for the Other, through vision. Similarly, in Echographies of Television, Derrida describes another situation in which vision called spectators to ethical and political responsibility, to respond against the violence done to others, and in which sight was passive. In the passage in question, Derrida describes the visual witnessing by television spectators of the police brutality against Rodney King. He writes,

     

    for the scene was, unfortunately, banal. Other, much worse scenes happen, alas, here and there, every day. Only there it was, this scene was filmed and shown to the entire nation. No one could look the other way, away from what had, as it were, been put right before his eyes, and even forced into his consciousness or onto his conscience, apparently without intervention, without mediator. And all of a sudden this became intolerable, the scene seemed unbearable, the collective or delegated responsibility proved to be too much. (Echographies 105 [91-2])

     

    In this case, Derrida describes the manner in which vision gave rise to an ethical response as language arguably could not: while Americans knew that there were instances of racial profiling and brutality against visible minorities by the police force every day–and knew this based on having heard and read of such cases–they could (and by and large did) avoid responding to this knowledge, and it was only when confronted with one such scene visually that a collective ethical response immediately occurred. In this case, both the sight of the beating and the ethical response to which it gave rise were “imposed” on the viewers, and thus vision, and the spectator’s response to what was seen, are described as passive: a sight is forced upon one’s eyes and one cannot help but respond. Although, as Derrida notes, such scenes as the Rodney King beating occur every day, with the televisation of the filming of this particular incident “no one could look the other way” (“personne ne pouvait plus détourner les yeux“). Unlike the narrator’s response in “The Oval Portrait,” in Derrida’s discussion of the Rodney King video it is ethically crucial that one not turn one’s eyes away from the violence one sees. Moreover, one cannot turn away from this sight or shut one’s eyes to it, for vision is already passively captivated by what has “been put right before his eyes,” to which one responds “all of a sudden”: one is already responding to what has been taken in before one has the choice to look away. Response, the realization that an intolerable situation is occurring and must be responded to, happens all of a sudden through vision, as may not be the case with language. In this discussion we see that, contrary to the other instances in which vision is theorized as active and violent in Derrida’s writing, here vision is theorized as the passive imposition of ethical responsibility upon a subject.

     

    What these examples show is that, as Derrida argues in “Violence and Metaphysics,” the theory of vision and light as violent is but a metaphor, even if it is one of the fundamental metaphors which has shaped our history, experience, and thought, and which has served too often as an alibi for real violence. Nonetheless, I have argued that Levinas’s persistent use of visual metaphors throughout his work despite his own critique of visuality shows not only that this metaphor is, as Derrida says, inescapable, but also that it can be transformed to describe other ways of seeing that we already experience. Derrida notes that there is no alternative to the metaphor of light, and certainly night and blindfolded synagogues are not such alternatives, and yet we can think of options other than the binding and blinding of eyes, and of other forms of light than the penetrating gaze of the sun. As such, we can develop new metaphors of light and seeing, moonlit metaphors of bewildered and responsive vision. One such image of vision I have developed in this essay is that of seeing tears and of seeing in tears, an image that, as seen, occurs briefly in Levinas’s discussion of the sculptures of Sacha Sosno, and equally briefly in the conclusion of Derrida’s Memoirs of the Blind. As Derrida concludes Memoirs, so I would like to conclude here with the suggestion that we need to believe in “these weeping eyes, those seeing tears,” and in a visionary ethics.

    Notes

     

    Matthias Fritsch, Robert Gibbs, Iain MacDonald, and the reviewers at Postmodern Culture have given me helpful and encouraging comments on this paper, for which I give many thanks.

     

    1. On Levinas’s discussion of vision and its relation to Judaism, see Jay 543 ff.

     

    2. For a discussion of vision and touch in Levinas’s philosophy, see Vasseleu.

     

    3. For a discussion of the shared critiques of the phallogocentrism of vision in Derrida and Cixous, see Jay 493-542.

     

    4. I am thinking for instance of Lyotard’s discussion of the differend.

     

    5. A disability critique of Diderot’s discussion of blindness and of the way in which blindness functions as a trope for inethicality and ethicality respectively in the works of Levin and Derrida could be warranted, although it is beyond the scope of the current paper.

     

    6. For a discussion of whether “other animals” can be considered to be others whom we encounter in ethical, face-to-face relations on Levinasian terms, see Llewelyn.

     

    7. Levin is discussing Levinas’s “Language and Proximity”; see his Collected Philosophical Papers 118.

     

    8. See Levin, “Keeping Foucault and Derrida in Sight” 398.

     

    9. Derrida refers to his writing of Memoirs of the Blind as the confessions of a blindman. He also claims to be struck by “a double infirmity: to this day, I still think that I will never know either how to draw or to look at a drawing” (37). For a critical discussion of Derrida’s blindness and anti-ocularism in the curatorship of the Louvre exhibition and Memoirs of the Blind, see Kelly 108-120). For a more positive discussion of Derrida’s writings on art, see Krell. For Krell’s discussion of the Louvre exhibition and Memoirs of the Blind in particular, see 50-81.

     

    10. Derrida uses the term “blindman” rather than “blind person” because he notes that most blind persons represented in art (other than those blinded by tears) are men. The point that the blind must encounter the other through language rather than through form is qualified by the manner in which the blind may encounter the other’s form through touch, which, for Levinas, is also not a manner in which the face may be encountered.

     

    11. For a discussion of tears in Derrida, see Caputo.

     

    12. Marvell writes, “For others too can see, or sleep/ But only human eyes can weep” (qtd. in Derrida, Mémoires 130).

     

    13. The last image reproduced in Mémoires is of a woman weeping at the cross.

     

    14. In The Opening of Vision (282), Levin cites Carol Gilligan’s observation as to “how accustomed we have become to seeing life through men’s eyes,” from In a Different Voice.

     

    15. Levinas himself notes the “archaic” and merely cultural status of these gendered terms, and says in an interview: “Perhaps . . . all these allusions to the ontological differences between the masculine and the feminine would appear less archaic if, instead of dividing humanity into two species (or into two genres [also meaning “two genders” in French]), they would signify that the participation in the masculine and the feminine were the attributes of every human being” (Ethics and Infinity 68 [71]). Levinasian feminist philosophers such as Leora Batnitzky have argued that Levinas’s use of gendered terminology, although it revalorizes traditionally feminine values and activities, does more harm than good, for it undermines the philosophical value of Levinas’s claims about the human, and reinscribes care as the domain and responsibility of women. See for instance Batnitzky 23. For further discussion of these points, see my “Levinasian Ethics and Feminist Ethics of Care.”

     

    16. I say that Derrida comes close to seeing this, because though he recognizes that tears are “feminine,” he does not recognize them as a “feminine” form of seeing, but only as a “feminine” form of blindness.

     

    17. In “Keeping Foucault and Derrida in Sight,” Levin also argues that Derrida has a positive as well as a negative account of vision. Levin claims that Derrida, like Foucault, sees modernity as ocularcentric, and resists this ocularcentricity, but that neither philosopher entirely rejects vision. Rather, both are critiquing and employing vision strategically in order to theorize and bring about a “postmetaphysical vision” (398). Levin thus writes that Derrida and Foucault “make use of vision in a critique of vision. Thus we must see that there is a potential in our vision that is opposed to the potential that our modern age has tended for the most part to realize. Our vision also has an emancipatory, or utopian, potential” (404).

     

    In an example, Levin notes that Derrida prioritizes graphe (writing) over phone (sound), and thus prioritizes something visible (written words) over something invisible (voice); however phone may be more inscribed than graphe in the desire to see, for one hears the other’s voice when in her presence, and thus is able to look at the one who speaks. In contrast, one reads, and sees, the other’s writing in her absence. Preferring the visible graphe to the invisible phone thus uses vision to subvert the ocularcentric metaphysics of presence (412). It is not simply that Derrida rejects vision, but rather that he chooses strategically certain forms of vision in order to subvert the dominant visual metaphysics.

     

    Works Cited

     

    • Batnitzky, Leora. “Dependency and Vulnerability: Jewish and Feminist Existentialist Constructions of the Human.” Women and Gender in Jewish Philosophy. Ed. Hava Tirsosh-Samuelson. Bloomington: Indiana UP, 2004. 127-52.
    • Caputo, John D. The Prayers and Tears of Jacques Derrida. Bloomington: Indiana UP, 1997.
    • Cixous, Hélène. “Appendix: An Exchange with Hélène Cixous.” Verena Andermatt Conley. Hélène Cixous: Writing the Feminine. Lincoln: U of Nebraska P, 1984. 129-61.
    • —. “Savoir.” Veils. Hélène Cixous and Jacques Derrida. Trans. Geoffrey Bennington. Stanford, Stanford UP, 2001. 1-16.
    • Deleuze, Gilles, and Félix Guattari. A Thousand Plateaus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia. Trans. Brian Massumi. Minneapolis and London: U of Minneapolis P, 1987.
    • Derrida, Jacques, and Bernard Stiegler. Echographies of Television: Filmed Interviews. Trans. Jennifer Bajorek. Cambridge: Blackwell, 2002.
    • Derrida, Jacques. Memoirs of the Blind: The Self-Portrait and Other Ruins. Trans. Pascale-Anne Brault and Michael Naas. Chicago: U of Chicago P, 1993.
    • —. “The Principle of Reason: The University in the Eyes of its Pupils.” Diacritics Fall 1983: 3-20.
    • —. Specters of Marx. Trans. Peggy Kamuf. New York: Routledge, 1994.
    • —. “Violence et métaphysique: Essai sur la pensée d’Emmanuel Levinas.” L’Écriture et la difference Paris: Éditions du Seuil, 1967. 117-228.
    • Jay, Martin. Downcast Eyes: The Denigration of Vision in Twentieth-Century French Thought. Berkeley: U of California P, 1993.
    • Kelly, Michael. Iconoclasm in Aesthetics. Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 2003.
    • Krell, David Farrell. The Purest of Bastards: Works of Mourning, Art, and Affirmation in the Thought of Jacques Derrida. University Park: Pennsylvania State UP, 2000.
    • Levin, David Michael. “Keeping Foucault and Derrida in Sight: Panopticism and the Politics of Subversion.” Sites of Vision: The Discursive Construction of Sight in the History of Philosophy. Ed. David Michael Levin. Cambridge: MIT P, 1997. 397-465.
    • —. The Opening of Vision: Nihilism and the Postmodern Situation. New York: Routledge: 1988.
    • —. The Philosopher’s Gaze: Modernity in the Shadows of Enlightenment. Berkeley: U of California P, 1999.
    • Levinas, Emmanuel. Ethics and Infinity. Trans. R. Cohen. Pittsburgh: Duquesne UP, 1985.
    • —. Éthique et infini: entretiens avec Philippe Nemo. Paris, Fayard, 1982.
    • —. “On Obliteration: Discussing Sacha Sosno.” Art & Text 33 (Winter 1989): 30-41.
    • —. Otherwise than Being or Beyond Essence. Trans. Alphonso Lingis. Pittsburgh: Duquesne UP, 1998.
    • —. Totality and Infinity. Trans. Alphonso Lingis. Pittsburgh: Duquesne UP, 1969.
    • Llewelyn, John. “Am I Obsessed with Bobby?” Rereading Levinas. Eds. Robert Bernasconi and Simon Critchley. Indianapolis: Indiana UP, 1991. 234-246.
    • Taylor, Chloé. “Levinasian Ethics and Feminist Ethics of Care.” Symposium: Canadian Journal of Continental Philosophy 9.2 (Fall 2005): 217-240.
    • Vasseleu, Cathryn. Textures of Light: Vision and Touch in Irigaray, Levinas, and Merleau-Ponty. London: Routledge, 1998.

     

  • Fragments of Utopia: A Meditation on Fassbinder’s Treatment of Anti-Semitism and the Third Reich

    Justin Vicari

    justinvicari@verizon.net

    I

     

    If only because of his difficult and unenviable historical position as a postwar German (he was born in 1945), Fassbinder could not escape bearing witness to the destructive impact of the Holocaust in every frame of his films. I believe absolutely without question that the Six Million were the most brutalized victims of the Third Reich, and that the atrocities committed by Hitler and the Nazis were and are unpardonable, and although I think Fassbinder would have considered it aesthetically “vulgar” to include such a bald statement in one of his films, there is nothing in his films that contradicts it, and in fact his films affirm it.

     

    But first of all, how does one depict the atrocities of the Holocaust in a film? No film has ever succeeded in being bleak enough, devastating enough; instead, films about the Holocaust often come to seem like traditional war movies, with the camps as one more horror among many to be resisted or suffered through. In contrast, Fassbinder depicts the Holocaust as a kind of negative presence, a shadow on the present, the return of the repressed, through moments in which violently disturbing unconscious material breaks through the deceptively calm surface of consciousness: the way that Hans, in Katzelmacher, suddenly beats Joanna and pulls her hair because she has stood up to him; the devious, narrowed eyes of the sister-in-law in Fear of Fear (1975) as she spies on Margot; the way the mother in The Merchant of Four Seasons (1971) crushes her son’s first choice of careers (auto mechanic) because she fears the stigma of a job where he must “get his hands dirty”; and the sickly, perverse smile that the nightclub owner gives to the Kusters daughter, in Mother Kusters Goes to Heaven (1974), propositioning her just after she has learned that her father is dead. These four examples, pulled at random from Fassbinder’s work, are like lightning-flashes in a dark sky whereby we glimpse a tiny visceral wedge of the psychopathic, amoral parade that was the Third Reich, and the widespread collective inhumanity that was the Holocaust. They are notes deliberately struck to expose what I would call “the Nazi moment,” dramatic translations of something vast and unknowable into something pointed and barbed, something that can be rendered palpable.

     

    This is also the point of the surreal moment in Despair (1977) when Herman Herman, at a sidewalk café, watches brownshirts throw bricks at the windows of a Jewish butcher’s shop. In fact the brownshirts do not succeed in breaking the windows, even when one of them kicks the glass with his boot. They skulk away and the shop owners desultorily come out to clear away the bricks. If Fassbinder had staged this scene like one of the overheated, operatic street-fighting scenes in Bergman’s The Serpent’s Egg (1977), for instance, he would have been competing not only with the brutality of history itself but also with the history of film, which has provided many “textbook” examples of Nazi violence. Instead, Fassbinder focuses on the intention, sinister and horrible enough, to destroy.

     

    Another example, which occurs toward the end of Katzelmacher: Paul’s girlfriend Helga is pregnant; in order to induce a miscarriage, Paul, on the advice of his friend Erich, beats her and throws her in the river. She loses the baby; but she still loves Paul, and he, realizing that he loves her, agrees to marry her (what he had hoped to avoid in the first place). Fassbinder does not show this violent scene on-camera. Instead, we hear about it, as gossip, just another incident in the flow of daily life, from two other friends in this social group. Fassbinder’s approach is more like a documentary filmmaker’s than like that of a director of “escapist” cinema. This indirect approach is more horrifying because of the matter-of-fact way in which he inscribes the brutal act within a larger pattern of brutality and socialization: the act itself, already a fait accompli by the time we hear of it, is rationalized and accepted as normal by its witnesses. That even the most violent atrocities and crimes can be justified, that “might always makes right,” that true love can only blossom out of sadomasochistic cruelty–these assumptions underpin the fascist state in Fassbinder’s work.

     

    Compare Fassbinder’s treatment of this theme–by showing a man violently inducing miscarriage in his girlfriend–with Gaspar Noe’s graphic presentation of the same scene in I Stand Alone (1996). Watching I Stand Alone, one becomes queasy, one’s adrenaline races, one is thrust right into the middle of the action and eventually, being able to withstand watching it at all, one grows numb to it. One is placed in the position of accepting it into one’s reality: one becomes, in short, a complacent voyeur. In Katzelmacher, however, one can remain enough outside the event to feel outraged by the way the others in the film have become numb to such things. One’s immediate visceral response does not overtake and overwhelm one’s ability to reason through the inappropriate and inhuman ways in which the other characters confront violence. Fassbinder refuses to place the audience in a complacent voyeuristic position, and instead draws us into an active, critical dialogue with the material–a dialogue by means of which complacency can, in fact, be rejected.

     

    If Nazism (and its legacy, its psychical aftertaste) comes to be linked in Fassbinder’s work with a pungent emotional neglect and domestic brutality–the twisted leer and the offensive remark, the man taking every opportunity to brutalize the woman and the woman taking every opportunity to betray the man–then this expression needs to be understood first of all in Freudian terms, as a return of the repressed. Traumatic, repressed emotion cannot be confronted all at once but must be excavated carefully through the work of analysis, which the prolific, constant outpouring of films becomes. And exactly what is being analyzed? Not only the vast amorphous subject of “German history” or “the repressed emotions of the postwar Germans,” but Fassbinder himself, his childhood and early life. Fassbinder’s insistence on representing fascism mainly as emotional neglect and brutality needs to be related to his own primary experience growing up in a broken home in postwar Germany: by all accounts he was subjected, as a child, to emotional neglect. For Fassbinder, this becomes inescapably the sign of the parental generation that put Hitler in power. It is finally as traumatized son that Fassbinder approaches the entire subject of the Third Reich, with all the strange admixtures of hatred, anger, jealousy and love that the status of “traumatized son” implies.

     

    II

     

    The protagonist of In a Year with Thirteen Moons, Elvira Weishaupt, used to be a man, Erwin Weishaupt; as a baby Erwin was abandoned by his mother and raised in a Catholic orphanage. Later Erwin becomes associated with a man named Anton Saitz, who had been a prisoner in a Nazi concentration camp when he was a boy. Having survived the war, Anton is determined to become rich. His first business ventures are in meat-packing, and his dealings become more and more underhanded; at one point, Erwin willingly takes the rap for one of Anton’s fraudulent deals and serves time in prison. Erwin feels that he loves Anton, though he cannot explain these feelings to himself, since he does not believe himself to be homosexual and had never felt love for another man before. One day Anton asks Erwin why he always stares at him so strangely, forcing the issue. “I love you,” Erwin rashly and recklessly confesses, more as a child would than an adult. Anton reacts by laughing: “If only you were a broad.” Hearing Anton’s offhand remark as a commandment (or a proposal), Erwin immediately flies to Casablanca and undergoes a sex change.

     

    This kind of sacrificial love–which doubles as self-repression, an ongoing death-in-life–figures prominently in In a Year with Thirteen Moons. Elvira’s sex change, her radical transformation into a machine designed to please, acts as a metaphor for cultural forgetting; she represents West Germany, erasing all memory of the Holocaust in order to reinvent itself as a satellite of American capitalism. The total, brutal change from man into woman–that sweeping cut that changes an entire identity irreversibly–symbolizes German amnesia. The fact that Elvira is clumsy and awkward as a woman, that she’s not “well-disguised” and is still grotesquely mannish, as well as the central inescapable fact that she isn’t happy–all of this constitutes the violent breaking-through of what has been repressed. (There is the central assumption at the heart of all Fassbinder’s work, that the German people never fully processed their collective memory of the Nazi years in the aftermath of the war: all bridges to the past were destroyed.)

     

    Elvira Weishaupt joins a long line of forgetters in Fassbinder films, whose repressions serve a larger cultural and historical need. Walter Kranz, the blocked writer in Satan’s Brew (1976), in his movement from left-wing “poet of the revolution” to eventual apologist for the Third Reich, has to suppress his own identity for a period of time, believing that he is in fact the nineteenth-century decadent poet Stefan George. In Bolwieser (1977), set in Munich in the late 1920s, a husband turns a deliberately blind eye as his wife sleeps with several different men (who all sport vaguely Hitlerian mustaches!) until he perjures himself in a court of law to protect her honor and ends up going to prison. Maria Braun remains tied to her husband, a Wehrmacht soldier, even though he is no longer in her life; no matter how rich and independent she becomes, something gnaws at her, leaving her unsatisfied and unfulfilled and finally driving her into a psychopathic state. By the time these forgetters have awakened from their somnambulistic trances, it’s too late for them; they’ve already become completely deformed, hapless, self-immolating victims of an oppression in which they have unwittingly collaborated.

     

    Because Elvira is an allegory of Germany, it becomes significant that In a Year with Thirteen Moons plays out as a series, almost a domino-chain, of symbolic acts of revenge against Elvira staged by members of the very groups that were persecuted under the Reich. The film begins with Elvira cruising a riverfront park, where she is beaten up by Polish hustlers; this becomes the symbolic reversal of Hitler’s invasion of Poland in 1939. Later, the character Soul Frieda stages the “gay revenge” against Elvira–hysterical and operatic–in his apartment. And then, of course, there is Elvira’s betraying friend Red Zora: the loaded adjective that is part of her name suggests not merely hair color, but Communism. (This secondary meaning is made even more explicit in the French release, where the character is called “Zora la Rouge.”) The final death-blow is struck by the Jewish Anton Saitz, survivor of Bergen-Belsen. The collective victims of Nazi oppression and of the Holocaust rise up, group by group as it were, to register their protest.[1] Of course Elvira is not to be equated with Hitler: she is only the symbolic body on which this protest is enacted, the scapegoat. Her passivity, more than anything else, places Elvira in this position: had she lived under the Third Reich, she probably would have been packed off to a concentration camp (wearing a pink triangle). However, she is not exactly innocent either: she does vaguely espouse pseudo-fascist values (in the slaughterhouse scene) and she dresses like a fashion plate of 1930s and 40s haute-couture, a throwback to the fascist era.[2] Moreover, her only way of standing with the victims, of showing solidarity, is to demand some kind of love from them: she attempts to buy the love of the Polish hustler; she supports her lover Christoph financially, in a transparent effort to make him love her more; most strikingly, she attempts to blackmail Anton’s love with her sex change. All of this, in itself, can be regarded as hostile and invasive: love has become so rare a commodity that Elvira’s desperate attempts to corner the market, so to speak, can only be read as a kind of fascist takeover. Her overwhelming need for love threatens the very stability of a social economy that has no love to sell her.

     

    The concept of achieving or exposing one’s difference via any form of bending one’s gender or sexuality has always been considered highly suspect; gays and transsexuals (and for the sake of argument I will include Elvira in this category, though she doesn’t inhabit it easily) often find themselves as minorities among minorities. The sexually different are seen as adding–to the legitimate difference of, say, Jewish people–an illegitimate difference that can be hidden at will or read as a sign of “shameful weakness.” Sexual difference cuts across too many issues of family loyalty, religious belief, and intangible questions of self-respect and even “honor.” The gay figure still stands very much alone, accused of fighting selfishly on behalf of sexual pleasure: yet the torments undergone by Elvira make explicit that her fight has nothing to do with claiming pleasure, but with claiming (or refusing) her very identity itself.

     

    In this sense, Elvira is like Sarah Jane in Douglas Sirk’s Imitation of Life (1959). Sarah Jane is black, but looks white; she chooses to pass, a decision that breaks her mother’s heart and eventually forces Sarah Jane to renounce her mother (a black maid) and move far away from her. (Arguably, slavery in American history is analogous to the Holocaust in German history: a shattering historical event that casts its shadow for generations into the future.) At the end of the film the mother dies; Sarah Jane belatedly returns and, at the funeral, acknowledges her black mother and, by extension, her own blackness. But this acknowledgment comes too late to do the mother any good; and ultimately, what will it do to Sarah Jane? The film has established her as a character who hates her own real identity, and who is ill-equipped to cope with it. What she does, at the funeral, in a paroxysm of guilt, is liable to have the gravest consequences for her in the future. (And there is another, more cynical way to read Sirk’s “happy” ending: with Annie–the only fully black-identified character–now gone, the “white” characters, including Sarah Jane, are free to form an exclusive and contented family.) Like Sarah Jane, of course, Elvira others herself in order to gain the approval and acceptance of a social category (men like Anton Saitz) to which she, as Erwin, once belonged by definition but without feeling exactly that she belonged. (If its title wasn’t already perfect, In a Year with Thirteen Moons could well have been called Imitation of Life, since Elvira lives without ever “really” living, which is to say, finding a way to be happy.) The sharp, nagging sense of difference precedes the act of othering oneself: Sarah Jane becomes the light skin she displays externally, while Erwin becomes the desiring female he feels himself to be inside, vis-à-vis Anton. Each becomes an other in her own skin: a tragic figure trapped forever between two identities, neither of which is tenable and neither of which makes sense.

     

    This dual citizenship in the world of the oppressed and of the oppressors is something uniquely central to Fassbinder’s philosophy, a hard kernel at the heart of his work that many have found indigestible. His oppressors who are also oppressed show that each person has his or her point of vulnerability. The drive for pleasure and power becomes fatally and inextricably bound up with the death drive. In Beware of a Holy Whore, the controlling Jeff is drawn to the one person, Ricky, whom he can least control: within his obsessive love is inscribed the seed of its own doom. Jeff rails and rages that he wants more freedom, more power, but all of this ranting is compensatory: he really wants less. He flees his own “name”: in the end, when he is given a newspaper with an article in it about him and the movie he is making, he chooses to read aloud from a police report, on the same page, about a serial killer who has finally been apprehended. “I guess I won’t really be able to rest until I know that he’s completely destroyed,” Jeff says in the end, hanging his head: with a shock we realize that he’s talking about himself. Similarly, Maria Braun is invincible to everything except her own past, which she neurotically cultivates in the form of the dead and dying roses her husband continues to send her as a kind of antidote to her own power: at one point she enters her house and plants her pocketbook in the vase, instead of the rose she has just received. “Maria Braun,” she tells herself, “you’re starting to lose it.” Again, there is the need for the powerful to diminish his or her own authority, and again, this need centers on a strange linguistic turn to the third person–she confronts herself as the specter of her own detested power, she attacks her own name.

     

    Why do the powerful–the oppressors–detest their power? Aside from the fact that both Jeff and Maria remain humane in some way, and thus are disgusted by the machinations of power and by the ways in which they are driven to hurt others, I think they recognize that love is absent from their power, that the drive to achieve this power is already a kind of death drive, since it has made it impossible for them to attain a “pure” and “equal” love (if this even exists in the first place).

     

    III

     

    When he was nineteen, Fassbinder wrote a play called Water Drops on Burning Rocks, which, I believe, contains an early draft of the story that later became In a Year with Thirteen Moons (I’m going by the text of the play filmed beautifully by François Ozon in 1999). The play is about a “round-robin” sexual game centering on the figure of a charismatic seducer. Near the end, in a startling confession, the seducer’s ex-girlfriend delivers the following tearful monologue:

     

    I’ve suffered in every way imaginable. So much sadness . . . I’ll suffer forever. . . . I’m his creature . . . . When I met Leopold, I had just come to Germany. I was like you: young, innocent and most of all: lost. Starved for love. He taught me everything about sex. It was wonderful. He was so good, he made me feel like I existed for the very first time. I was happy. That is, until he stopped desiring. He touched me less and less. Everything changed. It was unbearable. So, I took a drastic measure, crazy, crazy with love. He’d said to me once, “If you were a woman, I’d have married you.” I had a sex change for him, out of love for him, so he’d want me again. I spent all my savings. For a while, his desire was revived. It was the newness. I deluded myself. Then the desire died again. He made me a whore. Then he left me.

     

    There are certain prototypically Fassbinderian elements here: the feeling of finally being happy “for the very first time” is equated with a feeling of being in love and truly alive, beside which all the dull, ordinary moments of life seem to pale or become, in fact, “unbearable”; the person who finds and then loses happiness becomes doomed to spend the rest of life chasing after the lost, fleeting feeling, like a drug addict who seeks larger and more potent doses to attain the same longed-for euphoria and oblivion. The one who loves becomes the creature of her love, no longer the free living being that happiness had once, briefly, made her. We also see how economic considerations parallel emotional ones: “I spent all my savings” (all happiness requires some funding) and “He made me a whore” (what has ceased to become useful and productive in the emotional sphere, must be turned to use and exploited in the economic one). In this earlier version of the story, the sex change works, briefly, as a sexual novelty or proof of devotion, which slightly prolongs the beloved’s jaded interest. The radical othering of the body in order to please and serve is, for a short while, accepted by the man as a gift, in the spirit in which it is given. This is no longer the case with Elvira, whom Anton rejects as flatly after her sex change as he had before.

     

    The seducer in Water Drops on Burning Rocks who elicited the gift of an “othered” body is named Leopold Bloom, a reference to the Joyce character. Bloom, the “Rich Jew” in Fassbinder’s play Garbage, the City and Death, and Anton Saitz form a triad of Jewish men who are marked as ruthless seducers and despoilers of the innocent, and also cut-throat businessmen, all qualities that recall the anti-Semitic propaganda of the Nazi era. Honestly, what are we to make of these Jewish characters who seem to be deliberate constructs of inflammatory anti-Semitic projection? To suggest that Fassbinder is venting some kind of personal anti-Semitism seems wrong: there is something in the way these Jewish characters interact with the German ones that stresses the element of projection. For one thing, consider the fate of these German characters. The Nazi generation accused Jewish men of being “feminized” men; the extent to which this was meant to compensate for the Germans’ uneasiness about their own sexual identity is revealed in the ways the following German generation begins to explore and revise its sexual identity vis-à-vis Jewish men. Raoul the pimp, seduced by the Rich Jew, discovers that he was gay all along; Franz, the adolescent in Water Drops on Burning Rocks who seems to be a kind of surrogate for Fassbinder himself, tries gay sex for the first time with Leopold Bloom, and falls in love with him; Erwin, in love with Anton Saitz, decided to become a woman for him. Here, the transparent process of being or becoming “feminized” is owned directly by the German male characters; it is now the Jewish men who awaken and precipitate the longing to be feminized, or the acknowledgment that one is already feminine.

     

    Fassbinder has been criticized for depicting Jewish men as distant and unfeeling, while his German characters go through highly strung, deeply registered emotional changes: but for the anti-Semitic transference to work, this has to be the case. Feminization, once held by the Nazis to be a trait of the Jewish man, is shown not to apply in the slightest, while it’s the non-Jewish German men who go to pieces, who surrender to the neurotic realm of extreme emotionality, who are hystericized and in a word feminized . That this reversal is worked out through the next generation, among the children of the Nazis, is part of Fassbinder’s overarching vision of the slowness of the process by which worlds are remade.

     

    The presentation of sanitized, saint-like Jews does not do enough to battle the anti-Semitic legacy of the Nazis: rather, this taint can only be reversed, exculpated, by the presentation of Jewish characters committing and now getting away with the very “crimes” against society that the Nazis foamed at the mouth to denounce. About the various “rich Jews” one encounters in Fassbinder’s films, Saul Friedlander writes:

     

    The rich Jew reigns over his world, over property and hoodlums, but suddenly it becomes clear that he is also in league with the police and the town’s notables . . . . As for the patriarch Mendelssohn [in Lili Marleen (1980)], he knows how to pull all the strings from behind the scenes . . . . He is like a spider sitting in the center of his web, but a spider whose repugnant aspect [has] disappeared. A master of lies and duplicity, he seems a symbol of detachment and nobility. (110-11)

     

    These Jews are now depicted as doing everything they can to justify the anti-Semitic judgment, so as not to have suffered genocide in vain, so to speak: the subtitle of Garbage, the City and Death seems significant in light of this, since Frankenstein-am-Mainobviously refers to the creation of a kind of monster. Only now, the figure of the Jew, once so flagrantly open to attack, has become untouchable. In place of a guilty Germany that refused all blame for its crimes and an innocent Jewry massacred for no valid reason, there now stands the sign of a Germany that can be found guilty simply for existing, and a Jewry that can be “let off the hook” even when it deliberately “sins.” The psychological extremism of this formulation measures the incomprehensibility of the Holocaust itself: in response to such massive devastation, the collective ego of society undergoes a violent transformation, under hammer blows as it were, and gets turned inside-out.

     

    In this sense, Elvira also resembles the character of Muller in Garbage, the City and Death, the ex-camp-commandant who now performs a cabaret act in drag. Though seemingly harmless, Muller still espouses murderous Nazi values: “I wasn’t concerned with each and every one of the people I murdered . . . . I am a technocrat . . . . It’s no burden to be a Jew killer when you have convictions like mine . . . . So I’m waiting ’til my rights are rights again” (Fassbinder, Plays 185). Elvira is hardly so inflammatory and aggressive, but her sex change, her self-designation as Anton’s creature, also covers for her attempt to covertly carry on in the master role, now in non-threatening, emasculated disguise. How do we know she still seeks to dominate? The sex change can be read as a passive-aggressive form of emotional blackmail (which it also clearly is in Water Drops on Burning Rocks, victimized tears notwithstanding): Elvira does indeed other herself, her body, but in order to get something in return.

     

    Thomas Elsaesser has argued that Elvira’s sacrifices for Anton represent a working-through of German-Jewish relations in the wake of the Holocaust, with Elvira as a kind of patron saint of empathic identification with the other, choosing a noble if extreme form by which to implicate herself as a German and atone for German crimes (206-15). I disagree with the emphasis he places on Elvira’s sense of guilt, which is not particularly pronounced, and I also disagree with the claim for Anton’s (relative) importance as the locus of her real longings and love. The most significant lost love for Elvira is the original loss of the mother, who abandoned the child Erwin.[3] Infected by ego-injuries from early childhood, Elvira is classically narcissistic; she makes Anton a symptom, in the Lacanian sense, of her own fantasies of redemption: any empathy she may have is contaminated by what she would like to receive in validation. When Elvira tries to get an introduction to Anton’s office from Smolik, Saitz’s right-hand man, he asks her if she knows Saitz personally, and she replies, “Doch, doch. Doch. Ich kenne die Anton Saitz.” What she says is: “But yes, yes, of course–I know Anton Saitz,” her use of the feminine definite article, “die,” in front of Anton’s name shows she has made him her symptom. This feminization of Anton, at the level of language, suggests that Elvira seeks to make him into her creature, her sex change, and to emasculate him. The deep-seated fear of an imagined Jewish sexual potency, which motivated German anti-Semites to accuse Jewish men of being “feminine” and to classify them as Untermenschen (lower-men), survives at a barely registered level as a hysterical coveting of Jewish sexuality under the disguise of love.

     

    Having said this, I am nonetheless uneasy about the superficial equation that seems to be made between homosexuality/transvestism and Nazism. Both Elvira and Muller resemble Martin von Essenbeck from Fassbinder’s favorite film, Luchino Visconti’s The Damned (1969). At the beginning of The Damned, Martin, the black sheep son of a powerful industrial family, upsets his patriarchal grandfather by singing Dietrich’s signature song, “Einem Mann, einem richtige Mann” (“A man, a real man”) in full Blue Angel drag at a family celebration. Martin threatens to bring down the family by going to gay bars and molesting a little girl, but the family’s power is such–and the family steelworks are of such strategic importance to the Reich–that not only are these scandals hushed up, but Martin is recruited to the S.S. By the end he has traded his drag outfit for the uniform of a storm troop leader (a composite portrait of Martin Bormann?). He goes from singing that he wants “a real man” to being a real man, with the defining provision that the mark of this “real manhood” is that one knows how to kill.

     

    Implicit in Martin’s journey is a recapitulation of Freud’s three successive stages of human psychosexual development. He begins at the oral stage, fixated on his mother, who presides, smiling strangely, over Martin’s drag act. In this phase he is reckless and compulsive; he “devours” the little girl. Later, blackmailed by Uncle Constantine, he suffers through the anxious rigors of the anal stage, withdrawing from the world, holing up in a dark attic. This corresponds to the historical moment when the new S.S. cleans house by massacring the old S.A. during a huge gay orgy, a recreation of the “night of long knives” that is easily the most stunning scene in Visconti’s film. Finally, Martin confronts his deep-seated Oedipal complex by the extreme and unlikely act of raping his mother. Reborn, Martin loses his former weakness and joins the S.S.; he gets a girlfriend and graduates to the genital stage. In the end he engineers his mother’s death, signifying that he has overcome the Oedipal fixation at the root of his former homosexuality.

     

    Staging of homosexuality as a weakness that forces an overcompensation of aggression goes together with the Freudian reading of “sensitivity and aggression,” the movement of psychical overcompensation that marks so many of Fassbinder’s characters. Under the mincing, lisping drag queen lurks a predatory killer waiting to lash out. However, in many cases the comforting, seductive logic behind this duality isn’t really logic at all: just the expression of a societal aversion at the level of gut instinct, so to speak. The paranoia of this scenario speaks to the fear that all “abnormal” sexual identities are expedient to one degree or another, that the omnisexual subject has an ax to grind. Is the drag queen a distracting cover for criminal behavior? Is the killer merely compensating for his own fears that he may be effeminate? If this were true, then why aren’t all gay men killers? Even Adorno insists that fascism and homosexuality are linked as the operations of a narcissism whose insecurity excludes everything “other,” everything that is not already of oneself:

     

    In the end the tough guys are the truly effeminate ones, who need the weaklings as their victims in order not to admit that they are like them. Totalitarianism and homosexuality belong together. In its downfall the subject negates everything which is not of its own kind. The opposites of the strong man and the compliant youth merge in an order which asserts unalloyed the male principle of domination. (46)

     

    This sounds good as far as it goes, especially the first part in which the fascist (as inverted victim) is shown to pick on those who are weaker in order not to be classified as one of them. But of course not all gays are self-loathing (or fearful) so that they must become killers of other men. Received judgments about homosexuality, especially when applied to a case as serious and delicate as the Third Reich, seem to want to let history off the hook, so to speak. Friedlander has also noted that The Damned, “in choosing to make Essenbeck’s grandson a complete pervert,” finds its own way of “neutralizing the past,” even as it attempts to trace the precise origins of Nazi criminality (100). The evil, and hence the guilt, are invested in an isolated scapegoat, in this case a figure of malevolent sexual ambiguity. Fassbinder himself sometimes seems to make the same glib elision that Visconti makes between sexual perversion and Nazism (a case could be made that Lili Marleen is really about the Nazis’ projected identification with an artificial idea of women: rather than being a traditional pin-up, Lili Marleen stages the closeted drag fantasies of the troops). At the same time, Fassbinder’s sensitive, “weak” characters are more likely to be heterosexually identified than gay (Hans Epp, Whity, Herr R., Peter Troepper, Walter Kranz). Fassbinder wants to explore how anyonecould be made into a killer or collaborator–as the Nazis proved–not only those already twisted by psychosexual problems. Indeed the shifting of the burden of guilt onto a few psychosexually twisted individuals does not account for the fact that Hitler had millions of followers (they couldn’t all have been in the closet, surely) and also that other sets of “others” were targeted (communists, gypsies, etc.) who had little to do with issues of sexuality.

     

    IV

     

    In a scene from In a Year with Thirteen Moons, Elvira has come to the building where Anton Saitz has his headquarters; outside, a man begins talking to her. Like Elvira, he is an exile from the Saitz empire. He tells Elvira rather imperiously that he comes to stand in this same spot Monday through Friday during business hours, staring up at the windows of Saitz’s office where he used to work. This is a mini-portrait of alienated labor, a man so defined by his workaday job that, even after losing it, he is drawn back to the same office building, spending his time there even though he is no longer compensated for it.

     

    Like some jilted lover, this ex-employee is obsessed with Saitz. He is a custodian of Saitz’s history. Visually, the guy is a grotesque. In close-up, his skeletal face suggests one of George Grosz’s caricatures from the Weimar 1920s, a talking skull in business suit and hat. I am also reminded of the portrait photographs August Sander took of ordinary Germans between the wars: Sander began his project working for the census, taking identification photos of as many Germans as he could get to sit for him. His later, more formally composed pictures of men and women in stiff suits or work-uniforms have an uncanny quality: I know, when I’m looking into these eyes, that I’m looking at people who became Nazis. Sander wanted to build up the morale of Germans defeated in World War I; in certain of his portraits, the subject looks at the camera half-astonished that Sander believes him worthy of being photographed, an unmistakable flicker of returning pride crossing his face. Did Sander, by turning his camera on these ordinary Germans, inadvertently encourage a return of their will to power? Consider the photograph “Pastry Chef (Cologne, 1928)”–this burly skinhead with Hitler-like mustache already looks like an S.A. crewman; or “Varnisher (Cologne, 1932)”–where the man’s military haircut, stained smock and big can of varnish all combine with his face’s slightly stupid expression to look distinctly sinister. Perhaps it’s just historicist hindsight that seems to tip the hand of these portraits, but a similar “trick” occurs with some of the characters in Fassbinder’s films: the longer Fassbinder holds on close-ups of their faces, the more a kind of latent fascism begins to seep out. The ex-employee goes on to say that, in his early days, Saitz took over a whorehouse, running it “with an iron fist in the way he’d learned in the concentration camp. A brothel run like a concentration camp. The whole set-up functions perfectly.” Details are glossed over here, we never learn exactly how the brothel was run, but I take Fassbinder’s simile at face value, not as hyperbole, and assume that the women who worked in this whorehouse were most likely beaten, starved, humiliated, raped, paid no money, and even murdered; the customers were perhaps blackmailed and robbed. As opposed to Elvira, who has learned to masochistically embrace her own victimhood, Saitz has gotten back at the world by evolving into one of the oppressors.

     

    Is this logic cruel to the victims of the Holocaust and to other survivors who did not become like their oppressors? Perhaps, but isn’t it just as cruel to depict the Holocaust’s victims as nothing but victims, eternally destroyed again and again? “For it would, after all,” writes Elsaesser, “be too easy for a German to love a Jew, on condition that he is a nice, upright one” (197). The taboo against representing Jewish people humanly, with human faults and weaknesses like everyone, is yet another form of anti-Semitism, continuing to treat the Jew as Other.

     

    Later, Elvira is initially refused entrance to Saitz’s office. Saitz’s chauffeur and right-hand man, Smolik, tells her she can only come in if she knows one of the “codewords.” She turns her back to mnemonically sound out the password, summoning it up from the recesses of deep memory. Suddenly, out of her mouth pops “Bergen-Belsen!” Smolik gives a wolfish whistle: “Why didn’t you say so? That’s Code 1-A. . . the only password that’s never been changed. With ‘Bergen-Belsen’ you can even disturb him when he’s screwing!” Elvira, now inside the inner sanctum, laughs girlishly, pleased with herself for one of the few times in the entire film. The word itself, “Bergen-Belsen,” of course represents the return of the repressed. This makes Smolik’s last remark hilarious, since, in Freudian terms, traces of repressed traumatic memory can result in, among other neurotic symptoms, sexual dysfunction. What can “disturb Anton when he’s screwing” is the unwanted driving of unconscious memories (from his childhood in Bergen-Belsen) into consciousness.

     

    Some critics have felt that the concentration camp references here are arbitrary or unsubstantiated, but I don’t think there is a single Fassbinder film that is not about the camps to a greater or lesser degree. It was his heroic insistence that everything Germany had ever done, and everything Germany had done since the war, should be made to answer for the unspeakable horrors of the camps. Again, he would never have made a film directly “about” the camps; with his characteristic irony, he was incapable of making such an artistically blunt statement. Instead, the camps become a phantom presence: in Katzelmacher, in the way the circle of friends spend their time stabbing each other in the back, and then finally turn on the figure of the immigrant worker and beat him up, we see a schematic of “Nazi behavior.” Emmi, on several occasions in Fear Eats the Soul (1973), smilingly and nostalgically reminisces about Hitler and being in the Nazi Party when she was a little girl; shortly after marrying the Moroccan Ali, she will betray him in order to get back into the good graces of the other, racist ex-Nazis in her social circle–to “re-join the party,” so to speak. In Chinese Roulette a ruthless truth game is played: one team picks someone from the other team, and round after round questions are asked: “What kind of animal would the person be?” or “What author might have invented this person?” By the answers given, the other team is meant to try to guess which one of them has been chosen. The daughter Angela picks her own mother as the target in this game; the ultimate question is “Who would this person have been in the Third Reich?” Angela replies: “Commandant of the camp at Bergen-Belsen.” The Nazi era is evoked (in the context of a decadent 1970s party game) as a definitive crucible of human behavior.

     

    For Fassbinder the subject of the camps was so vast and terrible that it could only be rendered obliquely like this, broken down into human-sized stories: a chocolate manufacturer losing his mind in Berlin in 1929 (Despair); a has-been movie star committing suicide ten years after the end of the war and the simultaneous end of her career (Veronika Voss); the dissolution of a marriage in Weimar-era Munich due to rampant personal anxiety and pathological infidelity (Bolwieser); or the complete crisis of original thought and identity faced by a contemporary writer who cannot come to terms with Nazi history except by brutally recreating it through random acts of murder and S & M (Satan’s Brew). All these films are implicitly about the camps. Even the period piece Effi Briest, set in the Prussian nineteenth century, features a train–an obvious emblem of the Holocaust–as the sinister bringer of (state-sanctioned) death, in the duel scene. In In a Year with Thirteen Moons, the recycling of a dreaded camp name, Bergen-Belsen, into a fairly innocuous codeword or password (so redolent of not only espionage and crime, but of a boys’ clubhouse) is classic Freudian psychology: the trauma of the past is reduced to a kind of private joke, cut off from its social meaning. Part of the joke is the sheer mnemonic effort it requires for Elvira even to summon up the name in the first place. By doing so, she demonstrates that she is one of the ones who remembers; and for this alone, she implicitly consents to bear the burden of guilt. As part of the Nazi past that has been subjected to wholesale cultural amnesia, “Bergen-Belsen” can be remade to mean anything at all, a nonsense sound, or it can be completely pushed out of mind, buried so far down in the unconscious that it is completely forgotten.

     

    Similarly, when we hear that Saitz ran his whorehouses like concentration camps, we shudder to think what might have gone on in them. But the actual historical memory of the camps is shown to be so vague and imprecise that hardly anyone in the film ever surmises what crimes Anton may have committed. Rather we have a sense that what is implied is a generic kind of “order and discipline,” snap inspections: the same techniques of behavioral control used by all modern business offices. Big business cannot help but have absorbed the lessons of administrative efficiency and fine-tuned totalitarian infrastructure of Hitler’s death camps; the camps are a model of advanced-capitalist business administration, with their high-tech smoothness, their intricate chains of command allowing for guilt to be shifted from the top to the bottom, their dual agency (workhouse/slaughterhouse), and the secrecy with which they concealed corruption behind a benign, even purportedly humanitarian exterior. Fassbinder is linking all modern big business to the camps–or, more precisely, all the operations in modern society where people are reduced to numbers and stark functions are shown to be derived from the model of the camps, where human beings were also definitively reduced to numbers and to functions.

     

    V

     

    At the end of In a Year with Thirteen Moons, Elvira has died but her voice continues speaking, via a tape-recorded interview with a journalist: her monologue helps to explain her misbegotten life, even as it leaves some of her inherent contradictions intact. Fassbinder quotes this motif of the tape-recorded voice transcending the speaker’s literal death from the end of Sartre’s play, The Condemned of Altona (1959). Sartre was the first artist to address the legacy of Nazi violence in the reconstructed West Germany of the Wirtschaftswunder: the psychological dissolution and decay of a powerful industrialist family, the von Gerlachs, is shown to be in direct proportion to the extent of their crimes in the Third Reich and their material prosperity in the aftermath of the war. The eldest son, Franz, served as a Nazi officer, and earned a reputation as a sadistic torturer of prisoners; he returned from the war emotionally and psychologically destroyed. He has been hiding out for the past ten years in the attic of the family mansion, refusing to speak to anyone but Leni, the sister whom he loves incestuously, and the imaginary army of crabs that he believes lives on the ceiling of his room and that he also believes will one day take over the world. Holed up in this room, he obsessively audiotapes himself delivering rambling psychotic speeches. Rather than acknowledge Hitler’s defeat, he has replaced Hitler. He has convinced himself that Germany is still a defeated nation on its knees, in rubble, the way he left it when he went into seclusion; that way, he can content himself that the Nazi cause, for which he fought and sacrificed himself, had never been betrayed.

     

    Because the patriarch of the von Gerlach clan (himself a Nazi collaborator) is rapidly dying of cancer, the family attempts to break Franz out of his delusional isolation. But when the past is forcibly excavated through a series of conversations between Franz and his sister-in-law, and then an “interview” between Franz and his dying father, Franz can’t deal with the memory of the crimes he committed and witnessed, and he especially can’t deal with the present time, in which a recovered Germany has moved on and forgotten its past, of which Franz is a part. In the end, as his father wants, he drives a car with himself and his father in it off a bridge, killing them both. After he has died, Franz’s sister Leni plays one of Franz’s tape recordings, highlighting his complete crisis of identity: “Oh tribunal of the night,” he seethes, ” you who were, who will be, who are–I existed, I existed!” (178).

     

    Both The Condemned of Altona and In a Year with Thirteen Moons are expressions of a deep-seated postwar misanthropy, and both are studies of scapegoats in a group dynamic. Franz begins as an innocent boy who gets pressed into becoming a savage oppressor, a killer; he finally succumbs to his own frail, guilty victimhood: he simply can’t live with himself as a butcher. Elvira, similarly, renounces her original profession as (animal) butcher, then becomes a sacrifice. Both Franz von Gerlach and Elvira Weishaupt are the “walking dead,” existing in a semi-hypnoid state, waiting only for real death to finish them off, and leaving behind enigmatic epitaphs for their enigmatic lives. Both Fassbinder and Sartre use this posthumous voice ironically: the life eulogized by the voice is already sacrificed, in fact was sacrificed long before it ended; nothing can help it now. In The Condemned of Altona Franz’s surviving family files out of the room, indifferently leaving Franz’s tape to play on; in In a Year with Thirteen Moons, Elvira’s shell-shocked loved ones stand around, at a loss as to what to do, seemingly still pondering the enigma of this person whom they never really understood. If they seem to be paying more attention to Elvira now, this does Elvira no good; their attention comes too late.

     

    While Fassbinder and Sartre deplore Germany’s cultural amnesia, both depict their main characters–Elvira and Franz–as crushed by their attempts to swim against this amnesic tide. Knowing what happened does not save Franz from being devastated by this knowledge–in fact it makes him even more vulnerable. Likewise, Elvira is moved to investigate her past and is destroyed, in large part, by what she uncovers. I think that the blame, however, is not to be placed on the act of remembering itself, but rather on the lack of a supportive collective structure to help the individual process these memories: the family unit, bonds of friendship and love, society’s fabric, are all shown to be rotted away, unable to uphold the sacrificed victim who wants to make the effort to overcome the traumas of the past. Both works dramatize what is an essentially psychoanalytic, Freudian process–but one conducted not by a sympathetic professional, but by peers of the protagonist with axes to grind. In both, the traumas turn out to be so profoundly damaging that the individual’s recovery becomes impossible. The catharsis of the drama is, then, the failure of self-knowledge, the collapse of the protagonist under the weight of his or her own sickness. Sartre, like Fassbinder, draws on Freud in his critique of the prosperous “new Germany.” Franz and Elvira, latter-day hysterics, manifest a return of the repressed in psychopathological symptoms and in their general malaise and anxiety. As the key to Elvira is her fixation on love as a substitute for the lost mother, so Franz is revealed through his idée fixe that Germany remains exactly the same as he left it, in 1945, a mass of bombed ruins, destroyed and fragmented. In reality only Franz is broken, in ruins. And, like Elvira, Franz is the victim of a downward mobility: he has lost control of the von Gerlach business empire, which was to be his, to his younger brother Werner. For Franz and Elvira, insanity is a helpless response to the call of a higher, less sublimated reality, that of the collective and individual traumas that everyone else has forgotten:

     

    JOHANNA: Madmen often speak the truth, Werner.

     

    WERNER: Really? Which truth?

     

    JOHANNA: There’s only one: the horror of living. (115)

     

    Franz’s mental instability–again like Elvira’s–is shown to have been rooted, at its deepest point, in an unbearable family constellation: a brutal domineering authoritarian father, and an incestuous love relationship with his sister. The von Gerlach clan is riddled with overt and covert incest: the patriarch manipulates his daughter with creepy, pseudo-sexual caresses and compliments, and Franz, as the second generation, brings the latent incest-wishes of the father to fruition in his affair with Leni, as he also brings the power-mad dreams of the father to fruition in the Nazi army. Like the sick philosophy of Nazism itself, this unhealthy incest-mentality masquerades as a hypocritical agenda to keep the bloodline “purified,” as when Leni tells Franz: “I don’t amount to anything, but I was born a Gerlach, which means I am mad with pride–and I cannot make love to anyone but a Gerlach. Incest is my law and my fate” (88). The psychotic family bears a psychotic son, who finds (and invests) in the Nazi Party all the justification and fulfillment of his psychosis. The murderous violence of Nazism is shown to have grown directly out of these already pathic syndromes, a collective summoning and channeling of latent psychotic energies that remain unchanged and destructive after the war and the collapse of the Third Reich. The “Third Reich,” then, was just a temporary name given to an already existent condition of brutality and sadism. For Elvira, who gravitates toward violence and murder (in the slaughterhouse sequence) and who exposes the latent aggressions of her peers, one can say that, like Franz, she stands both within the collective psychosis and outside of it, its member and its victim. The collective victimization of Franz and Elvira–and ultimately their suicides–absolve them of complicity, but at the cost of their lives.

     

    I have no doubt that The Condemned of Altona was on Fassbinder’s mind in 1978. Certain other motifs from Sartre’s play had already surfaced in Peter Marthesheimer’s screenplay for The Marriage of Maria Braun, which Fassbinder had filmed earlier that year. An example: when Franz von Gerlach comes home from the front, he finds his sister having sex with an American G.I.; the two men fight, and Leni saves her brother by bludgeoning the G.I. to death with a bottle. This dramatic incident migrates almost wholly into The Marriage of Maria Braun. In both, the ease with which American soldiers are dispatched–by German women, with bottles of German wine!–seems like an ironic commentary on the fact that, even during the Occupation, the Germans were already regaining their former power, as well as the sadism and blood-lust that had fueled the Third Reich. Also, the ending of The Condemned of Altona–a murder-suicide by crashed car–was scripted as the original ending of The Marriage of Maria Braun: Fassbinder changed it at the last minute to a more ambiguous scene (in which Maria blows up the house, accidentally or on purpose, by leaving the gas oven on–itself a sardonic Holocaust reference), perhaps because he saw how closely Marthesheimer’s ending paralleled Sartre’s.

     

    Of The Condemned of Altona, Fredric Jameson writes, “the abstract future becomes visible. . .as the burning judgment of some unimaginable and alien posterity” (305). Franz, in his recorded speeches, ruminates on how the future will see him and his Germany–a future dominated by an alien race of evolved crabs. The end of In a Year with Thirteen Moons, with the emphatic words of the Connie Francis song, “Schoner Fremder Mann,” also turns toward the idea that the future will come to redeem the past: “the time will come/when all my dreams at last/will be reality.” Fassbinder and Sartre themselves stand at a pivot point, like their protagonists, wondering if these dubious redemptions will ever arrive; but they also stand as avatars of that “posterity” with its “burning judgment,” looking back at the ugly wreckage of history, excavating backwards from the incomprehensible sign of damaged life toward the origin of the damage itself: the parents spanking their children in Fassbinder’s BRD are ex-Nazis, and the children, the inheritors of both individual and collective damages, are left the choice of either perpetuating these cycles or breaking out of them. The former route is easier, but leads to a living death and to death itself; the latter means lifting the historical curse, curing the sickness, but how does one go about this, all alone? It is part of Fassbinder’s unique sensitivity to understand that the cruelest fate of the outsider–whether female, Jewish, gay, or anything–is that he or she must figure out how society works and how to overcome it, an obstacle with which those who flock to the status quo never have to deal.

    Notes

     

    1. This kind of radical paraphrasing or re-staging of German history, particularly the events leading up to World War II, can also be seen in Beware of a Holy Whore, where the mass presence of the German film-crew, “taking over” the Spanish resort, is implicitly likened to a Nazi invasion; and in Martha, when Helmut, with a maniacal and proprietary glint in his eye, tells Martha on their honeymoon, that “next year,” as a traveling salesman, he “will be in Germany, Austria and Switzerland,” not uncoincidentally the first countries controlled by Hitler.

     

    2. It almost goes without saying that such fancy, formal attire stands in stark contrast to the pungent scruffiness with which Fassbinder presented himself: in The Niklashausen Journey (1970), for example, his matted, unwashed hair and faded, mud-stained jeans signify the sincerity of his solidarity with the workers’ revolution. And one of the identity crises Fox faces, in Fox and His Friends (1974), is that his upper-class lover is critical of his casual, proletarian clothing, and wants to “make him over” in silk shirts and lounge slippers.

     

    3.”Unrequited” love between parents and children is one of Fassbinder’s great subjects. The cruel games of Chinese Roulette are driven by the daughter Angela’s feelings of having been wronged by her parents. Effi Briest wants to re-establish contact with her daughter, and her heart is broken when she realizes that the little girl has been trained by Instetten to despise her. Hans Epp and Peter Troepper have both been destroyed by lack of parental concern: they seem fixated in a moment of wanting to go back and re-make the past, but the objects of their unrequited love (for Hans his mother, for Peter his father) leave them coldly behind.

     

    Works Cited

     

    • Adorno, Theodor. Minima Moralia. Trans. E.F.N. Jephcott. London: Verso, 2002.
    • Beware of a Holy Whore. Dir. Rainer Werner Fassbinder. Perf. Lou Castel, Eddie Constantine, Marquard Bohm, Hanna Schygulla. 1971.
    • Bolweiser. Dir. Rainer Werner Fassbinder. Perf. Elisabeth Trissenaar, Kurt Raab, Bernhard Helfrich, Karl-Heinz von Hassel. 1977.
    • Chinese Roulette. Dir. Rainer Werner Fassbinder. Perf. Anna Carina, Margit Carstensen, Brigitte Mira, Ulli Lommel. 1976.
    • The Damned. Dir. Luchino Visconti. Perf. Dirk Bogarde, Ingrid Thulin, Helmut Griem, Helmut Gerger. 1969.
    • Effi Briest. Dir. Rainer Werner Fassbinder. Perf. Hanna Schygulla, Wolfgang Schenck, Ulli Lommel, Lilo Pempeit, Herbert Steinmetz. 1974.
    • Fassbinder, Rainer Werner. Plays. Ed. and trans. Denis Calandra. New York: PAJ, 1985.
    • Fear Eats the Soul. Dir. Rainer Werner Fassbinder. Perf. Brigitta Mira, El Hedi ben Salem, Barbara Valentin. 1974.
    • Fear of Fear. Dir. Rainer Werner Fassbinder. Perf. Marget Carstensen, Ulrich Faulhauber, Brigitte Mira. 1975.
    • Fox and his Friends. Dir. Rainer Werner Fassbinder. Perf. Peter Chatel, Rainer Werner Fassbinder, Karlheinz Böhm, Adrian Hoven. 1975.
    • Friedlander, Saul. Reflections of Nazism: An Essay on Kitsch and Death. Trans. Thomas Weyr. New York: Harper, 1984.
    • In a Year of Thirteen Moons. Dir. Rainer Werner Fassbinder. Perf. Volker Spengler, Ingrid Caven, Gottfried John, Elisabeth Trissenaar. 1978.
    • Jameson, Fredric. Marxism and Form. Princeton: Princeton UP, 1974.
    • Katzelmacher. Dir. Rainer Werner Fassbinder. Perf. Hanna Schygulla, Lilith Ungerer, Rudolf Waldemar Brem. 1969.
    • Lili Marleen. Dir. Rainer Werner Fassbinder. Perf. Hanna Schygulla, Giancarolo Giannini, Mel Ferrer. 1981.
    • The Marriage of Maria Braun. Dir. Rainer Werner Fassbinder. Perf. Hanna Schygulla, Klaus Löwitsch, Ivan Desny. 1979.
    • Martha. Dir. Rainer Werner Fassbinder. Perf. Margit Carstensen, Karlheinz Böhm, Barbara Valentin. 1974.
    • The Merchant of Four Seasons. Dir. Rainer Werner Fassbinder. Perf. Irm Hermann, Hans Hirschmüller, Hanna Schygulla, Klaus Löwitsch. 1972.
    • Mother Küsters Goes to Heaven. Dir. Rainer Werner Fassbinder. Perf. Brigitte Mira, Ingrid Caven, Margit Carstensen, Karlheinz Böhm. 1975.
    • The Niklashausen Journey. Dir. Rainer Werner Fassbinder and Michael Fengler. Perf. Michael König, Hanna Schygulla, Margit Carstensen, Michael Gordon. 1970.
    • Sartre, Jean-Paul. The Condemned of Altona. Trans. Sylvia and George Leeson. New York: Knopf, 1969.
    • Satan’s Brew. Dir. Rainer Werner Fassbinder. Perf. Kurt Raab, Margit Carstensen, Helen Vita, Volker Spengler. 1976.
    • Water Drops on Burning Rocks. Dir. François Ozon. Perf. Bernard Giraudeau, Malik Zidi, Ludivine Sagnier. Zeitgeist DVD, 1999.

     

  • Post-Cold War Paranoia in The Corrections and The Sopranos

    Martin Hipsky

    Department of English
    Ohio Wesleyan University
    mahipsky@owu.edu

     

    Being lectured by the President on fiscal responsibility is a little bit like Tony Soprano talking to me about law and order in the country.

    Senator John Kerry, televised presidential debate, 13 October 2004

     

    In the autumn of 2001, novelist Jonathan Franzen said of his burgeoning best-seller, The Corrections, “I feel like I’m solidly in the high-art literary tradition.” The comment, occasioned by Oprah Winfrey’s selection of the novel for her televised book club, sparked a media debate over the appropriateness of such a high-brow attitude in twenty-first-century American culture, whose egalitarian array of market niches would (some alleged) belie any old-fashioned binary between elite and mass cultures.1 It was a popular magazine, I want to suggest, that supplied us later that year with a cognitive map to clarify the debate: the Atlantic Monthly, whose oft-cited David Brooks article, “One Nation, Slightly Divisible,” popularized the notion of “Red America” and “Blue America.” Brooks’s piece torques the status poles of elite v. mass culture with a political wrench; though he does not discuss literature, his investigation of contemporary markers of consumption offers a sociopolitical critique of the judgment of taste, in an analysis we might call “Bourdieu lite” for twenty-first-century U.S. culture. This red-blue trope of national politics has since been refined and elaborated in the popular media, most recently in John Sperling’s widely read The Great Divide: Retro vs. Metro America (2004), which proposes that “a closer look at this divide reveals that it is not only political but also geographic, economic, religious, cultural, and social” (2). I will not here examine the theoretical viability of this multidimensional schism; instead, I want to propose that if such an admittedly schematic divide does exist, then Franzen’s novel of middle-class angst, together with its pre-eminent television analogue, The Sopranos, offers us a cultural index of the contemporary habitus of much of “blue America.” Indeed, for the eager audiences of the various “blue” demographics, The Corrections and The Sopranos afford parallel experiences–the one in the realm of literary fiction, the other in the realm of visual narrative–of a collective interpellation at once “straight” and ironic. These narratives abjure the formal experimentalism of Pynchonesque or David Lynch-style “high postmodernism” and offer instead a distinctively “accessible” and pleasurable incorporation of modernist flourishes and postmodern play into traditional realist narrative, thereby achieving considerable popular appeal among audiences who, long since immersed in the schizophrenic intensities of near-universal commodification, can powerfully “relate” to the narrative farragoes of psychic fragmentation, the “decline” of the family, and diffuse paranoia now on general offer.

     

    Most especially, I would suggest that this novel and television series exhibit a narrative logic that figures the political unconscious of the post-Cold War, professional-managerial class. In recent years, white-collar strata have been experiencing not a confident adjustment to Francis Fukuyama’s “End of History” (the catchy paradigm of just over a decade ago), but instead the anxieties of self-definition that have attended the loss of American capitalism’s reverse mirror image–the easily recognized, geographically specific, nationally grounded world system that was the Soviet sphere. As a result, these prominent texts of popular culture among the (largely) white-collar middle class offer us a metonymic realism without the consolations of myth or symbol, without the telos or metaphysics of master metaphor. Firmly established within the “low mimetic” modes of comedy and realism, even as they are intermittently destabilized by postmodern ironies and self-reflexivity, these popular narratives might be said to express the contemporary disquietudes and pathologies of “business as usual,” within a social imaginary that, to extend Jameson’s characterization of some postmodern theorists, is perhaps suffering from a “winner loses” logic (Postmodernism 5). A reductive way to express this notion would be to suggest that these texts address those who suffer from middle-class liberal guilt; but I want to argue that such a seemingly cliché formula concerning the reading and viewing audiences actually takes on textures that are unique to our time, and that these two texts effectively produce their representations of the contemporary white, bourgeois, nuclear family through a two-sided appeal to both domestic anxieties and what I will call “global paranoia.”

     

    Needless to say, to declare the emergence of a new strain of postmodern sensibility, on the evidence of two distinctively American narratives, would be foolhardy; the notion that these texts appeal especially to “millennial liberals” is intended to be conjunctural and speculative–an exploratory idea that would extend the logic of some recent discussions of the potential tendencies or vectors of postmodern texts in the contemporary situation. In part, what I am proposing about my case studies is inspired by Patrick O’Donnell’s analysis of representative cultural texts of the 1990s, from the popular films Groundhog Day (1993) and The Truman Show (1998) to Mailer’s Oswald’s Tale (1995) and DeLillo’s Underworld (1997). O’Donnell suggests that such

     

    narratives of paranoia . . . divulge [a] pathology in the social identifications and historical investitures of deeply conflicted postmodern subjects, who celebrate fluidity, schizophrenia, and deterritorialization . . . yet whose obsession with boundaries and boundary crossing suggests a collective nostalgia for the old binaries, economies, orders, and nations. (12)

     

    Generalizing from these narrative instances, O’Donnell advances his own version of the “winner loses” logic, limning a structure of feeling in which “it appears that the trilateral paranoia of the cold war is now in the process of being internalized, scattered, localized, and reiterated at a multitude of sites–from Oklahoma City, Waco, and Ruby Ridge, to Bosnia, the White House, and the security firewalls of the Internet–giving rise . . . to a perverse nostalgia for a paranoia in which the persecutor had a more or less recognizable face and a clear geographical location” (12).

     

    One could protest that in the early 2000s, the collective paranoia of our national culture has once again generated the allegedly “recognizable faces” and “clear geographical locations” of an external, enemy Other. In the analysis of my two case studies to follow, however, I accept O’Donnell’s identification of two-sided, schizophrenic-paranoid tendency within post-Cold War postmodernism as a trenchant and convincing one, which has by no means been obviated by the event of September 11, 2001, and the events that have followed it. Marianne DeKoven has identified the view among some observers that “postmodernism/ postmodernity as the defining paradigm of the contemporary cultural-political moment . . . may seem to have receded, or even to have lost relevance, in the face of what is now perceived as the challenge to modernity represented by the September 11 attacks” (xv). She goes on to refute this view, asserting not only that postmodernism/postmodernity remains “the most salient paradigm for understanding the current global situation” (xv), but also that “because postmodernity is now so well established as a cultural dominant, we are so entirely defined by it, it has become invisible. We no longer ‘see’ it as a phenomenon” (9). I would like to qualify DeKoven’s latter assertion by suggesting that, in light of the schematic of John Sperling’s “great divide,” it is true that certain members of the cultural intelligentsia no longer see, or choose to refine and extend the analysis of, postmodernism as a phenomenon. But perhaps this “phenomenon” continues to be felt, albeit not necessarily by name, by those many denizens of “metro America” who have patently cathected on such popular narratives as The Sopranos and The Corrections. It is the “blue” presidential candidate of 2004, and not his opponent, who would dare to refer to The Sopranos in the quip that stands as epigraph above. John Kerry’s rhetorical use of Tony Soprano may “decide” this ambivalent character as the antithesis of “law and order,” but the senator’s old-fashioned take only underscores a symptomatic paradox: Tony Soprano’s popularity among viewers seems to hinge, at least in part, on their identification, as O’Donnell’s “deeply conflicted postmodern subjects,” with the fundamentally lawless character’s “nostalgia for the old binaries, economies, orders, and nations”–an identification probably not unrelated to the series’ more commonsensically identified lures of sex, violence, and naughty language.

     

    As for the relationship of “retro” America to the latest manifestations of postmodern narrative, Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri suggest that

     

    Christian fundamentalisms in the US . . . present themselves as movements against social modernization, re-creating what is imagined to be a past social formation based on sacred texts . . . . The most prominent social agenda of the current Christian fundamentalist groups is centered on the (re)creation of the stable and hierarchical nuclear family, which is imagined to have existed in a previous era, and thus they are driven specifically in their crusades against abortion and homosexuality. (Empire 148)

     

    Hardt and Negri treat this “social modernization” as continuous, if not synonymous, with “postmodernity”; and so by their argument, postmodernism has by no means “become invisible” to the cultural right. Of course, the cultural right–quite distinctly from the more secular, free-market right–views postmodernism as the depraved phenomenon which goes by the name of “cultural relativism,” and the great popularity of The Corrections and The Sopranos, among thousands of other exhibits, is alleged to represent our contemporary decadence. And so we arrive at the obverse–literally, “the more conspicuous of two possible sides”2–of the diffuse, externally focused paranoia offered in these two popular narratives: their inward-facing, painfully equivocal “(re)creation of the stable and hierarchical nuclear family,” in representations which are dismissed as anathema by the tastemakers of “retro” America, but regarded with fascination by denizens of “metro” America. My discussion here will move from the “innermost” to the “outermost” of these zones of representation, and will limn the character of these two texts’ socially symbolic domains: the realm of “deep,” psychic interiority; the arena of the ironized family drama, both nuclear, and in the case of The Sopranos, broadly extended; the anxious, constantly traversed margin between the white, middle-class household and national structures of race and class; and finally, the milieu of post-Cold War capitalism, with its attendant paranoias of globalization. In a set of noteworthy parallels, these texts oscillate between traditional realism and postmodern play, between stable and unstable ironies, between visceral domestic anxieties and abstract global paranoia; they share a distinctive mimetic complex that distills many of the socio-cultural ambivalences characteristic of the early twenty-first-century urban and exurban middle classes.

     

    I. Versions of Interiority

     

    Within the first of the socially symbolic domains just listed, that of psychic interiority, both narratives offer us compelling panoramas of inner space that verge on the authentically surrealistic, but that are in each case reined in, their potentially destabilizing vistas of the untrammeled unconscious shuttered by their service to plot and character development. Instructive here is the contrast with, say, the aleatory Pynchon of Gravity’s Rainbow, or the perversely obtuse Lynch of Mulholland Drive. The oneiric sequences of The Sopranos, for all their psychic force, serve important narrative functions; there is no excess of signification, no notable transgression of realist representation. Tony’s dreamscapes, set within the perspectival sweep of the ocean shore or the seaside boardwalk, can appear inspired by the paintings of Giorgio de Chirico, but their action serves to confirm the darkest hunches of his mafioso Realpolitik and to lend psychological motivation to his waking acts of reprisal. Even the dream of a talking fish (Episode 26, “Funhouse”), for all its mordant absurdism, advances the plot in an essential way, as it confirms Tony’s suspicion about an FBI informant in his ranks (the fish tells him, “you passed me over for promotion–you knew”). Moreover, like Tony’s recounted dream of a “waterbird” that flies off with his castrated penis (Episode 1, “The Sopranos”), the orphic grouper on ice, symbolizing that “Big Pussy” Bonpensiero will “sleep with the fishes,”3 suggests a by-the-book manifestation of Freudian condensation (Verdichtung) and displacement (Verschiebung). These and other dreams in the series are central to the rich layering of the narrative, and unusually daring for a television show; at the same time, they should not be construed as experimental or avant-garde, conforming as they do to a straightforwardly Freudian symptomatology of the unconscious. Indeed, one may be tempted at moments to read them as a flatly parodying Freudianism. But that would unfairly impute a too-smug knowingness to the show’s creators–especially to creator and executive producer David Chase, who has referred earnestly to his own experience in psychoanalysis–and would seem out of keeping with the tone of the series as a whole, which does not generally sacrifice dramatic storyline to gratuitous cerebral display.

     

    At the same time, however, the series self-consciously demystifies or textualizes its oneiric sequences, depriving them of their more old-fashioned potential as narrative sites of mystery or transcendence. The series’ pilot episode signals this demystification through its prominent reference to Freud’s Interpretation of Dreams. It is Tony Soprano himself who, at one point in his therapy, defensively asserts, “I had a semester and a half of college, so I understand Freud.” The line is funny, but Tony is no ignoramus; as psychotherapist Jennifer Melfi gently nudges him into reading the ducks in his pool as a figure for his family, she reveals that she is indeed, in some respects, an unreconstructed Freudian. In a later episode we hear Melfi’s ex-husband Richard warn her, “Don’t bust my balls with Freud by numbers” (Episode 8, “The Legend of Tennessee Moltisanti”). More generally, Tony’s initial allusion to Freud points to one of this narrative’s distinctive counterpoints to its representations of the character’s psychic interiority: its occasional intertextualities, not only (as in common postmodern practice) with variously commingled high- and low-art figures of modern subjectivity–from Hawthorne and Melville to “The Happy Wanderer” and Grace Slick’s drug-induced white rabbit–but with postmodern theories of subjectivity. Tony Soprano’s adolescent son, for instance, encounters a crisis of meaning after a high-school encounter with Nietzsche’s writings (Episode 20, “D-Girl”). Meadow Soprano takes a course at Columbia University entitled “Images of Hypercapitalist Self-Advancement in the Studio Era” (Episode 28, “Proshai, Livushka”). Another episode features the following exchange between Melfi and her son, a student at Bard College:

     

    MELFI
    So, how’s that English class going? Comparative literature, whatever . . .

     

    JASON
    Comp lit was last semester. I told you I’m taking Lacan, deconstructive theory.

     

    MELFI
    Ooooh! Deconstructivist, excuse me . . . And your grandfather a contractor!

     

    (Episode 24, “House Arrest”)

     

    To see this as a gratuitous pot-shot at poststructuralist or psychoanalytic theory would be too simple; it could just as reductively be taken as a satiric stab at anti-intellectualism. In this scene Melfi is confrontationally drunk, having downed vodka in her office out of fear of her patient Tony Soprano, and she is only too pleased with her broad joke, the hostility of which may well be sparked by the intellectual threat that Lacan presents to such an old-school Freudian as herself. Then, too, there is the oedipal reversal of the scene, in which Jason, trying to control his mother, is resentful and embarrassed by her transgressive behavior when she hits a fellow restaurant patron. My perhaps too cumbersome reading of a deft and weightless scene is meant to show its textualized layerings, which should not be mistaken for easy satire, whether of intellectual pretensions or of anti-intellectualism. There is postmodern pleasure in its undecideable tone, but what I want to argue as distinctive here is the lightness of the self-reflexive touch, which is so clearly subordinate to The Sopranos‘s realist priorities of plot and character.

     

    The Corrections, for its part, represents its characters’ interior states in a bricolage of literary modes, predominated by traditional, free indirect discourse, but dipping occasionally into high-modernist and high-postmodern effects. Here is a transcription, from early in the novel, of Alfred Lambert’s consciousness:

     

    He began a sentence: “I am–” but when he was taken by surprise, every sentence became an adventure in the woods; as soon as he could no longer see the light of the clearing from which he’d entered, he would realize that the crumbs he’d dropped for bearings had been eaten by birds, silent deft darting things which he couldn’t quite see in the darkness but which were so numerous and swarming in their hunger that it seemed as if they were the darkness, as if the darkness weren’t uniform, weren’t an absence of light but a teeming and corpuscular thing, and indeed when as a studious teenager he’d encountered the word “crepuscular” in McKay’s Treasury of English Verse, the corpuscles of biology had bled into his understanding of the word, so that for his entire adult life he’d seen in twilight a corpuscularity, as of the graininess of the high-speed film necessary for photography under conditions of low ambient light, as of a kind of sinister decay . . . but in the instant of realizing he was lost, time became marvelously slow and he discovered hitherto unguessed eternities in the space between one word and the next, or rather he became trapped in that space between words and could only stand and watch as time sped on without him, the thoughtless boyish part of him crashing on out of sight blindly through the woods while he, trapped, the grownup Al, watched in oddly impersonal suspense to see if the panic-stricken little boy might, despite no longer knowing where he was or at what point he’d entered the woods of this sentence, still manage to blunder into the clearing where Enid was waiting for him, unaware of any woods–“packing my suitcase,” he heard himself say. This sounded right. Verb, possessive, noun. Here was a suitcase in front of him, an important confirmation. He’d betrayed nothing. (11)

     

    Through the patriarch Alfred Lambert, especially, the novel offers set-pieces of psychic interiority worthy of Virginia Woolf–or, as in the talking feces episode, of William Burroughs. But of course these moments generally represent Alfred’s psychotic breaks, which are induced by Parkinsonian dementia; no mystical insights soften their darkly comic terror. There may be a schizophrenic opacity to such passages, even a spatialization of the temporal, but their subordination to narrative purposes is quite evident; Franzen is not generally interested in the metonymic illustration of any collective schizophrenia induced by consumer capitalism. This passage is not offered to readers in the high-modernist spirit of the exploration of the dialectic between subject and object, or of the psychic-discursive constitution of the bourgeois self; this is instead postmodernist pastiche–neither parody nor homage–impelled not by textual self-reflexivity, but by a predominantly realist drive to capture the inner state of encroaching mental illness.

     

    There is an evident connection in the above-quoted purple patch to theories of poststructuralism in general, and Derrida in particular. But again, we are witnessing neither a parody nor a promotion of critical theory; this is rather the localized borrowing of contemporary philosophical topoi with a view toward psychological verisimilitude. Witness, by way of further example, Chip Lambert’s near-encounter with a nervous breakdown. Abandoning his visiting parents, he rushes through the streets of Manhattan to seek out his would-be screenplay editor:

     

    in New York you never had to go far to find filth and rage. A nearby street sign seemed to read Filth Avenue . . . Through the window of a cab he read GAP ATHLETIC as GAL PATHETIC. He read Empire Realty as Vampire Reality . . . He read Cross Pens as Cross Penises, he read ALTERATIONS as ALTERCATIONS.

     

    An optometrist’s window offered: HEADS EXAMINED. (102-5)

     

    These skittering signifiers offer a brief index of the character’s paranoid projections, but they are tightly linked to the break-up conversation that he has just had with his ex-lover, Julia, who has pointed out the sexually exploitative features of his failed screenplay.

     

    Elsewhere, The Corrections features a greater number of references to postmodern theory than does The Sopranos, but their thematic deployment is similarly ambivalent, oscillating between the parody of critical theory’s supposed pretensions, and the sober revelation of characters’ interior states. Witness Chip’s symbolic surrender of his critical oppositionality, as he sells his theory books to the Strand Bookstore:

     

    He turned away from their reproachful spines, remembering how each of them had called out in a bookstore with a promise of a radical critique of late-capitalist society, and how happy he’d been to take them home. But Jürgen Habermas didn’t have Julia’s long, cool, pear-tree limbs, Theodor Adorno didn’t have Julia’s grapy smell of lecherous pliability, Fred Jameson didn’t have Julia’s artful tongue. By the beginning of October . . . he’d sold his feminists, his formalists, his structuralists, his poststructuralists, his Freudians, and his queers. (92-3)

     

    In part, of course, the passage satirizes Chip’s complicity with the commodification of “the radical critique of late-capitalist society”; there is a familiar postmodern irony in the fact that the theory of lidibinal investment in the fetishized commodity is conveyed by some of the very texts that Chip is selling in exchange for his libidinal “investment” in Julia. But we may also witness, in Alfred’s psychic textures, an abstract intensity that owes its narrative poignancy to the same contemporary philosophies (“his poststructuralists, his Freudians”) that we have presumably just seen spoofed:

     

    Like an illogical woman in a dream who was both Enid and not Enid, the chair he’d pictured had been at once completely an electric chair and completely popsicle sticks. It came to him now, more forcefully than ever, that maybe every “real” thing in the world was as shabbily protean, underneath, as this electric chair. Maybe his mind was even now doing to the seemingly real hardwood floor on which he knelt exactly what it had done, hours earlier, to the unseen chair. Maybe a floor became truly a floor only in his mental reconstruction of it. The floor’s nature was to some extent inarguable, of course; the wood definitely existed and had measurable properties. But there was a second floor, the floor as mirrored in his head, and he worried that the beleaguered “reality” that he championed was not the reality of an actual floor in an actual bedroom but the reality of a floor in his head which was idealized and no more worthy, therefore, than one of Enid’s silly fantasies.

     

    The suspicion that everything was relative. That the “real” and “authentic” might not be simply doomed but fictive to begin with. That his feeling of righteousness, of uniquely championing the real, was just a feeling. These were the suspicions that had lain in ambush in all those motel rooms. These were the deep terrors beneath the flimsy beds. (274-5)

     

    Franzen may or may not have had in mind here Plato’s elaboration of the theory of forms from Book Ten of The Republic, in which Socrates uses a table and a bed, if not a chair, by way of example (“These three, then–painter, joiner, God–are responsible for three different kinds of bed” [Plato 69]). But the congruencies with twentieth-century critiques of metaphysics are plain, and the narrative uses to which they are here put cannot be called parodic; they are integral to the tragic realism of the character’s Innerlichkeit.4

     

    To complement these interiorized scenes, both novel and series offer a thematic of psychoanalysis and psychotropic drugs that is at once meticulously realist and a recurring gesture toward (an ultimately false) transcendence. Tony Soprano’s therapy sessions have drawn praise from psychoanalytic professionals for their verisimilitude, but there are precious few breakthroughs or transformative epiphanies to be witnessed here. And even as Franzen’s drug “Mexican A” serves as a marker of contemporary youth culture so hip that the thirty-nine-year-old Chip is far too old to understand it, the drug’s alternative name, Aslan, provides the novel’s single sustained metaphor for spirituality or metaphysics–and one that is too self-consciously nostalgic to be anything but ironic and illusory. Generically, then, this shared register of the two texts–the register of deep interiority–may again be described as at once realist and postmodern, the latter term here meaning specifically the implicit exhaustion of the modernist master narrative of transcendence through the mythical archetypes of a collective unconscious.

     

    II. Hybrid Irony amid the Family Romance

     

    The persistence of traditional realist modes, marbled through with modernist aesthetics and postmodern allusiveness–this in itself would not mark The Corrections or The Sopranos as especially noteworthy within the context of the recent development of popular narrative, notwithstanding their textual references, unavailable to narrative creations of a quarter-century ago, to the theories themselves of postmodernism. Nor, of course, would the shared themes of the family romance seem on first glance to offer anything especially new under the sun. The Home Box Office channel spins wordplay on the mafia in its promotional slogans–“Family Redefined,” “Spend some quality time with your favorite family,” “They are the one family everyone listens to,” etc.–but of course such puns had long since lost their pop-cultural freshness in the wake of the Godfather films and their various progeny of the 1980s, and the show does literally center upon the nuclear family of the title. Indeed, it can be argued that the tremendous popularity of the series lies in its juxtaposition of the extraordinary–the intrigue and violence of organized crime–with the ordinary–the ultra-familiar, up-to-the-cultural-moment depiction of American middle-class family life. Similarly, the schematic outline of The Corrections, with its five major chapters divvied up among the five members of the Lambert family nucleus–the middle child, the eldest child, the parents, the youngest child, and the family ensemble, respectively–is strikingly traditional, even as the novel gets its narrative energy from the centrifugal force of the three adult children’s desire to design their own lives as “corrections” of their parents’ errors.

     

    Nonetheless, on the level of their traditionally realist representation, these texts’ treatment of the nuclear family shares a distinctively ironic cathexis, imbricated within what Patrick O’Donnell has labeled the contemporary “obsession with boundaries and boundary crossing,” and suggestive of “a collective nostalgia for the old binaries, economies, orders, and nations” (12). An emblem of this fixation is Melfi’s jab at her son–“Ooooh! Deconstructivist, excuse me . . . And your grandfather a contractor!” Along with the significances I have already noted, the joke registers the generalized anxiety over a decline in morality across the generations, especially in the context of socio-economic upward mobility. This is an anxiety set in place within the first five minutes of the pilot episode, and a recurrent theme through The Sopranos‘ five seasons.5 As such, this one-liner encapsulates that category of irony, characteristic of both The Corrections and The Sopranos, which is most prevalent in their representations of the nuclear family: an irony which occupies the space between the distanced, ungrounded, blank ironies long associated with a postmodern sensibility, and the old-fashioned, grounded, stable ironies that Wayne Booth defined in his classic A Rhetoric of Irony (1974).

     

    This hybrid irony serves as a kind of representational proscenium to the texts’ parallel dramas of generational divides within the family–to, more specifically, the schisms of cultural identity among World War II, Baby Boom, and post-Baby Boom cohorts. When his teenage daughter Meadow (clearly a post-sixties name!) wants to discuss sex at the family breakfast table, Tony tells her, “Out there it’s the 1990s, but in this house it’s 1954” (Episode 11, “Nobody Knows Anything”). In the same season, Tony’s father-figure, Uncle Junior, complains about Tony to his mother Livia: “These kids today . . . He’s part of a whole generation. Remember the crazy hair and the dope? Now it’s fags in the military” (Episode 1, “The Sopranos”). As these contrasting generational identifications suggest, Tony Soprano’s moral and cultural values (on their realist stratum—the fact of his criminally violent behavior registers meta-realistically, as I will discuss below) ambivalently figure both pre- and post-sixties cultural sensibilities, scrambling the clear binaries so dear to those who favor a straightforward narrative of the historical degeneration of “family values” in U.S. society. David Chase and his series co-creators are well aware that, as Hardt and Negri suggest,

     

    the purity and wholesomeness of the stable, nuclear heterosexual family heralded by Christian fundamentalists . . . never existed in the U.S. The “traditional family” that serves as their ideological foundation is merely a pastiche of values and practices that derives more from television programs than from any real historical experiences within the institution of the family. (148)

     

    Chase and company have a lot of wicked fun in revealing such ideological projections to be holograms of a past that never was. But these frequently conjured simulacra are complex, part parody and part pastiche. As Uncle Junior lodges his complaint with Tony’s mother Livia, he represents a savage undercutting of the ideological closure of the preceding scene, in which Tony has had a sentimentalized breakthrough with his surrogate son Christopher. His biological father being dead, Christopher has complained that Tony withholds his parental love, and the father-figure has apologized: “You’re right. That’s how I was parented.” Viewers of the original screen-cast of this pilot episode may well have thought that this scene of masculine embrace and “father-son reconciliation” offered a pastiche: the upbeat dénouement, standard in American television drama, to one of the storyline’s family conflicts. But then we segue to the final scene, in which Livia and Uncle Junior, mother and father-figure, begin to plot the murder of the son. The all-too-evident parody of the notion itself of the generational decline of family values offers a stable irony; Livia and Junior are representatives of the World-War-II –or “Greatest”–Generation, just as Tony is supposed by his elders to be a stereotypically self-indulgent Baby Boomer, and Christopher is supposed by Tony to be a stereotypically self-indulgent Generation X-er. Reinforcing the stability of this irony is Livia’s name, an allusion to the wife of Augustus, who was used by the Caesar as a symbol of the restoration of ancient “family values” to the leadership of Rome. But of course this latter allusion is fairly high-brow, and with the undertow of the low-brow we arrive at unstable ironies. What do we do with the generic intertextuality of a father-son reconciliation scene, which refers to countless television holograms of sentimentalized family affirmation? And with the fact that Christopher’s rebellion in this scene takes the form of his threatening to write and sell a Hollywood screenplay of his life in the “family”? We have entered the endless regress of self-referentially ironic undercuttings, of the unstable ironies long seen to be characteristic of postmodern narratives.

     

    It is likewise tempting to take the family dinner scene at the center of The Corrections, with its depiction of the monumental repressions that undergird middle-class Midwestern “normality,” as a parody of the family scenes of 1950s and ’60s television sitcoms. This being a novelistic representation, the mimetic relationship to television is different from that of the Sopranos scene just discussed, and offers the stable irony of a nightmare version of, say, The Ozzie and Harriet Show. At the same time, the St. Jude family dinner functions as a counterpoint within Franzen’s text to the Philadelphia family dinners, set in the present, in which the parental policy of a very deliberate permissiveness illustrates Gary’s contention that “his entire life was set up as a correction of his father’s life” (181). This younger father is troubled that his policy is not having its intended effects, however; “to Gary it seemed that the nature of family life itself was changing–that togetherness and filiality and fraternity weren’t valued the way they were when he was young” (166). He fears that his sons are growing up to hate him. And indeed Gary’s familial “corrections” turn out to be, not so much “over-corrections” to which a happy middle course might be the appropriate response, but rather the same, enduring, structural effects of the nuclear family, regardless of the superficial particulars over which he seems to exert some (ineffectual, anyway) agency.

     

    So it is that both texts, with their stable ironies, offer their audiences an arch pleasure in the demystifying of the myths of the generational decline of “family values,” but at the same time, and very differently, we perceive that the narratives are propelled along by the engines of Oedipus and Electra. We have here to do with the endless, ironic regress, not only of the simulacra, but also, and quite distinctly, of the psychoanalytically-identified repetitions of the family romance. In The Sopranos, it is the love-denying mother Livia who functions as Tony’s psychic wellspring of malaise, his libidinal fons et origo malorum; in The Corrections, it is the male children’s rebellion against the domineering father, Alfred, which motivates the story arc. The Lambert patriarch is profoundly implicated, too, in his daughter Denise’s sexual adventurism. Her character’s anagnorisis arrives with the discovery of an old graffito of her initials and those of her first sexual partner, enclosed within a valentine heart, spelling “DAD L.[ambert]” (524).

     

    The fact that this moment may or may not provide the character of Denise with a traditional epiphany returns us what is perhaps new and different about the two narratives’ classification as postmodern–different, that is, from the (by now) classically postmodern deployment of irony. That difference resides in the undecideability regarding the irony’s function. A stable and socially specific set of ironies can serve the traditionally realist goals of positive social critique and, related to this, character development. If Denise’s surprise discovery is read as anagnorisis, its tragic import is complemented by the possibility that, in light of such moments, the character of Denise will have grown, whether morally or spiritually or epistemologically, etc., by story’s end. If this scene is read instead as a confirmation of the “always already” of psychic structures within the family romance–a possibility of which the characters themselves are explicitly aware–then we are momentarily shifted out of traditional realism and into the symbolic register of Beckett’s Waiting for Godot, where all is bounded by textualized, psychic structuration, and so unstable ironies run amok. Here is the moment at which the audience is first introduced to Livia:

     

    LIVIA
    (in response to a knock at the front door)
    Who’s there?

     

    TONY
    It’s me, ma.

     

    LIVIA
    Who are you?

     

    (Episode 1, “The Sopranos”)

     

    On such evidence from the two narrative texts under examination here, it is tempting to pose broad questions about recent developments in postmodern sensibilities. Is it possible that the time of flat and disaffected, postmodern pastiche has past, and that blank ironies have been reabsorbed by a traditional realist narrativity that is nonetheless altered by this subsumption? Do such unstable ironies infect the narratives they inhabit, transforming them, through the resulting tension with mimetically realist ironies, into something distinctive to our moment?

     

    III. Domestic Anxiety and the Production of the Middle-Class Family

     

    I would like to leave these questions open, and to move into the third and fourth of the mimetic domains I identified at the outset–the nationally mediated experience of the American middle classes, within the milieu of post-Cold War, global capitalism. Leaving the formal and generic issues of self-reflexivity and irony behind, we may now shift into a consideration of the structure of feeling or the prevailing affect of the two narratives in question. This may be labeled an amalgam of domestic anxieties and “global paranoia”: in an analogy with the packaging of computer software, we could say that these twinned affects are “bundled” so as to interpellate the texts’ target demographics by means of conscious and unconscious appeal to certain social preoccupations of our historical moment. These braided psychic energies cross back and forth from the representational domain of American racial and class structures, to that of global capitalism, as the characters experience the effects of these broader phenomena in their quotidian lives. In this section, I want to argue that it is the former of these two affective vectors, domestic anxiety–“domestic” in the double sense of “within the household” and “within the nation”–that initiates and renews the representational production of the white, middle-class nuclear family throughout The Corrections and The Sopranos. More specifically, this anxiety takes the form of apprehensions about the future of the rising generation, within a social universe of class- and race-based inequalities that are felt to be as intractable as indifferent Nature itself.

     

    Among the first five seasons of The Sopranos, no episode more compellingly illustrates this representational matrix of domestic angst than “University” (Episode 32). From the perspective of film editing, the episode is visually noteworthy for its matched cross-cutting between the plotlines of Meadow and the young stripper Tracee. The insistent continuity of images contrasts the sufferings of these two twenty-year-old white women, counterpoised as they are on different levels of the socio-economic hierarchy.6 Meadow is losing her half-Jewish, half-African-American boyfriend Noah Tanenbaum, in part because of her father’s racial intolerance; Tracee is being exploited and dehumanized by her employers at the Bada Bing strip club, in a plotline that culminates in her being beaten to death by “made man” Ralph Cifaretto. Tony is greatly saddened by the murder of Tracee, a surrogate daughter who had earnestly sought his guidance, but he prevents himself from expressing his emotion directly. The only version of the event that he can construct in his subsequent session with Dr. Melfi arrives in a choked, halting displacement: “A young man who . . . worked for us, Barone Sanitation . . . he died.” Carmela accompanies Tony in this therapy session; he tells her, “You don’t know him . . . he died, that’s all . . . work-related death. Sad when they go so young” (Episode 32, “University”). This verbal refraction of reality–it wasn’t Tracee’s work, but was in a sense her workplace that killed her–links both back and forward to other displacements and transferences on the part of Tony’s psyche. If the migrating family of ducks in the pilot episode established a symbolic leitmotif of the series as a whole (“I afraid I’m gonna lose my family”), Tony’s doomed racehorse Pie-O-My will serve as his psychic index to young Tracee, in whom he saw the image of his daughter. Tony Soprano’s characteristic response to domestic threats is to lash out with retributive violence, and so the eventual beheading of Ralph Cifaretto (“Whoever Did This,” Episode 48) is revenge for the death of the beloved horse, but is also, psychoanalytically speaking, rather overdetermined.7

     

    Interpreted within the context of the contemporary social experience of the American middle classes, the symbolic doubling of the Tracee episode can be said to involve a generalized dread regarding sociopathic threats to the rising generation;8 and at the same time, such moments as Tony’s revenge killing of Ralph are (at least in part) vicariously serving the viewing audience as cathartic fantasies of acting out against phantasmatic social threats. I will have more to say about this latter psychic phenomenon below; the immediate theme of the “University” episode is the relation between the two young women’s social vulnerabilities and their class difference. The stripper Tracee has been reared in hardscrabble circumstances by a mother whose idea of punishment was to hold her child’s hand to an oven burner. As if to mark the gap between the misfortunes of the high-middle class Meadow and the working-class Tracee, the last domestic exchange of the episode features Carmela’s question to her sullen daughter, “How was the dentist?” The moment offers a poignant counterpoint to Tracee’s life conditions; she borrowed money from her boss for orthodonture, in an effort to improve herself. Tracee was on her own, a young adult without parental support, despite her wish to cast Tony in that role. But Meadow is in no mood to feel gratitude; she has just been jilted by a young black man who was both repelled by her racist father, and confident of his own class superiority to her family. Meadow’s petulant response to her mother’s question–“God! Is there nothing to eat in this house?”–implies her obliviousness of her own social privilege, and will be recalled, as a flash of her wounded interiority, in the final scene of the fourth season (“Whitecaps,” Episode 52), when she is traumatized by the news of her parents’ separation. In the context of the present argument, what is noteworthy about these constellated moments of domestic anxiety, shot through with issues of race and class, is the complex of revulsion and identification that Chase and company intend to evoke within the viewing audience. Tony Soprano’s misguided belief that he must protect his daughter from romantic entanglement with a mulignan (a fear nicely ironized by Noah’s social status, with a jet-setting father and wealthy friends in Litchfield, Connecticut) is not unrelated to his life’s mission to consolidate his children’s class privilege. The show critically examines the former parental impulse, even as it lures the viewing audience into self-identification with the latter one. Through these edgy, equivocal representations of white middle-class domestic concerns, the racial policing ends up uncomfortably continuous with the project of upward mobility.

     

    The Corrections processes domestic anxieties in similar fashion; the social mise-en-scène of the white, middle-class nuclear family is similarly ambivalent, and a prominent subplot concerns the loss of a young woman to sociopathic violence. In the mid-section of the novel, devoted to Enid and Alfred Lambert, Franzen introduces their foils, Sylvia and Ted Roth, who have recently lost their twenty-something, art-therapist daughter to a crack-fuelled nightmare of a crime: “the tools of Jordan’s torture and murder had been one roll of nylon-reinforced ‘strapping’ tape, one dish towel, two wire coat hangers, one WMF serrated bread knife from Williams-Sonoma . . . the killer, a nineteen-year-old named Khellye Withers, had turned himself in to the Philadelphia police” (303). Sylvia confesses that she has spent the past five years as a “gun artist,” sketching the imaginary firearms that would avenge her daughter’s murder, and has searched hardcore porn sites for the perfect image of a black man fellating a white man–the artist’s model for her own drawing of Khellye Withers sucking on a pistol. Unlike her hyper-rational husband, who has repressed his grief and rage over their loss, Sylvia interprets Jordan’s death as “a divine judgment on her own liberal politics or liberal parenting or senseless affluence” (306). Sylvia serves as Franzen’s most articulate parent-figure, and I believe that she ideologically mirrors The Corrections‘ target demographics more directly than does Enid; her self-scrutiny of “liberal politics or liberal parenting or senseless affluence” informs a nexus of social attitudes, the examination of which is high on the text’s agenda.

     

    The character Khellye Withers, The Corrections‘ sole African-American male, is in this context a symbolic touchstone (and, indeed, the text grants him no subjectivity of his own). As Tracee stands in relation to Meadow, so the murdered Jordan Roth doubles for Denise Lambert; it is therefore fitting that Khellye Withers’ state-sponsored execution is linked to Denise’s moment of psycho-social, self-inflicted wounding. In the climactic scene of Denise’s narrative trajectory, her lover Robin has opted out of a long-promised night on the town with Brian (Robin’s husband), and instead attends a candlelight vigil to protest the imminent execution of Withers; Denise takes Robin’s place as Brian’s “date.” The ensuing restaurant scene, a tableau of these privileged characters’ cultural capital and arch knowingness, is rife with subtexts: it critiques both white privilege and liberal guilt over the violence engendered in socio-economic chasms. Brian has just produced an indie film, an updating of Dostoevesky called Crime and Punishment and Rock and Roll, and has convinced Martin Scorsese to see it at a private screening. No sooner does Denise join the entourage at a fashionably retro pizzeria (in company with Scorsese, Stanley Tucci, Mira Sorvino, and a “Famous British Author” who sounds suspiciously like Martin Amis), than the talk turns to the movie: “‘Raskolnikov in headphones, listening to Trent Reznor while he whacks the old lady, is so perfect,’ the very least famous person at the table, a college-age intern of the director, gushed” (427). The fictional Raskolnikov, impoverished Russian perpetrator of a double homicide, is a glamorized agent of violence who will by narrative’s end be redeemed. Meanwhile Withers, black perpetrator of a similar atrocity, is undergoing the institutional fate of those judged irredeemably violent in contemporary U.S. society. Denise appears unaware of the symbolic ironies here, but Robin clearly isn’t; she boycotts the celebration of Crime and Punishment and Rock and Roll under the double onus of her own anarchist brother’s crime (he nearly trepanned a rich corporate executive with a two-by-four) and of her guilt over the disproportionate number of African-American convicts sent to the electric chair. Brian complains to Denise about his wife’s AWOL status on this glamorous evening out: “this morning she decides she’s going to march against the death penalty instead. I’m no fan of the death penalty. But Khellye Withers is not my idea of a poster boy for leniency . . . I said she could miss one march for my sake. I said, why don’t I write a check to the ACLU, whatever size you want” (427-8). The character of Withers, whose own voice registers only in a court-transcribed bit of testimony, functions as a phantasm of the hegemonic racial imaginary, a metonymic projection of social pathology hovering just beyond the would-be security of the protagonists’ domestic spaces. Enid cannot bear to hear Sylvia Roth’s account of a parent’s trauma, but “while not listening she also had to listen, because she was missing certain key facts, such as whether Khellye Withers was black and whether Jordan had been brutally raped” (305). Withers serves the novel’s primary characters, all of whom are white, as an unacknowledged cipher of racial discourse. If Sylvia Roth has abandoned her “liberal politics” and her former guilt over her “senseless affluence” for fantasies of revenge on the racialized Other (including a newfound, visceral support for capital punishment), Robin Callahan has so embraced her white liberal guilt that it has become a form of megalomania–she feels personally responsible for racial and class inequities; a sense of culpability comes to inform her very identity. In their different ways, Sylvia, Robin, and Denise learn that their white middle-class family enclaves provide illusory refuge from the postmodern antinomy of white privilege and liberal guilt.9 The fallout of Denise’s night out is her retreat into the questionable domestic consolations of her “last Christmas in St. Jude” with her brothers and aging parents, as well as the dissolution of the Callahans’ domestic life, brought on by Robin’s and Brian’s radically different attitudes toward their own “senseless affluence.” For all three families–Roths, Callahans, and Lamberts–the politics of race and class are inscribed as destructive palimpsests upon the domestic sphere.

     

    For all that the Sopranos’ domestic space serves as a similarly fraught site of middle-class viewers’ identification, the audience is also aware that they, along with Dr. Melfi, have “been charmed by a sociopath,” Tony Soprano himself (“Employee of the Month,” Episode 30). With the character of Melfi, the white privilege/liberal guilt impasse lodges in the less exotic subjectivity of one outside the mob milieu; her clear-sighted observation here is of a piece with her own responses, unlike any seen in The Corrections, to that seemingly irresolvable antinomy. The Sopranos offers a correlative to the racial phantasm of Khellye Withers when we witness Melfi’s rape by a Hispanic service worker named Jesus Rossi (Episode 30, “Employee of the Month”). Melfi’s ex-husband, an Italian-American like her, is utterly shaken by the fact that the rapist’s surname could be of Italian provenance; his very identity is threatened by the possibility that this sociopath may not fit his marking of such a depraved human specimen as ethnically/racially Other. Melfi’s rage at her ex-spouse, and his investment in racial difference, points up the episode’s explicit awareness of precisely such racial projections. But if the liberal Melfi is enlightened enough to recognize and eschew such black-or-white, ethnic identitarianism, she does not avoid graphic revenge fantasies; she dreams of violent retribution, as a protective Rottweiler tears apart her real-life assailant. In her own counseling session, Melfi realizes that the Rottweiler represents Tony Soprano, and voices her satisfaction in the knowledge that she could have her rapist, who has gone free on a legal technicality, “squashed like a bug.” Nowhere, however, does the rapist’s putative ethnicity figure in her expressions of rage. Alongside such paroxysms as Tony’s revenge killing of Ralph Cifaretto, Melfi’s dream serves not only as her character’s wish-fulfillment, but as ours, too; the viewing audience enjoys psychic complicity–a complicity that, to the show’s credit, is no sooner engendered than problematized. This moment and others like it serve the viewing audience with cathartic fantasies of acting out against social threats that are felt to be part and parcel of the Real, but are only apprehended through the projection of ready-made constructs (the demonized criminal, the racial Other, etc.). It is all-important, then, that Melfi resists the urge to send Tony–himself a sometime sociopath, but one who has been irresistibly humanized–after her assaulter. After an agonized hesitation, she turns down Tony’s offer of help, and the moment ushers back in the briefly suspended reality principle, reminding the audience that this authoritative patriarch may represent the fantasy protector of the fragile, vulnerable domestic sphere, but he can also be its greatest threat. In The Sopranos, what produces the effects of the white, middle-class, nuclear family, may also symbolically undo the same family. Racially and/or economically privileged viewers are repeatedly denied the easy route of ideologically externalizing all social threats to the nuclear family.

     

    IV. Global Paranoia

     

    If the national-domestic anxieties that suffuse The Sopranos and The Corrections can be catalogued in such detail, the psychic energies that I have labelled “global paranoia” are a bit more diffuse. Nonetheless, they tinge the social imaginary with their own baleful tone. For decades now, theorists have asserted that postmodern cultural artifacts concentrate upon the schizophrenic circumstances induced by the fragmentation of the subject (Harvey 54). Patrick McDonnell, however, reintroduces paranoia (long associated with modernist texts) into his characterization of key postmodern texts of the 1990s:

     

    cultural paranoia is not projected as an existentially specific social disease nor a pathology that subtends a universally conceived “American way of life” but as a certain suturing of individuals to the social imaginary in which crucial differences between agency and national or other identificatory fantasies are collapsed. The representations of interpellation to be found in these works compel us to consider the ways in which cultural paranoia is a problem related to constructions of postmodern identity as symptomatic of late capitalism, its enjoyments and its discontents. (13)

     

    The use of this formulation of “cultural paranoia” in the present context is twofold: it suggests the possibility of more abstract, less explicit sites of the “suturing of individuals to the social imaginary” than we have just seen in the domestic representations of the two narratives in question, and it historicizes that suturing as “symptomatic of late capitalism.” I want to suggest that those sites of the texts’ suturing to the social imaginary are the places where radically different realities may intersect the ontological dominants of the texts’ more properly realist registers. For there is a meta-realist level of representation in each of the two texts, an ontological plane sharply askew the concurrent transcription of an everyday life that is familiar, indeed only too recognizable, to much of the “blue” or “metro” audience. Here, the parallel analyses of the two texts briefly part ways, though they will eventually dovetail again. In The Sopranos, the meta-realism consists in the series’ graphic violence, which is imbricated in the popularly imagined, out-of-the-ordinary life of the mafia, and which has never yet erupted within the familiar middle-class domesticity of Tony Soprano’s North Caldwell house; in The Corrections, the meta-realism appears in the uncanny latticework of narrative coincidence, which almost reaches (but does not quite) the level either of Pynchonesque conspiracy theory, or of magic realist enchantment.

     

    David Chase has said of his series, “I’ve always tried to cram the show just full of humor, suspense, violence, sex, and great rock ‘n’ roll music” (“Sopranos Homepage”). The self-mocking reference to violence and sex brings to mind the term “violence pornography,” which is of course seen as characteristic of action films of the last few decades, and about which Fredric Jameson has identified a formal problem: “the tension between the construction of a plot (overall intrigue, narrative suspense) and the demand for a succession of explosive and self-sufficient present moments of violence” (“End of Temporality” 714). This emphasizing of the distinction between plot and moments of violence suggests the common-sense notion that the intermittent paroxysms are easily separable from the rest of a given narrative, and are thus “gratuitous.” Jameson observes that in contemporary action films, “the succession of such moments gradually crowds out the development of narrative time and reduces plot to the merest pretext or thread on which to string a series of explosions” (714). Without going into the false problem of whether the violent sequences of The Sopranos are inimical to the realist register of plot, or merit the label “violence pornography” (though it is worth noting in passing that most viewers of the show would probably protest this charge), we can view them in light of Jameson’s larger theoretical point, namely that

     

    violence pornography . . . grasped from the perspective outlined here as a reduction to the present and to the body, is not to be seen as a form of immorality at all but rather as a structural effect of the temporality of our socio-economic system or, in other words, of postmodernity as such, of late capitalism. (718)

     

    This formulation, for which the primary examples are the Die Hard, Lethal Weapon, and Speed films (among others), is presented as a corollary of his well-known theory of the spatialization of time, the “‘schizophrenic’ structure (following Lacan)” of “our private temporality” under the conditions of postmodernity (Postmodernism 6). Within this broadly theoretical context, there is nothing especially new or noteworthy about the paroxysms of violence in The Sopranos, but Jameson’s notion does at least underscore the likelihood that such moments and images constitute a meta-realist register of representation that is characteristic of postmodern narratives in general.

     

    What may be distinctive about the violence of The Sopranos is its symbolic indexing of a generalized affect, suffusing the series as a whole, of a “cultural paranoia” that is well-nigh metaphysical. This cultural paranoia is realized in graphic violence, but is distinct from the representational deployment of violence-as-wish-fulfillment (which, as I tried to show in the previous section, instead has to do with what McDonnell calls a specific social “pathology that subtends a universally conceived ‘American way of life’”). The series begins with Tony’s first visit to the psychotherapist to discuss his panic attacks, which, as he soon comes to realize, hinge on a violence-related fear: “I’m afraid I’m gonna lose my family. That’s what I’m full of dread about” (Episode 1, “The Sopranos”). For viewers, the counter-real violence and the quotidian reality of the show begin their periodic intersections at this moment, which is so presented (the tough guy weeps) as to cement our subjective identification at the outset of a (thus far) sixty-odd-hour viewing experience. The structure of feeling here initiated parallels that conveyed by Franzen’s opening leitmotif: “Ringing throughout the house was an alarm bell that no one but Alfred and Enid could hear directly. It was the alarm bell of anxiety” (3). Panic attacks and alarm bells of anxiety: even the literalized psychic trope of depression, so prevalent in both narratives, is encompassed by a more universal affect of paranoia. It is a graphically violent attempt on his life that snaps Tony out of his deepest depression and back into an energizing renewal of his normal condition of paranoia (Episode 12, “Isabella”). Gary Lambert is coerced into a confession of psychic depression, which he may or may not suffer, due to the constant threat (or is it reality?) of surveillance by “adversaries” under his own roof, whether in the form of his phone-eavesdropping wife, or his son’s “project” of a surveillance camera that records his visits to the liquor cabinet.

     

    But these are examples of paranoia as manifested through individual characters, and do not convey the diffusion of this structure of feeling, which is a feature of the life-world itself which the characters inhabit. Detecting a metaphorical and collectivized paranoia as the ground tone to a number of postmodern texts, Patrick O’Donnell returns to Freud to reconstruct paranoia’s originally identified manifestations within individual subjects:

     

    a sense of impending, apocalyptic doom; racist, homophobic, or gynophobic fear and hatred of those marked out as other deployed as a means of externalizing certain internal conflicts and desires (the scapegoating of otherness thus is essential to the ongoing work of paranoia); delusions of persecution instigated by these others or their agents; feelings of being under constant observation; an obsession with order; and a fantasizing of the reviled, abjected self as at the center of intersecting social and historical plots. (13)

     

    If the exposition of a narrative may be said to help establish the affective ground tone to follow, then I think it may be instructive to juxtapose this list of symptoms with the opening sentences of The Corrections, offered in the second-person omniscient: “The madness of an autumn prairie front coming through. You could feel it: something terrible was going to happen. The sun low in the sky, a minor light, a cooling star. Gust after gust of disorder” (3). There is certainly a cosmic expression of apocalyptic forces here, as well as a connection of disorder with that doom. In response to this atmosphere, we are told, “and so in the house of the Lamberts, as in St. Jude, as in the country as a whole, life came to be lived underground” (10). The exposition to be found in the The Sopranospilot episode–an introduction that takes the form of a dialogue between Tony and Melfi–is less cosmically expressed, but nonetheless offers a comparable social synecdoche:

     

    TONY
    I don’t know . . . The morning of the day I got sick, I’d been thinking–it’s good to be in something from the ground floor–and I came too late for that, I know, but lately I’m getting the feeling I came in at the end. The best is over.

     

    MELFI
    Many Americans I think feel that way.

     

    TONY
    I think about my father. He never reached the heights like me, but in a lotta ways, he had it better–he had his people, they had their standards, they had pride. Today, what do we got?

     

    MELFI
    Did you have these feelings of loss more acutely in the hours before you collapsed?

     

    Moments later, Tony’s account of the day on which he collapsed begins with the story of “having coffee with” (we are shown that this translates into breaking the leg of) a man who owes him money, to whom he says, “You tell people I’m nothing compared to the people who used to run things!” This initial dialogue and flashback introduce the audience to a social matrix in which there will be a generalized sense of “persecution instigated by . . . others or their agents; feelings of being under constant observation; an obsession with order; and a fantasizing of the reviled, abjected self as at the center of intersecting social and historical plots.” In this narrative instance, it so happens that the “persecution by agents” and the “constant observation” will take the literal forms of maneuvers by rival mobsters and surveillance by the Federal Bureau of Investigations; but such crime-generic phenomena occupy the same fantasy register as the graphic violence. The notion that one’s life would be significant enough to require monitoring by authority appeals to narcissistic fantasies, and one is invited to identify with the subject position of the paranoid on this non-quotidian, non-“ordinary” level of reality.

     

    None of this discussion of the generalized affect of paranoia, however, has yet shown how it could be interpreted as “symptomatic of late capitalism.” In this connection, we should recall the last symptom of paranoia identified in O’Donnell’s catalogue, “a fantasizing of the reviled, abjected self as at the center of intersecting social and historical plots.” It is through the prism of this phenomenon, I want to suggest, that the two narratives in question figure an imaginary relationship of their central characters to their “real” conditions of existence within a fiercely competitive social order. In The Corrections, Alfred Lambert’s paranoid fantasy that he, and by extension his family, are in the crosshairs of malevolent plot is raised early on, as he ponders the medical pamphlets meant to prepare him for the ravages of his Parkinsonian dementia: “There were chapters in Hedgpeth’s booklets that even Alfred, fatalist and man of discipline that he was, couldn’t bring himself to read. Chapters devoted to the problems of swallowing; to the late torments of the tongue; to the final breakdown of the signal system . . . . The betrayal had begun in Signals” (68). “Signals” here refers to the Signal Department of the Midland Pacific Railroad, a once proud railway company whose operation is represented in an extended metaphor for Alfred’s formerly healthy nervous system:

     

    The brain of the Midland Pacific, the temple of its soul, was a Depression-era limestone office building . . . . Higher order consciousness had its cortical seat in the boardroom and executive dining room on the sixteenth floor . . . . Down at the reptile-brain bottom of the building were billing, payroll, personnel, and data storage. In between were the mid-level functions such as Engineering, which encompassed bridges, track, buildings, and signals. (353)

     

    Passages such as this, with its capitalist version of the brain of a Hobbesian body politic, provide a psycho-economic link between the characters’ inner states and the workings of global finance capital within the post-Fordist regime of production. The “betrayal” of Midland Pacific occurs in the mid-1980s, at the apogee of Reaganomic deregulation, when a predatory corporation, the Orfic Group (its very name an oracle of emergent economic practices) achieves the hostile takeover of this regional rail carrier, downsizes its workforce by 33%, and guts many of its operations. The victorious corporation even sends its employees out to dismantle “the railroad’s nervous system” (353), pulling down its networks of signal wires “for copper salvage at sixty cents a pound” (70). This finance conglomerate will reappear in bloated, global form in the present time of the novel as Orfic Midland, which liquidates the assets of Lithuania’s Port of Kaunas, and launches a line of “Dilbert” MasterCards in Vilnius through its banking subsidiary, FrendLee Trust of Atlanta. However, these financial territorializations do not function only as a paranoia-induced analogy to Alfred’s psychic deterioration. Denise discovers that the Electra-like moment of her initiation into adult sexuality was literally a subterfuge within a capitalist plot. In the mid-1980s, the rail-company peon Don Armour seduced her in order to blackmail her father and thereby defend his job against the merger-and-acquisition of the internationalizing Orfic Group. Years later, Denise experiences the vertigo that comes with realizing one’s most “private” moments may be implicated in the social disruptions of globalization. Not alone among the Lambert family members, she finds her abjected self in the crosshairs of intersecting social and historical plots.

     

    As I have already suggested, this is not quite a matter of metaphysical, Pynchonesque conspiracy, for neither Denise nor any of the other characters is subject to the mysterious grasp of, say, an octopus-like “Tristero”; it is instead the narrative’s synecdochic means to convey what O’Donnell calls “the paradox of the fluid and fragmented postmodern subject gaining identity by means of a spatialized history and operating within structurated networks of ever increasing complexity” (24). The betrayal that, for Alfred, “had begun in Signals,” represents the depredations of global finance capital, which is bringing about the dissolution of old binaries, economies, orders, and national borders. The acquisition, downsizing, and transformation of Midland Pacific, Alfred’s Fordist-era rail company, may thus represent a chapter of history that he, nostalgic and old-fashioned “man of discipline,” cannot bring himself to read. It seems appropriate here to invoke the Foucauldian and Deleuzian terms employed by Hardt and Negri in their theorization of the postmodern passage from a disciplinary society to the society of control: “The breakdown of the institutions, the withering of civil society, the decline of disciplinary society all involve a smoothing of the striations of modern social space. Here arise the networks of the society of control” (329). If the postmodern regime of flexible capital accumulation can be said to scatter Alfred’s three children to their various vocations–Denise to a venture-capital restaurant in Philadelphia, Chip to a public relations role for the Free Market Party Company of Lithuania, Gary to a position in a high-power East Coast investment bank–that same regime has engendered the private Retirement Communities and Assisted Living Centers that the younger generation, having left behind the institutions of the extended family and civil society that formerly provided the social support for the elderly, now deem appropriate for their aging parents. The Corrections‘ symbolic trajectory between the vocations of older and younger generations thus induces the sense of cultural paranoia that accompanies the society of control, and encodes the withering of civil society, the breakdown of the public/private polarity, and the dissolution of older hierarchies and social striations.

     

    This trajectory finds its analogue in The Sopranos‘ depiction of the evolving vocations of the New Jersey mob. We learn in the pilot episode that Tony’s official title is “waste management consultant”; this au courant term euphemizes the sanitation racket that has long been associated with the real-life mafia in the tri-state area. (As Christopher Moltisanti memorably exclaims, “Garbage is our bread-and-butter!”) As the seasons progress, however, the Soprano crew adds to its blue-collar fiefdom an increasingly lucrative series of white-collar endeavors–tech-stock schemes, phone-card swindles, and real-estate projects, including a Housing and Urban Development scam in a low-income Newark neighborhood, and the three-million-dollar Esplanade project along the long-neglected banks of the Passaic River. Tony speculates on real estate, buying property on Newark’s Frelinghuysen Avenue in order to sell it at jacked-up prices to the state-subsidized gentrifiers, who will soon, in the words of one televised politician, be establishing “condominiums, film studios, and public parks–a self-perpetuating revenue base” (Episode 30, “Employee of the Month”). These forms of underworld “earning” represent a significant step up from the petit bourgeois or working-class activities, legal and illegal, of Tony’s deceased father Johnny (“Retail meat and provisions. And a little numbers. Extortion, loansharking” [Episode 7, “Down Neck”]). Despite his upward mobility, as we have already seen, Tony feels that he and his generational cohort lack the “values” of his father’s generation. A key socio-political subtext here is Tony’s distance from the working-class milieu that he associates with his deceased father, a milieu we witness in flashbacks to Tony’s boyhood in the 1960s. In fact, Tony’s life-sphere is notable for the disappearance or the dispersal of the working class, members of which are glimpsed only in the unionized construction workers that he and the New York families control,10 and in the menials and low-level service workers that surround him–custodians, maids, caretakers, livery drivers, and fast-food employees, nearly all of whom are recent immigrants from Russia, Eastern Europe, Mexico, and the Caribbean. If these workers index the globalization of labor markets, Tony and his crew stand in symbolically (as has been the case, of course, with fictional Mafiosi at least since the 1970s and the first two Godfather films) for the entrepreneurs and managers of the business and corporate spheres. They are the agents of ever-mobile forms of capital accumulation, both in their shell-game with HUD’s federal financing of the “rehabilitation” of downtown Newark neighborhoods (whose denizens are violently evicted, so that–in a neat parallel with the Orfic Group’s gutting of railway infrastructure–Tony’s men can rip out the housing stock’s copper piping), and in their variously ingenious skimmings of the federal and state funding meant for the Esplanade project, with its high-tech, multi-million-dollar Museum of Science and Trucking. These various financial flows are made possible because the New Jersey and New York families “share” a corrupt New Jersey State Assemblyman, Ronald Zellman. The dissolution of the boundary between the private sector and the government sector is of course nothing new, such corruption being as old as capitalism itself, but The Sopranos‘ depiction of the deterritorializing and reterritorializing flows of finance capital certainly evokes an up-to-the-moment aura of conspiracy at high levels.

     

    We may well speculate that, in the era of the Enron and WorldCom scandals, The Sopranos‘s representation of venial interconnections between the public sphere of government and the private sphere of capital expresses a collective anxiety over the reality of state-sponsored plutocracy. Hardt and Negri suggest that we live in a time when

     

    “Big government is over” is the battle cry of conservatives and neoliberals . . . . The bottom line and brutal irony is that they sounded the attack on big government just when the development of the postmodern informational revolution most needed big government to support its efforts–for the construction of information superhighways, the control of the equilibria of the stock exchanges . . . . Precisely at this time, after the Soviet Union had collapsed, the imperial tasks facing the U. S. government were most urgent and big government was most needed. (348)

     

    Of course, the “big government” referenced here is not the welfare state measures of the New Deal or the Great Society, but rather the agent, ancillary to global capital, that “conducts the great orchestra of subjectivities reduced to commodities” (349). Taking this cue from Hardt and Negri, who underscore the significance of the post-Cold War juncture, we may perceive a complementarity in the two narratives under discussion here: just as the U.S. is a place where old-fashioned civil society and the imaginary border between public and private spheres are dissolving away, so too the characters from the former Second World are the toughest capitalists around. In a psychic crystallization of the texts’ global paranoia, the American protagonists of both The Corrections and The Sopranos experience crises of identity that derive directly and indirectly from the reinvention of the former Second World’s political economy after the model of American business culture. In order to illustrate this proposition, I want finally to examine a few passages from the texts that offer a condensed precipitate of these narratives’ political unconscious, on what Jameson calls the “narrowly political horizon–in which history is reduced to a series of punctual events and crises in time, in the diachronic agitation of the year-to-year, the chroniclelike annals of the rise and fall of political regimes and social fashions” (Political Unconscious 76-77). Through fictive synecdoches of the contemporary, global circuits of capital, the explicit horizon of these texts’ social realism may be seen to dispel an older metaphysics of national identity. American-style business-as-usual no longer projects any socio-economic system of the Other through which to constitute its own positive essence.

     

    Through the overseas adventures of Chip Lambert, The Corrections links the decaying infrastructure of the American Midwest with the efflux of capital into a social-Darwinist Lithuania. Chip accepts a job as a provider of web content for Lithuanian entrepreneurs who are luring wealthy American investors, and in the process, he begins to observe a certain mirroring between the political economies of the two lands:

     

    Chip was struck by the broad similarities between black-market Lithuania and free-market America. In both countries, wealth was concentrated in the hands of a few; any meaningful distinction between private and public sectors had disappeared; captains of commerce lived in a ceaseless anxiety that drove them to expand their empires ruthlessly; ordinary citizens lived in ceaseless fear of being fired and ceaseless confusion about which powerful private interest owned which formerly public institution on any given day; and the economy was fuelled largely by the elite’s insatiable demand for luxury.

     

    . . . The main difference between America and Lithuania, as far as Chip could see, was that in America the wealthy few subdued the unwealthy many by means of mind-numbing and soul-killing entertainments and gadgetry and pharmaceuticals, whereas in Lithuania the powerful few subdued the unpowerful many by threatening violence.

     

    It warmed his Foucaultian heart, in a way, to live in a land where property ownership and the control of public discourse were so obviously a matter of who had the guns. (443-44)

     

    Now, admittedly, this sardonic passage offers an ideological critique that could hardly be called “unconscious” on Franzen’s part. In his 1996 lament over “the death of the social novel,” “Perchance to Dream,” the writer professes that “in college my head had been turned by Marxism” (37), though he makes it clear that he personally has long since rejected the systematic critique of late capitalism. Notwithstanding the author’s cranky anti-theoreticism, Chip’s rumination effectively functions as a synecdoche for broader anxieties about globalization, and the ascendance of social Darwinism across the face of the earth. Indeed, the rest of the novel amply shows that, in the words of one mainstream critic, “the world of the Lamberts is under vaguely felt but continuing pressure from big business and its dubious intentions” (Edwards 84).

     

    For its part, The Sopranos imports thuggish Russians and Eastern Europeans to New Jersey, to do business with–and to threaten–the third- and fourth-generation Italian Mafiosi. This post-Cold War feature of mafia life in America is introduced in the series pilot, as recently arrived Czech mobsters are revealed to be undercutting the New Jersey mafia in the garbage contract business. In response to a threat from the Italian-Americans, the Kolar family head is reported to say that “if he could tell the commie bosses back in Czechoslovakia to go fuck themselves, he can fuckin’ tell us.” Soon thereafter we learn that Carmela Soprano employs a recently arrived Polish maid who lifts her cutlery, and that the ruthless Janice Soprano is not as tough as her mother’s one-legged, East European caretaker. When the hardened mafia daughter steals Svetlana’s prosthetic leg, Tony tells her, “don’t mess with the Russians, Janice, that’s all I’m gonna say” (Episode 30, “Employee of the Month”), and the Ukrainian herself says, quite prophetically, “this cunt is going to be sorry she ever fucked with me” (Episode 29, “Favorite Son”). Prominent in the story arc across its five seasons is Tony’s affair with Russian immigrant Irina Peltsin, whose amoral, vengeful survivalism will eventually lead to the biggest crisis in Tony’s nuclear family: she serves as the proximate cause of the separation between Tony and Carmela (Episode 52, “Whitecaps”). But these instances are plot-oriented and exterior to the psychic space that is so powerfully represented in the following post-coital exchange between Tony and Svetlana:

     

    TONY
    You always have this little smile. You don’t talk much, do you? I wish I knew your secret. Lose a leg, and start making websites.

     

    SVETLANA
    That’s the trouble with you Americans–you expect nothing bad ever to happen, when the rest of the world expect [sic] only bad things to happen, and they are not disappointed.

     

    TONY
    Well, that’s a fucking grim outlook.

     

    SVETLANA
    You have everything, and still you complain. You lie on couches, and bitch to your psychiatrist. You’ve got too much time to think about yourselves . . . I don’t want all the time prop you up [sic].

     

    The title of the episode is “The Strong, Silent Type”; the series’ creators are playing on the phrase by which Tony repeatedly invokes his ego ideal, the Gary Cooper of the 1952 western film, “High Noon.” It is perhaps fitting that a physically disabled Ukranian woman should be bestowed with the epithet of the American hero of a Hollywood movie that is often read as an allegory of the Cold War and U.S. foreign policy during the Korean War era. Indeed, Christopher Kocela has demonstrated that “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.” Svetlana is the one woman among Tony’s many amorous conquests who rejects the prospect of an affair with him, and he is not a little shaken to be perceived as someone who needs emotional “propping up.” She effectively characterizes their would-be relationship as a global allegory, wherein Tony figures the weak American and she “the rest of the world,” and she forces Tony to recognize, in a flash of paranoid self-illumination, a “certain suturing of individuals to the social imaginary in which crucial differences between agency and national or other identificatory fantasies are collapsed.”

     

    The power of these indestructible émigrés, Svetlana and Irina, over Tony’s fate suggests that those raised in the Second World can outdo the Americans on their own turf, in their own supposed milieu of risky entrepreneurship, cutthroat competition, and savvy street-smarts. This threat is the theme of one of the series’ most popular (if fans’ weblogs are any indication) episodes, “Pine Barrens.” Tony Soprano is using the Russian mafia to launder thousands of dollars through international banks, and when his underlings scuffle with one of these ex-Soviet counterparts, we witness the following exchange:

     

    Tony walks down the street outside Slava’s, talking on his cell phone as he heads to the Suburban.

     

    TONY
    (through some static)
    It’s a bad connection, so I’m gonna talk fast. The guy you’re looking for is an ex-commando. He killed sixteen Chechen rebels single-handed.

     

    PAULIE
    Get the fuck outta here.

     

    TONY
    Yeah. Nice, huh? He was with the Interior Ministry. Guy’s like a Russian green beret. He can NOT come back and tell this story. You understand?

     

    PAULIE
    I hear you.

     

    Paulie clicks off, and looks at Christopher.

     

    PAULIE
    You’re not gonna believe this. He killed sixteen Czechoslovakians. Guy was an interior decorator.

     

    CHRISTOPHER
    (amazed)
    His house looked like shit.

     

    (Episode 36, “Pine Barrens”)

     

    This seemingly superhuman “ex-commando,” Valery, is impervious to cold, and survives two attempts to “whack” him by Paulie and Christopher; not only does he escape into the woods, but he evidently steals their vehicle to make his getaway, thereby prompting speculation among fans about his presumably vengeful reappearance one day. As I have already suggested, Tony’s crew is intimidated by the Russians, who can evidently trump the Italian-Americans in the survivalist savagery that serves as a metonym of American-style capitalism. But what I find most interesting about the quoted dialogue is that the Russian Valery is understood in Cold War categories–he is an Eastern European version of the famously gung-ho Green Berets (subject of popular song in the reactionary countercurrent of the ’60s), and, with the term “Czechoslovakians,” his Chechen adversaries are translated–however unwittingly–into the repressed victims of the 1968 uprising against Soviet control. Paulie’s malapropism is thus a symbolic figure for the retrofitting of perplexing new geopolitical realities into outdated categories. In effect, it emblematizes a “collective nostalgia for the old binaries, economies, orders, and nations,” and “for a paranoia in which the persecutor had a more or less recognizable face and a clear geographical location.”

     

    V. Conclusion

     

    As promised, I have read this little exchange from The Sopranos as a symptom of the text’s political unconscious within what is, for Jameson, any narrative’s most explicit horizon of historical representation, “the chroniclelike annals of the rise and fall of political regimes and social fashions.” It is worth noting that “Pine Barrens” debuted in May of 2001; and likewise, that Franzen’s novel was published in the first week of September of the same year. Geopolitically speaking, of course, we have witnessed some “diachronic agitation” in the years since. The paranoid construction of new cultural and racial Others has proceeded apace in American culture, even as the official organs of the federal government and the culture industry have warned against the generalized scapegoating of Muslims. In this context, both the domestic anxieties and the global paranoia that characterizes the two narratives I have discussed here offer continuing counterpoints to the far more literal-minded paranoia, the cruder fears and hatreds, directed against those most recently marked out as Other. It is this feature of the texts, together with their troubled self-reflexivity and their not-simply-blank ironies, that might be said to mark them as “blue” postmodern.

     

    These are formal and thematic possibilities in the evolution of what must in any case be seen, in DeKoven’s words, as the “complex, multivalent, non-self-consistent ‘cultural dominant’” of the postmodern aesthetic (x). Among the many prevalent forms of postmodern culture that these two narratives do not participate in, for example, is the tendency, limned by Linda Hutcheon, of postmodernism as “the locus of a progressive cultural politics of the ‘minoritarian and ex-centric’” (Dekoven 10). Measured alongside those criteria, the best we can say about the cultural politics of The Corrections and The Sopranos, with their primary focus on the subjectivity of the straight white male, may be that they offer a partly complicitous critique of the existing order of things. But in light of the overall question of cultural politics, it is the two texts’ central thematic, the depiction of the nuclear family, that I would like to emphasize in closing, as I think this refracts tellingly through the post-9/11 cultural moment. As I suggested at the outset, The Corrections and The Sopranos evince a diffuse affect of externally focused paranoia, whose less subtle obverse is the representation of the inner workings of the nuclear family. The texts set out quite deliberately to demonstrate that “the traditional family” is, as Hardt and Negri suggest, “a fictional image projected on the past, like Main Street U.S.A. at Disneyland, constructed retrospectively through the lens of contemporary anxieties and fears” (148). These two narratives may be favorites among “blue” or “metro America” in part because of the power of this ambivalent demonstration, which rarely collapses into that different kind of postmodernism, the postmodernism of a too knowing, too distanced, too disaffected irony. Their negative mode of expressing the topoi of American middle-class life eschews the absolute relativism which is attributed, whether fairly or not, to other specimens of postmodern culture. On the contrary, their “winner loses” social logic, with its implicit affirmation of the non-identity of the terms “family” and “American” with their presumed objects, provides a powerful antidote to the far more crudely paranoid identity-think of the cultural right, of the ideologists who would lead “retro America.”

     

    Notes

     

    1. Franzen’s words come from an interview with the Portland Oregonian in October 2001: “I feel like I’m solidly in the high-art literary tradition, but I like to read entertaining books and this maybe helps bridge that gap, but it also heightens these feelings of being misunderstood . . . . She’s [Oprah Winfrey] picked some good books, but she’s picked enough schmaltzy, one-dimensional ones that I cringe myself, even though I think she’s really smart and she’s really fighting the good fight” (Edwards). On the Franzen/Winfrey controversy, see in particular Miller, Lehmann, and Campbell.

     

    2. “obverse.” Webster’s New Collegiate Dictionary (Springfield, MA: G. & C. Merriam Webster, 1973), 787.

     

    3. This is one of the series’ moments of self-conscious intertextuality with the Godfather (“Luca Brasi sleeps with the fishes”) and other mafia/gangster films–spots of generic self-reflexivity which have so long been standard in postmodern texts as to require no further comment here.

     

    4. I think it is worth suggesting, by way of personal digression, that the complaints of literary-theoretical academics (a tiny sliver of “metro” America) about The Corrections‘ “anti-intellectualism” are triggered by subjective animus–the result of their taking the Chip passages too personally. Irrespective of Franzen’s slightly whiney prejudices (see “Perchance to Dream,” the 1996 Harpers piece), I am arguing that the text deconstructs its own occasional lampooning of critical theory. I find it interesting that these same academics, in my experience, do nothing but rave about The Sopranos, which, while it doesn’t (yet) showcase any fictive university professors, offers a parallel awareness of late-twentieth-century intellectual trends. I suspect that these academics’ very different responses to the novel and the series have to do with differences in the expectations brought to “literary fiction” and to television.

     

    5. This seems a good place to mention that my analysis is being written before the appearance of Season Six of The Sopranos, which has been promised for spring 2006; certain generalizations may be rendered inoperative by future plot developments.

     

    6. For a thorough analysis of racial representations in The Sopranos, one more sophisticated than that offered here, see Kocela.

     

    7. The episode featuring Ralph Cifaretto’s murder makes it clear that Tony Soprano’s psychic urge is retributive, both for the horse Pie-O-My, who has died in what Tony believes to be Ralph’s insurance-motivated act of arson, and for the entirely innocent Tracee (or Meadow manqué). The last shot of the episode shows Tony gazing at a photograph of Tracee in the Bada Bing men’s room. Incidentally, this scene represents how, uniquely for a television series of its length, The Sopranos often manages a patient continuity along its vast narrative arc and its multiple plotlines, not unlike the installments in a nineteenth-century triple-decker novel.

     

    8. As obvious evidence of the existence of this kind of generalized dread, we can consider the prominence in the national media of news stories concerning the disappearances, abductions, and murders of white girls and young white women. The name recognition of Chandra Levy, Jon Benet Ramsey, Elizabeth Smart, etc., does not seem to be counterbalanced by any equivalent names among non-white, non-female victims of such crimes.

     

    9. I will here use antinomy in the sense of “a contradiction between principles or conclusions that seem equally necessary and reasonable” (Webster’s New Collegiate Dictionary 50).

     

    10. Ralph Cifaretto’s practice of payrolling “no-shows,” or non-existent construction workers, on the government’s “dime” nicely symbolizes the tendential dissolution of the old-fashioned working class and its unions on American soil.

     

    Works Cited

     

    • Booth, Wayne C. A Rhetoric of Irony. Chicago: U of Chicago P, 1974.
    • Bourdieu, Pierre. Distinction: A Social Critique of the Judgement of Taste. Trans. Richard Nice. Cambridge: Harvard UP, 1984.
    • Brooks, David. “One Nation, Slightly Divisible.” The Atlantic Monthly (December 2001): 53-67.
    • Campbell, James. “High Art in the Age of Oprah.” Boston Review: A Political and Literary Forum 27:2 (April/May 2002): PAGE ##S?
    • Chase, David. Interview by Terry Gross. “Fresh Air.” National Public Radio. 22 June 2000.
    • DeKoven, Marianne. Utopia Limited: The Sixties and the Emergence of the Postmodern. Durham: Duke UP, 2004.
    • DeLillo, Don. Underworld. New York: Scribner, 1997.
    • Edwards, Thomas R. “Oprah’s Choice.” Raritan 21:4 (Spring 2002): 75-86.
    • Franzen. Jonathan. The Corrections. Hardcover New York: Farrar, 2001.
    • —. “Perchance to Dream: In an Age of Images, a Reason to Write Novels.” Harper’s (April 1996): 35-47.
    • Freud, Sigmund. The Interpretation of Dreams. Oxford: Oxford UP, 1999.
    • Fukuyama, Francis. The End of History and the Last Man. New York: Avon, 1992.
    • Hardt, Michael, and Antonio Negri. Empire. Cambridge: Harvard UP, 2000.
    • Harvey, David. The Condition of Postmodernity. Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1989.
    • Jameson, Fredric. “The End of Temporality.” Critical Inquiry 29.4 (Summer 2003): 695-718.
    • —.The Political Unconscious: Narrative as a Socially Symbolic Act. Ithaca: Cornell UP, 1981.
    • —. Postmodernism; or, The Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism. Durham: Duke UP, 1991.
    • Kocela, Christopher. “Unmade Men: The Sopranos After Whiteness.” Postmodern Culture 15.2 (January 2005). 8 January 2006. <http://muse.jhu.edu/journals/postmodern_culture/v015/15.2kocela.html>.
    • Lehmann, Chris. “Jonathan Franzen: A Defense.” Slate 1 November 2001. <http://www.slate.com/id/2058036/>.
    • Mailer, Norman. The Executioner’s Song. New York: Little, Brown, 1979.
    • Miller, Laura. “Book Lovers’ Quarrel.” Salon 26 October 2001. <http://www.salon.com/books/feature/2001/10/26/franzen_winfrey/index.html>.
    • O’Donnell, Patrick. Latent Destinies: Cultural Paranoia and Contemporary U.S. Narrative. Durham: Duke UP, 2000.
    • Plato. “Republic,” Book Ten. The Norton Anthology of Theory and Criticism. Ed. Vincent B. Leitch. New York: Norton, 2001.
    • Pynchon, Thomas. The Crying of Lot 49. New York: Harper & Row, 1966.
    • —. Gravity’s Rainbow. New York: Viking, 1973.
    • The Sopranos. Seasons One-Five. Executive Producer David Chase. Los Angeles: Home Box Office, 1999-2004.
    • “Sopranos Homepage: Music Credits.” Home Box Office. 2005. 10 January 2005. <http://www.hbo.com/sopranos/music/episode61.shtml>.
    • Sperling, John, et al. The Great Divide: Retro vs. Metro America. Sausalito: Polipoint, 2004.

     

     

     

  • Not Burroughs’ Final Fix: Materializing The Yage Letters

    Oliver Harris

    Department of American Studies
    Keele University
    o.c.g.harris@ams.keele.ac.uk

    Consistent Scrutiny

     

    In the last decade of the twentieth century it seemed to some that a breakthrough was taking place in the longstanding isolation of interpretive criticism and textual scholarship. It may be premature to speak “in retrospect,” but it doesn’t appear that the theoretical turn taken by textual scholars, combined with the trumpeted technological fix of hypertext editions, has really achieved disciplinary togetherness. Of the major players who are synonymous with the effort to postmodernize the field of editing theory–D.C. Greetham, Peter L. Shillingsburg, and Jerome J. McGann–only McGann has achieved genuine name-recognition outside the field itself, while the jury remains out on the creation of satisfactory “postmodern” editions, electronic or otherwise.

     

    Within this general picture, the critical fate of William Burroughs–a figure paradoxically long central to postmodern culture and yet only lately brought in from the outer limits of the literary canon–may be especially illuminating. This is because Burroughs criticism has itself been highly paradoxical with respect to his literary history, in the sense that critics have not significantly researched the historical processes of textual production or reception, even though the production histories of Burroughs’ books–or rather, certain potent genetic myths–have decisively shaped his books’ popular and critical reception. That Burroughs was himself responsible for peddling these half-fictions about his fiction-making has not gone unnoticed, especially concerning Naked Lunch,1 but has itself been textualized as part of the writer’s mystique. The upshot is that, as the Burroughs critical field expanded, more and more interpretive work–often very impressive on its own terms–has come to rest on the same small and unreliable scholarly base.

     

    This kind of research has been central to my own work (in William Burroughs and the Secret of Fascination [2003]), but the credit for bringing Burroughs’ writing within the framework of materialist criticism and textual theory must go to Carol Loranger, for a landmark essay that appeared in Postmodern Culture in 1999. Focused on Naked Lunch, Loranger’s essay makes two powerful calls: one for “consistent textual, as opposed to interpretive, scrutiny” of Burroughs’ work; the other for a “postmodern edition” of his seminal novel, which would “necessarily be a hypertext edition” (24).

     

    Loranger’s second call raises important theoretical and practical issues without actually attempting to resolve them; as she puts it, her essay “should be taken as a series of first steps toward a postmodern edition of Naked Lunch” (2). The conclusion of this essay returns to these issues briefly in the context of both the new edition of Naked Lunch that actually did appear not long after (“The Restored Text” of 2003 by James Grauerholz and Barry Miles) and the “final steps” I have myself taken towards an edition of another work by Burroughs. The bulk of this essay details the materialist underpinnings to that edition, explored within a social text theory framework that “denies the automatic priority traditionally given to authors’ intentions, preferring instead to regard textual creation and transmission as a collaborative, social act” (Greetham 9). In order to set up these explorations and to establish both their necessity and importance, I want first to subject to scrutiny Loranger’s call for, and own practice of, textual scrutiny.

     

    Focusing on the relation between the text of Naked Lunch in its various editions and its part-publication in the little magazine, Big Table, Loranger’s case depends on two distinct claims. The first is by Burroughs himself, about “having no precise memory of writing” the text, a claim that underwrites Loranger’s insistence that “authorial intent is antithetical to the very spirit of Naked Lunch” (2). She doesn’t hold the author’s claims to non-authorship up to any material scrutiny, however, because her stated aim is “not to contest” the “truth-value” of the text’s genetic “mythology” (including “Burroughs’ fabled passivity during the production of the novel” [5]), only to “specify its function” (7). She can therefore sidestep not just research into manuscript history but even use of the available biographical evidence (chiefly Burroughs’ letters), either of which might have rescued at least some of the facts behind the fable. Loranger’s second claim is to be making comparative analysis of the actual texts, but, despite its interpretive strength, her account turns out to be inaccurate and incomplete even on its own terms. These failings bear down upon not only the practical rigor of her observations–and therefore the factual record on which interpretation is based–but, more broadly, on the descriptive opportunities opened up by social text theory.

     

    In terms of descriptive rigor, both Loranger’s observations about how little the “narrative portion” of Naked Lunch changed after the first edition–“the addition of two words” (“See Appendix”) (5)–and her comparative analysis of this text with the “Ten Episodes” published in Big Table, are marred by material errors.2 In the most significant instances, she fails to observe that the Olympia edition lacks not “two words” but over two-and-a-half thousand words,3 while in “the market” section there are a series of footnotes, the longest of which (over 800 words) runs across nine consecutive pages.4 Only about a quarter of this latter material, so visibly prominent in the first edition, ever became part of the narrative portion of Naked Lunch in later editions, the rest appearing in the “Appendix.” This last section is not, therefore, as Loranger claims, “an unrelated text, drawn into the orbit of Naked Lunch by the threat of obscenity charges” (in 1962, for the Grove edition). The significance of this point rests on the widely recognized effects of censorship in determining the appearance of Burroughs’ work throughout the 1950s and ’60s, and on the need for an accurate record of where, and by what agency, these effects occurred.5

     

    Finally, while Loranger cites approvingly Shillingsburg’s “post-electronic affirmation of the radical non-equivalence of ‘the work of art’ with ‘the linguistic text of it’” (1), her analysis all but passes over one of the most valuable aspects of social text theory6–namely, attention not only to the text’s words, its linguistic code, but to the materiality of bibliographic codes (physical features, from typeface to layout) and what George Bornstein calls “contextual coding” (the text’s location within a larger whole; see Frankel). In this light, we might consider both the possibility that such codes carried over from magazine to book publication, so affecting the production of Naked Lunch, and the hermeneutic significance of those codes for an analysis of the magazine versions as texts in their own right–texts whose social and cultural histories affected, indeed should be considered legitimate parts of, the reception of Burroughs’ novel.

     

    Recovering the original circumstances of publication is essential if Burroughs criticism is to undo what amounts to the repression of his oeuvre’s richly complex textual history.7 Textual scholarship of this kind must become more rigorous because interpretive criticism inescapably depends upon it. Even in the most determinedly interpretive criticism, there is no “degree zero” of materiality, and the consequences of a false base can be dramatic.8 One of the reasons for remaining suspicious of the solutions promised by hypertext editions, therefore, is that editing also depends upon critical interpretation–is indeed itself an act of interpretation–so that what is most needed for both criticism and for practical editing is an expanded material base informed by the rigorous scholarly application of the full descriptive potentials opened up by social text theory. The theoretical model opens up descriptive potentials by bringing new material objects within the frame of analysis (physical features of the text, multiple states, etc.), as the basis for further critical interpretation.

     

    In what follows, I take up these potentials for materialist criticism and editing in relation to The Yage Letters (1963), a text published four years after Naked Lunch (and to which Loranger makes passing reference in her final paragraph). The fact that her comparison, in effect, inverts the genetic relation between texts affirms once again that the value of this approach goes beyond analysis of individual works to embrace the intertextual relations between them. In the case of Burroughs, whose texts are a manifest bricolage of materials recycled across the oeuvre, such relations add up to a virtual limit-case, a nightmare of infinitely open-ended intertextuality. A complete analysis, in other words, lies far beyond the horizon of this essay.

     

    Edited Out

     

    For forty years The Yage Letters has been one of the most popular texts in the Burroughs oeuvre, a short (18,000 word) and accessible introduction to his work. In the form of an epistolary narrative, the bulk of it documents Burroughs’ seven-month journey through the Amazonian jungles of Colombia, Ecuador, and Peru in 1953. This is the exotic backdrop for satirical bulletins and ethnobotanical observations in the course of his quest to find the fabled hallucinogen that gives the book its title (more correctly, written yagé and pronounced “ya-hey”). Among other short pieces, the last quarter of the text features Ginsberg’s “reply” to Burroughs, reporting his own dramatic experiences with the same drug in the same region seven years later.

     

    Despite its popularity, The Yage Letters‘ critical reception is almost as thin and short as the book itself. Jennie Skerl’s thousand words in her 1985 study were the most detailed analysis until, in the last few years, two critics working outside the Burroughs field (Mullins in 2002, Martinez in 2003) advanced strong thematic readings that focus on sexuality and race. There are several reasons Burroughs critics have generally ignored The Yage Letters. Firstly, there’s the peculiar hybridity of its overall contents, since it combines completely different types of writing composed by two authors across two decades: the long first section, “In Search of Yage,” ambiguously presented as authentic letters from Burroughs to Allen Ginsberg in 1953; “Seven Years Later,” a shorter exchange of letters between Ginsberg and Burroughs in 1960; and “Epilogue,” a third section comprising a brief letter by Ginsberg from 1963 and a cut-up text by Burroughs, “I Am Dying, Meester?”

     

    Secondly, its place in Burroughs’ literary history is paradoxically fluid: Mullins calls it his “third book” (64), presumably because “In Search of Yage” was written after Junkie and Queer. But in the chronology of publication, The Yage Letters (1963) follows Junkie (1953), Naked Lunch (1959), Minutes to Go (1960), The Exterminator (1960), The Soft Machine (1961), and The Ticket that Exploded (1962), and so becomes his seventh book. The Yage Letters thereby actually precedes the second book in Mullins’s chronology, Queer (written in 1952 but not published until 1985), by over twenty years, by which time Burroughs’ long-abandoned manuscript had been re-edited to include as an epilogue material originally written to complete “In Search of Yage”; this material (“Epilogue: Mexico City Return”) was in fact added specifically in order to satisfy the publishers’ requirements for a longer text. The most visible of the resulting confusions between manuscript and publishing chronology concerns the phrase that is always quoted in discussions of The Yage Letters: “Yage may be the final fix.” These were the last words of Junkie (128),9 published in summer 1953 as Burroughs traveled through South America in search of yagé, and the inference seems obvious.10 However, the line dates from July 1952, long before Burroughs thought of writing “Yage,” and actually referred to Queer (which describes his unsuccessful 1951 quest for the drug), although the line was not in that manuscript, as Campbell assumes (132). In fact, the line was only added to Junkie at the last minute because Ace Books, which were then considering publishing Queer as its sequel, wanted it there to link the two books. Whether or not the drug proved to be Burroughs’ “final fix,” the impact of such contingent publishing circumstances suggests the urgent need to un-fix critical assumptions about the “final” text.

     

    And thirdly, there’s the indeterminate literary status of “In Search of Yage,” three of whose “letters” are actually signed by Burroughs’ fictional persona, William Lee. The book’s appearance therefore begs all sorts of textual issues, only complicated by the fact that the text has been twice revised (editions in 1975 and 1988 adding important new material to the first section, among other smaller changes). Features that seem to have deterred or confused interpretive criticism are, however, precisely those that make The Yage Letters ideally suited to a social text approach.

     

    In 1985, Skerl claimed that the “mode of composition (actual letters), the collaborative editing and publication, and the inclusion of later material” all make The Yage Letters “typical of Burroughs’ practice as a writer”: “He refuses to conform to the convention of the final text produced by the individual artist” (31). In broad terms, Skerl’s incisive analysis still stands, and suggests the value of analyzing The Yage Letters in the first place. A “socialized” approach, which views the text “as a collaborative, cultural force” and recognizes “the work as having a career independent of the author” (Greetham 3, 55) is certainly consistent with Burroughs’ authorship of (and in) The Yage Letters. On the other hand, the static notion of the “typical” text threatens to undo Skerl’s own analysis by fixing and dehistoricizing the Burroughsian text. The specificity of its multiple identities and engagements is, to borrow Nicholas Frankel’s terms, a sign of the text’s “continual and ongoing subjection to the forces of historical change” (353)–including the production of new editorial transformations. In the case of The Yage Letters, these forces of change manifest a remarkably dynamic process of collaborative and contingent textual activity. This is not to say that the kind of specific textual-historical research undertaken here can or should be the basis for larger claims about materiality or agency. Rather, my aim is more local and limited because, as the shortcomings in this area of Burroughs criticism make clear, the necessity and importance of such research have primarily to do with the factual record and material base on which interpretation depends.

     

    In common with earlier criticism, the recent approaches to “In Search of Yage” are based on material assumptions and on overlooking basic distinctions between the letter and literature. This is actually quite surprising, since both Mullins and Martinez make comparative use of Burroughs’ published correspondence precisely to highlight differences between the texts of letters as they appear in “In Search of Yage” and in The Letters of William S. Burroughs, 1945-1959. In other words, their interest in local textual differences ignores the generic distinction between the texts they are citing–enabling Martinez, in one place, to refer to The Yage Letters while in fact quoting from The Letters (43). Biographers tend to assume the documentary value of literary works–and “In Search of Yage” has been readily used in this way–but in interpretive criticism of evident sophistication, it is odd to see such “transparent” readings of letters, however they are presented.

     

    Although Skerl gives no detail to back it up, her implied skepticism–“the form of the narrative pretends to be strictly factual–a seemingly unrevised series of letters” (32)–ought to have suggested the need for interpretations either to build on manuscript research, or to avoid making the kind of specific claims that required it. This isn’t the place to document the complex manuscript history of “In Search of Yage”–it’s given in detail in the new edition itself–but suffice to say it reveals that the 1953 “letters” were, in almost all cases, fabricated in ways unimagined by Burroughs’ critics. The most striking feature of the work by Mullins and Martinez, however, is that they make direct and detailed claims not about the text’s manuscript genealogy but about its editorial history. These claims are made without any supporting material context, and yet they are presented confidently as evidence to ground and support (in Mullins’ case, otherwise illuminating and compelling) interpretation.

     

    Interestingly, each critic is concerned to demonstrate that “In Search of Yage” was subject to deliberate acts of self-censorship that removed the same racially sensitive material from Burroughs’ original letters, Mullins assuming that Burroughs “edited out” (77) this section because of its “offensiveness” (65), Martinez claiming that it was “edited for publication by Lawrence Ferlinghetti” (64), adding in a footnote, “the letters edited by Ferlinghetti were ‘cleaned-up’ for publication, omitting several passages which the publisher must have felt were racist or offensive. For example, Ferlinghetti strikes the frequent use of the word ‘nigger,’ substituting ‘Nigra’ or omitting the references altogether” (323). Whether aimed at author or editor, these are serious charges, and they raise highly relevant questions about censorship; they also beg questions about authorship and agency and about the processes of textual production, transmission, and reception.

     

    My aim in what follows is to settle the question of authorship (or perhaps more accurately, un-settle it) within the larger context of the text’s full publishing history. Shifting the latter from the bibliographic margins to the interpretive centre shows the value of material criticism not just for resolving particular interpretive disputes (whodunnit–Burroughs or Ferlinghetti?), or even for generating new readings of the text, but for recognizing new objects of critical analysis–objects useful for editors and critics alike.

     

    If I focus on Burroughs’ “In Search of Yage,” deal with his later material more briefly, and pass over the Ginsberg texts, I do so because the publishing history of this section is the most richly complicated. Across the three editions published in 1963, 1975, and 1988, “In Search of Yage” exists in book form in three versions (see Table 1). But its prehistory also involves the appearance of its material published separately in four different little magazines (see Table 2).11 And so, before describing how in 1963 Lawrence Ferlinghetti’s City Lights came to publish this text within The Yage Letters as a whole, I reconstruct the history of these magazine part-publications in order to recover their reception (their bibliographic, social, and cultural histories) and then, more surprisingly, in order to reveal their active role in the production of Burroughs’ “final” text.

     

    The Little Magazine Lark12

     

    Burroughs’ interest in magazines for the part-publication of his manuscripts goes back to his first novel, Junkie. Having completed a first draft called “Junk” in December 1950, he was by November of the following year sufficiently pessimistic about his chances of publishing the whole text as to be “ready to hack it up and peddle it to magazines” (Letters 95). Although Junkie was published in 1953–as a pulp paperback, hacked up in numerous places by its editors–Burroughs made no progress with its planned sequel, “Queer.” As for “Yage,” Burroughs finished it in December 1953 (producing, with Ginsberg’s help, a manuscript since lost), but started working on it again in 1955, by which time he was in Tangier, immersed in writing what became Naked Lunch and struggling ever more grimly with the commercial unviability of his writing. When quoting one of its obscene “routines” in December 1954, he quips revealingly to Kerouac: “I can just see that serialized in Cosmopolitan or Good Housekeeping. I mean it’s hopeless, Jack” (242). This, of course, was the point: Burroughs lacked a publishing context. That is why his comments about commercial magazines are so revealing. For, as his manuscripts got smaller–“Queer” and “Yage” combined were much shorter than “Junk”–and Burroughs found himself producing brief routines rather than coherent narratives, magazines actually offered the most formally appropriate mode of publication.

     

    The turning point in the history of Naked Lunch, which prompted Maurice Girodias at Olympia Press in Paris to accept the whole in June 1959, was the publication of the Big Table “Episodes” studied by Loranger–or rather, the non-publication of parts of this material in the issue of Chicago Review infamously banned by the university authorities, which in turn led to the creation of Big Table as a way to get the material into print. Burroughs himself summed up the immediate and longer-term significance of this chain of events: “So it was publication in a little magazine that led to the publication of Naked Lunch at a time when I had almost given up. For many years I sent out pieces to all little magazines that asked me for a contribution” (Maynard and Miles x). Actually, Burroughs’ publication in little magazines after Naked Lunch was more than just grateful payback; in important ways it was materially related to his cut-up practices, the kinds of text they produced, and the kind of reception they sought.13 The larger point is again one of context: by the 1960s there was a great countercultural world of little magazines, not integrated into either commercial or academic institutions, of a kind that barely existed in the previous decade. Burroughs’ closest Beat friends, Ginsberg and Kerouac, were also aware of the new opportunities and their promise to renew the magazine culture of prewar modernism–hence, Kerouac’s reference in late 1959 to Marianne Moore’s famous avant-garde magazine of the 1920s when he predicts the future for three of the new outlets, Kulchur, Yugen and Beatitude: “all those lil things will grow into big DIALS in time” (Selected Letters 219).

     

    The general picture needs some specificity, since the category “Little Magazine” conceals important differences in content, format, readership, and so on, and Burroughs’ involvement was with four quite different magazines: Black Mountain Review, Big Table, Kulchur and The Floating Bear. As well as their particular social and cultural histories, each of these magazines presented Burroughs’ material in distinct bibliographic environments, inviting us to consider both how these part-texts were received in their original publishing contexts, and how this relates to the reception (and indeed, production) of The Yage Letters.

     

    Black Mountain Review

     

    While its circulation remained very small (“a usual printing of some 500 to 750 copies, about 200 of which ever got distributed,” according to its editor, the poet Robert Creeley [261]), Black Mountain Review was highly influential culturally both on its own terms and for the new magazines its example inspired. For Creeley, the point of BMR was that it was not The Kenyon Review–not, that is, another forum for the academic literary establishment, any more than Black Mountain College was another orthodox educational institution. Although it was never a Beat magazine, BMR lasted long enough to publish its “epochal final issue” (Watson 225) of Autumn 1957 (actually issued in Spring 1958), co-edited by Allen Ginsberg and featuring an impressive Beat lineup, which included texts by Ginsberg, Kerouac, Michael McClure, Gary Snyder, Philip Whalen, and a certain “William Lee.”

     

    Figure 1
    Figure 1: Image from Black Mountain Review 7.
    Image used by permission of William S. Burroughs Trust and Estate.

     

    The Beat context for Burroughs’ text in BMR–the letter dated “July 10, 1953″[14]–actually signaled a double publishing breakthrough: as Ted Morgan notes, it was “a crucial break in the pattern of rejection” for Burroughs, and the first gathering of the major Beat writers in print, evidence “that the Beats were now a bona fide movement” (287). On the other hand, the cultural importance that is clear in historical retrospect contrasts strikingly with the obscurity, to all but a very few readers, of this particular text at the time.

     

    For nothing here identified the “Lee” whose name appeared on the contents page and at the end of the letter as William Burroughs, nor for that matter identified the “Allen” to whom it is addressed as Allen Ginsberg.[15] The title–“from Naked Lunch, Book III: In Search of Yage”–would surely have been just as mystifying then as it is now, albeit for different reasons. For here, contrary to all appearances, “Naked Lunch” does not in fact refer to the Naked Lunch that would be published in 1959, but to a tripartite work comprising “Junk,” “Queer,” and “Yage” that, during the mid-1950s, Burroughs grouped under that title: in other words, the heading in BMR actually identifies this text as part of “In Search of Yage.” But the most obscure aspect of the text’s presentation for the magazine’s readers is the most obvious: the letter appears on its own without any larger narrative context to make sense of it. Then again, after the opening lines, the text’s presentation as a letter is easy to forget, since most of it does not give the appearance of being part of any sort of epistolary narrative. It reads like an entirely self-contained text, and when it ends abruptly without any signing off, the name “William Lee” at the foot of the page (set in distinctive bold type) seems to identify an author, not a letter-writer.

     

    As for the particular contents of the “July 10, 1953” letter–the vision of the “Composite City”–this requires the most detailed analysis since it is by far the most widely referenced part of The Yage Letters.[16] One of Burroughs’ most extraordinary pieces of writing, stylistically close to the densely poetic collage cartographies of Rimbaud and St. John Perse–both major influences on Burroughs–it begins by declaring that “Yage is space time travel” and ends by prophetically announcing the intersection of “the unknown past and the emergent future” (Yage Letters 44, 46). While its striking thematic of physical and chronological transcendence is clear, the full significance of this text depends on recognizing the multiple material analogues of its theme generated by its equally striking bibliographical chronology. These analogues are of two kinds: firstly, the text’s publishing history, and secondly its intertextual relations as a part of The Yage Letters.

     

    To begin with, the “July 10, 1953” letter was the first published part of Burroughs’ “Yage” manuscript, but it is also the final letter in the whole epistolary sequence. Picking up BMR number 7, the first readers of “In Search of Yage” literally began at the end. However, the text goes on to perform an even more paradoxical inversion of chronology, since in 1963 the first readers of The Yage Letters were presented with another ending (the “July 8” letter) and would not find this letter there; nor would they until twelve years later, when it was at last included in the second edition. Bizarrely, then, the first letter of “In Search of Yage” to be published (in BMR) was also the last letter to be published in “In Search of Yage” (in The Yage Letters). On the other hand, sixteen years earlier, in 1959, readers of Naked Lunch would have come across it, because the letter, minus only the first four lines and with a few minor differences, appeared there at the start of “the market” section. The peculiarity of this complex bibliographical chronology in turn accounts for the genetic confusion in Loranger’s analysis. She inverts the true relation between texts because, far from the later-published Yage Letters “reworking material from the narrative portion of Naked Lunch” (24), as she asserts, in fact Naked Lunch assimilates the overlapping material–the “July 10, 1953” letter–first published separately in BMR but ultimately taken from the “Yage” manuscript. If yagé, the drug, “is space time travel,” and if “space time travel” became “the hallmark of Naked Lunch and his subsequent cut-up novels” (Mullins 65), then so, through its various material manifestations, is the very text that said so.

     

    This analogy between theme and material history is remarkable, but it is also accidental, a byproduct of contingent circumstances. The question of agency is crucial here, suggesting that the phrasing Skerl used to describe The Yage Letters as a whole–“Burroughs refuses to conform to the convention of the final text produced by the individual artist”–has to be revised: to downplay the assumption of authorial motivation (in ironically determining the refusal of authorial control), and to play up the material agency of the text (in determining the refusal of textual finality).

     

    What then, of the other–intertextual–analogue of this text’s thematics? Perhaps unsurprisingly, it also begs questions of agency and operates in two chronological directions at once. The first set of intertextual relations becomes visible only when the “July 10, 1953” letter is read retrospectively as the final part of “In Search of Yage.” In this context, the text describing the “Composite City” and “space time travel” now appears, materially, as itself a composite text that travels through textual space and time. This is because its collage aesthetic renders the yagé experience of visionary possession by being based on the wholesale recycling and transformation of phrases already read in the earlier letters, so generating cumulatively an uncanny sense of déjà-vu.[17] In terms of the book’s spatial and temporal existence, it is therefore fitting that this text should generate intertextual relations not just backwards in space and time but also forward.

     

    To begin with, the “July 10, 1953” letter was the first published part of Burroughs’ “Yage” manuscript, but it is also the final letter in the whole epistolary sequence. Picking up BMR number 7, the first readers of “In Search of Yage” literally began at the end. However, the text goes on to perform an even more paradoxical inversion of chronology, since in 1963 the first readers of The Yage Letters were presented with another ending (the “July 8” letter) and would not find this letter there; nor would they until twelve years later, when it was at last included in the second edition. Bizarrely, then, the first letter of “In Search of Yage” to be published (in BMR) was also the last letter to be published in “In Search of Yage” (in The Yage Letters). On the other hand, sixteen years earlier, in 1959, readers of Naked Lunch would have come across it, because the letter, minus only the first four lines and with a few minor differences, appeared there at the start of “the market” section. The peculiarity of this complex bibliographical chronology in turn accounts for the genetic confusion in Loranger’s analysis. She inverts the true relation between texts because, far from the later-published Yage Letters “reworking material from the narrative portion of Naked Lunch” (24), as she asserts, in fact Naked Lunch assimilates the overlapping material–the “July 10, 1953” letter–first published separately in BMR but ultimately taken from the “Yage” manuscript. If yagé, the drug, “is space time travel,” and if “space time travel” became “the hallmark of Naked Lunch and his subsequent cut-up novels” (Mullins 65), then so, through its various material manifestations, is the very text that said so.

     

    This analogy between theme and material history is remarkable, but it is also accidental, a byproduct of contingent circumstances. The question of agency is crucial here, suggesting that the phrasing Skerl used to describe The Yage Letters as a whole–“Burroughs refuses to conform to the convention of the final text produced by the individual artist”–has to be revised: to downplay the assumption of authorial motivation (in ironically determining the refusal of authorial control), and to play up the material agency of the text (in determining the refusal of textual finality).

     

    What then, of the other–intertextual–analogue of this text’s thematics? Perhaps unsurprisingly, it also begs questions of agency and operates in two chronological directions at once. The first set of intertextual relations becomes visible only when the “July 10, 1953” letter is read retrospectively as the final part of “In Search of Yage.” In this context, the text describing the “Composite City” and “space time travel” now appears, materially, as itself a composite text that travels through textual space and time. This is because its collage aesthetic renders the yagé experience of visionary possession by being based on the wholesale recycling and transformation of phrases already read in the earlier letters, so generating cumulatively an uncanny sense of déjà-vu.[17] In terms of the book’s spatial and temporal existence, it is therefore fitting that this text should generate intertextual relations not just backwards in space and time but also forward.

     

    Within The Yage Letters as a whole, the Composite City vision that concludes “In Search of Yage” finds an exact parallel in the text that concludes the whole book, “I Am Dying, Meester?” Although she gives no detail and overlooks the parallel, Skerl rightly observes that this text “employs the cut-up technique to create a collage from the materials in the earlier letters” (31). In fact, nearly a quarter of its 660 words derive from “In Search of Yage,” mainly from the “January 15” and “April 15” letters, although it is very difficult to be precise, given not only the nature of the cut-up method but the extent of this text’s internal repetition (nearly half the first paragraph, for example, occurs scattered about in later paragraphs). Such features are secondary, however, to the text’s visible foregrounding of its material procedures. For the immediate physical appearance of textual fragments, bridged by over seventy dashes in a piece less than 700 words long, forces the sign to point to itself and to its origins in other texts. This is apparent even before reading, which marks the obvious difference between this text and the “July 10” letter, whose act of recycling can only be recognized in retrospect, after reading the whole narrative. The cut-up text radicalizes this process by insistently calling into question the agency and integrity of authorship and language, not only with respect to itself, but with respect to all the preceding texts–to all the letters, franked with dates and signatures as signs of authenticity–that it has mixed and sampled.[18]

     

    The very placement of the “July 10, 1953” letter and of “I Am Dying, Meester?” in The Yage Letters invites the reader to see Burroughs’ cut-up technique as a systematic development of the earlier, yagé-inspired, bricolage text, and so recognize cut-up as the textuality of yagé experience. It is possible to explore the relations between the hybrid textuality of this letter and its thematics of cultural hybridity, and so recognize the relation between Burroughs’ emerging experimental aesthetic and his background in ethnology and anthropology. We might therefore read the Composite City, and its avatars in Naked Lunch and the cut-up trilogy, as a topographic mapping in the tradition of Surrealist ethnography, based on a collage aesthetic of juxtaposition that foregrounds “cuts and sutures” rather than presenting fixed wholes (Clifford 146).

     

    However, the placement of these two texts first makes its invitation only to the reader of the revised edition of The Yage Letters in 1975, because, as noted, the “July 10, 1953” letter wasn’t included until a dozen years after “I Am Dying, Meester?” was included. Or to put this bizarre inversion of chronology and causality another way, the text that was the earliest aesthetic precursor of Burroughs’ cut-up technique (by a decade) only took up its place in The Yage Letters a decade after the cut-up text whose recycling deliberately paralleled it. This in turn accounts for the significant–and otherwise surprising–absence from the cut-up text of any phrases derived from the “July 10, 1953” letter, since Burroughs cut up only those letters that appeared in the first edition.[19]

     

    The bibliographic and intertextual time travel that began with Black Mountain Review might go still further–to analyze, for example, the version of the Composite City that appears in Naked Lunch–but the central point remains the remarkable multiplication of its relations and meanings in comparison to its original magazine publication. How ironic that this specific letter–which not only concluded “In Search of Yage” but was partly made from recycling its materials–should have been published first and without any context so that it appeared to be self-contained. Then again, that is precisely why Ginsberg–acting on Kerouac’s recommendation in September 1956[20]–chose it from among Burroughs’ other manuscripts for Creeley’s magazine.

     

    Big Table

     

    Burroughs’ involvement with Big Table has become familiar, but only in terms of its publication of the Naked Lunch “Episodes.” The untold story of its relation to The Yage Letters is, however, of equal significance for the relation between magazine and book publications.

     

    After the suppression of The Chicago Review, the inception of the new magazine was, as Peter Michelson observed, “a stunning counterattack” against the academy that in turn “helped give shape to the Beat and Black Mountain ‘revolution’ in poetics” (350, 353). The “Chicago Review-cum-Big Table war” was therefore a decisive cultural moment, showing how the Beats “even turned apparent tactical defeats into strategic victory” (346). Big Table was also exemplary of the “kamikaze” little magazine that realized a specific function and then folded (after five issues). As Peter Martin notes, “it began as a controversial magazine, publishing suppressed material, but did not shift its emphasis or settle into a less incendiary editorial policy” (683). Burroughs’ praise was certainly emphatic. When he saw the Spring 1958 issue of Chicago Review, he told its editor, Irving Rosenthal, that it was “way ahead of these dead, academic periodicals like Partisan Review and Hudson Review,” and to be compared only with BMR.[21] In November 1959 he told editor Paul Carroll that “Big Table is the best in the field.”[22]

     

    Controversy was essential to Big Table‘s existence, and it is important to recall, as Martin does, that the first issue “was itself banned in March 1959, and more than four hundred copies were impounded by the Post Office” (683). In a lawsuit supported by the ACLU, on 5 July, judge Julius J. Hoffman ruled that the ban declaring Big Table “non-mailable” was null and void, and this second attempt at censorship ironically ensured the new magazine’s celebrity and the sale of its 10,000 print run. It also established the publishing context for the letters presented under the title “In Quest of Yage.” That is to say, the specific epistolary character of Burroughs’ text took on potential meaning insofar as it appeared in a magazine not only created from and then subjected to earlier acts of censorship involving publication of his fiction, but specifically in relation to censorship of this material distributed through the mail.

     

    Figure 2
    Figure 2: Image from Big Table 1.
    Image used by permission of William S. Burroughs Trust and Estate.

     

    The reception of “In Quest of Yage” in Big Table is determined by its immediate bibliographical context in unique ways. In contrast to the material’s presentation in other magazines or in The Yage Letters, here it is packaged with introductory texts by other authors, Paul Bowles and Alan Ansen, and with photographs of Burroughs by Ginsberg. Although Bowles’s essay, entitled “Burroughs in Tangier,” makes no direct reference to the letters, he does introduce them by way of a memorable personal portrait of Burroughs that must have had some bearing on the text’s reception.[23] Ansen’s essay, however, is the more precisely determining and significant. The first issue of Big Table had trailed the appearance of his “critical and biographical study” (2), and this substantial essay–over a third the length of “In Quest of Yage”–duly appears, before the Bowles piece. Ansen’s essay gives a compelling account of Burroughs’ career based on first-hand knowledge, but sets up for the reader a whole series of specific expectations about the letters that are–emphatically–not met. For example, according to Ansen, the letters describe Panama, introduce the character Allerton, and feature five “routines” (“Friendly Finance,” “Billy Bradshinkel,” “Roosevelt after Inauguration,” “the Zen Routine,” and the “most ambitious routine of all . . . a vision of ‘The Composite City’” [40]). Since there is no account of Panama, no Allerton, and not one routine in “In Quest of Yage,” the reader could only be left baffled, as if Ansen had described a different text altogether. The short explanation for the confusion is that nothing in Big Table clarifies for the reader that the six letters published here are actually part of a larger whole. But the view in retrospect–for readers of The Yage Letters–is, if anything, even more confusing, because the “whole” publication would still not match the text Ansen describes. It is just as well that Ferlinghetti did not take up Ginsberg’s suggestion to use Ansen’s essay–since it “describes the letters”–as an appendix for the City Lights edition.[24] However, the mismatch in Big Table does provide invaluable insights for critics into the fluid state of Burroughs’ manuscripts, since the reference to Allerton establishes the surprising overlap between “Yage” and “Queer” in the mid-1950s, while the inclusion of the “Friendly Finance” routine confirms that the “Epilogue” added to Queer in 1985 (where the routine appears) originally belonged to “Yage.” Another “In Search of Yage” becomes suddenly visible, one entirely different from the version eventually published.

     

    Finally, what of the text made by the letters themselves? Since “In Quest of Yage” comprises the fourth, fifth, sixth, seventh, tenth, and eleventh letters in the whole sequence of “In Search of Yage,” the reader inevitably confronts gaps in the narrative chronology. Thus the first letter–dated “February 28, 1953”–begins with Burroughs on his “way back to Bogota” (44), even though we’ve not seen him go there in the first place. Likewise, Doc Schindler is mentioned in the “March 3” letter, as if we had already been introduced to him (which happens in the second letter of “In Search of Yage”). On the other hand, the final letter, of “July 8,” makes similar references to “the Naval Lieutenant” and “the furniture salesman” (62)–and these are never explained in the whole sequence either. In other words, the very fact of epistolary presentation makes it easy to naturalize such gaps or slips as generic textual features, even to interpret them as signs of authenticity. This appearance is aided by the text’s presentation here–by “William S. Burroughs”–and it is noticeable that all the letters are signed “William” or “Bill”–none “Lee”–so avoiding (very likely deliberately) the contradictory signals about literary authorship and epistolary authenticity given in “In Search of Yage” within The Yage Letters.

     

    Kulchur

     

    Where Black Mountain Review was the poetry magazine of an experimental College in North Carolina, and Big Table had emerged as an alternative to the censored press run by the University of Chicago, Kulchur, under the financial patronage of Lita Horlick, was formed in 1960 as “a determinedly New York publication” (Burns 41), with an intellectual outlook of “high seriousness and wide-ranging interest” that included the Beats (Clay and Phillips 85). For Gilbert Sorrentino, “Kulchur most definitely reflected the close of a literary era that had begun in about 1950 and found its first voice in Black Mountain Review,” and (echoing Kerouac’s prediction) in his estimation it “must be considered one of the great magazines of the twentieth century, an authoritative voice, as important as The Little Review, The Dial, transition” (315, 311).

     

    Figure 3
    Figure 3: Image from Kulchur 3.
    Image used by permission of William S. Burroughs Trust and Estate.

     

    Predictably then, in issue number 3, Burroughs’ “In Search of Yage” appeared in familiar company, alongside poems by Ginsberg and Olson, and texts by Kerouac and Bowles. And, as with Big Table, Burroughs’ text also appeared here in the context of his own work’s publication in an earlier issue. In fact, the relations between texts in Kulchur are far more significant, since the text that appeared in number 1–“The Conspiracy”–was Burroughs’ unique, explicit fictional development of his interest in yagé, here described as an elixir of creative power and a weapon of political resistance. This would have set the Kulchur reader up to be disappointed, since the five letters presented here make almost no reference to yagé, let alone to its vital role in global conspiracies.

     

    The letters in Kulchur are directly introduced by a short editorial note that acknowledges their relation to “others, already published–BIG TABLE 2,” claiming that, together, “they constitute a collection that will one day appear as a book, under the title ‘In Search of Yage’” (7). Of course, when that one day came, the book that appeared would not bear this title, since by then “In Search of Yage” had itself become a part in a larger whole. However, the note at least explains the otherwise perplexing gap in the chronology of the letters–after three long letters, all dated within two weeks of each other, the sequence cuts from “January 30” to “May 12” and from Pasto to Lima, with no journey in between–a gap, this time, too large to naturalize.

     

    In the structure of “In Search of Yage” published in The Yage Letters, the letters here are the first, second, third, eighth and ninth. So, putting the selections from Big Table and Kulchur together, a reader can now interleave the two separate blocks of text used in each magazine to construct the proper sequence. Or the reader could do so, if a footnote to the last letter, “May 23” (1953), didn’t direct readers to yet another text in yet another magazine: “‘The Routine’ appears in The Floating Bear (#9), distributed solely by mailing list” (18). Adding to the bibliographical confusion, the routine referred to in the letter–“Roosevelt after Inauguration”–appeared in The Floating Bear four issues after that magazine had already published another element soon to appear in The Yage Letters (Burroughs’ letter of June 21, 1960), written some seven years after the routine; yet again, the publishing history of the text contrives to scramble the chronology of its parts.

     

    The Floating Bear

     

    Although its contents and readership partly overlapped those of quarterlies like Kulchur, The Floating Bear, at first distributed semi-monthly, was an altogether different type of magazine. Edited by Diane di Prima and Leroi Jones, and published out of a West Village bookshop’s storeroom, the Bear was a key player in the avant-garde “mimeograph revolution” of the early 1960s. Peter Martin describes one reason for its importance: “The subtitle ‘A Newsletter’ is the key to The Floating Bear‘s chief contribution to literature of the 1960s; it was a newsletter, a speedy line of communication between experimental poets” (699). Di Prima elaborates on this aspect, noting that it “was like writing a letter to a bunch of friends” and that she and Jones had a common “sense of urgency of getting the technological advances of, say, Olson, into the hands of, say, Creeley, within two weeks, back and forth” (x-xi). Her comments give rise to two ironies, the first of which is that, performing a broadly similar function, Black Mountain Review had actually “developed from the friendship in daily correspondence between Creeley and Black Mountain Rector Charles Olson” (Clay and Phillips 107)–which made all the more appropriate their magazine’s publication of Burroughs’ “July 10, 1953” letter. The second irony concerns the material appearance in Floating Bear of the two Burroughs texts that would later appear in The Yage Letters.

     

    Figure 4
    Figure 4: Image from The Floating Bear 5.
    Image used by permission of William S. Burroughs Trust and Estate.

     

    To begin with, the readers of Burroughs’ June 21, 1960 letter in Bear number 5 (April 1961) would not have been able to identify the “Allen” to whom it is addressed as Ginsberg. More importantly, nor would they have been able to reconstruct, or even imagine, the biographical epistolary context that gave rise to Burroughs’ letter, since nothing in it clarifies that Ginsberg had urgently asked him for advice about his own yagé experiences. Contrary to the magazine’s aim of reciprocation, here the reader is given only one half of an exchange of letters–indeed, is presented with the reply, without knowing what prompted it (and needing to wait two-and-a-half years to find out). The result is that Burroughs’ already enigmatic letter–a cryptically written prescription for Ginsberg to use his new cut-up method as “Help”–appears more mysterious still.

     

    Figure 5
    Figure 5: Image from The Floating Bear 5.
    Image used by permission of William S. Burroughs Trust and Estate.

     

    The bibliographical environment does, however, produce a direct context for Burroughs’ letter.[25] For it is immediately preceded by “OUT SHOW WINDOW AND WE’RE PROUD OF IT.” Although there is no acknowledgement, this short cut-up text is almost exactly the same as “FROM SAN DIEGO UP TO MAINE” that had appeared in Minutes to Go (1960)–the launching manifesto of the cut-up method, to which Burroughs’ letter actually directs Ginsberg. In other words, Floating Bear expanded on Burroughs’ letter by juxtaposing it with a specific and presumably relevant example of his cut-up practice. On the other hand, while the text illustrates and so helps disseminate what Di Prima called “technological advances” in literary technique, it does absolutely nothing to clarify the therapeutic function cryptically claimed in the letter.

     

    The same can be said of The Yage Letters, where Burroughs’ 1960 letter is followed by his cut-up text, “I Am Dying, Meester?” and where, once again, any demonstration of the method’s therapeutic function remains obscure. However, while a direct relation between Burroughs’ letter and “I Am Dying, Meester?” appears self-evident, the invitation to read the second text as an illustration of the method announced in the first is, in fact, the product of entirely contingent publication circumstances. For Burroughs’ decision to include “I Am Dying, Meester?” turns out to have preceded by some sixth months the plan to include his letter. The addition of this 1960 material therefore disguised and usurped the original intention, according to which the cut-up text from 1963 followed sequentially and logically after the 1953 letters of “In Search of Yage.”

     

    Finally, the material features of the text as it appears in Floating Bear are of particular importance. Ben Lee argues that the “willfully haphazard production” of the newsletter resulted in an improvisatory “slapdash aesthetic” that was “meant to mirror the sort of ‘open form’ its contributors favored in poetry and prose” (379, 375, 374). The low-cost mimeo format determined the physical appearance of the text on the page. Di Prima was specifically conscious of this point in relation to the Bear‘s use of 8-1/2″ x 11″ paper and standard typewriter font: “Almost everybody writes on typewriters, and I felt that a lot of what they were doing had to do with the shape of their page” (xi). Burroughs’ letter has, therefore, an appearance of authenticity that is entirely appropriate: at first sight, the letter printed in the Bear appears to be an exact facsimile of his original manuscript, down to his use of sections in block capitals and unusual layout. On closer inspection, it proves not to be, and the autograph signature reproduced here isn’t in Burroughs’ distinctive hand. This is also entirely appropriate given the letter’s cut-up critique of authorship (“My Voice. Whose Voice?”) and the fact that the signature is not actually for Burroughs’ name but for that of his spiritual patron, “Hassan Sabbah” (Yage Letters 59, 61). Nevertheless, it is a nice irony that by far the cheapest of the little magazines should have been the only one to approximate the material form of Burroughs’ letters, and that this particular letter should have been the only one to make decisive use of formal features.

     

    As for the appearance of “Routine: Roosevelt after Inauguration” in Bear number 9, no contemporary reader would likely have made any connection between it and the texts published in number 5. Although it is undated, readers familiar with Burroughs’ new cut-up methods would surely have recognized it as writing from the previous decade. Then again, there’s no obvious internal evidence for any connection to his various “Yage” publications, and it appears a self-contained and free-standing satire. This, the first part of the “Yage” manuscript to be completed (in May 1953), would be the very last part to be included in “In Search of Yage,” only appearing in the third edition, twenty-five years after the first. The reason for this delay was censorship exercised by the British printers in 1963, itself the renewal of an earlier act of censorship on the routine’s appearance in Floating Bear. Fittingly, this act had inserted the routine (back) into an epistolary context, since the censorship was directed against the magazine’s distribution to its mailing list. It came about when a copy sent to one man on the list, who was in a New Jersey prison, was intercepted by the censor. In October 1961, Di Prima and Jones were arrested for using the mail to disseminate obscene materials and, although cleared, their confrontation with the forces of censorship was certainly noted by Lawrence Ferlinghetti.[26]

     

    City Lights

     

    City Lights was set up in the mid-1950s as an independent publisher closely aligned with the emerging alternative poetry magazine culture, a position that led Ferlinghetti to fight the same battles against censorship (he supported Big Table, for example, and had famously gone to court over his publication of Ginsberg’s Howl and Other Poems in 1957). The cultural identity and social meaning of The Yage Letters was, therefore, decisively shaped by its publication as a City Lights paperback. City Lights’ ideal status as a publisher of Burroughs’ “Yage” material is evidenced by the dialogue conducted throughout the mid-1950s and early ’60s between Ginsberg and Ferlinghetti concerning the destiny of Burroughs’ manuscripts. Although, in September 1953, Ginsberg initially contacted Malcolm Cowley at Viking about “Yage,” he would soon begin to exert what he referred to as “golden pressure” on Ferlinghetti, driven by his belief that the expatriate Burroughs needed to be published not just in an American context but in one specifically determined as Beat.[27] Ferlinghetti, for his part, resisted Ginsberg’s lobbying, not only turning down the chance to publish the material in the banned issue of The Chicago Review simply because it had been censored–unlike Maurice Girodias, he was no opportunist–but also resisting for almost six years Ginsberg’s repeated suggestion he publish “Yage.”

     

    Burroughs had returned from South America in September 1953 and moved into Ginsberg’s East 7th Street apartment, where they worked together on his “Yage” and “Queer” manuscripts. So far as “Yage” was concerned, Ginsberg knew that no one “in the publishing business in N. Y. will find it an acceptable commodity.”[28] From the outset, Ginsberg expected censorship problems, and a decade later he even anticipated self-censorship by Burroughs in the run-up to the City Lights publication, asking Ferlinghetti: “Are you sure Burroughs’ Yage mss. is same as was published in Kulchur & Float bear & Big Table? Hope he hasn’t edited too much.”[29] Ginsberg’s anxiety was misplaced–and for a reason that reveals something fundamental about the editing history of The Yage Letters. The fact is that Ferlinghetti never saw an original manuscript, because Burroughs no longer had one; instead, he simply collected into a whole those parts that were in print. As the internal evidence of transcription errors carried over suggests, and as the City Lights editorial files at Berkeley prove, “In Search of Yage” was materially based on those texts already published in the little magazines,[30] and these were accepted by all concerned to define the complete text.[31]

     

    Now at last we can settle the question of agency and authorship with respect of the material that did (and did not) appear in The Yage Letters, by answering the whodunnit question posed by the censorship claims made by Mullins and Martinez. The short answer is that both of them are wrong, because neither Burroughs nor Ferlinghetti “edited out” anything. Martinez’s claim that Ferlinghetti “cleaned-up” Burroughs’ “original letters” for publication is based on two false assumptions: firstly, that the publisher was dealing with the manuscripts of Burroughs’ real correspondence (as later published in The Letters of William S. Burroughs, 1945-1959), which is contradicted by the fact that his “Yage” manuscript was entirely separate (and mostly not even based on real letters), and secondly, that Ferlinghetti worked on any Burroughs manuscript at all, whereas actually, apart from the two Ginsberg letters, everything in The Yage Letters derived directly from earlier magazine publications. If any censorship had affected “In Search of Yage,” it would have been the responsibility of Creeley, Carroll, or Horlick. In fact, the racially “offensive” passage probably was in the lost “Yage” manuscript Burroughs completed in December 1953; if so, it was contained in a separate, fabricated letter (dated “June 23/28,” Pucallpa) that wasn’t available to Ferlinghetti precisely because this (and one other, dated “July 20,” Mexico) had not previously been offered for magazine publication.[32] Rather than a deliberate act of last-minute editing, what took place was a prolonged, messy process of piecemeal manuscript cannibalization, an operation conducted long-distance, first from Tangier and then from Paris, always mediated by Ginsberg, and shaped decisively by other publishing contingencies in North Carolina, Chicago, New York and San Francisco.

     

    To a striking degree, the City Lights publication was determined by multiple and divided agencies and by contingent factors, affecting not just “In Search of Yage” but also the work’s other two sections. Thus, it turns out that Burroughs’ June 21, 1960 letter was only included on the suggestion of Ginsberg, six months before publication, and he only suggested it because Ferlinghetti had just then (by “a real stroke of luck”)[33] stumbled across, via a third party, Ginsberg’s June 10, 1960 letter, to which Burroughs’ letter was the reply. In other words, Ginsberg’s efforts to get “In Search of Yage” published brought about the creation of an entirely new section of 1960 letters, “Seven Years Later,” written by both men but never intended for the book. Paradoxically, the book that Ginsberg had been promoting on Burroughs’ behalf was itself radically transformed by his efforts. Burroughs approved the addition of the two 1960 letters, or perhaps simply acquiesced. He did not entirely surrender authorial control to Ginsberg and Ferlinghetti, however, overruling both of them when each expressed doubts about the inclusion of “I Am Dying, Meester?” as the final text. And yet, even here, Burroughs had the last word in the book only in a paradoxical fashion. After the cut-up text, there appears his name–but only because John Sankey, Ferlinghetti’s London printer, suggested it should be there, since otherwise the “reader cannot see if this is by Ginsberg or Burroughs.”[34] The very name of the author thus reflects the determinism of a social agency.

     

    In the “Roosevelt” routine–a text only admitted into The Yage Letters in 1988 after a contingent publishing career determined by acts of censorship–there’s a passage where Burroughs fantasizes the post of Congressional Librarian being awarded to a “transvestite lizzie” who “barred the male sex from the premises” so that “a world-famous professor of philology suffered a broken jaw at the hands of a bull dyke when he attempted to enter the Library” (36). Given Burroughs’ own experience of being barred from fulfillment by those institutions regulating sexuality and literature, this vision of aggressive hybrid creatures taking over the academy and roughing up the venerable authority of philology seems strangely prophetic.

     

    Naked Lunch Restored

     

    In a comprehensive critical review of D.C. Greetham’s attempt to postmodernize editing theory, Paul Eggert contests his verdict in Theories of the Text that we now live in “post-philological days,” arguing that “the moment of editorial theory is over” (331). Then again, Greetham had himself questioned the value of McGann’s influential theory of social text editing (“I am by no means sure I understand exactly what is a socialized text” [406]), expressing the central doubt about the practical value of theory with which Thomas Tanselle began his millennial review of textual criticism, noting how “a focus on texts as social products came to characterize the bulk of discussion of textual theory, if not editions themselves” (1; my emphasis). “What we need now” is not more theory, Eggert concludes, but “the practical responses: the reports from the editorial trenches” (332).

     

    Before concluding my own “report” from the front-line of Burroughs editing, what of the “Restored” Naked Lunch as a response to Loranger’s call for a postmodern, hypertext edition? Although it has many other merits, the edition produced by Grauerholz and Miles overlooks the value of her analysis for presenting, if not an interactive hypertext, then at least a text that (to cite the quotation in her title) “spill[s] off the page in all directions.” Most simply, it does this by providing a contents page that locates each of the book’s many sections. Since one of the most distinctive features of Naked Lunch is the extraordinary difficulty every reader experiences in finding their way around it, the effect–to stop the words spilling off the page–is, in Loranger’s terms, “a grave editorial sin” (23).

     

    More substantially, the “Restored” edition falls short in theoretical and practical respects. As Eggert notes, even “if there is no stoutly defensible philosophical grounding for editing,” practice can at least “be self-consciously aware that its operations are necessarily contextualised by the present” (331). The “restored” Naked Lunch misses this opportunity because, while it does describe and reflect on its own workings, there’s almost no development either in terms of theoretical models or in terms of practical detail. Thus in their “Editors’ Note,” Grauerholz and Miles observe–unlike Loranger–that the texts of the 1959 Olympia and 1962 Grove Naked Lunch “are quite different” (234), but since they give no details, it remains unclear how a comparative descriptive analysis informed their editing practice. Equally, while both editors are well aware of the complex, contingent circumstances of the text’s production and publication, they do not position their work with respect to the old or the new “grails” of editing theory–put reductively, the single, intentional, originating authorial genius and the socially collaborative multitude of equally valid contributing agents.

     

    One especially fitting example should illustrate this editorial practice in Naked Lunch. In the “Editors’ Note,” the author’s “authority” is called upon to approve the removal of certain duplicate passages: “Miles once asked Burroughs if the repeated passages in the book were all intentional; Burroughs replied that they were there by mistake, caused by the rush to get the text to Girodias” (245). It might seem that the issue here is whether the editors should have chosen, as a matter of principle, a social rather than authorial model of agency, and let the repetitions stand. But it is also a question of which “repetition” should be cut. In “the market” section they remove the passage beginning “the room seems to shake and vibrate with motion” from what was its first appearance in the text. This material at the start of the section, however, reproduces the “July 10, 1953” letter as published in Black Mountain Review (minus its opening lines and with other minor differences). By deleting the passage in this context, rather than when it reappeared a few lines after this material, the editors overlook the longstanding integrity of the “Composite City” text as it had existed in its manuscript, magazine, and book publishing histories. The descriptive potentials of a socialized approach could have better guided the editors’ decisions, even if they were framed by a traditional theory of final authorial intentions.

     

    The Yage Letters Redux

     

    I have already argued that The Yage Letters is suited to a social text approach to editing because of the text’s bibliographical variability–both its external multiplicity (as Stillinger would term it) and also (adapting Bakhtin) its internal multiplicity–and because of the strong material parallels between its thematic and formal hybridity. In describing the publishing history of its various parts, I have made it possible to recognize the ways in which the published edition of The Yage Letters, in the very act of “restoring” these part-texts to their proper chronological place in the whole, also removed them from their social embedding and material histories. Those several histories in turn clarify that this “whole” was no more than the retrospective sum of the parts.

     

    In order to suggest the implications for editing of these acts of historical repression and recovery, I want to focus on perhaps the smallest possible concrete instance of editorial practice, one with minimal semantic value. In the text, certain letters have a comma while others have a colon to conclude the opening line of address (“Dear Allen:” etc.). Burroughs’ letters have seven colons and six commas, which looks like a simple matter of inconsistency in his use of epistolary formats. Since both the French and German editions of The Yage Letters standardize the use of the comma, the issue seems to be the appropriateness of editing for internal consistency. Given the heterogeneity of materials and the hybridity of the text overall, such homogenizing might seem a mistaken effort to resolve contradictions and unify dissonant parts into a singular whole. Equally, we might appeal to authorial practice to question such regularization. In the case of Burroughs’ letters, however, a striking fact emerges with exceptional clarity. Up until late 1959, Burroughs never used a colon to punctuate his address, but always a comma. After November 1959, he shifted–suddenly and almost completely–from comma to colon. Therefore, the use of the colon in his June 21, 1960 letter appears consistent with his letter-writing, while its use in six of his “1953” letters now appears inconsistent. The implication for any editing intervention seems clear.

     

    However, something else might be involved if a pattern were observable. The six 1953 letters that use colons are the fourth, fifth, sixth, seventh, tenth and eleventh letters in the sequence of “In Search of Yage.” In short, these were all the letters first published in Big Table. And of course the fact that this issue was published in Summer 1959 (before Burroughs changed his epistolary practice) establishes that the use of the colon in them cannot be attributed to Burroughs’ making belated revisions, but must be accounted for by the house style of the magazine’s editor, Paul Carroll.

     

    What, then, is the editorial upshot of unraveling this history of the comma and the colon? Should the 1953 colons be replaced by commas to bring the letters correctly into line with the author’s practice and to remove the “corruption” of Carroll’s editing? Or should the colons be retained for this very reason, since they are material traces carried over from the text’s original part-publication, evidence of the determinism of material history at the level of even the smallest bibliographic code? Allowing the contradiction in punctuation to stand across the text of “In Search of Yage” becomes, then, a way to respect internal units of consistency by acknowledging the separate authority of the part-publications. In that case, the new edition would make no change, and it may seem a metaphysical distinction to have arrived at this conclusion by such a long and circuitous path. However, if we take up Tanselle’s argument for the “constructed” rather than “emended” text (“editors should not be thinking in terms of altering a particular existing text but of building up a new text, word by word and punctuation mark by punctuation mark, evaluating all available evidence at each step” [71]), then The Yage Letters Redux becomes the first edition to knowingly employ both forms of punctuation, guided by the larger aim to represent the multiple histories and composite agency of the text.

     

    Clearly, there’s no need to detail the micro-editing decisions made for Redux, but the descriptive analysis in previous sections should have demonstrated the validity of a practice informed by the full social and bibliographical life of the text in its multiple material histories. To give just the example involving the largest number of interventions; the third edition of 1988 made wholesale changes in accidentals and bibliographical codes, altering most visibly the first edition’s layout in twelve out of the fifteen letters. Here, a precise knowledge of the magazine formats establishes the arbitrary nature of these alterations, which are neither internally consistent nor motivated by being grounded in previously published versions (let alone manuscripts). But if the third edition (being the most complete) can still be used as the base text, should the first be used as the copy text in its accidentals? A socialized approach might suggest restoring the formats of the magazines rather than that of the first City Lights edition. This would bring differences in original codes to the foreground, to display rather than conceal the text’s multiple material histories. And yet there’s a distinction between removing arbitrary homogenizations (as in the punctuation of the French and German editions) and preventing a smooth, consistent reading by crudely maximizing heterogeneity to the extent, for example, of reproducing different typefaces to make visible the historicity and provenance of each part.

     

    In any event, there are practical limits to such variability. What to do about layout features particular to one bibliographical format that cannot be carried over to another, such as the line spacing of letters manipulated to fit page size? Likewise, if social editing suggests a “diplomatic” documentation to reproduce the mimeograph qualities of Burroughs’ letter in The Floating Bear, then how is one to justify clear-text elsewhere? Then again, the key practical limits, the most materially determining consequences of the collaborative agency of publication, are those set by the publisher. Although immune to theory, commercial publishers work with the practical contingencies of the world, and it would be ironic and naïve for a social text approach to forget it. Take, for example, the label “definitive”: discredited in theory as the chimera of positivist philology (for implying an autonomous, timeless text that exists beyond the historical contingencies of its own making), it returns in practice if the publisher has the last say on the title and the sales department wants it on the cover (see my Introduction to Junky: the definitive text of ‘Junk’), or if the marketing term seems useful to promote the book on the publisher’s website). And so for The Yage Letters, as a City Lights publication, the challenge remains how best to exploit the rich descriptive and interpretive opportunities of a social text approach while still retaining the reader-friendly clear-text demanded by publishing.

     

    A new edition can advance interpretive criticism by materializing the text’s neglected histories of formal, thematic, and bibliographical “space time travel,” while being itself part of that historical process and not its conclusion. As Eggert acknowledges, “one does one’s best. The result is practical, not ideal; useful and usable, not perfect” (334). Burroughs himself knew the “fix” is never final, even if, at the time, that is what he wanted to or did believe, which is surely why he did not include in his text the verdict he reached in July 1953 about the object of his own grail quest: “Yage is it” (Letters 180).

     

    Notes

     

    I would like to thank the Arts and Humanities Research Council and Keele University for generously providing the leave needed to carry out the research for this essay, and Jim McLaverty for giving supportive feedback.

     

    For permissions to publish material and for their personal assistance, I want to thank Anthony Bliss (Curator, Rare Books and Literary Manuscripts, The Bancroft Library, University of California, Berkeley); Richard Clement (Special Collections Librarian, Kenneth Spencer Research Library, University of Kansas); Bernard Crystal (Head of Rare Books and Manuscripts, Columbia University, New York); and Sandra Roscoe and Jessica Westphal (Special Collections Research Center, University of Chicago Library).

     

    1. Compromising precision for the sake of convenience, I ignore the fact that the definite article in the title was only dropped after the first edition of 1959.

     

    2. On closer inspection, paragraphs Loranger identifies as having been “deleted” from Big Table (105 and 107) were actually moved elsewhere in Naked Lunch ([New York: Grove, 1966; Black Cat edition] 160).

     

    3. The Olympia edition also had two hundred more words that did not appear in later editions.

     

    4. Like many other critics, Loranger confusingly refers to the two dozen separate sections of Naked Lunch–divisions of the text that, inconsistently in the first edition, were given their own titles–as “routines,” a term Burroughs only ever applied to self-contained material of up to a few pages in length.

     

    5. Equally, knowledge of the manuscript history would have changed dramatically Loranger’s analysis of the genetic relation between material appearing in Big Table and in Naked Lunch where she sees the texts “developing” from magazine to book–“Burroughs makes extensive revisions of all but two episodes” (8); in fact, in almost all cases it can be shown that the “revised” material was not new at all, but was already present in his 1958 “Interzone” manuscript, from which Burroughs had made selections for Big Table designed to avoid American censorship. Although she employs appropriate caveats here (“It is reasonable to assume” [9]), the detailed tables that document her comparative analysis give an impression of more materially-grounded rigor. For example, in her Table 2, “Revision from Big Table to Naked Lunch,” Loranger describes the relationship between “Episode 6” in Big Table and the “Islam Incorporated” section of Naked Lunch, noting “additional material on 147, 148-52 including Sample Menu.” Far from being new material written in 1959, all this material was in the 1958 “Interzone” manuscript.

     

    6. Loranger refers only to “cosmetic changes–the numbered episodes in Big Table become unnumbered, titled routines in Naked Lunch” (8).

     

    7. For my terms here, see Young’s excellent article. There are signs that the field of Burroughs textual scholarship is starting to expand. Most notably, Davis Schneiderman has produced strong, culturally informed materialist readings in two recent conference papers: “Everybody’s Got Something to Hide Except for Me and My Lawsuit: DJ Danger Mouse, William S. Burroughs, and the Politics of Grey Tuesday” (Collage as Cultural Practice Conference, University of Iowa [March 2005]), and “If I hold a conch shell to my ear, do I owe a royalty to Neptune? Scribbles on the a-history of pla(y)giarism” (Association of Writing Programs Conference, Vancouver, British Columbia [April 2005]).

     

    8. This is a case I have made with reference to the radical errors in bibliographic chronology that led another of Burroughs’ otherwise finest critics, Robin Lydenberg, to get backwards the relationship between “early” and “late” texts in her deconstructive analysis of his cut-up novels. See my Secret of Fascination, 244-45.

     

    9. Junkie published in “unexpurgated” form as Junky in 1977; I quote from the re-edited 2003 text; see my introduction for a detailed publishing history.

     

    10. The relation seems especially self-evident in the 1978 German edition, which prints the two books back-to-back so that the last page of Junkie, with the words “Vielleicht ist Yage der endgültige Fix” (206), is followed by the first page of “Auf der Suche nach Yage” (confusingly using the title of just one section to identify the whole).

     

    11. Although all editions carried a note acknowledging these part-publications, full details were never given, and were given sometimes only to be obscured (e.g., the second edition of 1975 did give full bibliographical details of the “July 10, 1953” letter it now included, but by the eighth printing [February 1978] the information had been reduced to read only as follows: “A 1953 letter was in Black Mountain Review No. 7″).

     

    12. The phrase comes from Burroughs’ letter to Mel Hardiment, 23 Jan. 1961 (The Ginsberg Circle: Burroughs-Hardiment Collection, Kenneth Spencer Research Library, University of Kansas).

     

    13. See my “Cutting Up Politics.”

     

    14. Here and throughout, I cite the date of each letter from “In Search of Yage” as if it were the title of a text precisely in order to make clear their fictional status as dated letters.

     

    15. Ironically, Ginsberg’s contribution, his poem “America,” actually names Burroughs.

     

    16. As Ginsberg recalled, this specific text was actually “the seed of Naked Lunch” (Lotringer 807). The letter’s compositional history can also be seen as another materialization of its “space time travel” theme. For while the bulk of the text dated “July 10, 1953” does derive from Burroughs’ real letter from Lima of the same date, the final paragraphs–from “Followers of obsolete unthinkable trades” to “waiting for a live one”–were composed in Tangier, two years later.

     

    17. For example, the account of a literal trip “across the Pacific in an outrigger canoe to Easter Island” returns the reader to the yagé trip in Mocoa (in the “April 15” letter), where a hut seems to take on “an archaic far-Pacific look with Easter Island heads” (44, 24), while the Composite City, where “the untended dead are eaten by vultures in the street,” echoes the gross sight in Esmeraldas, Ecuador (in the “May 5” letter) of “vultures eating a dead pig in the main drag” (45, 31).

     

    18. Indeed, agency and authority are interrogated as a coded joke in the very first line –“Panama clung to our bodies — Probably cut –” (65)–which takes the reader back to the first letter of “In Search of Yage”: “I wonder what a Panamanian boy would be like. Probably cut” (4). The repetition of the phrase is at once fully motivated–a precisely contrived pun on the cutting-up of physical and textual bodies, deconstructing their integrity–and yet called into doubt by the very notion of “probability” that governs the production of meaning in the cut-up text. An intertextual analysis of “I Am Dying, Meester?” would also include its extensive overlap with material in the “Where the Awning Flaps” chapter of The Soft Machine (2nd and 3rd editions).

     

    19. Interestingly, at about the same time, Burroughs did make a cut-up version of the whole “July 10, 1953” letter, possibly intended for The Yage Letters.

     

    20. “Tell Allen the piece of Burroughs I suggest for Black Mountain [Review] would be the whole vision of the Yage City” (Selected Letters 586). It seems Ginsberg initially considered offering Creeley another letter as well, as evidenced by a version of his “January 25, 1953” letter headed “2 letters from Bk III of Naked Lunch by Wm. Seward Burroughs (pseud. is William Lee)” (Burroughs Collection, Columbia University). In contrast to the “July 10, 1953” letter, this one is clearly part of an ongoing epistolary narrative.

     

    21. Letter, Burroughs to Rosenthal, 17 May 1958 (The Chicago Review Papers, University of Chicago).

     

    22. Letter, Burroughs to Carroll, 14 Nov. 1959 (Paul Carroll Papers, Series 2, University of Chicago).

     

    23. Unlike Ansen’s essay, Bowles’s was not commissioned by Big Table, and was, in fact, originally written as a letter to the poet John Montgomery.

     

    24. Letter, Ginsberg to Ferlinghetti, 19 Sept. 1962 (City Lights Records 1955-1970, Correspondence Files, University of California, Berkeley) [hereafter CLR, UCB].

     

    25. There is also an indirect context, since, before the cut-up text, there appears an undated letter from “Roi” (Jones) to “Diane” (Di Prima), in which he advances his understanding of Floating Bear as, precisely, “letters.”

     

    26. “Re ROUTINE, you were not very happy about it yourself, especially the name Roosevelt, and we had already discussed some possible modifications from your own point of view before they [Scorpion, who refused to print the text] came along.” Letter, Sankey to Ferlinghetti, 8 Oct. 1963 (CLR, UCB).

     

    27. Letter, Ginsberg to Kerouac, 9 Oct. 1957 (Miles Collection, Columbia University).

     

    28. Letter, Ginsberg to Cowley, 10 Dec. 1953 (Miles Collection, Columbia University).

     

    29. Letter, Ginsberg to Ferlinghetti, Feb. 1963 (CLR, UCB).

     

    30. The internal evidence shows the presence in the City Lights text of numerous transcription errors carried over from the magazine publications. In the City Lights Editorial Files, together with proofs and long galleys, Carton 1 contains the relevant pages cut from Big Table 2 and Kulchur 3, marked up with instructions (e.g., “Printer: Begin here”) (CLR, UCB).

     

    31. “Have you thought again of printing Burroughs’ collected So American letters – they’re all available in Big Table, Kulchur + Floating Bear — It would make a nice small prose book + it’s all there in print now.” Letter, Ginsberg to Ferlinghetti, 26 Jun. 1962 (CLR, UCB). Italics added.

     

    32. The “July 20” letter overlapped extensively with the text later published as the Epilogue to Queer. Most of this material in turn derives from Burroughs’ original notebook; see my introduction to The Latin American Notebook of William S. Burroughs (forthcoming from The Ohio State University Press).

     

    33. Letter, Ferlinghetti to Ginsberg, 11 Jun. 1963 (Ginsberg Collection, Columbia University).

     

    34. Letter, Sankey to Ferlinghetti, 16 Oct. 1963 (CLR, UCB).

     

    Works Cited

     

    • Ansen, Alan. “Anyone Who Can Pick Up a Frying Pan Owns Death.” Big Table 2 (Summer 1959): 32-41.
    • Burns, Jim. “Kulchur.” Beat Scene 43 (Summer 2003): 38-41.
    • Burroughs, William S. “from Naked Lunch, Book III: In Search of Yage. ” Black Mountain Review 7 (Autumn 1957): 144-48.
    • —. “In Quest of Yage.” Big Table 2 (Summer 1959): 44-64.
    • —. “In Search of Yage.” Kulchur 3 (1961): 7-18.
    • —. Junkie, Auf der Suche nach Yahe, Naked Lunch, Nova Express. Ed. and trans. Carl Weissner. Frankfurt: Zweitausendeins, 1978.
    • —. Junky: The ‘Definitive’ Text of ‘Junk’. Ed. Oliver Harris. New York: Penguin, 2003.
    • —. Letter (June 21, 1960). Floating Bear 5 (1961): 7-8.
    • —. The Letters of William S. Burroughs, 1945-1959. Ed. Oliver Harris. New York: Viking, 1993.
    • —. Naked Lunch: The Restored Text. Eds. James Grauerholz and Barry Miles. New York: Grove, 2003.
    • —. “Out Show Window and We’re Proud of It.” Floating Bear 5 (1961): 6.
    • —. “Routine: Roosevelt after Inauguration.” Floating Bear 9 (1961): 8-10.
    • Burroughs, William S., and Allen Ginsberg. The Yage Letters. San Francisco: City Lights, 1963; 1975; 1988.
    • Campbell, James. This Is the Beat Generation. London: Vintage, 2000.
    • Clay, Steve, and Rodney Phillips. A Secret Location on the Lower East Side: Adventures in Writing, 1960-1980. New York: Granary, 1998.
    • Clifford, James. The Predicament of Culture: Twentieth-Century Ethnography, Literature, and Art. Harvard: Harvard UP, 1988.
    • Creeley, Robert. “On Black Mountain Review.” The Little Magazine in America: A Modern Documentary History. Eds. Elliott Anderson and Mary Kinzie. New York: Pushcart, 1978: 248-61.
    • Di Prima, Diane. “Introduction.” The Floating Bear: A Newsletter, Numbers 1-37, 1961-1969. Eds. Di Prima and LeRoi Jones. La Jolla: Laurence McGilvery, 1973: vii-xviii.
    • Eggert, Paul. “These Post-Philological Days.” Text: An Interdisciplinary Annual of Textual Studies. Vol. 15. Eds. W. Speed Hill and Edward Burns. Ann Arbor: U of Michigan P, 2003: 323-36.
    • Frankel, Nicholas. “The Hermeneutic Value of Material Texts.” Rev. of George Bornstein, Material Modernism. Hill and Burns 350-60.
    • Greetham, D.C. Theories of the Text. Oxford: Oxford UP, 1999.
    • Harris, Oliver. “Cutting Up Politics.” Retaking the Universe: William S. Burroughs and the Global Order. Eds. Davis Schneiderman and Philip Walsh. London: Pluto, 2004: 175-200.
    • —. William Burroughs and the Secret of Fascination. Carbondale: Southern Illinois UP, 2003.
    • Kerouac, Jack. Selected Letters, 1940-1956. Ed. Ann Charters. New York: Viking, 1995.
    • Lee, Ben. “LeRoi Jones/Amiri Baraka and the Limits of Open Form.” African American Review 37.2-3 (Spring 2003): 371-87.
    • Loranger, Carol. “‘This Book Spill Off the Page in All Directions: What Is the Text of Naked Lunch?” Postmodern Culture (1999) 10.1. <http://muse.jhu.edu/journals/postmodern_culture/toc/pmc10.1.html>.
    • Lotringer, Sylvère, ed. Burroughs Live: The Collected Interviews of William S. Burroughs. Los Angeles: Semiotext(e), 2001.
    • Martin, Peter. “An Annotated Bibliography of Selected Little Magazines.” Anderson and Kinzie 666-750.
    • Martinez, Manuel Luis. Countering the Counterculture: Reading Postwar American Dissent from Jack Kerouac to Tomás Rivera. Madison: U of Wisconsin P, 2003.
    • Maynard, Joe, and Barry Miles. William S. Burroughs, A Bibliography, 1953-1973. Charlottesville: UP of Virginia, 1978.
    • Michelson, Peter. “On The Purple Sage, Chicago Review, and Big Table.” Anderson and Kinzie 340-75.
    • Morgan, Ted. Literary Outlaw: The Life and Times of William S. Burroughs. New York: Holt, 1988.
    • Mullins, Greg. Colonial Affairs: Bowles, Burroughs and Chester Write Tangier. Madison: U of Wisconsin P, 2002.
    • Skerl, Jennie. William S. Burroughs. Boston: Twayne, 1985.
    • Sorrentino, Gilbert. “Neon, Kulchur, etc.” Anderson and Kinzie 298-316.
    • Tanselle, Thomas. “Textual Criticism at the Millenium.” Studies in Bibliography 54. Ed. David L. Vander Meulen. Charlottesville: UP of Virginia, 2003: 1-80.
    • Walsh, Marcus. “Hypotheses, Evidence, Editing, and Explication.” Yearbook of English Studies 29 (1999): 24-42.
    • Watson, Steven. The Birth of the Beat Generation: Visionaries, Rebels, and Hipsters, 1944-1960. New York: Pantheon, 1995.
    • Young, John K. “Pynchon in Popular Magazines.” 44.4 (Summer 2003): 389-404.

     

  • Laurie Anderson’s Telepresence

    Eu Jin Chua

    The London Consortium
    eujinchuaemail@gmail.com

     

    Alter Egos

    Ventriloquism–the act of speaking through a surrogate body–is a frequent device in the work of American performance artist Laurie Anderson. In many of her installations and performances, Anderson herself does not speak as such–rather, she speaks through alter egos, usually technologically generated, who ventriloquize her stories and anecdotes. She frequently interposes a substitute persona between herself and her audience, and it is this which does the talking. Such surrogate personae are often vocally manipulated: in her performances, she frequently modulates her voice to play different characters (the masculine “voice of authority,” the squeaky voice of a child, the plaintive tones of “Mom” in her well-known 1981 hit song “O Superman,” and so on). Or they are musical instruments. Anderson, a classically trained violinist, has said that, in her performances, “the violin is the perfect alter ego. It’s the instrument closest to the human voice . . . I’ve spent a lot of time trying to teach the violin to talk” (Stories 33). But there are also more complete physical surrogates to whom Anderson transfers her voice. A list of Anderson’s physical alter egos might include the “digital clones” of the 1986 video series What You Mean We?, a literal ventriloquist’s dummy that played a scaled-down violin in Stories from the Nerve Bible (1992), and the animatronic parrot of the installation Your Fortune One $ (1996) that squawked non-sequiturs in a computer-generated voice at passing gallery-goers.1 In a commentary on this last work, Anderson says:

     

    As a talking artist, I’m always on the lookout for alter egos–surrogate speakers. And I’ve always been completely fascinated by parrots. . . . I spent a lot of time with my brother’s gray African parrot Uncle Bob. Uncle Bob has a vocabulary of about five hundred words. You’re never sure with Bob where the line is between repetitive babble and conscious communication. The more I listened to Bob the more it seemed like he could communicate emotion–cries and phrases that expressed loneliness, fear, sheer happiness–all with his extremely limited vocabulary. It made me realize how much human language is a combination of rote phrases and fortuitous invention, a complex mix of the things that can be said and the unsayable. (“Control Rooms” 128)

     

    Or to take the title of another one of Anderson’s famous songs, “language is a virus from outer space.” Which should also remind us that the list of Anderson’s alter egos could be expanded to include her policy of performing shows in the local native language when touring non-English-speaking countries–even when completely ignorant of the meaning of the words that issue from her mouth, thus effectively ventriloquizing herself through the mediation of a translator. On one notable occasion, Anderson stuttered through a show in Japanese, carefully pronouncing each sound phonetically, unaware that she had been tutored by a translator with a speech impediment.2 “My mouth is moving,” she said of the experience of performing concerts in French, “but I don’t really understand what I’m saying” (Goldberg, Laurie Anderson 60).

     

    The circuitous route from written words, to translation, to enunciation by a speaker not fluent in the language of the resulting translation, seems to emphasize the constitutive self-estrangement of the speaking subject. Here language speaks the subject rather than the other way around. Anderson’s alter egos speak through her uncannily: “She is the medium which so many incorporeal voices require in order to communicate with us, the body they temporarily assume” (Owens 123).

     

    At The Shrink’s

     

    One of Anderson’s earliest physical alter egos was a 1975 installation called At the Shrink’s. In a corner of the Holly Solomon Gallery in New York sat an eight-inch high figurine, a wee homunculus carved out of light. It was, as Anderson called it, “a fake hologram” (Goldberg, Laurie Anderson 54), a tiny Super-8 film projection of Anderson’s image cast on a clay “sculpture” that had been carefully molded to conform to the proportions of her filmed body. Leaning in close, you could hear the figure tell a story about trips to the analyst. The effect of this makeshift trompe-l’oeil would have been astonishing in its three-dimensionality, and indeed its strangeness was undiminished in a reworked, though largely unchanged version that I viewed at the Auckland City Art Gallery, New Zealand, in 2004 (see Figure 1 for the original 1975 version). Part of the point of this installation, said Anderson, was “to make someone else talk for me . . . it was a way of doing a performance without being there” (Goldberg, Laurie Anderson 54). It was a surrogate for the performance artist’s own body, parroting back words pre-recorded by the “real” Anderson.

     

    Figure 1
    Figure 1: At the Shrink’s
    Sculpture, Video Projector, DVD w/Audio
    1975/1997
    Used with permission of Laurie Anderson.

     

    At this very early stage in her career, Anderson had already become well-known for performing quirky one-woman spoken-word and musical recitals, delivered to audiences in galleries and alternative venues in New York and around the United States. But the conceit of At the Shrink’s–“doing a performance without being there”–meant that a key element of “performance art” as such was attenuated. After all, one of the most important notional definitions of performance is that it is predicated on the presence of both performer and audience in a particular time and particular space, on the embodied immediacy of the performance event, on “live gestures” (Goldberg, Performance Art 7). Peggy Phelan’s is perhaps the most sustained and unequivocal articulation of this definition of performance: “Performance’s only life is in the present. Performance cannot be saved, recorded, documented, or otherwise participate in the circulation of representations of representations: once it does so, it becomes something other than performance” (146). According to such a definition, At the Shrink’s can hardly be said to have been a performance. It was simply a played-back recording of a prior event, absorbed already into a system of reproduction, with the would-be singularity and immediacy of the original event mitigated. The difference between At the Shrink’s and a film recording of a performance screened in the “regular” way is the device of the “fake hologram.” By projecting the recording onto a three-dimensional form as opposed to a flat screen, it is understood that an effort is made to amplify the ostensibly attenuated “reality” of the film image. Better than a film projection, Anderson’s storyteller squarely took up space. The projected figure bulged into three-dimensions–less a projection than a manifestation, more present than a two-dimensional image yet less so than a solid live body.

     

    If the “three-dimensionalizing” device of At the Shrink’s can be read as an attempt to amplify the performance artist’s body to compensate for its loss in the filmic image, then one would expect Anderson’s live performances themselves to be in no need of this amplification. After all, the performer is right there on stage, temporally and spatially co-extensive with the audience. Yet, as we have already seen, the use of technologically or performatively generated alter egos in Anderson’s performances undoes any sense that the mode of address in these events is direct, singular and immediate. Anderson’s performative surrogates–her synthesized voices, her ventriloquist’s dummy, her video clones–insert a gap between the audience and the would-be authenticity and immediacy of the performer’s persona. Moreover, many of her songs and anecdotes take this very gap as their subject matter. Thus in the apostrophic device of the song “O Superman,” a mother speaks to her absent daughter through an answering machine. In “Language is a Virus from Outer Space,” language itself is the technological or ventriloquial apparatus that inserts itself into the would-be direct connection between speaker and audience. Both the form and content of Anderson’s performances have to do precisely with the rupturing of a desired repleteness and presence by the exteriority of a system or apparatus–whether this external apparatus is that of language or of technology. Describing the increasingly large-scale stage performances of the late 1970s and early 80s that would eventually become United States (1983), Craig Owens noted that although Anderson is physically present on stage in these shows, “she interrupts the fantasy of copresence that links performer and spectator by interposing electronic media between them” (123).

     

    She no longer performs directly for her audience, but only through an electronic medium. While the media literally magnify her presence, they also strip it from her. Her work thus extends and amplifies the feeling of estrangement that overcomes the performer who submits to a mechanical or electronic device: the film actor or recording artist. (123)

     

    In such a reading, technological aids–the film camera, sound recording–augment but also attenuate the body’s presence and immediacy. Anderson’s performances–with their technologically imparted tales of problems that arise in a world in which meaning in all its forms is technologically imparted–fragment and disperse any notion of an unmediated performative presence. This is a body of performance work which, because already internally riven by what Philip Auslander calls “mediatization,” seems to refute Phelan’s definition of performance as uncirculatable and present-to-itself.[3] Yet these performances enter into the condition of mediation precisely to interrogate and underscore the oppressiveness of such an estranged (and inescapable) condition, thus also bearing out Phelan’s compelling claim that any performance captured by mediation is one that is inevitably subject to the law and the Symbolic.

     

    We could say that the cause and the effect of such a fragmentation of presence, of such a rift in the fantasy of immediacy and origin, is precisely the production of doubles, alter egos, or doppelgangers. Anderson’s alter egos generate the feeling of estrangement that Owens describes, but they could also be understood as an effect of the constitutive estrangement that arises out of the subject’s dependence on the mechanical, the technological, or (in a word) the symbolic. After all, when the fantasy of singular self-presence is ruptured, what we get is degrees of otherness–doubles and doppelgangers.

     

    Escape By Hologram

     

    It is not this body, as produced in At the Shrink’s, of an “estranged” performer “submitting” to a technological apparatus, that I want to discuss in this article, however, but another one that crystallizes in a more remarkable way the relation of technological and symbolic otherness into subjectivity. In 1998, twenty-three years after At the Shrink’s, Anderson repeated the device of the “fake hologram” in a new installation–but with differences (see Figure 2).

     

    Figure 2
    Figure 2: Image from Dal Vivo
    Multimedia installation
    Fondazione Prada, Milan (1998)
    Used with permission of Laurie Anderson.

     

    For one thing, the projected figure was now life-size. For another, the projection in this case was not that of a film, but of a live cable telecast. Thus, where At the Shrink’s was temporally distanced in the sense that it was a film recording–an event mechanically reproduced and thus “delayed,” playing itself out after the fact–this later work, Dal Vivo, closed up that gap in time. The title, Dal Vivo, Italian for “live” (as in “live telecast”), played on the multiple meanings of the word–life-like, life-size, live. Also “life sentence.” For the subject of this “fake hologram” was not Anderson this time but–significantly and extraordinarily–an inmate at a high security prison, convicted of “aggravated homicide,” among other crimes, and sentenced to remain there for much of the rest of his life.[4] A camera picked up the image of the man sitting in his cell in the San Vittore prison several miles away and transmitted it into the darkened exhibition space of the Prada Foundation in Milan where the work was installed. The prisoner, one Santino Stefanini, understood his participation in the installation as a “virtual escape” (and indeed he was selected, out of all other candidates for the job, at least partly owing to the fact that this conception of the installation as “virtual escape” was important to Anderson’s own conception of her project) (Anderson, “Some Backgrounds” 31). The spectacle in the gallery must have been strange and uncanny indeed, an immobile human figure decorporealized into shimmering scanlines, yet incorporating all the real time twitches and involuntary movements that must have resulted from the necessary hours of seated immobility. A court of law deemed the presence of this man unsuitable for society, but there he was, apparently having re-entered it–if only by sending out a harmless electronic substitute, a doppelganger, incapable of further transgression. Germano Celant, in the monograph published to accompany the exhibition, describes this spectacle as an apparition both “marvelous and terrifying” (“Miracle in Milan” 18).[5]

     

    Why is this electronic figure uncanny? Why so marvelous and terrifying? This may seem like a rather unnecessary question given the immediately apparent force of the installation, but it is one that bears asking in order to unpack its effect. For after all, the technological logic of Dal Vivo is simply the more or less ordinary one of live television. At the Shrink’s too, now that we mention it, depends on nothing more than cinematic projection. In the latter work, as we have already seen, part of the strangeness of the projected figurine derives from its “fleshing out” in three-dimensions by means of the fake hologram device. So too with Dal Vivo–the image is projected onto a clay “statue,” thus also amplifying the sense of bodily presence. But with the addition of greater size and “liveness,” we understand this sense of presence and immediacy to be doubly magnified. The technological basis of Dal Vivo may be simply that of television, but, in the combination of liveness with material heft, it is an exaggeration of television. It exaggerates the capacity of the televisual image to produce bodies that are, as it were, in two places at the same time.[6] As opposed to the flatness of regular living room cathode-ray images, this one appears hefty, material, life-size. The corporeality of the real body is emphasized by simulating elsewhere its capacity to take up space. Thus, more successfully than At the Shrink’s, this later work produces the impression of a double presence. It is quite literally a “projection,” in the sense of something thrown out–in the manner of a ventriloquist “throwing” his or her voice into a puppet so that something is not where it should be but is in both places at once. The transgressing of the rule that circumscribes all bodies–the rule that says that it is physically impossible to be in two places at the same time–would seem to account for much of the uncanniness of the installation.

     

    But if Dal Vivo thus magnifies the materiality of a televisual body and doubles it in space, then the installation is also all too easily read as the opposite–a multiplication of absences. For one thing, photographs (in the exhibition monograph) show the clay “statue” prior to its animation by live video projection–it looks lumpy and heavy, a dead weight (see Figure 3).

     

    Figure 3
    Figure 3: Image from Dal Vivo
    Multimedia installation
    Fondazione Prada, Milan (1998)
    Used with permission of Laurie Anderson.

     

    This “dead weightness” is not just a figure of speech, for if we are to take seriously these photographs as integral to a reading of the installation, then we are also to understand that Dal Vivo is not simply installation art but also a new sort of statuary. Kenneth Gross, in a phenomenological study of representational sculpture, reads statuary as, quite literally, dead weights–that is, they inevitably call up anxieties of mortality in the viewer:

     

    What I see in the statue is really a once-living thing whose life has been interrupted; it is a creature stilled, emptied of life, turned to stone or bronze or plaster; captured, thus possibly needing to escape; dead, thus needing resurrection or galvanization . . . This sense of something “ended” is what can give to the statue its melancholy and spectral character, lend it the curious deathliness of a tableau vivant. Not unlike Roland Barthes’s description of the photograph, the statue presents a body or a pose arrested in time, arresting time itself. (15)

     

    Arrested time, death, capture (and the corresponding “need to escape”) are all apropos of Anderson’s installation, and not only because of the language of incarceration that Gross employs here. In at least two layouts in the monograph published to accompany the exhibition of Dal Vivo, pictures of ancient Egyptian statuary are placed next to images of Anderson’s installation, in an evident attempt to provide a “sculptural” genealogy to the electronically petrified body of the prisoner (Celant, “Miracle in Milan” 19, 22). The point of Dal Vivo, then, is to give “a living body to a statue,” as Celant claims (“Miracle in Milan” 20), to animate and quicken to life, in the manner of the rabbi and his Golem or Pygmalion and his Galatea, a thing characterized by the opacity and stasis of death. But just as spectrality and deathliness are part of the representational burden of the mimetic statue, so are they also part of the representational burden of the filmic and the electronic image. As Gross’s allusion to Barthes suggests, the conventional logic holds that the photographically generated image gives us a marvelous “capture” of reality, yet falls short of the fulsomeness of the real body. The mechanically reproduced image, Barthes’s photograph, represents a presence constitutive of absence, life and animation constitutive of death (Barthes, 79, 96, and passim). Thus, in Dal Vivo, when such a paradoxically deathly electronic image is projected on a moribund lump of clay that is an ultimately futile simulacrum of life, what we have is absences piled up on absences. There is both a multiplication as well as a mitigation of the loss and lack of the inanimate reproduction–a kind of “walking corpse” condition that we find confirmed in Celant’s description of Dal Vivoas a tableau of a “bloodless metaphysical figure, a televised specter that nevertheless continues to possess the breath of life” (“Miracle in Milan” 17). The attempt to amplify the immediacy and presence of the electronic image inevitably calls attention to the lack and absence inherent in such an image.

     

    The idea that the prisoner’s body is transgressive on the one hand, and enervated on the other would seem to be contradictory. To construe the device of the installation as a means for a “virtual escape”–a jailbreak, a violation of the law–is not compatible with the impression we get of the prisoner’s transmitted body as passive, vulnerable, sensorily deprived. This is a body blind, dumb, and mute, for no provision is given for sound transmission into the gallery, and none for the prisoner to see the space into which he is projected. At one level, the installation is understood as being a temporary liberation of a body that is heavily proscribed and delimited. Augmented by the technological apparatus of camera, cable hookup, clay statue, and projector, the prisoner regains his freedom for the duration of the exhibition. Far from being a passive act, a jailbreak is an assertion of the prisoner’s refusal to accept the restrictions institutionally imposed upon his body. At another level however, the reality is that the prisoner doesn’t lift a finger to accomplish this jailbreak–it is a completely passive transgression, and its result is simply the lodging of a reproduction of the prisoner’s body in yet another claustrophobic and restrictive space, that of the gallery. The statue becomes a live body, but conversely, the live body is petrified into the condition of a statue. The experience for the prisoner of participating in the installation brings out this contradiction–to virtually escape, he has to sit more still than ever. To transgress the confines of his cell, he has to remain even more securely restricted within the field of the camera. The installation, in short, stages the paradox of a body both passive and ineffectual, and newly vigorous and forceful.

     

    Telenoia

     

    If we were to ignore our reading of Anderson’s prisoner as passive and lacking, and instead emphasize his vigour and potential–his technologically-aided liberation from the forces that imprison him–what we might get is a kind of techno-utopianism. Tele-technologies, so used, have the potential to liberate bodies from their messy and undesirable corporeal limitations so that they can accomplish the heretofore physically impossible (so the logic might go).

     

    The strongest strain of such an uncritical techno-utopianism in connection with tele-technological art comes from a body of writing, from the 1980s, by Roy Ascott–the artist, writer, and father figure of so-called “telematic art” (telematics being the alliance between telecommunications technologies and computers–the term is one coined by Simon Nora and Alain Minc in the late 1970s[7]). But Ascott’s conception of tele-technologies is not simply as a kind of convicted murderer’s will-to-power and liberation; rather, his fantasy is the far more sweeping, technologically deterministic one in which these technologies have the potential to be the panacea for all social ills. They are an egalitarian force with the capacity to flatten social and cultural difference. Summing up his ideas in a 1990 article–prior to the widespread emergence of email, the World Wide Web, internet relay chat, and digitally-networked what-have-you–Ascott writes:

     

    telematic culture means . . . that we do not think, see, or feel in isolation. Creativity is shared, authorship is distributed, but not in a way that denies the individual her authenticity or power of self creation. . . . [T]elematic culture amplifies the individual capacity for creative thought and action, for more vivid and intense experience, for more informed perception, by enabling her to participate in the production of global vision through networked interaction with other minds, other sensibilities, other sensing and thinking systems across the planet–thought circulating in the medium of data through a multiplicity of different cultural, geographical, social, and personal layers. (238)

     

    In even more sweeping prose, Ascott goes on to claim that computer-aided tele-technologies are an opportunity for

     

    our sensory experience [to become] extrasensory, as our vision is enhanced by the extrasensory devices of telematic perception. . . . With the computer, and brought together in the telematic embrace, we can hope to glimpse the unseeable, to grasp the ineffable chaos of becoming, the secret order of disorder. And as we come to see more, we shall see the computer less and less. It will become invisible in its immanence, but its presence will be palpable to the artist engaged telematically in the world process of autopoeisis, planetary self-creation. (244-45)

     

    This account of tele-technologies encapsulates, among other fantasies, the overcoming of the sensory and perceptual limitations of the human body (“our vision is enhanced by the extrasensory devices of telematic perception”); the magnification of authorial agency, autonomy, and creativity (telematics “amplifies the individual capacity for creative thought and action,” for “autopoeisis, planetary self-creation”); the intensification of the immediacy of experience (telematics also amplifies the capacity for “more vivid and intense experience”); the enhancement of intimacy and understanding between individuals (the telematic subject participates in “networked interaction with other minds, other sensibilities, other sensing and thinking systems across the planet”); and, most exemplary of all, the elision of the mediating apparatus (“as we come to see more, we shall see the computer less and less”) through which all the other goals are achieved.

     

    For Ascott, telecommunications technologies fulfill a fantasy of an ideal and transparent post-symbolic condition. Here the fantasy takes the form of a state of perfect, absolute communication and understanding–a kind of technologically enabled intersubjective “love.” Ascott’s article is titled “Is There Love in the Telematic Embrace?”–and by “love” he means the possibility of communion between two individuals outside of symbolic mediation. To put it another way, the fantasy here is of tele-technologies as being halfway along the road to the unmediated intimacy of telepathy–that most perfect and replete of all communications at a distance. The ideal telematic condition is a “meeting and conjoining of minds and machines,” “a condition of expanded global consciousness and harmony (Shanken, “Art and Telematics” 68).

     

    Fantasies such as those of Ascott can be easily deconstructed. The other side of the fantasy of transparent immediacy becomes briefly visible when the question of narcissism or solipsism is broached in Edward Shanken’s otherwise sympathetic commentary on Ascott’s writings:

     

    The eroticism of the telematic embrace is seductive and appealing, perhaps more so for its elusiveness . . . . While enabling new conditions for, and qualities of mutual exchange, such hyaline interfaces [of the telecommunications apparatus] may equally transform communication into monologue, unification into narcissism, passionate attraction into solitary confinement. Might not the persistent self-reflection one experiences on a computer screen interrupt the mantric union of technological apparatus and human consciousness, network and node? Do not many delays, bugs, viruses, and crashes . . . remind the telematic participant that s/he is inevitably a perpetual observer, a voyeur whose electronic relationships are subject to autoerotic soliloquy? (“Art and Telematics,” n. pag.)

     

    Imagined intersubjective intimacy might be precisely that–imagined, imaginary. But if narcissistic solipsism is one way to read the fantasy of perfect, undifferentiated communication (the conflation and identification of self with an other that can only be imaginary), then the obverse of this comforting solipsistic embrace, telematic or otherwise, is the paranoid fear of engulfment and incorporation. As it turns out, Ascott is perfectly aware of this, for his name for the condition of perfect telepathic union is “telenoia”–a coinage which deliberately contrasts the “unification of minds collaborating remotely (combining the Greek roots “noia” meaning mind and “tele” meaning “at a distance”) with the paranoia that results from the opposition of minds trying to control one another surreptitiously” (Shanken, “Tele-Agency” 67). The state of telenoia is “not at all . . . imprisoning,” Ascott insists (qtd. in Shanken, “Art and Telematics” n. pag.), presumably as opposed to the effect of paranoia which is.

     

    A Dislocation of Intimacy

     

    Anderson’s installation, we might say, is a return of Ascott’s repressed, precisely the obverse of Ascott’s fantasy of perfect communion at a distance by tele-technological means. Whereas in the latter’s utopian scenario all the obstacles of external mediating systems are made transparent by the sublimating capacities of tele-technologies, in Dal Vivo such systems become even more congealed, more opaque. In Anderson’s unnerving scenario, tele-technology produces not pure unmediated intimacy, but rather a profound blockage. While Ascott’s “telenoic” subject is transcendently disembodied, Anderson’s prisoner’s body is disabled rather than sublimated (his mobility is severely delimited for the duration of his spectral appearance in the gallery). While Ascott’s subject is sensorily and perceptually enhanced, Anderson’s prisoner is deprived of sensory power (he can’t see or hear the place into which he is projected). While Ascott’s subject is supposedly energized by the potential for perfect intersubjective communication, Anderson’s prisoner lacks all capacity for speech and communication; in the gallery he is effectively deaf and dumb, a subject turned into a spectacular and impenetrable object, isolated and fetishized as such. While Ascott’s subject enjoys unimpeded movement (“thought circulating in the medium of data”), Anderson’s prisoner is defined by stasis; it is a tableau. In the live communion between gallery-goers and the prisoner, we find paralysis instead of repleteness, mediation instead of unimpeded access.

     

    A similar blockage of “intimacy” is to be found in another comparable artwork, exactly contemporaneous with Dal Vivo, by Ken Goldberg and Bob Farzin. Dislocation of Intimacy adds to our analysis the point that such a blockage, or dislocation, of intimacy is also a blockage in knowledge.[9] Ken Goldberg, a prominent practitioner of what has come to be known as tele-robotic art, is also a theorist known for coining the term “telepistemology,” referring to the epistemological problems inherent in experiencing things at a distance (a paradigmatic telepistemological problem is the question of how to interpret the veracity of knowledge gathered at a highly mediated remove, for instance, by telescope, or by tele-robot–as in space expeditions to distant planets, say) (Goldberg, Robot). Goldberg’s work, in a way perhaps similar to Anderson’s, focuses primarily on issues as fundamental as the nature of truth or knowledge in a heavily technologically mediated world, and Dislocation of Intimacy continues this theme. The work is a large black steel box exhibited in a gallery, unembellished and impenetrable except for a wire snaking out of it and air vents let into its side. The wire links the box to the internet, and there, at a website, accessed on one’s home computer, views of the inside of the box can be requested. There is apparently a webcam set up inside the box, with various lighting configurations adjustable by clicking on buttons at the website. The views, however, are murky, monochromatic, tenebrous. They appear to show lacy foliage silhouetted against backlights, and it is impossible to make out whether these images are of real foliage, or perhaps of plastic substitutes, or cardboard cutouts–or whether the entire set-up is a hoax in which photographs are made available for download on to a gullible viewer’s computer. Thus the effect is a Plato’s cave scenario in which knowledge of an object–and by extension, intimacy with it (as the title suggests)–is only possible at a highly mediated remove. Contrary to all we understand about the concept of intimacy, intimacy with this mechanical object is only possible at a point spatially distant from the object itself–literally a dis-location of intimacy. But even when the viewer has “entered” the box by means of the webcam views, the visual intimacy thus apparently accomplished is further obstructed, not consummated, by the images–which are evocative yet all but unreadable in terms of both content and provenance.

     

    The point of course is that in this project, as in Anderson’s installation, we find a condition in which intimacy with an object is as much impeded as enabled by the tele-technological apparatus, thus belying Roy Ascott’s fantasy of perfect telematic communion. In Dislocation of Intimacy, however, the act of petitioning views from the black box suggests a sexual encounter, and perhaps even more disconcertingly, a medical dissection. For, at the gallery, the box lets out gasps of air from the vents in its side whenever it is quickened by a remote viewer’s solicitation for visual “intimacy” (it also lets out gasps independently at periodic intervals). The box appears to respond to the telematic caresses administered by remote probers. The metaphor here is thus of the box as a biological and organic entity (likewise its vegetative interior belies its industrial façade). But if the remote viewer’s act of solicitation is understood as the opening up of an organic object to receive knowledge of its interior, then there are also intimations of the metaphor of anatomical dissection. The problem here, Goldberg would no doubt stress, is an epistemological one, and to establish this medical metaphor in relation to an instance of epistemological desire is not historically unprecedented. Thus when Barbara Maria Stafford writes of eighteenth-century medical images, her remarks on anatomical diagrams seems uncannily applicable to the scenario that we find in Goldberg’s and Farzin’s project:

     

    The Galenic conception of anatomy as an “opening up in order to see deeper or hidden parts” drives to the heart of a master problem for the Enlightenment. How does one attain the interior of things? Anatomy and its inseparable practice of dissection were the eighteenth century paradigms for any forceful, artful, contrived and violent study of depths. (47)

     

    We might say that in the case of Goldberg’s and Farzin’s artwork, the telematic apparatus figures as the scalpel that bloodlessly peels open the black box in order to expose its secret.

     

    If we compare Anderson’s installation with that of Goldberg and Farzin, we find notable congruencies. Though I have been implying that the prisoner is the primary “telematic subject” in this tele-technological connection, the gallery-goers or viewers of the artwork are equally subjects augmented or enhanced by a telecommunications apparatus. The apparatus allows the “virtual escape” of the prisoner, but, conversely, it allows the gallery-goers access to an otherwise impossible or prohibited visual intimacy–that with the body of a convicted murderer shut away behind the walls of a penal institution. Thus, both Dislocation of Intimacy and Dal Vivo are tele-technologically aided fulfillments of a desire to see something sealed away–in the former case, to see the inside of a sealed box; in the latter, to see the spectacle of a convicted murderer inside his prison.

     

    But if the metaphorical scenario of Dislocation of Intimacy can be read as an anatomization–that of a physician probing a lifeless or unconscious mass of flesh submitting to the scrutiny of the medical eye–then the equation with Dal Vivo suggests that the prisoner exhibited in such a way is also a hapless subject caught in the gaze of scientific–or in this case, penal–power. The situation to which Anderson submits the prisoner reiterates the disciplinary power to which he is already subjected every day through incarceration, surveillance, and regimentation–with the inflection that the institution that now holds him in thrall is not only the penal, but also the aesthetic. Thus, in the companion monograph to Anderson’s installation, we find constant references to Foucault’s concept of disciplinary power. A quote from Discipline and Punish is spread across two pages in large boldface (Celant, Laurie Anderson 44-5). As Anderson and her curators rightly understand, the telematic apparatus in this case reproduces the panoptic and disciplinary gaze that everywhere already surrounds the prisoner (even as it appears to “let him off the hook” by “virtually” releasing him). Thus it gives the lie to Ascott’s assertion that the telematic communion is “not at all . . . imprisoning,” for in this case, it is quite literally so.

     

    The Opacity of the Father

     

    Yet the prisoner’s posture is also that of an authority enthroned, upright, hands on knees, presiding over his viewers in the manner of a sovereign receiving an audience. He “convey[s] an ambiguous, regal appearance,” Anderson notes. “He’s not offering himself; rather he looks more like a judge” (“530 Canal Street” 255). Celant compares him to “the statue of the potentate–the king or the pharaoh, the hero or field general–that is spread about, in its many reproductions, as a surrogate of power” (“Miracle in Milan” 19). The transformation of the prisoner’s body into a reproducible electronic one is here read less as a dispersal of presence, a fragmentation into the absence and death of the mechanically reproduced image, than as a transformation into the omnipresence of paternal authority. Anderson reads the sensory and discursive deprivations undergone by the prisoner not as lack, not as an electronic debilitation, but rather as the production of a powerful paternal opacity: “He’s seen, but does not turn his gaze outward. He’s isolated from the sounds of the world, but he reappears in space as ‘deaf’; he doesn’t speak or listen. There’s something in his immobile position and appearance that takes us back to childhood. He’s like a deaf parent, who is asked by his child: ‘Mommy, daddy . . . look at me.’ But the parent doesn’t see him, he’s not present” (“530 Canal Street” 255). The father is of course not “really” blind or deaf in the situation Anderson describes. What is being referred to here is not the actual, “real” body of the father, but rather the fantasmatic, “transubstantiated” body of the father, or of the monarch (Kantorowicz).[10] This second, sublime body of the Father affects the world of its subjects beyond the sum of its physical parts, and its silence and blindness constitute the sort of power it represents and the effects it elicits. This would seem to correspond, quite literally, with the body of the prisoner–there is the actual, real body sitting in the cell, but also the second, transubstantiated body that is blind and dumb and produces visual effects quite beyond itself. Hence Celant’s comparison of the prisoner’s electronic double with the statue of the pharaoh or potentate. The statue is a kind of literalization of the doubling of the classical monarch’s body and its petrifaction–or transubstantiation, which is paradoxically the same in this case–into phallic and universal law.
    Jacques Derrida’s claim that the tele-technological apparatus itself always already produces an irreducible historicity or heritage or burden of the law is useful to this line of reading:

     

    The specter [of the deathly, mechanically reproduced image] is not simply someone we see coming back, it is someone by whom we feel ourselves watched, observed, surveyed, as if by the law: we are “before the law,” without any possible symmetry, without reciprocity, insofar as the other is watching only us, concerns only us, we who are observing it (in the same way that one observes and respects the law) without being able to meet its gaze. Hence the dissymmetry and, consequently, the heteronomic figure of the law. . . . This flow of light which captures or possesses me, invests me, invades me, or envelops me is not a ray of light, but the source of a possible view: from the point of view of the other. (Echographies 120, 123)

     

    For Derrida, the recorded image everywhere generates a spectrality, a sense of death and “pastness,” that is tantamount to the weight of history and inheritance bearing down on the viewer-subject. This weight of “inheritance” makes clear that subjectivity, for all subjects, is fundamentally constituted out of systems–names, traditions, laws–which precede it, which it can only inherit (and not own). Moreover, in Derrida’s account, nothing changes when one switches one’s deconstructive focus to the temporality of the live tele-technological apparatus; the very fact of mechanical recording itself, whether it is presented live or not, throws the pall of death and history over the image: “As soon as there is a technology of the image, visibility brings night. . . . [B]ecause we know that, once it has been taken, captured, this image will be reproducible in our absence, because we know this already, we are already haunted by this future, which brings our death” (Echographies117).

     

    It seems then that Anderson’s prisoner is rendered a figure of symbolic authority in both content (posture, presentation) and form (tele-technological transmission always already, in Derrida’s logic, subjects the viewer to the law of heteronomy). But what are we to make of the paradox that the prisoner is represented both as symbolically powerful (the specter of the potentate) as well as the opposite–that is, subjugated by disciplinary power? What are we to make of the fact that the prisoner is both judge and criminal, both spectral law and spectral subject, both phallic and castrated? The answer, I think, is that the registers of power operating here are different. That is, in the scenario that Anderson offers us, we can make a distinction between the sort of power that the prisoner ostensibly “wields” over his spectators, and the sort of power that the spectators or gallery-goers “wield” over him. For whereas the former is that of the classical, irreducibly opaque patriarch, the latter is on the contrary a power that is not blind or deaf or mute but rather all eyes, all ears, and all chattering discourse. In other words, the prisoner is subjected to disciplinary power, whereas the spectators are offered the spectacle of juridical power. The distinction is made by Foucault in Discipline and Punish:

     

    Historically, the process by which the bourgeoisie became in the course of the eighteenth century the politically dominant class was masked by the establishment of an explicit, coded and formally egalitarian juridical framework, made possible by the organization of a parliamentary, representative regime. But the development and generalization of disciplinary mechanisms constituted the other, dark side of these processes. The general juridical form that guaranteed a system of rights that were egalitarian, in principle was supported by these tiny, everyday, physical mechanisms, by all those systems of micro-power that are essentially non-egalitarian and asymmetrical that we call the disciplines. And although, in a formal way, the representative regime makes it possible . . . for the will of all to form the fundamental authority of sovereignty, the disciplines provide, at the base, a guarantee of the submission of forces and bodies . . . . The contract may have been regarded as the ideal foundation of law and political power; panopticism constituted the technique, universally widespread, of coercion . . . . The “Enlightenment,” which discovered the liberties, also invented the disciplines. (222)

     

    The spectator in the gallery is presided over by a distant sovereign, an unambiguous egalitarian patriarchal authority of the New Testament variety who surveys without seeing, impels without enunciating (as the comparisons with statues of pharaohs and potentates would suggest). But the prisoner, on the other hand, is in the grip of Foucault’s more disturbing, more ambiguous post-Enlightenment “disciplinary power,” that enacts an unseemly intimacy and proximity with the body of the subject, and that “guarantees the submission of forces and bodies.” (And to describe this latter power as all eyes and all chattering discourse as I have done above is also to conjure an image of the throngs of gallery-goers assembled before the spectacle of the prisoner, watching and analyzing, in the manner of a theatre full of medical students inspecting the day’s specimen of pathological interest.)

     

    This also means that an imbalance remains owing to the very different nature of disciplinary power from its juridical variety. Gallery-goers may be disconcerted by their encounter with the opacity of the “king’s” second sublime body, but this, I believe, is trumped by the more profound predicament of the prisoner caught in the headlights of a far more disturbing disciplinary interrogation. In fact, the tableau here might be quite literally read as that of an interrogation rather than that of an audience before a judge or a king, for Anderson’s original plan was to transmit the telepresent images of two other figures: those of guards flanking the prisoner (this would have shifted further the balance of “exploitation” to the disadvantage of the prisoner; see Figure 4)[11]

     

    Figure 4
    Figure 4: Image from Dal Vivo exhibition monograph
    Multimedia installation
    Fondazione Prada, Milan (1998)
    Used with permission of Laurie Anderson.

     

    In addition, owing to the permutation of the tele-technological mechanism, the gallery-goers are always aware of the prisoner’s presence (after all, he is right there on display), whereas the prisoner, blind and deaf, cannot know whether he is being observed at any one time–which is of course the very definition of panopticism. Being solicited by a blind patriarch, Eric Santner argues, can be less disturbing than not knowing at all whether one is being watched or solicited:

     

    uncertainty as to what, to use Lacan’s term, the “big Other” of the symbolic order really wants from us can be far more disturbing than subordination to an agency or structure whose demands–even for self-sacrifice–are experienced as stable and consistent. The failure to live up to such demands still guarantees a sense of place, meaning, and recognition; but the subject who is uncertain as to the very existence of an Other whose demands might or might not be placated loses the ground from under his feet. (133)

    Telematic Paranoia

     

    What would it mean to read the tele-technological basis of Anderson’s installation as the deployment of a mechanism of disciplinary power? For one thing, I would suggest that the condition generated is that of paranoia–as indeed Ascott indirectly points out, by way of disavowal, through his use of the phrase “telenoia.” The prisoner is held in a disciplinary matrix generated by tele-technologies, the power of which is registered as a kind of paranoia.

     

    To test this relationship between paranoia and the tele-technological apparatus, I want to make a somewhat lateral move into psychoanalytic history. For the case of history’s most famous paranoiac, the German judge Daniel Paul Schreber, presents us with a kind of proto-tele-technological problem that works to overturn the ostensible repleteness of Ascott’s “telenoia”–revealing it, once and for all, to be anchored in the paranoid. Schreber, in other words, is an interesting figure through which to think the paranoia of Anderson’s prisoner. The tele-technological problem Schreber poses is this: what happens when a tele-connection becomes too close, when one is in a too intimate “embrace” with the person at the other end of the line? For Schreber, that person was God. In Schreber’s extraordinary and elaborate delusional cosmology (outlined in his Memoirs, the famous 1903 text detailing his collapse into psychosis in mid-life), the system of nerves and wires through which God could normally communicate with human mortals had gone awry. An unprecedented crisis had caused God to become entangled, in an agglutination of nerves, with Schreber’s own body and mind. The switchboard system connecting the calls between God and His subjects had gone catastrophically haywire, so to speak, and hanging up was impossible. The effect for Schreber is that it became a struggle for him to distinguish his own thoughts, dreams, and bodily functions from those that were the result of God attempting to coerce a “disconnection.” Suicidal impulses, for instance, or insomnia, even bowel movements, and most famously, a feeling of emasculation (Schreber 64-65, 95, 127, 204-06, 123-24, passim), he thought to be the result of God’s attempt to extract Himself from Schreber’s mind. Thus, contrary to Roy Ascott’s utopian fantasy, Schreber’s predicament tells us that such an intense communion–the telematic or telepathic embrace–might induce not a state of “telenoic” plenitude and transcendence, but rather that of paranoia. After all, how does one know when a telepathic connection is severed, if a telepathic link has been “hung up”?[12] How does the telepath know if God is not still in his head?

     

    The triangulation between tele-technology, paranoia, and disciplinary power becomes more complete in Santner’s revisionist reading of the Schreber case. For Santner proposes that Schreber’s symptoms indicate an attunement to the emergence of the disciplinary. His psychosis, according to Santner, is congruent to that historical shift in which the primacy of the juridical was supplanted by its disciplinary counterpart. Santner seizes on the fact that, in Schreber’s delusional theology, all is well and good when God is distant and removed. Conversely, the sign that things have gone awry is that God becomes excessively intimate. In the normal “Order of Things” (Schreber’s phrase for the world in a state of equilibrium and propriety), God keeps a respectful distance from the mortals of His creation. But crisis is precipitated when “God, who used to be an immense distance away, had been forced to draw nearer to the earth, which thus became a direct and continual scene of divine miracles in a manner hitherto unknown” (Schreber 90). According to Santner, this aspect of Schreber’s delusional schema seems to reproduce precisely a distinction between a juridical authority acting at a proper distance from its subjects, and a disciplinary power soliciting its subjects with the inappropriate intimacy of an overfriendly acquaintance. Santner’s argument is that, at some level, Schreber had become attuned to the normally invisible workings of power around him, and had formulated a cosmology that represents in delusional form the mechanisms of excessive disciplinary power. “It is clear,” he argues, “that Schreber’s purpose . . . throughout his Memoirs is to tell the story of the catastrophic effects that ensue when a trusted figure of authority exercises a surplus of power exceeding the symbolic pact on which that authority is based” (37). Expanding on this point, Santner writes:

     

    If Lacan is right about Schreber–that his psychosis is the result of a “foreclosure” of the paternal metaphor, the Name-of-the-Father . . . –then [Schreber’s blockage of subjective legitimation by a symbolic other] would seem to be a function not of a “too little” but rather of a “too much,” not of an excessive distance from the attentions of a solicitous authority but rather of an excessive proximity. Nowhere is Schreber clearer about this than in his repeated references to the fact that God normally remains distant from and ignorant of living human beings. (61)

     

    Such an excessive proximity to disciplinary power, according to Santner, is a recipe for the malfunctioning of the process by which subjects maintain their place in the Symbolic. For subjective legitimation is said to proceed normally when the Symbolic Other invests the subject with meaning and identity. But when the Symbolic Other possesses the insistence of the disciplinary (rather than the opacity of the juridical), then the constitutive flaws of symbolic investiture are themselves laid bare. If the agency that gives you agency keeps performing such overfriendly violence upon your psyche, then you begin to realize that subjective agency may itself be something untenable. Such a realization leads down the path to paranoia, and Schreber came unconsciously to this realization one too many times through his personal and professional experiences — experiences which arose out of a particular historical juncture, that of modernity.[13] In Santner’s analysis, Schreber is a defining figure of modernity precisely because his psychosis is a deeply tragic negotiation of the question that ultimately plagues all subjects: how to remain whole in the face of a violent and solicitous Symbolic order.

     

    The Artist’s Predicament

     

    I’d like to suggest that in Dal Vivo, we find a Schreberian figure struggling to maintain spatial and temporal integrity under the strictures of the symbolic, and who, as it were, is similarly bedeviled by malfunctioning wires (or by wires that malfunction by functioning too smoothly). Anderson’s Schreberian figure serves to illuminate the relationship between tele-technologies and disciplinary power, and constitutes a fascinating instance of the way in which the tele-technological can become imbricated in the question of symbolic authority and modern subjecthood. But, as with Schreber, so with Stefanini–symbolic malfunction is the price to pay.

     

    In Anderson’s installation, the question of authority is expressed in the form of a concern about “exploitation”–a concern that sees the installation as caught in a remarkable ethical bind:

     

    One of the reservations I’ve had from the beginning is the potential [the project] has for exploitation of the prisoner. I ask this person to sit silently in a chair for weeks and then I sign my name to it as my art work. Trying to understand that has been one of the biggest parts of the project for me. What is the line between exploitation and collaboration? (Anderson, “Some Backgrounds” 31)

     

    At what point does collaboration become exploitation? At what point does the ventriloquist do violence to her puppet? At what point is violence inflicted upon the homunculus that performs for the performance artist without her being there? At what point does the artist become toosolicitous? Anderson tries to avoid reaching this point, and indeed the sense that her work is exploitative is mitigated through at least two strategies in the published exhibition monograph (if not in the installation itself). Firstly, the monograph provides room for the prisoner to “speak.” There is a fascinating and poignant thirty-one page illustrated essay written by Stefanini himself which details his prison experiences, the events leading up to his thirty-year sentence (a series of petty robberies in his youth, escalating to organized crime), and his remorse (“Here [in prison] I’ve reflected upon a past season. A mistaken journey that has produced a lot of grief for a lot of people, and that has ruined more than thirty years of my life” [Stefanini, “A Life” 176]). There are also two transcriptions of interviews with Stefanini (conducted mainly by Celant and Anderson), one of which contains a striking articulation by Stefanini of his point of view: “[This] project of Laurie Anderson seems very positive for the prison environment. It’s like a trickle into the outside world. Also, I hope that it helps to obliterate my past, to paint a different portrait of me” (Stefanini, “San Vittore” 199). From this vantage point, it is hard to fault Anderson for exploiting the prisoner–the installation comes to be seen more as a process of give-and-take, a mutual exploitation, as it were. A virtual jailbreak is allowed, as long as it is only a “trickle” of an escape. An even more claustrophobic circumscription is exchanged for the possibility of absolution. Anderson further reduces the prisoner’s bodily freedom, but, in return, bestows on him some measure of aesthetic visibility, paints him a better portrait.

     

    Despite these attempts to emphasize the mutual nature of the exploitation, the imbalance of the registers of power remains. This imbalance is made even clearer by the near futility of the second means by which Anderson attempts to diminish the overall impression of exploitation. This is by identifying with the prisoner. A third of the way through the monograph, Anderson’s vita is placed in conjunction with Stefanini’s vita: a timeline of Anderson’s career accomplishments is laid out in alternating pages along with Stefanini’s catalogue of multiple felonies and multiple arrests. This well-intentioned juxtaposition unfortunately has the air of trying to express middle-class or survivor’s guilt (“there but for the grace of personal history and social circumstance, go I”), and is ultimately inadequate. At another point in the monograph, Anderson tries to empathize with the prisoner, to imagine herself in his position by recalling her experience of being incarcerated in a body cast when she was twelve:

     

    They brought me to the hospital, where I was put in traction . . . [and was told that] I’d never walk again . . . . I spent the days with the other children in the ward who, for the most part, had suffered severe burns and screamed all night. I’ll never forget those screams, which symbolized immobility and suffering to me, and the impossibility of getting out of the plaster cast, and ever escaping from the hospital. Your entire body becomes hypersensitive, your hearing sharpens, everything becomes a torture connected to the fact of being isolated and trapped in a closed, limited space that imposes certain visual and auditory rules of life on you. (“530 Canal Street” 247)

     

    Again this attempt at empathy, at reverse ventriloquism, falls somewhat short. Though the threat of permanent bodily paralysis certainly justifies Anderson’s empathy, her ultimately short-term immobility is not quite equivalent to a thirty-year jail sentence.

     

    Despite the artist’s attempt to lessen the sense of “exploitation” through empathy, through the gift of speech and visibility, and through simple self-awareness (which admittedly does count for something), the insufficiency of these attempts hints that something violent is taking place in the exchange between prisoner and artist. The convict’s agency is usurped without sufficient compensation. He “parrots back” or enacts Anderson’s artistic ideas on her behalf (“I ask this person to sit in a chair for weeks and then I sign my name to it as my artwork”) (Anderson, Some Backgrounds 31). His is a body that does a performance for her without being there. It is the dummy to her ventriloquist, a self-alienated automaton that fulfils or realizes or enunciates her art ambitions. It is a figure caught in a situation of “dislocated intimacy” so profound (with Anderson, with the spectators) that he finds himself in the predicament of one who is utterly heteronomous.

     

    Dal Vivo represents the mediatized heteronomy of the modern subject (perhaps the primary theme of Anderson’s entire oeuvre) by including in its performance event not just technology or self-reflexive language, but a living being (moreover, a living being who is already in a state of proscription). In such a representation, Anderson creates for herself an insidious ethical problem that ultimately, I think, cannot be resolved–but that also makes visible the relationship between disciplinary power, the tele-technological, and the paranoid predicament of modern subjecthood. In the act of opening up for critique a relationship of power and subjecthood, Anderson becomes complicit in that which she would critique.

     

    Performer, Prisoner, Parrot, Puppet, Paranoiac

     

    Ultimately, Anderson’s ventriloquizing of Santino Stefanini’s body is a problem of symbolic investiture and naming. In the act of turning Stefanini’s body into an electronic specter, Anderson gives him legitimacy, lifts him from a place (the prison) in which his symbolic position is that of an invisible wretchedness, and deposits him in a new place where he is now defined by an aesthetically sanctioned legitimacy, named as art object. The installation takes the form of a coronation or enthroning, as it were: it says to Stefanini, “here, for the duration of this exhibition, you are the king.”

     

    However in so doing, it travesties the act of symbolic investiture in two ways. One way is a sort of temporary carnivalesque overturning of the law; it is a state of topsy-turvy that for a while indicates that up is down, left is right, a convict can be king. But the other way is more insidious, for it subjects the prisoner to yet another disciplinary gaze. In so anatomizing the prisoner under the harsh lights of a coercing Big Other, the ultimate foundationlessness of the process of symbolic naming–the process that calls the subject to itself, that anchors the subject in its position in the “world”–is exposed. The paradox of disciplinary power, as Santner notes, is that it calls for autonomy in its subjects, but does this by pillorying them with the heteronomy of inflexible laws (which should ideally be converted into self-policing–that is, autonomy). Its intimacy is of the order of a virus whose purpose is to infect its victim with its intractable regulations, one of which is that the victim should remain uninfected, autonomous. It attempts to seize subjective individuality by insisting that subjects “parrot back thoughts, words, and phrases”–a contradiction in terms (Santner 21). It sends us the paradoxical message that we should relinquish our freedom in order to be free subjects. As Santner notes, this sort of solicitation is impossible and damaging:

     

    The conversion of heteronomy into autonomy so crucial to [the Enlightenment project] leaves a residue of heteronomy . . . that not only resists metabolization . . . but returns to haunt and derange the subject whose physical, moral, and aesthetic cultivation that system was designed to achieve. . . . What Foucault calls disciplinary power is potentially so damaging not because it opposes the principles of Enlightenment or . . . liberal values . . . from some exterior cultural domain, but rather because it in effect literalizes the “performative magic” sustaining the authority of those values and the institutions built upon them. The disciplines transform the performative dimension of symbolic authority into regulations for the material control and administration of bodies and populations. Such a literalization has the effect of reversing the most fundamental processes whereby humans are initiated into a world of symbolic form and function. (91)

     

    Disciplinary power, so defined, crystallizes the foundationlessness of the performative magic of symbolic naming; it contradicts and undermines it from within. It is an Other that acts on subjects in a way so literal that it makes the untenability of subjecthood clear, and can, as in the case of Schreber, precipitate psychosis. The subject becomes one caught in the “drive dimension of signification” (Santner 35) where subjective meaning can only be produced by an arbitrary “performative magic,” an automaton-like reiteration, a ventriloquized effect. The paradox of post-Enlightenment modernity is that it insists on the autonomy of the subject, and yet disciplinary power, the “dark side” of this juridical insistence, coerces and anatomizes all subjects to such a degree that it generates a profound sense of heteronomy that can only undermine the initial imperative of the symbolic. As Santner puts it, “the subject is solicited by a will to autonomy in the name of the very community that is thereby undermined, whose very substance thereby passes over into the subject” (145).

     

    If the installation is an act of symbolic investiture, as I claim, then Anderson here takes the position of the agent who names: she is the social agent already herself invested with authority who has the capacity to invest other subjects with their names (and it is the art system that is the larger authority that has invested Anderson with the legitimate power to herself name another person–the prisoner–as an aesthetic object). But Anderson’s artistic authorship becomes conflated with or collapsed into that of authority. Since she is the figure orchestrating the installation or “pulling the strings,” disciplinary power becomes hers to wield, throwing into disarray the functioning of the ventriloquist’s puppet by coercing it too much to speak. The puppet is enjoined to speak by remaining dumb, to escape by sitting still. Somewhere between collusion and cautionary tale, Anderson’s installation suggests a Schreberian scenario in which the use of tele-technology turns dysfunctional. In the extraordinary conflation of artistic investiture and disciplinary authority that characterizes Dal Vivo, Anderson doesn’t quite succeed in warding off the specter of exploitation. This failure, though a noble one, forms, I think, a radical endpoint in Anderson’s ongoing project of artistic commentary on the estrangement produced by modern technological mediation and the modern workings of symbolic power.

     

    Notes

     

    An early and much abbreviated version of this essay was published in Polish translation in the journal Kultura Popularna 4.10 (2004). Thank you to Misha Kavka and Eluned Summers-Bremner for their helpful comments and for shepherding the earliest version of this article to completion.

     

    1. The best surveys of Anderson’s oeuvre are Roselee Goldberg’s Laurie Anderson and Anderson’s own Stories from the Nerve Bible. What You Mean We? is illustrated in Goldberg 30-31. Several of Anderson’s ventriloquist dummies are described and illustrated in Goldberg, Laurie Anderson 37, 78, 88, 247. Your Fortune One $ is described in Goldberg, Laurie Anderson 178-79 (where its title is given as Your Fortune for a $). Also see Laurie Anderson’s own commentary on this latter project in Anderson, “Control Rooms” 128-31.

     

    2. This is a popular Anderson anecdote frequently rehashed in numerous reviews and monographs, for instance, Burckhardt 155. It is used by Anderson herself as material for one of her songs, “Speaking Japanese.”

     

    3. While Auslander argues that a definition of “performance” cannot be fixed with recourse to any ostensible ontology, only to historical circumstance, Auslander’s claims can be extrapolated (as he is no doubt aware) to make the more theoretical (rather than historicist) point that any attempt to affix the “life” of performance in the absolute present is to look for a vanishing origin.

     

    4. The prisoner, Santino Stefanini, has been serving out a thirty-year prison sentence since 1987. His prison dossier, reprinted in the exhibition monograph, contains a full list of his crimes: “complicity in attempted homicide, numerous aggravated kidnappings, violations of weapons law, violation of narcotics law, receipts of stolen property, aggravated theft, aggravated homicide” (Celant, Laurie Anderson 322). There is some ambiguity about the exact nature of the “aggravated homicide,” a crime listed only once, and quite late, in his lengthy prison dossier. No clarifying details of this crime are provided anywhere in the monograph, as far as I am able to ascertain. I have chosen not to pursue these details since, for the purposes of this essay, it suffices to point out that Stefanini’s crimes were serious and that (as we shall later see) he has apparently grown remorseful during his years in prison.

     

    5. Most of my information on Dal Vivo derives from the monograph published on the occasion of the exhibition (Celant, Laurie Anderson). Dal Vivo was exhibited together with a companion work, Dal Vivo Stories, installed in an adjacent room. This companion piece was comprised of several “fake holograms” generated in much the same way as that of At the Shrink’s, and of similar size. The films projected on the clay statues here were of Laurie Anderson telling stories, and these “fake holograms” were scattered around the room to suggest a kind of chattering “Greek chorus” (Anderson, qtd in Goldberg, Laurie Anderson 180) made of a host of Anderson’s miniature doppelgangers. The stories told by these doppelgangers seem to have been reworked from some of her earlier pieces. For an illustrated description of Dal Vivo Stories, see Celant, ed., Laurie Anderson 274-307; and Goldberg, Laurie Anderson 180, 182.

     

    6. On this capacity of the televisual image, see the chapter “Television: Set and Screen” in Weber.

     

    7. For an account of the genesis of the term “telematics,” see Shanken, “Tele-Agency” 65-66.

     

    9. The art work can be viewed at <http://www.ieor.berkeley.edu/~goldberg/art/doi.html>.

     

    10. The classic account of the splitting of the pre-modern monarch’s body into “real” and sublime bodies (the natural body and the body politic) is Kantorowicz’s The King’s Two Bodies.

     

    11. Sketched images of this original plan are to be found in Celant, Laurie Anderson 270-73.

     

    12. Marc Redfield delineates this in more deconstructive terms: “telepathy communicates a fantasy of unmediated communication, and at the same time records in its very name, an irreducible distance within self-presence. It promises an escape from the technology of the signifier, but in doing so imports techne into the heart of pathos. For whose pathos is it, once tele-pathy has begun?” (qtd in Thurschwell, 130). Also see Derrida, Telepathy.

     

    13. Santner here refers to Schreber’s experiences as victim to the hyper-rationalistic and abusive pedagogical practices of the time, as sickly patient to physicians trained in scientific Kantianism, and finally as an appointed judge presiding over the judicial apparatus of the Saxon Supreme Court. See Dinnage and Niederland, as well as Santner, for accounts of Schreber’s biography.

    Works Cited

     

    • Anderson, Laurie. “Control Rooms and Other Stories: Confessions of a Content Provider.” Parkett 49 (1997): 127-35.
    • —. “Some Backgrounds on Dal Vivo.” Celant 25-32.
    • —. Stories from the Nerve Bible: A Retrospective 1972-1992. New York: Harper, 1994.
    • Ascott, Roy. “Is There Love in the Telematic Embrace?” 1990. Telematic Embrace: Visionary Theories of Art, Technology, and Consciousness. Ed. Edward A. Shanken. Berkeley: U of California P, 2003. 232-46.
    • Auslander, Philip. Liveness: Performance in a Mediatized Culture. London: Routledge, 1999.
    • Barthes, Roland. Camera Lucida: Reflections on Photography. New York: Hill, 1981.
    • Burckhardt, Jacqueline. “In the Nerve Stream.” Parkett 49 (1997): 152-57.
    • Celant, Germano. “Laurie Anderson: Miracle in Milan.” Celant 15-23.
    • Celant, Germano, ed. Laurie Anderson: Dal Vivo. Milan: Fondazione Prada, 1998.
    • Celant, Germano, and Laurie Anderson. “530 Canal Street, New York, May 13, 1998.” Laurie Anderson: Dal Vivo. Ed. Germano Celant. Milan: Fondazione Prada, 1998. 233-60.
    • Derrida, Jacques. “Telepathy.” Trans. Nicholas Royle. Oxford Literary Review 10 (1988): 3-41.
    • Derrida, Jacques, and Bernard Stiegler. Echographies of Television. 1996. Trans. Jennifer Bajorek. Cambridge: Polity, 2002.
    • Dinnage, Rosemary. Introduction. Memoirs of my Nervous Illness. Daniel Paul Schreber. New York: New York Review of Books, 2000. xi-xxiv.
    • Foucault, Michel. Discipline and Punish: The Birth of the Prison. New York: Pantheon, 1977.
    • —. The History of Sexuality: Volume I: An Introduction. 1978. Trans. Robert Hurley. New York: Vintage, 1990.
    • Goldberg, Ken, ed. The Robot in the Garden: Telerobotics and Telepistemology in the Age of the Internet. Cambridge: MIT P, 2000.
    • Goldberg, Roselee. Laurie Anderson. New York: Harry N. Abrams, Inc., 2000.
    • —. Performance Art: From Futurism to the Present. London: Thames and Hudson, 1988.
    • Gross, Kenneth. The Dream of the Moving Statue. Ithaca: Cornell UP, 1992.
    • Kantorowicz, Ernst H. The King’s Two Bodies: A Study in Mediaeval Political Theology. Princeton: Princeton UP, 1957.
    • Niederland, William. The Schreber Case: Psychoanalytic Profile of a Paranoid Personality. Hillsdale: Analytic, 1984.
    • Owens, Craig. “Amplifications: Laurie Anderson.” Art in America 69.3 (1981): 120-23.
    • Phelan, Peggy. Unmarked: The Politics of Performance. London: Routledge, 1993.
    • Santner, Eric. My Own Private Germany: Daniel Paul Schreber’s Secret History of Modernity. Princeton: Princeton UP, 1996.
    • Schreber, Daniel Paul. Memoirs of my Nervous Illness. 1903/1955. New York: New York Review of Books, 2000.
    • Shanken, Edward A. “Introduction. Art and Telematics: A Match Made in Heaven?” Telematic Connections: The Virtual Embrace. Exhibition website. 31 March 2002. <http://telematic.walkerart.org/timeline/timeline_shanken.html>.
    • —. “Tele-Agency: Telematics, Telerobotics, and the Art of Meaning.” Art Journal 59.2 (2000): 64-77.
    • Stafford, Barbara Maria. Body Criticism: Imaging the Unseen in Enlightenment Art and Medicine. Cambridge: MIT P, 1991.
    • Stefanini, Santino. “A Life Behind Bars. From Cesare Beccaria to San Vittore.” Celant 146-176.
    • Stefanini, Santino. “San Vittore Prison, Milan, April 8, 1998.” An interview with Santino Stefanini conducted by Laurie Anderson and Germano Celant. Celant 190-99.
    • Thurschwell, Pamela. Literature, Technology and Magical Thinking, 1880-1920. Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 2001.
    • Weber, Samuel. Mass Mediauras: Form Technics Media. Stanford: Stanford UP, 1996.