Category: Volume 17 – Number 3 – May 2007

Steven Helmling
University of Delaware
English Department
helmling@UDel.Edu

A review of:

• Adorno, T.W. History and Freedom: Lectures 1964-1965. Ed. Rolf Tiedemann. Trans. Rodney Livingstone. Cambridge: Polity, 2006.
• —. Letters to His Parents: 1939-1951. Ed. Christoph Gödde and Henri Lonitz. Trans. Wieland Hoban. Cambridge: Polity, 2006.
• —, and Thomas Mann. Correspondence 1943-1955. Ed. Christoph Gödde and Thomas Sprecher. Trans. Nicholas Walker. Cambridge: Polity, 2006.
• Gerhardt, Christina, ed. “Adorno and Ethics.” Special issue of New German Critique 97 (Winter 2006).

When students excited by “The Culture Industry” or some other Adorno reading ask how to get a larger grip on Adorno overall, I finally have a good answer: History and Freedom, Adorno’s previously unpublished 1964-1965 lectures at Frankfurt. There are now several of these collections: in the 1960s, tape recorders were usually running when Adorno was speaking; and these lectures, addressed (from notes but without script) to undergraduates, are far more accessible than the self-consciously “difficult” writings addressed to fellow-adepts. Buzz on these lectures always mentions that they were given while Adorno was composing Negative Dialectics; History and Freedom is among the collections that can be read as a collateral draft of parts of that “late” work. Actually History and Freedom reprises Adorno’s whole career: the lectures continue the argument of Dialectic of Enlightenment (the opening lecture is called “Progress or Regression?”); along the way, two lectures elaborate the crucial early essay, “The Idea of Natural History,” and no fewer than four extend the hints in “The Actuality of Philosophy” on “the transition from philosophy to interpretation.” All of Adorno’s major career investments are here except “the aesthetic”: there are, indeed, many asides on art especially in the lectures on interpretation, but “the aesthetic” connects with the main theme mostly via Hegel’s “end of art.”
 

Oh, yes: Hegel. Hegel’s ubiquity in Adorno and Adorno’s conflictedness about him are evident even to beginners, but hitherto it needed hard-won expertise to discriminate Adorno’s near-idolatry of Hegel from his often angry critique of him. By contrast, History and Freedom compels Adorno to engage systematically with the major Hegelian themes: the [historicized] dialectic, universal and particular, identity and non-identity, objectivity and subjectivity, self-consciousness (both individual and collective), the World Spirit, the Absolute, conscience and law, race and nation. (Short version of the critique: Hegel too often ontologizes or absolutizes one term of a binary pair, thus reifying what he, of all people, should have kept fluid and “dialectical”; worse, Hegel’s lapse into this error is always in favor of the “universal” and against the “particular,” for the master and against the slave.) When Adorno mentions (without quoting) some “famous” remark from Hegel (or whomever), Rolf Tiedemann’s expert notes quote generously from the relevant sources, with invariably helpful comment–and, often, instructive pointers to dissonances with Adorno’s other writings. (Adorno here also gives his most straightforward evaluation of Kant.)
 

Advanced students, too, will find this collection (more than any of Adorno’s other lecture collections) a thrilling read, because even improvising for undergraduates, Adorno’s thinking aloud produces a Niagara of insight and provocation that overloads the most diligent attention. Adorno’s power to “ram every rift with ore” is as striking here as anywhere in his oeuvre. I have said this book is more accessible than Adorno’s “finished” prose; it is often more stirring as well, because more spontaneous and digressive, as well as more passionate in venting Adorno’s vibrant indignation at the course of the world, reprising and updating his chronic anxieties “after Auschwitz” and after Hiroshima.
 

Here as in Dialectic of Enlightenment Adorno diagnoses the devolution of “spirit” from Hegel’s dialectical joining of spirit and matter “objectively” (anticipating dialectical materialism) to positivism’s dichotomizing of the two, which renders “spirit” merely “subjective,” the disvalued term of an antithesis. In the problem of universal and particular Adorno elicits the agon of history and the individual. “Philosophy of History” in the West has presupposed “universal history”–an idealist and reifying concept that Adorno of course historicizes to yield the heuristic of a “technological rationality” which may usefully be staged as a single story, that of the “progress” from slingshot to atom bomb–with “progress” pointedly in scare-quotes. Technology promises universal mastery over nature even as it reduces millions of particular suffering individuals to servitude. “Domination” (Herrschaft) as universal “master” produces the “dominated” as particular “slave.” History promises universal freedom, but delivers instead universal compulsion, unfreedom.
 

In the final third of the course, Adorno pursues “Antinomies of Freedom” not anticipated in Dialectic of Enlightenment, often eliciting psychoanalytic overtones. “Enlightenment” since Spinoza has held that happiness is living “in accordance with Reason,” but even apart from the “dialectic of Enlightenment” sketched above, some obdurately bodily “impulse” intuits freedom as archaic and primordial, and thus irreconcilably at odds with administered modernity. Reason becomes the opposite of happiness, that chancy state that ratio can never “rationalize.” (Both German Glück and English “hap”-piness connect etymologically to chance or [good] luck.) The body experiences happiness as freedom from reason, freedom of and for “impulse” itself–a word whose connotations of irrationality Adorno charges with utopian voltages. Oddly, Adorno doesn’t cite the distinction, posited by his erstwhile Oxford colleague Isaiah Berlin, of “positive freedom” (freedom to participate in political life), as against “negative freedom” (freedom from unnecessary social constraints). But here as elsewhere Adorno’s thematic of “ego weakness” converts Nietzsche’s warnings about “the last man” from a portent for the future to a present condition, and in ways that resonate richly with Lacan and Zizek on the ways we learn to love our unhappiness. Adorno himself almost yields at moments to the premise that consciousness enlarges fruitfully only under the sting of unhappiness, though obviously the lectures as a whole assimilate freedom to happiness, however “broken” this “promise.” But in the closing lectures, a critique of Kant’s coercive categorical imperative, another universal master by which the individual is condemned (in Sartre’s phrase) to freedom, the “somatic impulse” of happiness has its analogue in morality as well, thus opening at least the possibility of a happy and moral futurity, a “not yet” worthy to be called “history.”

 
In his “Foreword ” to History and Freedom, Rolf Tiedemann observes that for Adorno, “freedom” is a problem “in the philosophy of history, rather than in moral philosophy where it has traditionally been found” (xvi). I cite the point by way of an introduction of the Winter 2006 New German Critique special issue on “Adorno and Ethics.” Adorno’s acid comment that “ethics” is “the bad conscience of morality” is a slam at ethics and morality both–he goes on to speak of “the blunt incompatibility of our experience with the term ‘morality’” (Problems 10)–and in History and Freedom, he asks whether good and evil can still mean anything for us, living as we do “[in] a kind of infernal reflection of the utopia of which Nietzsche had dreamt” in Beyond Good and Evil (History and Freedom 207). Almost half the New German Critique articles don’t address ethics at all; those that do mostly project ethics as a high ideal that “we” continually fail, especially “after Auschwitz,” to live up to. (“We” professionals? “We” practitioners of critique? “We” whose professional ethic should be to gag at the very phrase “professional ethics”?) The New German Critique ethicists fret over “the very possibility of an ethics,” finding (of course) for impossibility, and duly lamenting it. The problematizations are subtle and scrupulous, but they skirt the problem Adorno rubs raw, the corruption and illegitimacy of “ethics” at large. After Auschwitz?–no; since long before Auschwitz, and as cause, not as effect: after “administration,” doing ethics has become barbaric.
 

The “ethics” essays are led off by J.M. Bernstein’s “Intact and Fragmented Bodies: Versions of Ethics ‘After Auschwitz’.” Bernstein identifies four “lacunae” in Adorno’s attempt at a “philosophical” response to the Shoah, and finds these deficits supplied by Agamben’s Remnants of Auschwitz, “almost as if Agamben’s book were designed to fill in the missing arguments in Adorno’s account” (33). Besides Agamben, Bernstein takes bearings from Primo Levi and Hannah Arendt (a footnote explains that the essay is part of a larger attempt to reconcile Arendt and Adorno [35n7]); another waypoint is Foucault’s “modernity as biopolitics”–the claim not merely to power over subject populations, but of “administrative” sovereignty over biological process as such. Hence the “administrative” drive, in the camps, to reduce the inmates to “living dead”: to kill individuality and moral agency in advance of killing the “mere” physical bodies. Bernstein rewrites a famous sentence in the Dialectic of Enlightenment, putting “biopower” where the original had “enlightenment”: “biopower is mythical fear radicalized” (40, adapting the Jephcott trans. 11). Hence if Agamben’s account of “domination” is more philosophically coherent than Adorno’s, this achievement proves to be self-discrediting. “Biopolitics” requires a constitutive distinction of reason from bios, and in deconstructing this binary Bernstein shows that Agamben’s critique of it actually preserves its kernel of domination (reason as master, bios as slave). Thus does Agamben’s ethical argument compromise the very possibility of an ethics. Adorno partisans will think this a satisfying result, but it raises the question, Why adduce Agamben at all?–since the terms in which Bernstein sets up his argument are drawn rather from Arendt. Presumably Agamben is a foil for Arendt, setting the terms for Bernstein’s projected Arendt/Adorno rapprochement. Bernstein defaults to the Adorno premise that a properly philosophical response to the Shoah must resist the “dialectic of enlightenment” dynamic of domination. In Adorno, that means (at minimum) a response that owns affect, and on that ground, surely, Arendt is closer to Adorno than to Agamben. I can’t guess whether Bernstein’s pursuit of his theme will traverse the question of “philosophy and literature,” but his evocation of Primo Levi (in a moving passage from The Drowned and the Saved) seems a promising, if oblique nod toward “the aesthetic.”
 

Bernstein’s article is followed by Michael Marder’s “Minima Patientia: Reflections on the Subject of Suffering,” an eloquent inquiry, in implicit dialogue with Bernstein, into how, if at all, “we,” the living, can witness for the six million dead–questions that generate discussion of “ethics” and/as memory. Christina Gerhardt’s “The Ethics of Animals in Adorno and Kafka” reviews Adorno’s treatment of cruelty to animals, the relevant contexts from Kantian “Reason” (in which animals figure simply as the not-rational) to Freud’s account of totemism (which uncovers telling cathexes of animals in the unconscious), and Schopenhauer. The essay is more a survey than a critical discussion: the account of Kafka, for instance, makes nothing of the affective distance between the stories functioning within the “animal fable” paradigm (the ape of “Report to an Academy,” the dog of the “Investigations”) and that wholly original ordeal of guilty revulsion, “The Metamorphosis.” Alexander Garcia Düttmann, in “Adorno’s Rabbits; or, Against Being in the Right,” mounts impressive indignation on Adorno’s behalf against recent culture-wars detractors in the German press, and re-enacts Adorno’s protest against “domination” in all its forms (cognitive, affective, material, economic), in the proposition that “Being right . . . is not an ethical category”: insofar as philosophy is invested in being right, so much the worse, ethically, for philosophy.

The richest of the “ethics” essays is Robert Kaufman’s “Poetry’s Ethics? Theodor W. Adorno and Robert Duncan on Aesthetic Illusion and Sociopolitical Delusion.” Kaufman floats free of the straitening scruples of “philosophy” to demonstrate that “Poetry’s ethics”–the aesthetic at large–dramatizes the conflicting claims of is and ought “rather than, as might seem to be required in philosophy itself, abstractly deciding between them” (77). Kaufman is a professor of literature, with joint appointments in English and German; he offers close readings of key passages, almost always citing (and discussing) the German text as well as the translation, beginning with the first “after Auschwitz” quote and Adorno’s many variant restatements of it throughout the ensuing controversy. “Lyric” is a focus for Kaufman–references to his other articles suggest a book in progress–because lyric, untrammeled by the burdens of narrative and character, epitomizes one extreme of aesthetic “semblance,” a mimesis that maintains a dialectical non-identity with what it ostensibly offers a semblance of. A “semblance,” in short, that refuses “adaequatio” conceptions of representation, can “keep the difference” between (the terms of Kaufman’s title) “aesthetic illusion,” which “keeps determination and ethical possibility open for exploration,” and the “sociopolitical delusion” that “the poem itself is already an ethical or political act” (118).

 
Kaufman writes and argues with a daring that accepts the challenge of Adorno’s dictum (which he quotes [92]) that “The prudence that restrains us from venturing too far ahead in a sentence, is usually only an agent of social control, and so of stupefaction” (Minima Moralia 86). He pursues, for example, the “poetry is barbaric” meme via the “homeopathic” twists of “immanent critique,” to the point of turning Adorno’s initial scorn of a certain genteel denial of twentieth-century barbarism into a justification of an unflinching poetry of shock, of “semblance”-barbarism like Paul Celan’s. (A two-page coda features Duncan’s poem, “A Song From the Structures of Rime Ringing as the Poet Paul Celan Sings.”) Most daringly of all, Kaufman shares a story told him by his father, an Auschwitz survivor–and then interprets it, in just the way Agamben et al. would insist that “we,” whose witness can never be “authentic,” mustn’t do. On Kaufman’s (as on Adorno’s) showing, poetry’s ethics prove more flexible, more open, more ethical indeed, than philosophy’s; but Kaufman makes explicit the “ultimate [ethical] concern” (to recall Adorno’s under-acknowledged early mentor, Paul Tillich) that Adorno refused to declare in so many words. (As in the famous Hemingway passage about the words we don’t use anymore, refusal of the word attests commitment to the thing.)

 
Kaufman’s emphasis on Adorno’s language segues conveniently to two articles that touch on Adorno’s implicit “philosophy of language.” Gerhard Richter, in “Aesthetic Theory and Nonpropositional Truth Content in Adorno,” replies to Rüdiger Bubner’s indignant refusal of Adorno’s ethicizing (so to speak) of the aesthetic. Richter argues the case by reading the last section of Minima Moralia with close attention to the German and with many instructive dissents from the standard translation by Edmund Jephcott. As in Kaufman, Adorno’s “non-propositional” truth-claim refuses “adaequatio” in favor of a Messianically-tinted “mimesis of what does not yet exist, the negative traces of a futurity that can be neither predicted nor programmed in advance but that nevertheless inscribe themselves into the artwork and into the philosophy that enters a relation with that artwork, as a nonidentical and negatively charged otherness” (Richter 129).
 

Samir Gandesha defends Adorno in “The ‘Aesthetic Dignity of Words’: Adorno’s Philosophy of Language” against Habermas’s charge that Adorno remains stuck in a “philosophy of consciousness” by appealing to what he considers Adorno’s implicit philosophy of language. The argument is based on Adorno’s early “Theses on the Language of the Philosopher,” which Gandesha and Michael Palamarek have translated for the first time, in a forthcoming University of Toronto volume, Adorno and the Need in Philosophy. (The translation is not included here.) Adorno writes that “all philosophical critique today is possible as the critique of language,” a dictum that Gandesha calls “programmatic for his philosophy as a whole” (139) and that he connects with the early Wittgenstein’s adviso that “all philosophy is critique of language” (Tractatus 4.0031). He likewise assimilates Horkheimer and Adorno’s diagnosis of the “entwinement of myth and enlightenment” to the later Wittgenstein’s campaign against the “bewitchment” of thought by language. Gandesha’s effort (in which the defense against Habermas recedes) is to situate Adorno vis-à-vis not only Wittgenstein early and late but also vis-à-vis Heidegger, by the light (mostly) of the contemporaneous “Idea of Natural History” (in which Heidegger is the implicit adversary) and “Actuality of Philosophy” (in which it’s the Vienna-circle Wittgenstein). As for the later Wittgenstein, Gandesha finds unacknowledged rapprochement in “The Essay as Form” and in “Words from Abroad.” But Gandesha passes over Adorno’s dissents from Wittgenstein on clarity and on remaining silent, and from Wittgenstein’s adherence, early and late, to the “adaequatio” ideal, which would rule out critical negation (Kaufman’s “semblance,” Richter’s “mimesis”). Adorno does not share Wittgenstein’s aspiration to “leave everything as it was.”
 

I come at last to the two essays that come first in the New German Critique special issue. Detlev Claussen, in “Intellectual Transfer: Theodor W. Adorno’s American Experience,” wants to overturn the received view of the “mandarin” Adorno holding his nose through his forced exile in vulgar America. This meme is in the air, as witness David Jenemann’s Adorno in America (U of Minnesota P, 2007)–but whereas the American Jenemann stays modest in his claims, to avoid any appearance of grabby over-reach, Claussen, a German, stages the “American Adorno” as an affront to his countrymen, who take their proprietary title to Adorno too complacently for granted. “Simply put: without America, Adorno would never have become the person we recognize by that name” (6). Indeed, he might not have adopted that name; Claussen’s freshest suggestion is that Adorno dropped “Wiesengrund” (in 1942 in California) not to minimize his Jewishness (the usual conjecture) but to downplay his Germanness. (But see below.) Claussen overstates his case regarding Adorno’s absorption of American social-science research methods: Adorno’s indictments of positivism and empiricism, early and late, attest that his work on Paul Lazarsfeld’s Radio Project and The Authoritarian Personality only intensified his disdain of quantitative “research.” Perhaps Claussen argues the point more persuasively in his recent (as yet untranslated) 2003 biography, but as a short essay, the case seems more a provocative “exaggeration” than a worked-out attempt to convince.

 
Martin Jay’s “Taking on the Stigma of Inauthenticity: Adorno’s Critique of Genuineness” is less concerned to rehearse (again) Adorno’s critique of Heidegger, Jaspers, et al., than to pursue subtle contrasts between Adorno and Walter Benjamin on, e.g., “aura.” The famous peroration of Benjamin’s “Mechanical Reproduction” essay–where fascism aestheticizes politics, communism politicizes art–is usually taken proscriptively; hence Adorno’s differences with Benjamin on “aura” (etc.) have been extensively discussed, but almost always on political grounds. Jay is alert to the politics, most interestingly with the suggestion that “authenticity” as a subtext of fascist racism prompted Adorno and Benjamin to valorize “the stigma of inauthenticity” (Jay adapts his title from Minima Moralia 154) on behalf of those condemned in Nazi-speak as “rootless cosmopolitans.” But by coming at these issues via “authenticity,” Jay illuminates the aestheticization sustaining that fetish. Especially illuminating is Jay’s articulation of “authenticity” with “mimesis.” As a conformity-imperative on behalf of authenticity, mimesis simply is ideology; but Jay also discerns along lines similar to Richter’s and Kaufman’s (above) a critical and negative mimesis that foregrounds its dissonance from “what is,” thus (in Jay’s words) “resisting identity thinking and the preponderance of the subject over the object,” and promoting a “passive receptivity that avoided domination of otherness” (21). To that extent mimesis has the potential to function not as the repetition but as the critique of “what is,” and not despite its “inauthenticity” but because of it. Hence the stakes in “taking on the stigma of inauthenticity.” (Jay also confronts a contradiction most commentators ignore: for all his sneers at “authenticity,” Adorno can evoke it honorifically in praise of artworks that realize these critical potentials. Jay deftly explains the terminological aspects of the question–i.e., the range of terms that English translates as “authenticity”: Authentizität, Eigentlichkeit, Echtheit–without reducing it to them.)

 
I picked up the Adorno-Mann correspondence expecting light on the Doctor Faustus collaboration, and I salivated over the early letter in which Mann woos Adorno, explaining what kind of novel he has in mind, and what kind of help he wants, but the actual work took place in real time when Mann and Adorno lived within easy reach of each other in Los Angeles, and by page 18 Doctor Faustus is already in print. (There are appendices reprinting Adorno’s two memos on how to characterize particular works by “Adrian Leverkuhn,” Mann’s composer-protagonist; these are apparently the principal documentary remains of the collaboration.) The reviews and controversies following Faustus‘s publication prompt some interesting exchanges, but the interest of these letters lies elsewhere. (I place Schoenberg’s pique at Mann’s novel, whose protagonist is credited with the dodecaphonic system Schoenberg himself invented, among the “elsewhere.”) Mann and Adorno exchange worries about the emerging Cold War; about Germany’s “recovery” from the war, especially its numbed and, both agreed, morally deficient posture toward (or away from) the genocide; about the German future and the question of their own return (or not) to Germany. Mann swore never to return; when he finally left California, it was to end his days in Switzerland. Adorno’s 1949 Frankfurt University stint as visiting lecturer was intended as a reconnaissance, but receptive students, a sense of duty as a public intellectual, and his unforeseen home-coming emotions (not to mention the rise of HUAC and McCarthy in America) started him thinking of returning for good. His first letter from Frankfurt to Mann makes a rich complement to the one he wrote his mother (see below).

 
Throughout, Mann and Adorno are exchanging current work: on Adorno’s side, Philosophy of New Music (Mann had read the Schoenberg sections in draft while writing Faustus, but the Stravinsky sections were new to him), Against Epistemology, In Search of Wagner, and numerous essays, reviews, radio talks, etc. Mann sent along The Holy Sinner, The Black Swan, and drafts of Felix Krull, as well as various essays and lectures. The back-and-forth, as each comments on the other’s latest work, is intellectual exchange of a very high caliber. (The extensive discussion of Wagner [92-7] is particularly rich.) There is, however, almost no disagreement between these two, and such differences as there are, they express in the mildest possible terms. Mann was ever the canny literary diplomat, but an Adorno who pulls his punches is something new.
 

Here is the largest interest (or guiltiest pleasure?) of these letters, the keyhole they open onto the personal relations of these two. For Mann, Adorno is (initially) an intellectual whose musical expertise he needs and whose continuing allegiance he wants; his praises of Adorno’s works can feel more than a little overdone. It helps, of course, that Adorno is an admirer from the beginning. Adorno, for his part, finds himself dealing for once with more than an equal: with a great and politically committed literary artist and cultural icon. (Mann’s Nobel came in 1929, when Adorno was 26.) Mann clearly had, and kept, the upper hand. Adorno saw that association with Mann could greatly boost his own prestige. Doesn’t Adorno compromise principle (not to say, make his own Faustian bargain) in agreeing to serve Mann’s basic premise–Schoenberg as the proto-Nazi Faust?–for Adorno thought Schoenberg the preeminent modernist good guy; wouldn’t he have preferred a Wagner-like protagonist for Mann’s Faustus? or a Stravinskian “reactionary” (see Philosophy of New Music)? Mann’s view of Wagner was aesthetic (à la early Nietzsche) rather than political; insofar as Mann and Adorno both took bearings from Freud, Mann sees Wagner as aesthetically potent in ways Freud helps confirm, Adorno as ideologically symptomatic in ways Freud helps diagnose. In any case, when Mann announces that he is writing a memoir about the composition of Faustus, Adorno is thrilled that his backstage role will get a curtain call, a prospect Mann played up while the book (Story of a Novel) was in progress. In the event, Adorno would be disappointed: Mann’s praise was fulsome, but (Adorno thought) understated his contribution. And of course Adorno had to swallow his spleen; he could never confess to Mann how slighted he felt.¹
 

Mann, as accredited culture-hero, can address Adorno with magisterial aplomb; Adorno, by contrast, is as usual (indeed, more than usual) anxious to dazzle. Story of a Novel isn’t the only case in which Mann seems almost to toy with the feelings of his admirer; consider also the issue of Mann’s “modernism.” Mann was a touchstone of modernism for Adorno; of anti-modernism for Adorno’s adversary in debate, Lukács–so of course Adorno sought to win the protean, shape-shifting Mann to the “modernist” side, away from the Lukácsean “demand for realism” (103). This push-pull is the subtext of a late exchange that begins when Mann confides his despair over Felix Krull, a comical picaresque of horny youth he had left unfinished decades earlier; resuming it now, at age 77, alas! he can’t find the right style, is uncertain of his genre, can’t reconcile the conflicts…. The letter is clearly fishing for encouragement, and Adorno is positively gallant in response: Mann’s past accomplishment has brilliantly reinvented genres, evaded the old-fashioned “will to style,” drawn power from dramatizing, not reconciling, tensions–assurances, of course, encoding an undeclared manifesto for (Mann’s) modernism. You can’t help imagining Mann’s Mona Lisa smile when, in a later letter, he shakes his head over Waiting for Godot in terms Lukács would applaud (“I cannot help feeling some anxiety for the society that finds acclaimed expression in such a work,” etc. [107]).
 

The head-games are of an altogether different kind in Adorno’s Letters to His Parents. To his public, Adorno was a virtuoso of unhappy consciousness; en famille, he’s a virtuoso of cheery exuberance–allowing that “virtuoso” connotes a certain willfulness. To his parents Adorno ever remained the adored only child, the star family performer and perpetual center of attention–but in these letters, Adorno must keep everyone’s spirits up during a maximally anxious period: the flight from Nazism and adjustment to a new and exigent life in a strange land. There is almost too much to discuss here, so let me simply list some principal interests of these letters. First, the candor and Gemütlichkeit of the family atmosphere: the abundant endearments and pet-names; gossip about family and fellow exiles; health complaints; and anxieties about the fate of dear ones (and property) left in Europe. Adorno’s parents devotedly read all their son’s work, and when (just once), the assiduousness falls short, Adorno’s protest is plaintive and loud–“Though . . . I can also understand that your weary old heads want to have some peace . . . Even the simplest things in life are just so damned dialectical” (165). Adorno’s father was the intellectual parent, and intellectual interest falls off after his death (8 July 1946), to which Adorno reacts with a classic, and eloquent, spasm of survivor guilt (258-59) well worth comparison to his published meditations on the Shoah.
 

To his mother, Adorno confesses his erotic turmoils–three of them: one, the disquieting reappearance of an old flame; one a heady but harmless infatuation with a charismatic beauty; and one a full-blown (but unserious) infidelity. If you only browse this book, don’t miss letter #83, a comic masterpiece in which Adorno boasts of his smitten-ness and of the charms of the sublime object, which are such as to arouse the cloddish hoi polloi to envy and hatred–“just like our theoretical writings” (139)! (Greta’s reaction to these adventures is not recorded here.)
 

Another fascination is Adorno’s running commentary on war news–e.g., the first letter after 1 Sept. 1939 swings between foreboding and sarcasm, in anxious hope that the whole thing may prove a drôle de guerre and end quickly. There is no reaction at all to Pearl Harbor, though America’s entry into the war had been a consummation devoutly to be wished. By late 1943 Adorno has become unrealistically optimistic about victory, consistently underestimating how long it would take, even as he remains apprehensive about fascist currents in America. We glimpse the effects of “enemy alien” restrictions: curfew (monitored by unannounced drop-ins from police); miles-from-home limits; travel permits from the FBI; worries about possible “evacuation” (i.e., internment). To his father Adorno blames his name-change (the loss of the patronymic Wiesengrund) on a stupid bureaucratic error.
 

These letters also give a vivid sense of the collaborative relationship with Horkheimer, especially of the degree to which Adorno was the one who set the words on paper, not only in their co-authored work but in much that is credited to Horkheimer alone, which Adorno edited, revised, rewrote–ghost-wrote, to put it no more strongly. Adorno briefs his parents on the inception and progress of what would eventually become Dialectic of Enlightenment. He also fumes about the research projects (especially the “Studies in Prejudice” reported in The Authoritarian Personality) whose quantitative method he disdains, but whose reputation-making power he is determined to make the most of.
 

I’d always assumed Adorno’s 1941 move from Manhattan to Los Angeles galled him; not so: he disliked New York, and raved about the Riviera-like beauties of Southern California. Most touching is his recurrent wonder, despite the provincialism and vulgarity, at the fundamentally democratic culture of America: bureaucratic encounters are friendly as they would never be in Europe, and even the police who showed up unannounced to check curfew compliance were amiable and courteous. (That was then, this is now.) In November 1949, Adorno’s triumphant return to the family’s war-ravaged home-town (Frankfurt) generates poignant accounts of the ruins, both architectural and human.
 

We’ve been in something of an Adorno boom for some time now. Books, articles, and special issues of journals (like New German Critique‘s) continue to appear; even more auspiciously, important works like History and Freedom are being translated and published. (What I want next is Adorno’s first Habilitationschrift, a neo-Kantian reading of Freud that Adorno withdrew when it lost the support of Hans Cornelius, his advisor. In later years Adorno would veto its publication.)² Some of Adorno’s “canonical” works are even being re-translated: just in the last few years, we’ve had Dialectic of Enlightenment translated anew by Edmund Jephcott, and Philosophy of New Music by Robert Hullot-Kentor, and Hullot-Kentor is reportedly at work on a retranslation (long overdue) of Negative Dialectics. There is also a loosening of the strictures against interest in Adorno’s personal life. High-minded disdain of “the personal” is widespread in our highbrow culture; it has been consistent, however diversely motivated, from the New Criticism to la nouvelle critique and beyond; and it’s a disdain that Adorno, virtuoso of the hairshirt, might seem to epitomize. But predictably enough, Adorno’s centenary year (2003) announced the arrival of what we might call the moment of biography. In Germany, three of them have appeared. Detlev Claussen’s Der Letzte Genie remains untranslated, but as for the two now available in English, Lorenz Jäger’s Adorno: A Political Biography is a culture-wars screed; Stephan Müller-Doohm’s Adorno: A Biography is a reverential academic monument; neither gives any sense whatever of Adorno as a personality. Nor have the hitherto available letters: Adorno’s correspondence with Benjamin, despite the mutual affection between them, stays on a remarkably stratospheric plane of high-minded intellectualism. I would expect the correspondence with Horkheimer to be warmer and more personal, but it remains untranslated. Only the just-published letters to Berg have hitherto given us any flavor of Adorno’s humor, lustig very much in the Viennese manner. The letters reviewed here give us a more lively sense than any we’ve had so far (in English, at least) of what the private Adorno was like as a social being and as a family man. Of course the “personal” isn’t the only interest of these letters: as we’ve seen, Adorno’s commitment to his work was of an intensity to fuse public preoccupations with the personal ones. But “the personal” as such in Adorno proves to hold surprising fascinations of its own. If the letters to Mann suggest something of the degree to which the public Adorno’s hairshirt mortifications, all the guilt of history and the agonies of “after Auschwitz” granted, also had their springs in predictable personal ambitions and vanities, the letters to his parents disclose a real, and attractively “happy” surprise that I, at least, never anticipated: how lively and mercurial a sprite capered under the hairshirt.

Notes

1. For a strongly pro-Adorno account of further details–side-by-side comparisons of Adorno’s memos with Mann’s published text, anti-Adorno invective from Mann’s family after the great man’s death, Adorno’s reaction to slighting remarks about him that Mann had written in letters to others–see Müller-Doohm 314-20.

2. Der Begriff des Unbewußten in der transzendentalen Seelenlehre [The Concept of the Unconscious in the Transcendental Theory of the Psyche] (Philosophische Früschriften 79-322); for details of the episode and a brief account of the dissertation, see Müller-Doohm 103-6.

Works Cited

• Adorno, T.W., with Max Horkheimer. Dialectic of Enlightenment. Trans. Edmund Jephcott. Stanford: Stanford UP, 2002.
• —. Minima Moralia. Trans. E.F.N. Jephcott. London: Verso, 1974.
• —. Philosophische Frühschriften. Theodor W. Adorno. Gesammelte Schriften, Band 1. Ed. Rolf Tiedemann. Frankfurt: Suhrkamp, 1996.
• —. Problems of Moral Philosophy. Ed. Thomas Schröder. Trans. Rodney Livingstone. Stanford: Stanford UP, 2001.
• Müller-Doohm, Stephan. Adorno: A Biography. Trans. Rodney Livingstone. Cambridge: Polity, 2005.
• Wittgenstein, Ludwig. Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus. Trans. D.F. Pears and B.F. McGuinness. London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1972.

Brook Miller
Department of English
University of Minnesota, Morris
cbmiller@umn.edu

A review of: Martin Conboy, Tabloid Britain: Constructing A Community Through Language. New York: Routledge, 2006.

I said Charles, don’t you ever crave
To appear on the front of The Daily Mail
Dressed in your Mother’s bridal veil?
. . .
Oh, has the world changed or have I changed?

–The Smiths, “The Queen is Dead” (1986)

Opening with the WWI tune “Take Me Back to Dear Old Blighty” juxtaposed to an aggressive punk drumbeat, “The Queen is Dead” playfully questions whether Britain’s tabloid culture represents a radical break from a sentimental, affectionate vision of a tradition-encrusted nation. In Tabloid Britain, Martin Conboy answers “no, but…” by tracking the paradoxical dual rhetoric of the contemporary British tabloids: on the one hand, indulging in prurient spectacle, while on the other, grounding a reactionary moralism in working-class rhetoric and nostalgic images of the British past.
 

According to Conboy, the British tabloids emerged in recognizable form in the late nineteenth century, heavily influenced by the American press. In the early twentieth century, British publishers pioneered new formatting and circulation conventions, and in the 1930s “fierce circulation wars . . . led to developments which aimed at a . . . more populist and more commercially successful format for a mass readership” (6). The Daily Mirror embodied these changes, with “larger, darker type, shorter stories, and less [sic] items on a page” (6). In the late 1960s and 1970s, The Sun attained a dominant market position by emphasizing sex, entertainment, and celebrity while still appealing to the “views and interests of the British working people” (7). This formula, and the tensions implied by it, largely has survived into the present, with periods of more or less salacious content.

 
Tabloid Britain might best be read in conjunction with Conboy’s two previous books, Journalism: A Critical History (London: Sage, 2004) and The Press and Popular Culture (London: Sage, 2002), that examine how changes in journalistic practices and in industrial relations manifested in newspaper content in the 1970s, 1980s, and 1990s. These earlier books give the reader a stronger sense of the context that has fostered the rhetoric Conboy examines. In particular, Conboy describes Rupert Murdoch’s transfer of production facilities to Wapping in the 1980s as “a symbolic clustering of the technology, politics and ownership at the heart of much of tabloidization’s imperatives” (Journalism 193). These texts also dissect the impact of the tabloids upon journalism more generally.
 

Conboy’s newest book makes an important contribution to the critical discourse studies associated with Teun van Dijk by dissecting the complexities of popular discourse. Coverage of celebrity culture, for example, exposes a key nuance in the conjunction of spectacle and moralism: “Celebrity news . . . is not a one-way street of prurient gossip, sensation and revelation. It can also be used to drive an alternative and highly moralistic agenda” (190). David and Victoria Beckham provide a key contemporary case in point: while both Beckhams are national, indeed global, sex symbols, their relationship has at times embodied “traditional notions of the family,” especially the naturalness of wifely domesticity; at others, however, David Beckham’s tattoos have associated him with thuggish “yob” culture (190-1).

 
By limiting its purview, Tabloid Britain contributes a nuanced thesis about the operations of bias and ideology in a particularly vitriolic area of the modern media. It extends and complicates critical discourse studies of the media that posit a direct sociolinguistic affinity between the politics and background of a particular readership and the language of the newspapers they read, notably Roger Fowler’s seminal Language in the News: Discourse and Ideology in the Press (Routledge, 1991). Here Conboy convincingly demonstrates that the tabloids operate not simply as rhetorical and ideological mirrors of their readerships, but as significant “social educator[s]” through the “normalization of certain modes of social belonging” (9). This function is expressly nationalistic, and Conboy’s study focuses “on one strand of a complex flow of institutional, economic and journalistic processes, namely the language used to create and maintain a readership that is predicated on a sound grasp of a British national identity and a propensity to sense and exploit issues likely to stir nationalist feelings within the readership” (9). At the same time, Tabloid Britain “aims to show less the effects rather than the attempts to construct [a national] community of readers” and to engage with “the dynamics of discourse construction within the tabloids” (47).
 

The tabloids pursue this function by inflecting a “close textual display of intimacy with idealized individual readers” into “a version of the citizen-ideal of the public sphere, albeit one without the analysis of central social issues other than when they are refracted through sensation, celebrity, and a prism of everyday life” (10). This rhetoric is highly successful commercially, and it promotes an “ideological pact” with the readership in which “the newspaper appears to side with a populist chorus of condemnation of the ills of society [with] the implication that a return to some form of harsh regime of discipline is the solution . . . the tabloid agenda is one all too often predicated on an authoritarian populism” (26).

 
This agenda typically supports conservative values drawn from visions of individual initiative and character, charged by spurs such as threats to neo-Victorian ‘mums,’ and contextualized within a triumphant vision of Britain’s past salted with fears of an assault upon national values by progressive ideologies and non-white, non-British bodies. The weltanschauung of the tabloids is typically “non-rational . . . where humans are at the mercy of strange and incongruous events. The logic of this world has a corresponding politics, according to which improvements in life come from individual effort or the workings of fate” (33). Yet this textual politics also sometimes operates in the service of radical causes, as in a Daily Mirror exposé of the culture of racism at a detention center for asylum seekers and in its critique of the trade and monetary policies of the West as causes of African poverty (175, 176). These radical positions can be particularly pointed when directed towards supporting workers’ rights.
 

To enact this pact, the tabloids make frequent use of first-person plural pronouns and a tone of shared indignation (conveyed most overtly through a consistent use of ALL CAPS), an emphasis upon features that promote a sense of interaction between readers and the paper, indeed giving the readers the impression of authorship and agency within the paper. Published on pages titled “THE PAGE WHERE YOU TELL BRITAIN WHAT YOU THINK” and “IT’S THE PAGE YOU WRITE,” “the letters . . . are editorially themed around particular issues which act as a constructed dialogue between readers and newspaper, prioritizing the newspapers’ agenda but in terms which appear to illustrate a seamless continuity between newspaper and readers as evinced by their letters” (20).

 
The body of Tabloid Britain focuses on how this compact relies upon the representation of British history, outsiders, gender, sexuality, popular politics, and celebrity culture. The use of demotic language consolidates these topics into a singularity of voice. Manifested in “us and them” logic, this voice crucially secures its market while promoting reactionary positions, often against the interests of its own readership.

 
Conboy ably describes and analyzes the rhetorical conventions that convey this relation. These conventions include using slang as a sign of anti-establishmentarian skepticism, the use of familiar first names (as opposed to British journalistic conventions of using surnames preceded by a polite form of address), a rhetoric of “violent encounter,” binary lists structured in a “good vs. evil” format, cross-page headlines, and salacious storylines, all of which serve to depict news in terms of outsized, hyperbolic clashes of personalities. Additionally, the tabloids emphasize their own importance and agency, rather than objectivity, as a way of promoting its shared suspicion of elites.
 

Several semantic constructions and narratives typically mediate the relation of textual community to the ‘us’ and ‘them’ so important to articulating the nation. These include demonstrations of unquestioning support for military personnel, assertions of the right to show explicit pride in nation and national symbols, and fashioning Europe as an antagonist. The primary narrative told through the tabloids is of national decline, with fault laid at the door of elites, political correctness, or invasions from abroad.
 

The narrative of national decline is supported by stories of history designed to reinforce Britain’s status as an exceptional nation. Reverence for, and knowledge of, celebrated moments such as the D-Day invasions provides one index of British identity that flattens class distinctions. Detractors from these carefully scripted stories, and figures who obstruct the remembrance and celebration of these narratives, correspondingly function as the agents of threat to or the decline of the nation (92).
 

In addition to moral indignation, the tabloids consistently operate in the register of humor. The punning headline–such as “THE POLE TRUTH” heading a story about the Polish president admitting to have worked illegally in London as a youth–is a staple of tabloid stories, as are humorous “menus” sending up current scandals as recipes for disaster, and other forms. The humor is at times subversive, but it generally operates to shut down “systematic investigation of the implications of language which may offend minorities or politically and socially marginalized groups” (157).

 
Such a use of humor also characterizes the tabloids’ rhetoric regarding scopic sexuality. The institution of the “Page 3 Girl,” a topless model available to readers of The Sun immediately upon opening the paper, is defended from allegations of sexism on the basis of being just “a bit of fun.” While innuendo about celebrities’ sex lives operates in much the same spirit, the tabloids also police the moral standards of its readership: “as soon as sex threatens to become real . . . the atmosphere changes very swiftly and the language used to describe it returns to the more puritanical end of the tabloid spectrum reserved for activities and people they disapprove of” (132).
 

This policing of the socioeconomic group ventriloquized in the tabloids coalesces in the common target of the ‘yob’–a term for a loutish member of the working class. Paradoxically, “the newspapers are written to appeal to the working classes but go to some lengths to castigate this particular type as if to draw on the Victorian moral distinction between the deserving and undeserving poor” (17).
 

The subtlest of these rhetorical strategies is an absence; while reportage may tend towards racism, xenophobia, sexism, and a variety of other strategies of exclusion, these tendencies are trumped by the anti-establishment agenda, which sometimes means taking radical positions. What is insidious about the tabloids, however, is the manner in which these perspectives tend to avoid critique of the relations of power; instead, “the structural and institutional aspects of the story are relegated to an incidental feature beneath the triumphant and self-promotional tone of the tabloid which emphasizes the end of racism at the centre” (177). The larger stakes of the argument, and a motif which emerges sporadically throughout Tabloid Britain, is that we should understand the political function of the British tabloids. Through “exaggerated foregrounding of sensation and ‘human interest’ . . . [the tabloids structure] the world in a way which rejects fundamental political issues and focuses instead on random events within a world of common sense” (15).

 
The weakness of such an approach is that it fails to take significant account of the political allegiances held by particular tabloids. The Royal Commission on the Press’s 1977 Final Report (London: Her Majesty’s Stationary Office, 1977), for example, noted the emergence of a gap in centrist and central-left perspectives created by the demise of the Daily Herald and News Chronicle, and it notes the extent and degree of dissatisfaction with the coverage of industrial relations and trade union affairs as a significant weakness in newspapers” (100).
 

John Tulloch, in his introduction to Chris Horrie’s Tabloid Nation, argues that “one of the most debilitating aspects of debates on the press is the tendency to lump different newspapers together–and the most notable example is the tabloids.” While such a critique might apply to Conboy’s Tabloid Britain, Tulloch further claims that the debates tend to center upon the notion that because tabloids obey “the same economic laws . . . . They’re not newspapers, but consumerist magazines . . . [and thus] abdicate the arena of political debate.” Tabloid Britain‘s contribution, then, is to make political sense of the consumerist tendency in the tabloids. In so doing, Conboy provides significant substantiation for James Curran’s and James Thomas’s observations that since Wapping there has been a significant rightward turn of the popular press.
 

In addition to Tabloid Britain, readers might find interesting Chris Horrie’s analyses, in Tabloid Nation, of the internal politics of the tabloids and the state of the tabloid press. Horrie makes two observations that seem particularly fitting here–first, he notes a movement away from ‘bonk’ journalism in the 1990s evidenced by the rise of celebrity magazines such as OK! and Hello! and their partnerships with tabloid papers. Second, Horrie observes that “by 2003 young people in Tabloid Britain were starting to turn their backs on the tabloid newspapers,” primarily as a result of increased access to the same material through television and the internet.”

 
Tabloid Britain provides a satisfying anatomization of the various rhetorical strategies employed in the tabloids, but Conboy’s suggestion of deep affinities with other literary and cultural discourses often feels cursory. For example, he repeatedly links the tone of indignation to the traditions of the moralizing folk tale and to melodrama, but neither of these links are established in any serious depth. Treated as conventional ideas the reader would be expected to understand, such linkages largely lose their potential to reveal the tabloids’ deep fascination with soap opera and reality television.

 
Lost as well are some of the more interesting meditations upon the tabloids’ simulation of working-class rhetoric. In a provocative aside, Conboy notes that studies have indicated “a male tendency to bond with lower socio-cultural patterns of language” (23). The possibility that the tabloids’ rhetoric is associated with machismo suggests a complex class dynamic that Conboy never explores. Further, he does not fully delve into one of the paradoxes immediately evident upon opening the website to any of the tabloids–while a profusion of bared female bodies hails a heteronormative male gaze, the papers directly appeal to female audiences as well. Perhaps a deeper excavation of the heteronormativity of the tabloids would secure the claims for its heritage in melodrama and folk tale, but Conboy does not explore this territory (he does, however, mention lesbians as a group particularly targeted by the newspapers). Moreover, one wishes that Conboy had explored his notion that the national community evoked by the tabloids “recalls something of Baudrillard’s simulacrum” by considering the way tabloid coverage, like much of the contemporary blogosphere, is often a re-processing of news narratives offered elsewhere (13).
 

One of the key questions that emerges from this engagement with nationalism is the impact of global and transnational culture upon the tabloid market. Conboy argues that although nation is a construct, “national news may exist within global communications conglomerates, but it needs a strong local resonance for its continued success” (47). The circularity that underlies this response is crucial, for it legitimates the extensive analysis of “narratives of nation” while refusing the insistent question “why” that emerges in response to a multitude of claims. Tabloid Britain is a fine, insightful analysis of rhetoric, but it leaves this reader thirsty for a deeper grasp of the contexts, forerunners, and implications of the rhetoric it treats.

 
One regrets missed opportunities within the criticism that would have permitted Conboy to clarify some of these critical dynamics. One pertinent example is his use of Homi Bhabha’s work on nationalism: citing only Bhabha’s introduction to Nation and Narration, Conboy misses a central analysis of the duality of nationalist discourse as both pedagogical and performative, a conceptual frame that would strengthen his argument. Another is the significant absence of Ernest Gellner’s perspective on the relations between nationalism and the elite celebration of ‘peasant’ culture, which might strengthen his claims about homologies between tabloid rhetoric and the folktale.
 

In light of recent critical arguments over the “kinda hegemonic, kinda subversive” appropriation of Foucault in literary analysis, it would behoove Conboy to explore questions of consumption more closely (see Miller). In examining the rhetoric as an ideological support for the political economy of the papers, Tabloid Britain refuses to confront the point any representative of the papers would immediately make: that they are simply giving the people what they want. For Conboy, the tabloids “enable the reader to use the newspaper as a textual bridge between their own experience of the culture in which they live, and their own attitudes and beliefs within a range of language which is a close approximation to what they imagine themselves to be using when they speak of these things themselves” (11). But do tabloid readers use it as such, or are the tabloids consumed for their deeper coverage of sport and celebrities? How have changes in the tabloid audience and changes in tabloid rhetoric and content related to one another over time? And are tabloids typically consumed as a proletarian voice, as a source of political information and opinion? James Thomas notes mixed information in the studies done to date on this topic: the public, even when restricted to tabloid readers, tend to express distrust of their content; on the other hand, researchers have found evidence that readers “had absorbed the information they claimed not to believe” (153). While the answers to these questions are indefinite, some consideration of reception would strengthen Tabloid Britain‘s argument about the insidious nature of tabloid rhetoric.
 

Questions of readership arise throughout Conboy’s extensive use of primary evidence. While not the book’s stated intention, stronger distinctions between the particular tabloids, and careful examination of the evolution of tabloid rhetoric in relation to the publishing industry, the growth of the internet, and British politics would evoke great interest and fall outside of the purview of the critics he has quoted. Conboy does occasionally indicate the targeting of a particular tabloid towards gender or political affiliations, but his intention to illuminate the political economy of the tabloids is underserved by an absence of deeper analysis of these concerns.
 

In terms of tabloid content, one of the odd omissions of the book is any extended analysis of how the tabloids represent the British royal family, surely the sine qua non of national self-iconography. Conboy’s study resonates with the contemporary reader because of its continual use of examples from the Blair administration, including debates over immigrant asylum, the War in Iraq, and the Global War on Terror; and examples from celebrity culture, including internet sex-scandals involving British soap stars and the personal and marital travails of British football star David Beckham. With “Teflon Tony” and “Becks” poised to fade from the front pages, one must wonder about the currency of Tabloid Britain five years hence. Indeed, one deeper problem with the book is that, in engaging in rhetorical analysis, Conboy’s emphasis on the synchronic blurs into an emphasis upon the ephemera that are supposed to function merely as examples of the tendencies he chronicles.
 

The book is admirably up-to-date in terms of how new technologies have had an impact on the consumption of the news. Yet the prevalence of references to email and texting speaks to the need for periodic updates if the book is to maintain its currency. On its website at the time this review was written, The Sun had a number of features that Conboy would certainly find interesting, including ‘virals’ for readers to forward, blogs, YouTube-style comedy videos, interactive gambling games, a fantasy football game, online shopping featuring Sun gear, a weight loss club, and numerous other features.
 

Were such an update to occur, the argument would be strengthened by specific attention to the ways in which email, texting, and other forms of virtual participation in the tabloid’s imaginary community changes, or perhaps deepens, the sense of creating a simulacrum of the natio. Were Conboy to explore such an analysis, he would be well-positioned to make a significant addition to critical work on media culture, capitalism, and nationalism.

Eric Keenaghan
Department of English
State University of New York, Albany
ekeenaghan@albany.edu

Review of: Laura Moriarty, Ultravioleta. Berkeley: Atelos, 2006; Jocelyn Saidenberg, Negativity. Berkeley: Atelos, 2006; Juliana Spahr, The Transformation. Berkeley: Atelos, 2007.

 
Disturbed by the mid-century capitalistic imperative that Americans make a living, and unsatisfied with the Soviet Union’s alternative of valorizing communal labor, Hannah Arendt seeks in the human condition some other idea of freedom. She is drawn to the ancient Greek polis model of a public space accessible exclusively to free male citizens liberated from the bonds of household labor and the work of crafting material goods. There men freely engaged in activities possessing virtú, or a liberating virtuosity and improvisational subtlety not unlike that of a musical performance. For Arendt, politics, speech, and music “do not pursue an end (are ateleis) and leave no work behind (no par’ autas erga), but exhaust their full meaning in the performance itself.” The freest and most political action in this schema is that which expends itself in the moment and place of its enactment, where “the performance is the work” (206). Arendt especially struggles to pinpoint where poetry lies in her tripartite schemata of work, labor, and action. She contends that “a poem is less a thing than any other work of art; yet even a poem, no matter how long it existed as a living spoken word in the recollection of the bard and those who listened to him, will eventually be ‘made,’ that is, written down and transformed into a tangible thing among things” (170). An odd predicament, indeed. Poetry does not belong to this world, nor can it found a polis. Since its material is language, it closely resembles Arendt’s esteemed category of thought; but because words must be put to paper, poetry is not properly atelic. Thus, she judges it to be an impotent form: it cannot hope to found a new form of politicized action and freedom, and it may not even be the stuff of an intellectual performance.

 
I do not know whether Lyn Hejinian and Travis Ortiz had The Human Condition in mind when they named their new publishing venture a decade ago. Yet their press, Atelos, implicitly challenges Arendt’s–and many others’–misunderstanding of poetry’s relationship to politics. Since its first publication (Jean Day’s The Literal World, 1998), all of the press’s books have included a clear mission statement: “Atelos was founded in 1995 as a project of Hip’s Road, devoted to publishing, under the sign of poetry, writing which challenges the conventional definitions of poetry, since such definitions have tended to isolate it from intellectual life, arrest its development, and curtail its impact.” The press sets out to correct commonplace contemporary misunderstandings of poetry (as Romantic, self-contained, removed from politics, or unable to create new communities), and it also takes on those respectful but skeptical views of poetry such as Arendt’s. Atelos does have an end, a telos, since the publishers have announced that the list will include only fifty titles, a sort of literary republic or poetic polity mirroring the constitution of the actual States. Atelos resignifies not only how we understand “poetry” as a literary genre but also how we understand the virtuosity of poetic performance. The work need not disappear with the performance for it to have political virtú. Atelos Press reminds us that quite the opposite is true.

 
In the current climate of globalized capitalism, it’s impossible to romanticize, as Arendt had, a revolutionary space apart for politics or for poetry. We cannot naïvely want a genuinely atelic performativity. Art’s political performance now depends on manufacturing a product whose very materiality exists in a critical and conflicted relationship with dominant economic and political logics. Atelos has produced books that double as aesthetic objects and commodities. All of the books have the same distinctive dimensions (7.9 x 5.3 inches), with a slender band wrapping around the cover and containing the title’s number. While the objects are branded, what’s between the recognizable covers varies greatly–perhaps too much so for some readers’ tastes. In small press publications, content, like the covers, is usually branded. Not only does the Atelos catalogue contain a miscellany of authors not always thought to “belong” to the same poetic “tradition” or “school” or even “generation,” but Atelos projects often mark a departure from the authors’ own previous ventures. Rae Armantrout’s recourse to a form resembling memoir in True (1998), Barrett Watten’s documentary poetic prose in Bad History (1998), and Fanny Howe’s inclusion of a CD of a dramatic performance of her poem Tis of Thee (2003) are exemplary cases in point. The Atelos list has included work by younger poets–sometimes their first books (like Lohren Green’s Poetical Dictionary: Abridged, 2003) and sometimes not (like Rodrigo Toscano’s Platform, 2003)–that offer exciting evidence of the emergence and strengthening of newer generations of U.S. poetries that are at once lyrical and experimental, literary and political, philosophical and documentary/citational.

 
At the time of this writing, the Atelos catalogue contains twenty-seven titles. The six most recent are: Taylor Brady’s Occupational Treatment (2006), Ed Roberson’s City Eclogue (2006), Tom Mandel’s To the Cognoscenti (2007), Jocelyn Saidenberg’s Negativity (2006), Laura Moriarty’s Ultravioleta (2006), and Juliana Spahr’s The Transformation (2007). Each continues Hejinian and Ortiz’s mission and deserves review in its own right. I concentrate my remarks on the last three. These are written by women now based in northern California, the original home of L=A=N=G=U=A=G=E poetry. Saidenberg, Moriarty, and Spahr are well-known and respected as important younger writers. All are concerned with poetry’s ability to pursue new political horizons, and each of their volumes plays with the relation between syntax and the poetic line. Unlike their predecessors’ New Sentence, though, these women are differently invested in what Ron Silliman denounces as conventional syntax’s “syllogistic leap, or its integration above the level of the sentence, to create a fully referential tale” (79). Referentiality, he argues, is capitalism’s chief ideological vehicle. If poetry reproduces the imperative that sentences combine to make sensible narratives, or if it commits the equally cardinal sin of a lyric association of poetic word with spoken parole rather than with written langue, the genre would be incapable of producing a resistant politics. Saidenberg, Moriarty, and Spahr may not opt for lyric, but their abandonment of earlier vanguardists’ suspicion of narrative still prompts questions. What’s so generically distinctive about poetry or its “intellectual life” if it produces works locked into market and branding logics, and cannot distinguish itself from other written forms? Can contemporary poetry really deliver virtuoso political and intellectual performances?
 

Of the three titles, Jocelyn Saidenberg’s Negativity most closely resembles what nearly all readers would recognize as contemporary poetry. Its eight integral sections feature longer pieces constituted of segments, sometimes with line breaks (but more often not) and written in the familiar (even comfortably so) style of experimental poetry–what Spahr’s book repeatedly describes as “writing that uses fragmentation, quotation, disruption, disjunction, agrammatical syntax, and so on” (e.g. 59, 61, 62, 63, 64, 78, 80, 155). As the director of San Francisco’s Small Press Traffic Literary Arts Center and a participant in the Bay Area’s queer arts community, Saidenberg is explicitly invested in the politicized relationship between art and community. From her opening Dante-esque walk through a dusky wood (“Dusky, or Destruction as a Cause of Becoming”), Saidenberg constructs a shadowy, infernal world inextricably linked to her American one. “In This Country” turns on its head the Bush administration’s recapitulation of Samuel Huntington’s “theory” of civilization versus barbarism and its jingoistic rhetoric of being “with us” or “against us”: “In this country I’m in two places at once, with you and with you” (51). This voice is a representative of a queer nation: “In this country, we take our identity from how it feels when we come. When we come we are only that” (49). Here sex and pleasure do not found an idyllic queer community; rather, they entail a negotiation of homophobic ideologies, narratives, and realities. For example, in “Not Enough Poison” Saidenberg’s narrator performs cunnilingus on her partner’s “gash.” Citing a misogynistic slur, the poem tries to resignify the negative reference as “not separating, but unifying the abrasion to all the impure, non-separated.” This is not an utterly naïve or utopist attempt to remedy social ills with a verbal patina. Orgasm, that experience of supposed transcendental unification, is disturbingly represented as an “unmending, secreting, and discharging, leaking out in glops and gummy pus. Blending into the boundaries, coterminous sore of the visible, not presentable superannuated surface of self” (38). The narrator’s subjective agency is reduced to a mere fetish’s objectivity. “So I as shoes that have been sniffed and bitten and kissed hundreds of times” (44). Devastating scenes like this recur in Negativity. They form a perverse wall (one section is even titled “Immure”) into which we run headlong. As Saidenberg warns, “let no gate deceive you by its width” (31). Whether that gate is understood to refer to a general promise of freedom from a subjectivating order or to the specific promise of erotic freedom that comes through vaginal or anal gateways, freedom always has a price: of pain, fear, even death. By linking radical pessimism to radical critique, Saidenberg tries to do for poetry what Kathy Acker or Reinaldo Arenas had done for fiction. As we might expect from a poetic resistance reminiscent of Acker’s inveighing against Reagan’s murderous silence about HIV/AIDS or Arenas’s maniacal tirades against Castro’s internment of Cuban homosexuals, the political effectuality of Saidenberg’s narratival lyric risks being confined to that negative milieu it references and from which it cannot wholly extricate itself.

 
Laura Moriarty succeeds a bit more in that extrication; ironically, that is due to the fact that her Atelos volume is generically closer to postmodernist science fiction than to poetry. The central conceit of Ultravioleta is allegorical: books function as a mode of transport. Characters traverse space by vehicles made of paper, driven by the activities of reading and writing. The book we hold in our hands is itself a double for the fictive craft giving the volume its title. Moriarty’s narrative masquerades as epic, even including a feast reminiscent of Beowulf . . . but the adventure circles about on itself and the plot literally goes nowhere. In its generic failures as science fiction or epic, though, Ultravioleta (the book) ironically succeeds. Moriarty challenges what Samuel R. Delany describes as the “linear, systematic, more or less rational, more or less negotiable” conventional narrative. Ultravioleta is presented as a critical apparatus because it takes varieties of sources and reconnects them in less “rational” and “systematic” ways, and thus imbues its own internal “relations” with a “problematic status” (Delany 416).
 

Because of her fantasy relies on allegory, Moriarty–like Spenser–walks a thin line between heavy-handed political moralism and ethical reflection. At times, her characters’ distrust of “the government” and the media working in its service and infilitrating their homes reads as a bit too referential to post-9/11 America. But the poet deploys poetry and sci-fi’s shared device of the imagination to let this pseudo-epic act more virtuously. Referred to simply as “the I,” the fictive Martians embody an imperialist force existing somewhere between shadow and body, absence and presence, as they feed on human thoughts. Not reducible to an oppressive government and symbiotically linked to their hosts, the “I” is a subjectivating part of humanity that must be critically understood. With these alien figures, Ultravioleta consciously reclaims Jack Spicer’s poetic from Silliman and the L=A=N=G=U=A=G=E poets so as to rethink their rejection of referential and lyric poetry. Her fantastic scenario echoes Spicer’s warning to other poets to “try to keep as much of yourself as possible out of the poem” (Spicer 8), and instead to let in the “Martians” and “ghosts” to move around the “furniture” and “obstructions” of words, ideologies, history, and even personhood (29, 30). In her compelling “narrative” about the impossibility of narrative, in her characters’ allegorical struggle with being subjected to and occupied by a sense of personhood that reduplicates the governmental strategies now responsible for imperialistically occupying foreign lands, Moriarty is also implicitly criticizing the naïveté underlying the unexamined ideas of resistance promulgated by Spicer and the experimental poets he influenced. For Moriarty, opening a political space for poetry cannot rely on a New Sentence concerned primarily with language’s structure, nor can subjectivity be set aside so that language itself might speak.

 
The “I” plaguing Ultravioleta is also the subject of the struggle of Juliana Spahr’s The Transformation. Even more narrative than Saidenberg’s and Moriarty’s texts, The Transformation documents “a barely truthful story of the years 1997-2001” in Spahr’s relationship with her partners Bill Luoma and Charles Weigl (217). Dispensing with the memoir’s conventional first-person narration, Spahr opts to tell her story in the third-person plural. The threesome, then, collectively narrate their move from graduate school at SUNY Buffalo’s Poetics department to Spahr’s first tenure-track job at the University of Hawaii to their move to partial employment in New York City, just prior to the 9/11 bombings. The style of The Transformation performs the political nature of our struggle with communication’s categorical imperative. Unlike a deconstructionist, Spahr is nostalgic for, rather than skeptical of, transparent communication and referentiality. Poetry’s anti-narrative basis–its ability to refigure relations and to sustain aporetic conditions–is presented by Spahr as the best, if imperfect, means of communicating otherwise inexplicable differences.

 
Against the current trend to see violence in categorization and identitarian logics, The Transformation exhibits a nostalgia for some acceptable way to talk about identity and community. Spahr reveals the problem of defining who “they” are as ubiquitous in this age of Homeland Security. “So it was a time of troubled and pressured pronouns” (205). What happens when we identify not under the banner of an “us” (or the U.S.) but as a “they”? “They agreed to falter over pronouns. They agreed to let them undo their speech and language. They pressed themselves upon them and impinged upon them and were impinged upon in ways that were not in their control” (206). This volunteering to let one’s self be undone–not dissimilar to Judith Butler’s notion of precarious life–leads Spahr’s figures to a condition in which “they” come to terms with their writing bodies’ extension of their political environments. The Transformation tries to embrace all forms of alterity that condition us and estrange us from ourselves. Only then can we commune with those “theys” with whom we’re not supposed to sympathize. “Pumped through their lungs grief for all of them killed by the military that currently occupied the continent, the thems they knew to be near them and the thems they knew not to be near them, because to not grieve meant that their humanity was at risk” (213). Here, the historical referentiality of Spahr’s memoir generates a rather unpoetic moralism and a suspicious longing for the security of an identifiable world we might know and narrate in full. But this postlapsarian melancholic expression may be forgiven if we concentrate on the theoretical and ethical conclusion of Spahr’s work: in the end, writing is an ecological exercise. It affirms inclusive fields of connection, so poetry can manufacture “a catalogue of vulnerability” that lets her memoirs’ subjects, and by extension the author and her readers, “begin the process of claiming their being human” (Spahr 214). Even while longing for a humanist past, complete with its identitarian fictions, The Transformation–much like Negativity and Ultravioleta–demonstrates an awareness that the very conditions that we use to signify the human and to understand our selves have changed.
 

Unlike their L=A=N=G=U=A=G=E forebears, Saidenberg, Moriarty, and Spahr insist that language is referential, that the sentence be combined syllogistically into narrative units, and even that the poetic personhood be recuperated. These decisions open their work, and Atelos, to some criticism. When a press defines its genre so vaguely as to include prose poems, memoir, and science fiction on its list, does the very term “poetry” lose meaning altogether? Should experimental writers and publishers provide a more coherent political and intellectual program today? Depending on their tastes, different audiences will arrive at different conclusions. Many, I suspect, will be pleased by the individual books but dissatisfied with what the list as a whole suggests about the state and the coherence of contemporary American poetry. After all, like Spahr’s figures, many readers long for the security provided by identity, even an avant-garde one. An oppositional identitarian attitude is often mistaken for a resistive politics and for a sign that poetry is doing its work.
 

However, these titles might also indicate that contemporary poetry publishing stands to gain much by avoiding a return to vanguardism’s combatative and territorial posturing. Read together, the volumes by Saidenberg, Moriarty, and Spahr offer a “catalogue” (as Spahr would describe it) of how we are shaped, affected, and conditioned by forces to which we must remain vulnerable–including language itself. These ethical lessons have enduring political pertinence beyond the present moment. Writing “under the sign of poetry,” as Atelos’ mission statement phrases it, are performances that afford readers opportunities to critique the imperatives of identification and categorization constituting our social, cultural, and political lives. Such relations affect how we see both subjectivity and personhood. In this way, Atelos and its authors continue the project with which Gertrude Stein charged her art over three-quarters of a century ago. “The composition is the thing seen by every one living in the living they are doing, they are the composing of the composition that at the time they are living is the composition of the time in which they are living. It is that that makes living a thing they are doing” (Stein 516). The poetic page connects us anew with the world, and the selves we thought we knew. Some reference is necessary, then, so that we might move forward. It is reckless to insist on a poetic “us” absolutely divorced from a political “them.” Literature need not disavow narrative; instead, it can resignify narrative as a device for constructing other forms of commonality and for beginning the work of redefining personhood and humanity. We, the readers, are extensions of the poem; ultimately, that is the only factor that makes aesthetic work atelic. It’s up to us to continue its performance, so that life itself might be composed a bit more poetically. To paraphrase Stein, politics begins only in our beginning again the work our poets have already begun.

Works Cited

• Arendt, Hannah. The Human Condition. 1958. 2nd ed. Chicago: U of Chicago P, 1998.
• Delany, Samuel R. “Some Remarks on Narrative and Technology; or: Poetry and Truth.” 1995. Shorter Views: Queer Thoughts and the Politics of the Paraliterary. Hanover: Wesleyan UP, 1999. 408-30.
• Silliman, Ron. The New Sentence. New York: Roof, 2003.
• Spicer, Jack. “Dictation and ‘A Textbook of Poetry.’” 1965. The House that Jack Built: The Collected Lectures of Jack Spicer. Ed. Peter Gizzi. Hanover: Wesleyan UP, 1998. 1-48.
• Stein, Gertrude. “Composition as Explanation.” 1926. Selected Writings of Gertrude Stein. Ed. Carl Van Vechten. New York: Vintage, 1990. 511-23.

Kyle A. Wiggins
Department of English and American Literature
Brandeis University
kwiggins@brandeis.edu

A review of: Jameson, Fredric. Archaeologies of the Future: The Desire Called Utopia and Other Science Fictions. New York: Verso, 2005.

It is difficult to gauge the political utility of expressly fictive locations like utopias, given the immediacy and concreteness of a daily, lived political environment. Fredric Jameson sets out to address this quandary in Archaeologies of the Future: The Desire Called Utopia and Other Science Fictions. Jameson outlines the contributions utopian fictions have made to the ongoing dilemma of systemic change in a world of capitalist hegemony. Acknowledging the current skepticism in academic discourse about the value of utopian thinking after the Cold War, Jameson ponders the status of utopian fiction and what remains of the link between utopia and socialism. The book sketches the terrain of a “post-globalized Left” that appears to have recovered utopian thought as a “political slogan and a politically energizing perspective” (xii). Jameson goes on to pose the necessary question: What explicitly does utopia seek to negate and what are the contours of imagined alternative worlds? Jameson continually returns to this question, working through a plethora of science fiction (SF) texts in which a utopian impulse or “desire” is perpetually emerging. Science fiction’s hospitable futures are commonly rubbished by a world that cannot abide fanciful trajectories. But these visions of global community are not lost. They are simply awaiting excavation from a literary expression committed to thinking the world differently. By addressing the irrepressible wish-fulfillment of new economic and social systems in SF, Jameson counters the cynicism abundant in criticism of utopian literature. Archaeologies of the Future is a deft treatise on the resolute political vitality of the utopian form, an argument laced with timely optimism.

 
Archaeologies of the Future is divided into two sections: the first section comprises previously unpublished material that theorizes the utopian genre and codifies Jameson’s earlier schematics on the subject, and the second collects essays on utopias that Jameson has written throughout his career, ranging from 1973 (“Generic Discontinuities in SF”) to recent efforts (“Fear and Loathing in Globalization”), including some of his most provocative essays, pieces that are landmarks in utopian criticism and theory (“Progress versus Utopia, or, Can We Imagine the Future?”). The book’s holistic project traces the historical development of utopia as a literary form, moving from Thomas More’s generative 1516 text, Utopia, to contemporary novels. However, Jameson devotes most of his analysis to utopian mechanisms in science fiction. He follows Darko Suvin’s postulation that utopia is a socioeconomic sub-genre of SF and that, like the larger genre to which it belongs, utopia produces an effect of “cognitive estrangement”–that is, the fictions in which utopian desire appear make strange the familiar power structures of our lives. As readers, we recognize our own world burning within the alien place. Malls, prisons, governments, customs, speech, and even geographies are recognizable yet different by one remove (or more). By disturbing the familiarity and fixity of recognizable power structures, SF texts tease us with radical social models. Science fiction satiates our desire for a transformed tomorrow while reminding us of that future’s uncertainty and contingency. However, Jameson dismisses the “vacuous evocation” of utopia “as the image of a perfect society or even the blueprint of a better one” (72). Such a conception of utopia is too simplistic. Instead, he sees utopian desire as global capitalism’s imagined neutralization. Jameson believes that “one cannot imagine any fundamental change in our social existence which has not first thrown off Utopian visions like so many sparks from a comet” (xii). Utopia’s political relevance, though, comes not from banal pining but from its combative opposition to the “universal belief that the historic alternatives to capitalism have been proven unviable and impossible, and that no other socioeconomic system is conceivable, let alone practically available” (xii). Utopian science fictions threaten the ideological dominance of capitalism by theorizing a world change towards egalitarianism. Or, as Jameson puts it, the utopians “not only offer to conceive of such alternate systems; Utopian form is itself a representational meditation on radical difference, radical otherness, and on the systemic nature of social totality” (xii). Utopia offers the imaginative counterpunch to the Thatcherite decree that free-market capitalism is our inevitable future.

 
Confronting entrenched capitalism is, according to Jameson, the fundamental process of the desire called utopia. It is a dialectical movement whose political strategy is, strangely, “anti-anti-Utopia.” The double negative indicates the imperative to address anti-Utopian ideologies that swirl through capitalism with speculative alternatives. Jameson’s most emphatic claim is that utopian literature performs a “critical negativity, that is in their function to demystify their opposite numbers” (211). Utopian SF’s political significance (and it is reinforced that SF carries this charge more resoundingly than atavistic and magical Fantasy literature) is not necessarily its prescriptive capacity to imagine the exterminating agent of capitalism or even the exactness of its replacement system. Rather, SF’s potency comes from the way it encourages readers to envision alternate social systems. SF asserts an ideological refusal of capitalism “by forcing us to think the break itself” (232). Jameson joins Russell Jacoby (The End of Utopia and Picture Imperfect: Utopian Thought for an Anti-Utopian Age) as one of the few voices on the political left still committed to the power of utopian idealization. However, unlike Hardt and Negri’s spontaneous utopian gatherings (Multitude, 2004), Jameson’s Archaeologies is more concerned with the stuff of dreams, the imaginative utterance of solidarity and tolerance, and the nefarious critique that such dreams are politically obsolete.
 

Jameson complicates the specificity of utopian thought in science fictions by situating these messages firmly in the sociocultural and material histories that produce them. Jameson’s explication of the historical conditions that generate individuated wishes for utopia is understandable: the conditions that determine the nature of utopian longing and protest are often the same ones that make society consider utopia an irresponsible fantasy, or as Reinhold Niebuhr declared in 1952, “an adolescent embarrassment.” Still, viewing utopia from a material and psychological vantage can’t completely overcome the inherent vagueness in the utopian impulse as Jameson describes it. His account of the cultural and political forces in various eras that repress the desire for a better world nevertheless leaves the utopian project orbiting on a general path, far from the praxis that trenchant dissatisfaction with capitalism would seemingly demand. While his point is well taken that the inability to imagine alternative societies would mark the triumph of capitalism, Jameson perhaps overestimates the political practicality of the imaginative process. This is a shortcoming that may leave some Marxists who were expecting more material applicability dissatisfied. That said, Jameson does well to remind us that “our most energetic imaginative leaps into radical alternatives were little more than the projections of our own social moment and historical or subjective situation” (211).

In calling attention to the cultural conditions that germinated utopian and dystopian narratives, Jameson opens up fascinating comparative avenues between works. For example, he suggests that Orwell’s “dispirited reaction to postwar Labour Britain” (202) produced a vastly different critique in 1984 than do the media and mass culture targets ridiculed in Huxley’s Brave New World, despite the commonplace move to group the two novels together as texts with similar dystopian projects. It is no surprise then that much of Archaeologies of the Future‘s first section extrapolates evidence of and reactions to the political climates of the 1950s and 1960s (commitment to protest and revolution, suspicion of failed communist movements) from science fiction novels of those eras.
 

Despite the invigorating first theoretical section of Archaeologies, the text’s bifurcated structure troubles its cohesion, and the format of its second half is scattershot. Consequently, some of the compiled essays read as exercises in utopian analysis rather than contributions to a unified argument. Readers familiar with Jameson’s impressive body of utopian scholarship may find little new material (both for the field and for Jameson’s own oeuvre). Furthermore, Archaeologies‘ discussion of utopianism as a hermeneutic practice essentially rehashes a reading model that has been popular in Science Fiction studies for quite a while. Though Jameson helpfully reminds us of Ernst Bloch’s centrality in developing a method of interpreting a text’s utopian content, one can’t help but feel that we are treading over territory thoroughly mapped by Carl Freedman and others. That said, it is perhaps Freedman’s insight that “it is in the generic nature of science fiction to confront the future” that enables us to recognize the importance of Jameson’s work (199). If late capitalism enervates our political will by insisting on its immortality, then ostensibly fictionalizing a future free of capitalism can free agency from this postmodern deadlock and stave off the intractable position of despair.
 

At his most lyrical, Jameson poignantly reflects on moments in U.S. and European history when revivals of utopian literatures optimistically heralded resistance to inequity. At key points, he includes schematic graphs that concisely delineate the various formulations of utopia SF, contrasting diametric narrative tactics and linking constitutive traditions (4, 37, 131). In the opening chapter, for example, Jameson graphs two descending lines from More’s originating text. One line represents programs intent on the realization of a utopian project (such as revolutionary praxis, intentional communities, and the utopian text), while the other includes omnipresent utopian impulses that are less concerned with totality and more directed towards equivocal matters like reform (such as political theory or hermeneutics). In a later graph, Jameson sketches the imbricated field of prophetic texts and moral fables. These graphs clarify Jameson’s occasionally expansive comparisons, succinctly showing, for instance, how some satires of systemic corruption share political interests with utopian manifestos. In Archaeologies, Jameson’s writing is familiarly tricky, yet the graphs and end-of-section summations reward those willing to negotiate the vines of many tangled literary traditions by revealing the structure that networks together five hundred years of branching utopian thought. Though rarely as edifying as Jameson’s adroit close readings of trans-historical themes, the graphs remind us of SF’s obsession with class striation.

 
Class division and economic dominance cast large categorical shadows over Archaeologies, looming so large that at times Jameson’s text seems redundant. Jameson unfortunately devotes far fewer pages to sexual and racial utopianism. While his attention to the urban sexual politics of Samuel Delany’s Trouble in Triton considers emancipation via posthuman prostheses, the episode is one of a few brief digressions on utopian engines that are not explicitly anti-capitalist. Not only does this mode of thinking place inordinate pressure on economics to resolve social identity disputes, it also excludes many important SF utopian texts from Jameson’s discussion. Specifically, though William Burroughs’s sexual utopias (Cities of the Red Night, Naked Lunch) have been copiously addressed by critics, contemporary utopian studies must still come to terms with other alternative orders, like Burroughs’s, that are not forged in economic materialism. Misha’s Red Spider, White Web, and nearly all of Kathy Acker’s catalogue braid artistic trade and non-normative sexuality to form new, just modes of community. A chapter dedicated to recent SF texts that probe scientific and intellectual property politics concomitantly, such as China Mieville’s New Crobuzon novels, would neatly fill the lacuna of non-economic utopias or dystopias in Archaeologies. Jameson’s study would be significantly richer if it responded in more depth to growing feminist criticism on cyberculture, posthumanism, and recombinant sexuality (for example, work by N. Katherine Hayles and Lisa Yaszek). SF’s voluminous articulations of sexual alterity, bodily augmentation, and alternative social models of gender inclusivity scream for critical placement alongside studies of communitarian or socialist revolution. In the end, Jameson’s theory that utopian SF enacts “negation of a negation” is somewhat troublesome no matter how important and accurate we take that project to be. Does a Hegelian model of negation, and anti-anti-capitalism, neutralize an unjust system, or does it erect a better one? If the former is true, is the neutralization of global capitalism with local resistance the best we can hope for? How “utopian” is a series of toggling ideological reversals? The paradox of utopian thought in a global age, however, seems to exactly validate Jameson’s project. Not only is utopian desire the inextinguishable negative of capitalist totality, utopianism is the opposition necessary to imagine capitalism’s mortality into being.

 
While Jameson’s allegiance to Hegelian negation can be wearying, abstractions of hyper-aggressive postmodern capitalism, particularly those that modify Marcuse and Adorno, are illuminating. Additionally, the analyses spin out from the work of utopian theorists of Science Fiction Studies fame, Darko Suvin and Tom Moylan, though there is less dialogue with critics in the field than with continental philosophers. Jameson acknowledges Moylan’s classification of the “critical dystopia” as utopia’s negative cousin, and offers a useful distinction between the often collapsed categories “dystopia” and “anti-utopia.” He spends very little time on this divergence, and the heft of the dystopia discussion is left for totalitarian structures in Orwell’s fiction. Jameson has heralded cyberpunk as the quintessential cultural expression of postmodernism, but he bypasses the opportunity to reexamine the dystopian genre as the apex of viral corporatization, electing instead to press its depiction of labor. Jameson levels a critique against the utopian science fictions of the 1960s that imagined radical new social structures but stopped short of imagining the progressive applications of cybernetics. He posits that the utopian impulses in cyberpunk fiction and those texts written during the rise of the internet seem “less to have been the production of new visions of social organization and of social relations than the rendering anachronistic and insipid of the older industrial notions of non-alienated labor as such” (153). The consequences of such limited utopianism are far-reaching in the globalized world. Jameson rightly argues that business capitalists have outstripped literary utopianists in envisioning new infrastructural models and social relations to economic production. He concedes that post-Fordism is perhaps an antiquated and imprecise categorization of the current stage of capitalism, relying instead on economic theorists’ ironic coinage “Walmartification” as indicative of the economic climate. Jameson’s diagnosis of this globalized, Walmart stage, and his dissatisfaction with it, dovetail into his argument that the literary utopia must be recognized as an antidote (“a meditation on the impossible, on the unrealizable in its own right”). Conceivably, utopian texts act as counterweights to the neo-liberal celebration of globalization. Jameson urges us to develop an anxiety about losing the future. If we cease envisioning utopian tomorrows, revising them, discarding them, and rewriting them (hence, the poetic title of the book), then we acquiesce to static exploitation. Utopia gives us hope; it is “a rattling of the bars and an intense spiritual concentration and preparation for another stage which has not yet arrived” (233).
 

Jameson’s call to reinvigorate a progressive political imagination is captured in his concluding remarks on Robinson’s Mars trilogy. Jameson argues that the fictive end to patriarchy and property on Mars “is an achievement that must constantly be renewed . . . [since] utopia as a form is not the representation of radical alternatives; it is rather simply the imperative to imagine them” (416). Jameson dodges the trap of assigning utopian narratives the task of designing a new society that can be installed in perfect replication. Though the imaginative ability to shake capitalism’s hold on our present and future is still rather tenuous by the conclusion of Archaeologies, Jameson convincingly situates utopianism as a politics of hope and difference to offset the ideological claim that capitalism lacks natural enemies. A utopian aesthetic is a viable first step (even if it is only that) towards realizing a system of equality. By continuing to imagine alternate worlds, the utopian desire, at once atomized and collective, exacts the ennobling ideology of negation and shakes the conformist myth of capitalism’s permanence in our own lives.

Works Cited

• Freedman, Carl. Critical Theory and Science Fiction. Hanover: Wesleyan UP, 2000.
• Jameson, Fredric. Postmodernism, or, The Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism. London: Verso, 1991.

Jim Hicks
Smith College
University of Massachusetts, Amherst
JHICKS@email.smith.edu

I begin with a naïve question. How is it possible that the publication of the Abu Ghraib photographs did not (yet) adversely affect the careers of those responsible for the war in Iraq? The photos offer dramatic evidence to the court of public opinion. And the case at hand, at least as prosecuted by Mark Danner, is clear enough:

It has . . . become clear that President Bush and his highest officials, as they confronted the world on September 11, 2001, and in the days after, made a series of decisions about methods of warfare and interrogation . . . . The effect of those decisions . . . was officially to transform the United States from a nation that did not torture to one that did. (22)

Michael Ignatieff, in describing the benefits of truth commissions, suggests that they may at least “narrow the range of permissible lies.”¹ Yet days following his re-election, President Bush appointed Alberto Gonzales to head the U.S. Justice Department–Gonzales, the author of a White House memo describing the Geneva limitations on the questioning of enemy prisoners as “obsolete.” The U.S. press, after the election, widely speculated that Donald Rumsfeld would be a single-term appointee. He was not, and few would cite the Abu Ghraib scandal as an important factor in his long-awaited departure. Condoleezza Rice replaced Colin Powell as Secretary of State. Major General Geoffrey Miller, former head of the prison at Guantanamo Bay, was given command of Abu Ghraib. How could this happen? Perhaps someone somewhere believes they’ve all been doing a heck of a job.

On an apparently unrelated front, theater critic turned pundit Frank Rich has opined that the U.S. public is “living in a permanent state of suspension of disbelief,” always “ready and willing to be duped by the next tall tale.” Though Rich’s immediate subject is a fake memoir by James Frey, he uses the best-seller success of this scam publication to decry (or was it admire?) his real target–the “Frey-like genius of the right” and “the White House propaganda operation,” with their “intricate network of P.R. outfits and fake-news outlets.” According to Rich, Stephen Colbert nailed it when he coined the word “truthiness”; today the public demands nothing more substantial, reputable or real than that. One explanation for the lack of outcry regarding the promotions of the gang that brought us Abu Ghraib might thus be that the U.S. public ingests whatever Bushite is dished out to it. Where there are counterstories in the media at all, they are buried, squelched, or otherwise rendered ineffective.
 

And yet, just a decade ago, things seemed different. Reiterated in most accounts of the war in Bosnia is the claim that photojournalism helped bring the slaughter to an end. This notion is familiar, of course, at least since Vietnam: reporting has been said to set the terms of public opinion, and politicians in the West are often seen as responding to the sentiments of their various publics. In short, the right pictures are worth a thousand divisions. I won’t speculate here about whether the power of the press is in fact so telling; in regards to ex-Yugoslavia, many articles, and a few books as well, have already begun to investigate this issue.²
 

Even before we examine the effects of war coverage, I believe, we would do well to analyze the coverage itself. To my mind, recent war journalism still largely follows representational practices put into place during the eighteenth century–it forms part, broadly speaking, of that literature which, from the nineteenth century on, was disparaged as “sentimental” but which, during the eighteenth century, existed as a complex configuration of psychological “sentiment,” social “sensibility” and philosophical “sympathy.”³ The key question I wish to address is whether a structure of representation which is roughly three centuries old has outlived its usefulness.
 

In a passage from his Discourse on Inequality, one which has become something of a touchstone for contemporary analyses of sentimentalism, Jean-Jacques Rousseau presents “the tragic image of an imprisoned man”–an onlooker who witnesses, and is unable to aide, a mother and child being attacked by a savage beast.⁴ Rousseau imagines

the tragic image of an imprisoned man who sees, through his window, a wild beast tearing a child from its mother's arms, breaking its frail limbs with murderous teeth, and clawing its quivering entrails. What horrible agitation seizes him as he watches the scene which does not concern him personally! What anguish he suffers from being powerless to help the fainting mother and the dying child! (Fisher 105)

As Carol McGuirk has shown, a scene such as this, recurring in more or less achieved form throughout the literature of sensibility, can serve as a key to the mechanics of sentimental display. Time and again its three (or possibly four) subject positions are reinstated, always in the same form, though not always with the same effect. Most fundamental to the scene is the position of the victim, whom McGuirk calls “the pathetic object”; she notes, however, that the viewer’s own role sometimes takes center stage. In fact, she argues that

sentimental novelists following Sterne . . . made the presence of an interpreting sensibility seem more important than the wretchedness described . . . . The cult of feeling, from Yorick on, is characterized by a preference in the sentimental spokesman for props that cannot upstage him. (507)

I will return to the crucial distinction suggested here between value denied to the experience of what McGuirk calls “the pathetic object” and value added to the discourse of the interpreting subject, or viewer. For now, let me remind you that the third position in staging sentimentalism, in Rousseau’s scene at least, is taken up by the beast. A fourth position–or at least potential position–is made necessary by the prison in which Rousseau’s viewer is arbitrarily placed. Although there is none at hand, we may imagine that rescue–and therefore a rescuer–is called for.⁵
 

One way to parse such sentimental scenes may be to consider the intentions that give rise to them.⁶ At a Smith College teach-in during the NATO bombing campaign in Kosovo, a sociologist long involved in refugee work was the first to speak. He began by showing a collection of news photos culled from a variety of conflicts during the fifty-odd years since WWII. Each photo portrayed a nearly identical image, a mother and her child, invariably in the midst of desolation of one kind or another. The professor explained, with no trace of irony, that within human rights organizations this image is commonly referred to as “The Madonna of the Refugees.” His intention was not, as mine is, to investigate the representational constraints and presuppositions that generate this image, time and time again. He simply wanted us to think about this woman with her child, to imagine ourselves in her place, and to remember her face the next time that history brought it to our attention. In this case, the time was now: almost as if my colleague had predicted it, the very next cover of Time magazine portrayed a Kosovar Albanian woman wearing a head-scarf and breast-feeding her child while carrying it through a crowd of other displaced people.

Figure 1: The Madonna of the Refugees Time, 12 April 1999

When an exhibition of Ron Haviv’s war photographs, which include some of the most widely-known pictures of the war in Bosnia, opened in New York in January 2001, a single image accompanied the New York Times article publicizing the event. The shot is actually the middle of a sequence taken in Bijeljina, a town in northeastern Bosnia that was “cleansed” even before the first shots were fired on Sarajevo. The first photo was taken from a space between the cab and trailer of a truck where the photographer hid himself. Not long after, the paramilitary leader Zeljko Raznjatovic accosted Haviv and stripped him of his film–one roll was missed.[7]

Figures 2-4: Ron Haviv, Blood and Honey Used with permission of the photographer

The first image shows a woman bending over and touching a prostrate man; the last shows that same woman and man, and another woman, all apparently dead–a soldier stands above them, looking over a gate, not at them. The central photo captures another soldier in the act of kicking the second woman: sunglasses tucked into his hair, he holds a rifle nonchalantly in one hand, a cigarette in the other. Peter Maass, a U.S. journalist who witnessed both Bijeljina and the camps at Trnopolje and Omarska, writes that:

when the call of the wild comes, the bonds of civilization turn out to be surprisingly weak . . . The wild beast had not died. It proved itself a patient survivor, waiting in the long grass of history for the right moment to pounce. (15)

The reporter introducing Haviv’s exhibition commented simply, “[This photo] tells you everything you need to know.”

I believe this last statement to be flat-out wrong. What this photo tells us first and foremost, when it is reprinted by the New York Times along with an article reviewing a photo exhibition, is “read the article” and perhaps “come to the exhibition.” In the context of this essay, what this photo and the Time cover tell us is also clear. The latter image focuses on one iconic, nameless victim in an apparently infinite procession to the exclusion of the other subject positions outlined above, thereby summoning up the very interventionist sentiment–“Are Ground Troops the Answer?”–which its caption questions.[8] The key photo in the Haviv sequence, in contrast, centers exclusively on a different subject position: an act of aggression that is animal-like in both savagery and grace. As an early emblem for the war in Bosnia, this image was used for diverse cultural work, including offering a warning to the U.S. public about the risks of intervention. “What does the earth look like in the places where people commit atrocities?” asks Robert Kaplan, in Balkan Ghosts. There are also reasons why, when confronted with stark images of their military’s interrogation techniques, the U.S. public was in fact not told everything it needed to know. For the moment, however, I would like to stay with our penultimate mediatized war.
 

There exist, of course, alternatives to the thin history of daily newspapers and to the slick stories of government press offices. For example, a group of over 200 professional historians, during the past few years, has been working in teams to write a consensus history of the wars of the former Yugoslavia. One way of characterizing “The Scholars Initiative” would be to say that the project intends to refute the quotation from Simo Drljaca that serves as their epigraph: “You have your facts. We have our facts. You have a complete right to choose between the two versions.” (For more information, see www.cla.purdue.edu/si/scholarsprospectus.htm.) Drljaca was instrumental in establishing a series of prison camps near Prijedor in Bosnia-Herzegovina; he himself was killed during an arrest attempt before he could be brought to trial at the International Criminal Tribunal for the Former Yugoslavia (ICTY) in the Hague. In short, the scholars were not the first to offer a refutation. Let me cite here, from a press release, the ICTY’s verdict about the crimes committed at Drljaca’s camps:

Like Trnopolje and Keraterm, Omarska camp was officially established on 30 May 1992 by Simo Drljaca . . . Planned initially to function for a fortnight, it in fact remained in operation until 20 August 1992. During this period of almost three months, more than 3,334 detainees at least passed through the camp . . . . All those detained were interrogated. Almost all were beaten. Many would not leave the camp alive. The living conditions in Omarska camp were appalling. Some of you, perhaps, remember the images filmed by a television team showing emaciated men, with haggard faces and often a look of resignation or complete dejection. These are the images which would make the international community react and are, perhaps, one of the reasons the Tribunal was established.

In some sense, the very existence of institutions such as the ICTY, as well as their verdicts, provide a definitive answer to the militant relativism of the world’s Drljacas. Though courts and historians are hardly infallible, whatever power they have, they are granted.

It is striking as well that the judge of an international court should attribute his very mandate to the so-called “CNN effect”; as suggested above, the verdict by sociologists, political scientists, and media critics on the very existence of such an effect is far from clear. In this case, Judge Almiro Rodrigues, in sentencing five participants in the “hellish orgy of persecution” at the camps, may have also felt it necessary to respond to an essay–originally published in February 1997 in a journal called Living Marxism or LM–which argued that the press reports about the camps were a massive hoax. Its author, Thomas Deichmann, begins the essay with a claim much like the one that introduces the Haviv photo exhibition:

None of the reporters present in August 1992 described Trnopolje as a concentration camp comparable with Auschwitz. But pictures speak for themselves. The general public around the world that was confronted with this ITN-picture interpreted it without waiting for an explanation.

Of course, even a cursory glance at a Time magazine cover taken from the British ITN television footage, or at the similar photo posted along with Deichmann’s article, shows that in these cases there was no need for the general public to wait for an explanation: they were given one with the image itself.

Figure 5: ITN Photo. Time, 17 August 1992

At the bottom right, Time captions their cover as follows: “THE BALKANS / Muslim prisoners / in a Serbian / detention camp.” While locals might grimace at the Balkanism inherent in the all-caps phrase, or at the “ethno-national” identifications, considerable thought probably went into the choice of the phrase “detention camp” as a label for the scene on the cover. Claiming a greater part of the page, and hence of our attention, there is the question, “MUST IT GO ON?” There is a delicate balance here between an implicit call to action (“this must not go on”) and fatalism (“it will go on”), a part of all sentimental representation.

On the relation between photographic images and the words that accompany them, John Berger has given perhaps the most sober and even-handed description:

In the relation between a photograph and words, the photograph begs for an interpretation, and the words usually supply it. The photograph, irrefutable as evidence but weak in meaning, is given a meaning by the words. And the words, which by themselves remain at the level of generalisation, are given specific authenticity by the irrefutability of the photograph. Together the two then become very powerful; an open question appears to have been fully answered. (92)

In Deichmann’s case a supratitle, and not the image, is meant to do the talking. Here are the details of his claim (offered without substantiation of any kind):

Now, four and a half years later, it turns out that the media, politics [sic], and the public have been deceived with this picture. It is a proven fact that it is not the group of Muslim men with Fikret Alic that are surrounded by barbed wire, but rather the British reporters. They were standing on a lot to the south of the camp. As a preventive measure against thieves, this lot was surrounded with barbed wire before the war. . . . There was no barbed-wire fence around the camp area, which also included a school, a community center, and a large open area with a sports field. This was verified by international institutions such as the International Criminal Tribunal in the Hague and the International Red Cross in Geneva. The fact that it was the reporters that were surrounded by barbed wire can be seen in the other film-material that was not edited or broadcasted.

The rhetorical move is familiar to most amateur magicians: if you dazzle them, you do so by misdirection. Here Deichmann translates an argument about events in the world into a dispute over barbed wire and misrepresentation. Certainly both the Time cover and Deichmann’s image were cropped, centered and captioned with a purpose–yet magazine editors, journalists, and photographers do not, at least when they are acting as editors, journalists, and photographers, create the events they portray. The obvious bears repeating on another point as well. As Elie Wiesel, in his preface to a memoir from an Omarska survivor, comments, “Omarska was not Auschwitz. Nothing, anywhere, can be compared to Auschwitz. But what took place at Omarska was sufficient . . . to justify international intervention and international solidarity” (Hukanovic vii).[9] John Berger remarks:

The photographic quotation [from reality] is, within its limits, incontrovertible. Yet the quotation, placed like a fact in an explicit or implicit argument, can misinform. Sometimes the misinforming is deliberate . . . ; often it is the result of an unquestioned ideological assumption." (97)

A key purpose of this essay is to demonstrate, in photographic records of war, the traditional structural foundations for such ideological assumptions.

But first let me tell you something more about their effects. When I first gave materials on the Bosnian camps to students as part of a “War Stories” course, my idea was simply to “teach the conflicts.” Given that the semester had already provided several occasions for examining the use and abuse of war photos, I felt that Deichmann’s article would offer an important cautionary tale. What I myself read as a relatively sophisticated, and sophistic, attempt, in a Bosnian context, to disseminate the equivalent of Holocaust denial was meant as a window into history in the making–a case where the verdict of the international image tribunal hadn’t yet been delivered.
 

There are no doubt a number of reasons why my students believed Deichmann and discounted, or didn’t read, the other evidence they were given (including coverage of ITN’s libel case against Living Marxism, which ITN won). What I believe their response demonstrates most strongly, however, is the obverse side of the truthiness factor. Today campaigns to discredit the media are at least as powerful, and no doubt easier to mount, than successful propaganda. What strikes me most, however, in seeing the Time cover and Deichmann’s denial together is that both exploit the same representational structure. Rather than Rich’s ready state of suspended disbelief, today we may actually find ourselves trapped in a supersaturated suspension of particulate histories–ready to believe, or not, whenever thew right mix comes together.
 

Bruno Latour is right: it is time for critique to stop fighting the last war. As he puts it, “entire Ph.D. programs are still running to make sure that good American kids are learning the hard way that facts are made up, . . . that we are always prisoners of language, that we always speak from a particular standpoint, and so on, while dangerous extremists are using the very same argument . . . to destroy hard-won evidence that could save our lives” (227). Latour goes on to argue that the best critic is not “the one who debunks, but the one who assembles”–that the “question was never to get away from facts but closer to them, not fighting empiricism but, on the contrary, renewing empiricism” (246). Understandably upset at a family resemblance between his own work and the discourse of conspiracy theorists and anti-science conservatives, the philo-, socio-, anthro-historian of science proposes a reassessment of tactics and a reaffirmation of principles.

 
It should not have been surprising, perhaps, to read Deichmannesque pronouncements about the Abu Ghraib photographs coming from supporters of the Bush administration. Most notorious among these were the widely reported comments of Rush Limbaugh, aired on his radio show in early May of 2004. Limbaugh first apparently claimed that the interrogations were “no different than what happens at the Skull and Bones initiation” and went on to characterize the torturers as “need[ing] to blow off some steam,” arguing that “emotional release” is understandably needed in a situation where soldiers are “being fired at every day” “I’m talking about people having a good time,” he added. A few days later, Limbaugh returned to the topic, this time comparing the interrogations to “good old American pornography.”[10]
 

Given a pre-Abu Ghraib survey which suggests that 63% of U.S. citizens believe that torture is sometimes justifiable,[11] as well as the recent popularity of pro-torture television (e.g., 24 and NYPD Blue), it is necessary to remind ourselves of what Limbaugh’s identification with the aggressors occludes. Let me offer one particularly eloquent example. With great economy and discretion, Jean Améry describes the manner by which the Gestapo dislocated both his shoulders. He also notes however, that the key existential moment in his horrific experience in fact came much earlier. As he puts it,

The first blow brings home to the prisoner that he is helpless, and thus it already contains in the bud everything that is to come . . . . They are permitted to punch me in the face, the victim feels in numb surprise and concludes in just as numb certainty: they will do with me what they want. (27)

Améry uses a deceptively simple phrase to describe the transformation we undergo when a regime that uses torture takes us into its hands. What dies at that moment he calls “trust in the world.” We lose, he explained,

the certainty that by reason of written or unwritten social contracts the other person will spare me--more precisely stated, that he will respect my physical, and with it also my metaphysical, being. The boundaries of my body are also the boundaries of my self. My skin surface shields me against the external world. If I am to have trust, I must feel on it only what I want to feel. (27-28)

In The New Yorker in 2005, Jane Mayer recounts the following:

Two years ago, at Abu Ghraib prison, outside Baghdad, an Iraqi prisoner in [C.I.A. officer Mark] Swanner's custody, Manadel al-Jamadi, died during an interrogation. His head had been covered with a plastic bag, and he was shackled in a crucifixion-like pose that inhibited his ability to breathe; according to forensic pathologists who have examined the case, he asphyxiated. In a subsequent internal investigation, United States government authorities classified Jamadi's death as a "homicide," meaning that it resulted from unnatural causes. (1)

Mayer also refers to an Associated Press report describing the position in which Jamadi was killed “as a form of torture known as ‘Palestinian hanging,’ in which a prisoner whose hands are secured behind his back is suspended by his arms” (7). This form of torture was also used by the Gestapo to simultaneously dislocate both of Jean Améry’s shoulders. And yet, unlike Jamadi, and unlike the vast majority of victims portrayed in the last three centuries of sentimental display, Améry’s voice has not been silenced.

The most sustained and insightful analysis of the Abu Ghraib photos, as well as the most provocative thesis regarding their (lack of) reception by the U.S. public, has been recently published by the art historian Stephen Eisenman. His book, The Abu Ghraib Effect, traces the representational history of a certain form of pathos in Western art from Greco-Roman sculpture to the mass culture and racist subcultures of today. For Eisenman, the Abu Ghraib photographs draw on a mnemonic heritage that has made the inscription of “passionate suffering” a key foundational discourse in what has come to be known as Western art. As an art historian, Eisenman asks how this obvious connection–to works by such artists as Michelangelo and Raphael–were not immediately obvious to his colleagues, and why scholars turned instead toward antiwar representations by Goya and Picasso (or Ben Shahn and Leon Golub) in their discussion of the torture images. Despite topical resemblances that are at times undeniably striking, the latter group of artists, after all, meant to expose and oppose the horrors they depicted. Instead, the tradition which Eisenman dates from the Pergamon Altar (c. 180-150 BCE) through the Italian masters and beyond celebrates the expressive depiction of suffering; its “pathos formula of internalized subordination and eroticized chastisement” functions as “a handmaiden to arrogance, power and violence” (122). According to Eisenman, this insistent attention to one set of artists, and blindness to a more obvious and much wider field within Western visual culture, is evidence of an “Abu Ghraib effect,” a Freudian parapraxis that has largely succeeded in repressing the uncanny doubling between these most recent documents of Western barbarism and some of the “most familiar and beloved images” in its representational tradition.

 
One strength of Eisenman’s argument is that it makes sense of the comments by Rush Limbaugh I cite above–a necessary task since much of Limbaugh’s audience can be assumed to be in agreement with them. After all, unlike Bill Maher or Don Imus, Limbaugh’s remarks didn’t cause him to lose his job. The key elements of the rant–its eroticization of the images, its identification with the torturers, and its imputation of the victims’ willing complicity in their own degradation (“a Skull and Bones initiation”; “good fun,” etc.)–are point for point those found by Eisenman in works such as Michelangelo’s Dying Slave and Raphael’s Battle of Ostia.
 

Unlike Eisenman, most critics who write about the photographic evidence of U.S. torture in Iraq follow Deichmann’s lead: they substitute an argument about images for one that focuses on the acts they depict. In a recent PMLA essay, for example, Judith Butler calls an unexpected witness–the then current U.S. Secretary of Defense–to help prosecute her argument with Susan Sontag. Butler opines that when

Rumsfeld claimed that to show all the photos of torture and humiliation and rape would allow them "to define us" as Americans, he attributed to photography an enormous power to construct national identity. The photographs would not just communicate something atrocious but also make our capacity for atrocity into a defining concept of Americanness. (825)[12]

According to Butler, Sontag’s influential writings on photography deny interpretive power to the photographic image. Butler argues that Sontag consistently characterized photography as appealing to the emotions, not the understanding, and that for Sontag, a photograph “cannot by itself provide an interpretation” (823). Butler, however, also cites Sontag’s New York Times Sunday Magazine essay on the Abu Ghraib photos, a polemic that seems to contradict this thesis. That essay, published in as national a forum as Sontag was likely to get, memorably argues that “the photographs are us’” (Butler 826). Butler speculates that “perhaps [Sontag] means that in seeing the photos, we see ourselves seeing . . . . If we see as the photographer sees, then we consecrate and consume the act” (826). There is, of course, a less complicated reading that sees Sontag’s comment directed toward the world, not toward the photos. In a democracy, citizens bear responsibility for the actions of their representatives.

The political and ideological power of war photography, and the limits of that power, has long been an explicit subject of Martha Rosler’s work, from her seminal Bringing the War Home: House Beautiful (1967-72) to a more recent series of photomontages. Rosler’s Election (Lynndie) pastes the U.S. soldier and her leashed prisoner into a magazine layout displaying an ultra-modern, high-tech kitchen (a selection of Rosler’s images, including both those discussed here, can be found at <http://home.earthlink.net/~navva/photo/index.html>). A city in flames, presumably Iraqi, can be seen outside the room. At some point, the viewer notices the business end of the leash, hidden behind the cabinet, reproduced again on the glass of the oven door, placing the prisoner inside. A second Abu Ghraib photo of a naked prisoner cowering before an attack dog is attached to the door of the oven above. The viewer will also notice photos on the covers of cooking magazines and on files in a recipe rack. A pair of scissors and some clippings lie on the counter, as does an electric green, iconized print of the hooded man photo; a hot pink version appears next to a salad bowl on the opposite counter. On the face of a cabinet is a cut-out quote from the New York Times: “Be Part of the Solution . . . If this election is going to be a fair and honest one, concerned citizens will have to do their part to ensure that every vote counts.”

 
Though he does not say so in The Abu Ghraib Effect, I have little doubt that Eisenman would read Rosler’s recent work as a direct descendent of Goya and Picasso, or of Gillo Pontecorvo, Ben Shahn, and Leon Golub–that “limited number of artists who acted against the instrumental and oppressive authority of the Western pathos formula” (122). In its explicit engagement with both politics and photography, however, Election (Lynndie) also forces us to think about the categorical difference trapped within the single word “representation.” As the legendary French documentary cinematographer, Chris Marker, has commented, “as long as there is no olfactory cinema . . . , there will be no films of war” (“smellies,” we would probably call them, just as we used to say “talkies”). Marker adds that this absence is “the prudent thing to do, because if there were such films, I can assure you that there wouldn’t be a single spectator left.”[13] Though more complex and powerful, the play of irony, horror, and critical distance in Rosler’s image is ultimately similar to, and probably no more effective than, the Ipod/Iraq parodies it cites. Even if, as Rosler’s title suggests, Abu Ghraib alone ought to have changed the past Presidential election, the newspaper clipping incorporated into the work appears more inane than hortatory. Rosler’s masterful assemblage will rivet any audience already convinced of the U.S. public’s complicity, duplicity and complacency; whether its critique gets us closer to the facts, or simply closer to the process of fabrication, is another story.

Although Rosler’s technique in this image resembles that in her earlier work, its effects seem worlds apart. Take, for example, her Vietnam-era montage entitled “Balloons.” In the right foreground, a Vietnamese peasant carrying a wounded child begins to climb the stairs in a suburban home; to the back on the left, we see the white living room with its floral divans and sunroom, replete with rattan swing. In the corner, balloons lie in a pastel pile. After My Lai, and before Watergate, bringing the war home was an essential political move, one that helped puncture the bubble of faith enveloping the Cold War U.S. Balloons‘s ironic title is overpowered by a victim who refuses to be occluded by the sentimental tradition. After My Lai, the U.S. public needed to hear and to see in their living rooms Corporal Paul Meadlo respond to Mike Wallace’s question (“And babies?”). Today another tactic is needed.

We can start with what the pictures themselves show. In a monograph entitled Sociology after Bosnia and Kosovo, Keith Doubt cites a rather lengthy passage from Peter Maass’s Love Thy Neighbor which, mutatis mutandis, applies to the torture in U.S. military prisons:

Bosnia makes you question basic assumptions about humanity, and one of the questions concerns torture. Why, after all, should there be any limit? . . . You can, for example, barge into a house and put a gun to a father's head and tell him that you will pull the trigger unless he rapes his daughter . . . . The father will refuse and say, I will die before doing that. You shrug your shoulders and reply, Okay, old man, I won't shoot you, but I will shoot your daughter. What does the father do now, dear reader? He pleads, he begs, but then you, the man with the gun, put the gun to the daughter's head, you pull back the hammer, and you shout, Now! Do it! Or I shoot! The father starts weeping, yet slowly he unties his belt, moving like a dazed zombie, he can't believe what he must do. You laugh and say, That's right, old man, pull down those pants, pull up your daughter's dress, and do it! (51-52)

As Doubt comments, the scene contains, in addition to the torturer and his victims, at least one other representational position, that of the witness. In Maass’s scenario, that position is occupied both by the gunman’s accomplices (it can hardly be imagined as the work of a single soldier) and by the “dear reader” whom Maass explicitly invokes–the observer who is asked to actively imagine him- or herself in the role of torturer.

In many readings of atrocity, including those emanating from Washington, emphasis is placed on aberrant psychology or convulsive histories–the “bad apples.” Doubt, borrowing his analytic frame from Harold Garfinkel, discusses instead Maass’s scene of forced rape in terms of its social context. The passage is read as an example of an “attempted degradation ceremony,” a ritual that involves, by definition, a scene of denunciation in front of witnesses. Doubt observes that, “the denouncer and the denounced do not alone constitute a degradation ceremony . . . . To induce shame, a denouncer needs to convince the witnesses to view the event in a special way” (39). He cites Garfinkel:

The paradigm of moral indignation is "public" denunciation. We publicly deliver the curse: "I call upon all men to bear witness that he is not as he appears but is otherwise and in essence of a lower species. (39)

In his analysis of the scene from Maass, Doubt also emphasizes that the gunman’s attempt ultimately fails, for at least two reasons: first, the gunman himself violates the moral order from which he attempts to remove his victim, and second, the victim has no choice in the matter. He comments that, “if the degradation ceremony is to be successful, the denouncer must show that the denounced chose to be estranged from the values that the denouncer and witnesses share” (40).[14]

The key to Doubt’s analysis, however, is his reversal of the focalization in Maass’s scene. Rather than share the gunman’s point of view, he attempts to give his reader the victim’s perspective.[15] Like Maass, he uses second-person address to produce this viewpoint:

The gunman . . . is not just trying to shame you; he is trying to shame your relation to the world, the fact that you and the world share values, fundamental values such as fatherhood . . . . Only in this way can the gunman . . . presume to be a legitimate spokesperson for the world. As long as the world stands for nothing, the gunman becomes the legitimate spokesperson for the world . . . . If the dignity of the world is to stand for nothing, then the gunman speaks for the world and the world's relation to you, that is, the world's rejection of you and itself. (43)

Using language more typical of existential hermeneutics than U.S. sociology, Doubt sets up here a key analytic reversal:

Soon you begin to see that the world, even more than you, is being denounced. Your role at this point changes. You become not the one being denounced, but the witness to the denunciation of the world . . . . You see the world rather than you is being denounced, and you begin to pity the world. (43)

Doubt sees the former object of attempted degradation as the ritual’s true interpreting subject, the only subject who, in this case, has authentic moral standing.

Much of the world has denounced the Abu Ghraib photos for what they are: a record of beastly, state-sanctioned aggression. They also record an attempted degradation ceremony. For many U.S. citizens, however, the victims themselves have been less important than the faces and uniforms of the aggressors–which poses something of a problem. The evidence that those faces and uniforms present contradicts the a priori positioning of most U.S. war stories. Though it would be absurd to argue that the position of compassionate observer in the scene of sentiment belongs to any one nation, an argument can be made for the peculiarity of the U.S. fascination with this perspective. Certainly the story we tell ourselves about ourselves fits it rather neatly. Isolationists first, then liberators in two World Wars, we have since played the liberation theme over and over again, most notably in the other Americas, most recently in Afghanistan and Iraq. Like any compassionate observer, we anguish over the fate of innocent victims; unlike others, we also send in the cavalry.
 

Such stories have consequences, both obvious and not so. One effect of this particular narrative–self-identification in the U.S. with an eighteenth-century construct of compassion–is that the Abu Ghraib photographs were not seen by the U.S. public as the rest of the world saw them. In a sense, perhaps, the U.S. public could not see them at all. If a nation that believes itself compassionate had actually seen state-sanctioned torture, would it have re-elected the man in charge? The photos’ reception in the U.S. has probably been affected by the depiction of smiling soldiers whose good humor contradicts the cruel and degrading actions they performed; two of the photos in which soldiers give “thumbs-up” gestures show a soldier’s smiling face just inches away from that of a dead Iraqi prisoner. These photos can only be described as trophy shots.[16] Unlike the rest of the world, we citizens of the United States of America cannot look on from the point of view of a compassionate observer. We are being hailed by our own soldiers; when someone makes a “thumbs-up” sign to you, you’re supposed to return it.
 

In effect, what the Abu Ghraib photos ask us to do is join the party at www.nowthatsfuckedup.com. Before the site was closed down in April 2006, and its webmaster (briefly) jailed, anyone with an internet connection had access to just the gleeful sort of aggressors community which the Abu Ghraib photographs record.[17] In 2003, a 27-year-old Floridian named Chris Wilson had opened a website originally dedicated to amateur pornography, one where users could gain access to restricted areas either by paying or by sending in photos and videos of their own. At some point in 2004, Wilson decided to grant U.S. soldiers free access to the site, provided that they sent in some photographic evidence that they were indeed U.S. soldiers. What followed? Postings of the charred remnants of Iraqis, or of their mutilated heads, torsos, or severed limbs, accompanied by cold jokes from both photographers and viewers.[18] If, while surfing the internet, it were possible to stumble innocently onto such images,[19] wouldn’t one’s likely response be simply to clear the screen? Such a site would most likely not elicit sympathy, fascination, or glee, but just make the viewer run for the nearest exit. As one of the bloggers remarks in an essay response to Chris Wilson’s site, “We don’t want to know what the war looks like” (Gupta).

 
As for me, at this point I’d like to step back into the eighteenth century again–where, in some sense, all this began. Perhaps the oddest feature of the vignette cited earlier from The Discourse on Inequality is its provenance. Rousseau’s explicitly acknowledged source for his scene of pathos and horror is Bernard de Mandeville (a pairing which, politically speaking, is about as strange as Judith Butler agreeing with Rumsfeld). As it turns out, however, unlike the French philosophe, the author of The Fable of the Bees intended his scene to be ironic. We know because Mandeville prefaces his portrait by giving us a sort of Deichmannesque supratitle–telling us in advance that he considers compassion a “counterfeit Virtue.” He thus intends not to reveal, but to expose. His version of the scene concludes gleefully:

To see [the beast] widely open her destructive Jaws, and the poor Lamb beat down with greedy haste; to look on the defenceless Posture of tender Limbs first trampled on, then tore asunder; to see the filthy Snout digging in the yet living Entrails suck up the smoking Blood, and now and then to hear the Crackling of the Bones, and the cruel Animal with savage Pleasure grunt over the horrid Banquet; to hear and see all this, What Tortures would it give the Soul beyond Expression! (255)

If you find this description only grotesque, and not comic, note the ease with which the word “pleasures” may be substituted for Mandeville’s “tortures” (“What [Pleasures] would it give the Soul beyond Expression!”). Such, for Mandeville, is a clear, distinct and unadulterated example of Pity or Compassion, one with which, as he puts it, “even a Highwayman, a House-Breaker or a Murderer” could sympathize (254-56). That one might well exhibit such virtuous sentiments and yet keep on being a highwayman, paramilitary, torturer or even paidophage, is the Dutch critic’s point. Mine is somewhat simpler: I believe that it’s time to think beyond this obvious, and apparently natural, triad of observer, aggressor and victim, given that its terms provoke wildly disparate and often opposing effects.

Might it instead be possible to create, as Domna Stanton has suggested, “a new interdisciplinary field, one that conjoins the critical and interpretive practices of the humanities with the ethical activism of the international human rights . . . movement” (3)? The necessary steps are rather obvious. Taking the side of Harriet Jacobs against Hannah Arendt, Elizabeth Spelman has commented that, “The solution is . . . if possible, to make sure that those who are suffering participate in the discussion” (88). And yet, as a Peabody award-winning episode of the radio show This American Life put it in 2006,

one thing that's just weird about Guantanamo is that in all of these years . . . why haven't we seen more of these guys on radio or TV? Over 200 of them have been released, right? At our radio show this week we were talking about this, and we realized that NONE of us had ever heard or read any interview with these guys.[20]

How many interviews with Abu Ghraib prisoners have you read, seen, or heard? How about Bagram? How about the known unknown locations?[21]

Among the foundational texts for the field that Stanton envisions would surely be Nunca Más (1984), published by the Argentine National Commission on the Disappeared, a group headed by novelist Ernesto Sábato. Sábato begins his prologue to Nunca Más by comparing the then recent history of Italy to that of Argentina. He notes that, “when Aldo Moro was kidnapped, a member of the security forces suggested to General Della Chiesa that a suspect . . . be tortured. The general replied . . . : ‘Italy can survive the loss of Aldo Moro. It would not survive the introduction of torture’” (1). Sábato’s answer to his country, to a State that “responded to the terrorists’ crimes with a terrorism far worse than the one they were combatting,” was to debunk torture quickly and to assemble painstakingly a report on human rights in Argentina. In place of the military junta’s blather about “individual excesses,” about acts “committed by a few depraved individuals acting on their own initiative,” the Sábato Commission presented a nearly 500-page tome, reporting on several thousand statements and testimonies and referring to over 50,000 pages of supporting documentation. It is nearly impossible to imagine a U.S. novelist entrusted with a similarly historic Commission. But why? Sábato’s prologue is arguably as essential to Nunca Más‘s reception as the evidence it summarizes. His strategy, the argument of a novelist, is to present the Argentine public with a structuralist analysis. “From the huge amount of documentation we have gathered,” Sábato comments, “it can be seen that . . . human rights were violated at all levels by the Argentine state . . . . Nor were they violated in a haphazard fashion, but systematically, according to a similar pattern, with identical kidnappings and tortures taking place throughout the country” (2, emphasis added). The general introduction to the assembled testimony fills in this pattern: its “typical sequence” is named “abduction–disappearance–torture” (9).
 

In the PMLA volume that includes the Judith Butler piece cited above, another essay refers to Myra Jehlen’s suggestion, some twelve years ago, that we study “history before the fact,” i.e., history in the making, rather than “history as the past.” The “prisoner abuse” story is of course far from settled; as I’ve attempted to demonstrate, it’s hardly been opened. Even the trials of Argentina and Chile have not yet ended. The International Image Tribunal has some long work days ahead. One thing, at least, seems clear. No matter what new photos surface, and no matter what they depict, there will be those who wish to see the images themselves as the issue, rather than investigate what they depict. Not long ago, a publication by Human Rights Watch called for a special counsel investigation of prisoner abuse in Iraq, in order to focus on the command responsibility of Rumsfeld et al. The HRW report was given the title, “Getting Away with Torture?” To my mind, that’s the question we should settle.

Notes

1. This quote comes from the preface, by Ignatieff, to an excellent comparative study of truth commissions by Priscilla Hayner. Since truth is at issue here, I should add to Danner’s comment a response to it from an Argentine poet, social critic, and friend Judith Filc. “Yes,” she notes, “you didn’t have torturers, you just trained them.”

2. See, for example, the study by Charaudeau and the collection of essays edited by Gow. For an insider’s view that argues against the so-called “CNN effect,” see Western.

3. The term “sympathy” has an even longer and more complicated history; it was also used as a technical term in the Renaissance sciences of alchemy and astrology. Eisenman, in an excellent book on the relation between Western art history and the Abu Ghraib photos (discussed below), traces what he calls the “pathos formula” in art back to Hellenism. Carlo Ginzburg, in an important historical essay on sympathy, goes back to the Greeks as well, beginning with a discussion of Antigone.

4. My attention to this passage results from its analysis by Philip Fisher in the chapter on Uncle Tom’s Cabin in his book Hard Facts. In a conference on sentimentalism at Brown University, Nancy Armstrong commented that she and Elaine Scarry have frequently made use of the same passage from Rousseau.

5. The classic spoof of this structure can be found in Mel Brooks’s Blazing Saddles: “Won’t somebody help that poor man?”

6. I am aware of the long history, and metaphysical foundations, that underlie constructions of authorial intention. My own intention is to focus, whenever possible, on public records of intentionality, and to include evidence of reception within the same general framework, conceiving of the ensemble, in short, as part of “the text.” “A thing,” Nietzsche argues, “is the sum of its effects.”

7. This account, and the photos below, are taken from the coffee table edition of Haviv’s work Blood and Honey.

8. One of the most famous, and influential, examples of sentimental representation with a similarly exclusive focus on the victim is Josiah Wedgewood’s 1788 jasperware cameo depicting a kneeling slave in chains, with the supratitle “Am I Not a Man And A Brother.” See Eisenman (80-81) and Hochschild (129).

9. As for the Fikret Alic, the man front and center on the Time cover, the Deichman article originally claims that his horribly emaciated state was due to “a childhood bout of tuberculosis” (Connolly). This claim no longer appears in the on-line version of Deichmann’s article cited here. David Campbell has authored a detailed analysis of this controversy and its political implications in the Journal of Human Rights.

10. One of the more extensive discussions of Limbaugh’s comments in the mainstream media was given by Dick Meyers on CBSnews.com (<www.cbsnews.com/stories/2004/05/06/opinion/meyer/printable616021.shtml>). See as well Kurt Nimmo’s comments at <www.pressaction.com/news/weblog/full_article/nimmo05082004/>. References to the remarks can also be found in columns by Maureen Dowd (New York Times 6 May 2004) and Frank Rich (New York Times 16 May 2004) as well as in an article by Stephen Kinzer and Jim Rutenberg (New York Times 13 May 2004).

11. According to a Pew Center poll conducted between 5 September and 31 October 2003 (as reported by Agence France Presse on 17 November 2005).

12. Rumsfeld, of course, was likely to have been less worried about the photos defining America than about them defining his administration. On the other hand, his refusal to release evidence, to confess his complicity, and, in general, the Bush administration’s attempt to pass the whole thing off as the work of a few criminal apples lead much of the world to equate these photos with the country. If the U.S. doesn’t stand against them, it stands for them.

13. “Tant qu’il n’y aura pas de cinéma olfactif comme il y a un cinéma parlant, il n’y aura pas de films de guerre, ce qui est d’ailleurs prudent, parce qu’à ce moment là, je vous jure bien qu’il n’y aura plus de spectateurs.” From Loret’s review of Sacco’s Safe Area Goraude (my translation).

14. As Eisenman point outs, and as Limbaugh implies, central to the pathos formula in works that celebrate torture is an attempt to depict victims as complicit in their own victimization.

15. I came across Sociology after Bosnia and Kosovo after reading Igor Sladoje’s unpublished American Studies Diploma thesis, which uses Doubt’s analysis to open an investigation of the U.S.’s role in recent international conflicts. In Sladoje’s opinion, “the conflicts in Bosnia and Herzegovina, Somalia, Rwanda and Kosovo may be regarded as attempted degradation ceremonies in which the role of the witness to ethnic cleansing, genocide, violence and starvation was played by the world. For this gazing world, the role of the witness becomes problematic. Serving as a witness to evil simply becomes untenable because of the moral values the world claims to stand for. The world can choose to identify itself with either the denouncer or the denounced” (3). Bosnian himself, Sladoje’s text here performs, in paraphrase, the very act which Doubt sees as the end result of the Bosnian war: “Eventually, the roles are exchanged. The victim is no longer the one being denounced; he is instead witness to the denunciation of the world” (3).

16. In an essay written only a few days after the photos became public, Luc Sante calls them precisely that. He also sees a resemblance between the attitudes they displayed and the photographic records of crowds at lynchings.

17. See <http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nowthatsfuckedup.com>; <www.thenation.com/doc/20051010/the_porn_of_war>; <www.theledger.com/apps/pbcs.dll/article?AID=/20051008/NEWS/510080427/1039>; <www.indypendent.org/?p=692>; and <www.eastbayexpress.com/2005-09-21/news/war-pornography/>. A selection of the photographs, with an introductory essay by Gianluigi Ricuperati and an afterword by Marco Belpoliti, has been published in Italy.

18. On the “cold joke” and its prevalence in combat situations, see Glover.

19. It wasn’t–you had to either pay, or to play by sending in your own.

20. The show “Habeas Schmabeus” was first broadcast on 10 March 10 2006. Free podcasts are available at <www.thislife.org>.

21. For an important exception to this general silence, see the work of artist Daniel Heyman based on interviews with Abu Ghraib detainees, as presented and reviewed in SMITH magazine.

Works Cited

• Arendt, Hannah. On Revolution. Westport, CT: Greenwood, 1963.
• BBC News Online. “ITN wins Bosnian war libel case.” 15 Mar. 2000. <news.bbc.co.uk/1/low/uk/677481.stm> 15 Dec. 2002.
• Berger, John, and Jean Mohr, with the help of Nicholas Philibert. Another Way of Telling. New York: Pantheon, 1982.
• Brody, Reed. Getting Away with Torture?: Command Responsibility for the U.S. Abuse of Detainees. Human Rights Watch 17.1 (2005).
• Butler, Judith. “Photography, War, Outrage.” PMLA 120.3 (2005): 822-27.
• Campbell, David. “Atrocity, Memory, Photography: Imaging the Concentration Camps of Bosnia–The Case of ITN Versus Living Marxism, Part I.” Journal of Human Rights 1.1. (March 2002): 1-33.
• —. “Atrocity, Memory, Photography: Imaging the Concentration Camps of Bosnia–The Case of ITN Versus Living Marxism, Part II.” Journal of Human Rights 1.1. (June 2002): 143-72.
• Charaudeau, Patrick. La télévision et la guerre. Déformation ou construction de la réalité? Le conflit en Bosnie (1990-1994). Louvain-la-Neuve, Belgium: Ina-De Boeck, 2001.
• Connolly, Kate. “He Was the Face of Bosnia’s Civil War–What Happened Next?” Guardian Unlimited <observer.guardian.co.uk/milosevic/story/0,,769071,00.html>.
• Danner, Mark. Torture and Truth: America, Abu Ghraib, and the War on Terror. New York: New York Review of Books, 2004.
• Deichmann, Thomas. “The Picture that Fooled the World.” <www.terravista.pt/guincho/2104/199810/deichmann_9701.html> 15 Dec. 2002.
• Doubt, Keith. Sociology After Bosnia and Kosovo: Recovering Justice. Lanham, MD: Rowman and Littlefield, 2000.
• Eisenman, Stephen. The Abu Ghraib Effect. London: Reaktion, 2007.
• Fisher, Philip. Hard Facts: Setting and Form in the American Novel. New York: Oxford UP, 1985.
• Frey, James. A Million Little Pieces. New York: Doubleday, 2003.
• Ginzburg, Carlo. Ugly Wooden Eyes. New York: Columbia UP, 2001.
• Glover, Jonathan. Humanity: A Moral History of the Twentieth Century. New Haven: Yale UP, 2000.
• Gow, James, Richard Paterson, and Alison Preston, eds. Bosnia by Television. London: British Film Institute, 1996.
• Hartley-Brewer, Julia. “ITN Denies Bosnia Report ‘Fabrication.’” The Guardian 29 Feb. 2000. 15 Dec. 2002.
• Haviv, Ron. Blood and Honey. A Balkan War Journal. Essays by C. Sudetic and D. Rieff. New York: TV Books, 2000.
• Hayner, Priscilla. Unspeakable Truths: Facing the Challenge of Truth Commissions. New York: Routledge, 2002.
• Hicks, Jim. “‘What’s It Like There?’: Desultory Notes on the Representation of Sarajevo.” Postmodern Culture 12.2 (January 2002). <http://muse.jhu.edu/journals/pmc/v012/12.2hicks.html>
• Hirsch, Marianne. “Editor’s Note.” PMLA 120.3 (2005): 713-14.
• Hochschild, Adam. Bury the Chains: Prophets and Rebels in the Fight to Free an Empire’s Slaves. Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 2005.
• Hukanovic, Rezak. The Tenth Circle of Hell: A Memoir of Life in the Death Camps of Bosnia. Ed. A. Alcalay. Intro. E. Wiesel. Trans. C. London and M. Ridjanovic. New York: Basic, 1996.
• ICTY Trial Chamber. “Judgement in the the Case The Prosecutor Against Miroslav Kvocka, Milojica Kos, Mlado Radic, Zoran Zigic and Dragoljub Prcac: (Omarska/Keraterm/Trnopolje).” The Hague, 2 Nov. 2001.
• Jehlen, Myra. “History before the Fact; or Captian John Smith’s Unfinished Symphony.” Critical Inquiry 19 (1993): 677-92.
• Kaplan, Robert A. Balkan Ghosts: A Journey Through History. New York: Vintage, 1994.
• Latour, Bruno. “Why Has Critique Run Out of Steam? From Matters of Fact to Matters of Concern.” Critical Inquiry 30 (2004): 225-48.
• Maass, Peter. Love Thy Neighbor: A Story of War. New York: Knopf, 1996.
• de Mandeville, Bernard. The Fable of the Bees. Ed. F.B. Kaye. Oxford: Clarendon, 1924.
• Mayer, Jane. “A Deadly Interrogation: Can the C.I.A. Legally Kill a Prisoner?” The New Yorker 14 Nov. 2005.
• McGuirk, Carol. “The Sentimental Encounter in Sterne, Mackenzie and Burns.” Studies in English Literature 1500-1900. 20.3 (1980): 505-15.
• Mehmedinovic, Semezdin. Sarajevo Blues. Zagreb: Durieux, 1995.
• —. Sarajevo Blues. Trans. A. Alcalay. San Francisco: City Lights Books, 1997.
• Rich, Frank. “Truthiness 101: From Frey to Alito.” New York Times 4.16. 22 Jan. 2006.
• Ricuperati, Gianluigi, ed. Fucked Up. Milan: BUR, 2006.
• Rieff, David. A Bed for the Night: Humanitarianism in Crisis. New York: Simon and Schuster, 2002.
• Rosler, Martha. “Photomontages 1965-2004.” Gorney, Bravin + Lee Gallery, New York. 19 Nov. 2004 -8 Jan 2005.
• —. Positions in the Life World. Birmingham: Ikon Gallery, 1998: 17. Rousseau, Jean-Jacques. The First and Second Discourses. Ed. R.D. Masters. Trans. R.D. Masters and J.R. Masters. New York: St. Martin’s, 1964.
• Rumsfeld, Donald H. “Remarks.” Defense Department Town Hall Meeting. Pentagon, Washington. 11 May 2004. 13 May 2005. <www.defenselink.mil/speeches/2004/sp20040601-secdef0442.html>.
• Sábato, Ernesto. “Preface.” Nunca Más: The Report of the Argentine National Commission on the Disappeared. Intro. R. Dworkin. New York: Farrar, 1986.
• Sante, Luc. “Tourists and Torturers.” New York Times. 11 May 2004.
• Sontag, Susan. Regarding the Pain of Others. New York: Picador, 2003.
• —. “Regarding the Torture of Others.” New York Times Magazine 23 May 2004: 24+.
• Spelman, Elizabeth V. Fruits of Sorrow: Framing Our Attention to Suffering. Boston: Beacon, 1997.
• Stanton, Domna. “Human Rights and the Humanities.” MLA Newsletter 37.4 (2005): 3-4.
• Time cover photos. August 17, 1992 and April 12, 1999.
• Wallis, Brian, curator. “Inconvenient Evidence: Iraqi Prison Photographs from Abu Ghraib.” International Center of Photography, New York. 17 Sept. 2004-28 Nov. 2004.
• Western, Jon. Selling Intervention and War. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins UP, 2005.
• White, Ed. “Invisible Tagkanysough.” PMLA 120.3 (2005): 751-67.

E.L. McCallum
English Department
Michigan State University
emc@msu.edu

"Today everything exists to end in a photograph."

–Susan Sontag, On Photography

On Photography

To speak of ending in a photograph, as Susan Sontag does, would seem to aver photography’s orientation towards death, an association it has held since its inception and one that has become practically axiomatic in photography theory. While Sontag means that our photophilia will turn everything eventually into an image (24), I’d like to ask what it means to end in a photograph, and what kind of end the photograph presents. For that matter, I’d like to interrogate the different ways of being a photograph. Will literature, too, end in a photograph or come to a photo finish? Does this end perhaps open up the form a photograph can take, complicating the truism that photography is thanatography? Might photography’s end be a proliferation rather than a singular event?

Because film photography is, as Derek Attridge has pointed out, “analogically bound to the referent,” it faces a challenge in the digital age when the photograph “can always not be the direct effect of the referent on sensitized paper” (86). The change from emulsion to pixels impels us to rethink fundamentally what photography might be. Can we compare image pixels to those that comprise words? The change in medium raises the question of whether there is a change in the photographic relation as well: would photography no longer work through analogy, or for that matter through the contiguity of the negative and the printing paper? These questions push us headlong into the theory of digital images. But before we reach that end, before we consider what end has photography, or literature, come to in the age of the digital, I’d like to turn back and offer a palinode on the theory of the photographic image. Examining what’s behind the photographic image leverages a space to consider how the verbal medium for photography might come between film and digital.

One can read Sontag’s claim as tracing out the conventional analogy between life and death, living and photography. To be sure, some of the most widely read photography theory focuses on death as the way of figuring ending in a photograph. Sontag herself sweepingly claims that “all photographs are memento mori” (15). Similarly, remarking on a photograph of himself in Camera Lucida (the book he wrote after the death of his mother), Roland Barthes tells us that “death is the eidos of that photograph” (15). Even critics who do not explicitly link photography with death tie it to implicitly deathly things: André Bazin, for instance, after suggesting that “the practice of embalming the dead might turn out to be a fundamental factor” in all of the plastic arts (9), goes on to claim later that photography in particular “embalms time” (14). Eduardo Cadava’s more recent reading of photography in the oeuvre of Walter Benjamin leads him to attest that “photography is a mode of bereavement. It speaks to us of mortification” (11). Geoffrey Batchen reveals that the link might reach back to portrait photography’s earliest days, when subjects’ “heads were inevitably supported by a standing metal device to keep them steady for the necessary seconds. Photography insisted that if one wanted to look lifelike in the eventual photograph, one first had to pose as if dead” (62); even so, “photography was a visual inscription of the passing of time and therefore also an intimation of every viewer’s own inevitable passing” (133).

Bazin’s and Batchen’s revelation of time as key to photography’s thanatographic inscription is congruent with Christian Metz’s insights when comparing film and photography. Metz uses the photograph’s stillness and silence against film’s motion and multisensory appeal to support his assertion that photography is a thanatography. But Metz goes further, noting that through its linkage with death, the photograph “is an instantaneous abduction of the object out of the world into another world, into another kind of time” (158). It is the temporal disjunction of the photograph, in contrast to the film’s display of temporality–which, however similarly severed from the indexical moment, is nonetheless replayed in “an unfolding time similar to that of life” (158)–that most clearly demarcates the photograph from film in Metz’s account. He cites Phillipe Dubois’s remark that “with each photograph, a tiny piece of time brutally and forever escapes its ordinary fate, and thus is protected against its own loss” (158). Likewise, Barthes’s conception of photography is so imbued with time that he declares that “cameras in short were clocks for seeing” (15). Photography’s baleful association has become a usured figure for articulating the problems of absence and temporality that the medium engages. Batchen, reflecting on protophotographic theory, avers that Daguerre “like Talbot, seems to be suggesting that the primary subject of every photograph is time itself” (12).

If photography is really about time, it may be aligned with narrative. Batchen notes that “in stopping or turning back time, photography appeared once again to be playing with life and death” (132). But if photography’s engagement with time and ends is like narrative’s, might it also turn to concerns other than death that as a literary form narrative has, like love or loss or immortality? The persistent alliance of death and photography needs to be troubled as it settles into axiom, because a too-pat conflation of death and ending occludes other concerns with time that photography theory can articulate.

Little else but time comes to an end in the photograph. We might even ask of Metz, what kind of time? If “another kind of time” emerges, is it not linear time but layered time–whether a moment excised and pastiched into a future time, or the more immediate folding of time that digital photography, with its instant playback or easy proliferation on a network, affords. The fixing of the image–which evokes the cultural associations with death–happens in the middle of the photographic process, before the image circulates. Perhaps, then, photography’s association with death might recast that figure as the middle, rather than the end. The photograph would offer itself as the tain of time, bouncing the past into the future like the silver backing on a mirror that bounces our image back to our eyes.

The photograph, however, offers not simply to perpetuate a moment or event beyond its time, nor does it merely indicate the absence or displaced trace of the depicted, but produces a new fold in the networks of meaning. When the photograph itself is supplanted by or transformed into verbal description, what happens to the absent or lost object/time of the photograph? It is not now doubly absented, but oscillating between the impossible “photograph” (which may or may not exist as actual object) and the verbal description. To reevaluate absence and time in photography is to intimate that the disjunction of the image might offer an escape route from death, provide a residue whose unending potential for recombination suggests a tantalizing immortality. The interplay of presence and absence, folded space and the space enfolded, invites us to consider such recombination and folding by examining some absent photographs, by which I mean photographs that structure a text but that do not appear as visual representations. These absent photographs, rather than silencing or subtracting by their absence, organize openings around which meanings can collect and layer across linear time. As verbal objects, these depictions function as photographs despite the difference in medium.

My concern, therefore, is less with the possibilities of visual narrative than with the narrative of the visual. Camera Lucida is compelling in no small part because there Barthes narrates the visual and challenges the presumption that what is seen is necessarily present. Perhaps one of the most memorable images in the book is the unreproduced photograph of his late mother, the image Barthes calls the “Winter Garden photograph” (70). Barthes is not the only writer who verbally produces an absent photograph, and the reversal of the usual order of representation–the photograph being the absent object that is represented rather than representing the absent object–opens up a space to rethink the possibilities and parameters of photography in relation to narrative. As Attridge argues, “Barthes’s practice . . . shows that the referent is not the source of photography’s special power–although the referential may indeed be crucial” (87). Verbal photographs produce a kind of hypotyposis that hinges on the absence of the depicted object, namely the visual photograph. In seeing not Barthes’s mother (a doubly-layered referent) but the absent image of his mother, we not only perceive an experience analogous to Barthes’s experience of originary loss, but are vulnerable to be wounded by the punctum of the verbal photograph. Yet rather than work extensively with well-thumbed texts of Sontag and Barthes–texts which nonetheless remain in contact with my concerns here, because their insights incessantly return from the dead like photographs–I want to elucidate the problem of narrating photographyy by reading a more recent text that narrates absent photographs.¹

Anne Carson’s novel in verse, The Autobiography of Red, concludes its main narrative section with a series of photographs, or at least chapters that claim to be photographs. This is, therefore, a text that almost literally ends with a photograph, whose trajectory is predicated on a series of final or closing shots. The book is composed of seven parts, the longest of which, “Autobiography of Red: A Romance,” offers the most extensive and detailed narrative of the seven. The “Romance” has 48 one- or two-page chapters, most pithily titled by a single word, making it all the more notable that the section ends with a series of chapters titled “Photographs” and having different subtitles (although the very last one, “The Flashes in Which a Man Possesses Himself” offers a remarkable contrast to this pattern). The reader encounters five shorter sections before the “Romance” and one final segment, an “Interview,” after it. My initial focus is on the “Romance,” a modern rewriting of the ancient poet Stesichoros’s tale of the red, winged monster Geryon, since the relation between narrative and photography is most explicit there. In Carson’s version, Geryon grows from childhood to manhood, becoming a photographer and negotiating both his monstrosity and his unrequited love for Herakles. More classically, Geryon was a mythic monster whose murder and the murder of whose cattle was one of Hercules’s labors. Stesichoros’s writing of the tale, Carson points out in an early section, breaks free of the Homeric convention of relying on a specific adjective for each noun (“When Homer mentions blood, blood is black . . . Homer’s epithets are a fixed diction” [4]). Steisichoros also adopts the monster’s view, rather than the hero’s. These ancient innovations and the fact that their explication frames the “Romance” invite us to reflect on how we might understand the interventions Carson makes in thinking about photography. If film photography fixes the image to the paper, what does Carson’s verbal photography fix–or unfix?

I. A Fine Romance

The Autobiography of Red poses a number of visual and narrative paradoxes, and these hinge on photography. Perhaps the most obvious one is that Red did not write this Autobiography. Rather, a largely unmarked narrator tells the life story of Geryon, a monster who becomes a photographer. And while the text offers a recognizable trajectory through a life, and Geryon is in fact red, it becomes clear that the referent of “Autobiography of Red” may not be the Romance itself or the novel as a whole, but rather elements in the text–the series of photographs described at the end. In other words, the autobiography referred to is visual, not verbal, and the title is eponymous, not categorical. Indeed, the autobiography as an object in the narrative is referred to as having “recently taken the form of a photographic essay” (60), although this mention, midway through Geryon’s life story, curiously destablilizes the form of its object, implicitly raising the question of whether the photographs at the end are part of this same photographic essay.

A second complication of Autobiography of Red is its range of composite references. In what might be called the romance’s front matter–two essayistic sections on the poet Stesichoros and three list-like appendices–we learn of the historical poet’s long poem on the red, winged monster Geryon who was killed by the hero Herakles for his red cattle. The first section begins with second-order representation, already reflecting on how the story is being recounted: Stesichoros’s poem survives only in fragments, some of which are still being discovered, we are told. This prolegomenon foregrounds the form of the fragment and renders Stesichoros a rather postmodern poet: “the fragments of the Geryoneis itself read as if Stesichoros had composed a substantial narrative poem then ripped it to pieces and buried the pieces in a box with some song lyrics and lecture notes and scraps of meat” (6-7). This excerpt instigates Carson’s theory of photography in this text: the fragmentation and jarring juxtapositions typify what photographs do to what they depict. That the fragments are still being discovered, moreover, intimates how photographs function in our daily lives: buried in boxes, files, or albums, they are still being uncovered as the sands of clutter shift to turn them up either purposefully or inadvertently.

The “Romance”‘s ending photographs are, first of all, not visual images, but rather page-or-two-long verbal descriptions of scenarios, a snapshot of what readers conventionally project to be a more extensive, more continuous experience of what transpires with the protagonists–Geryon, Herakles, and Ancash–on their trip to the volcano Incchantikas. In narrative terms, this mode seems to be summary. Each of the chapters has as its first line what appears to be a description of the photograph that is the chapter’s subject. The first five are fairly concrete, evident descriptions: “It is a photograph of four people sitting around a table with hands in front of them” (136) or “a close up photograph of Geryon’s left pant leg just below the knee” (137). But the last two shift from concrete, visualizable nouns to more abstract, existential claims: “It was a photograph just like the old days. Or was it?” (142), or “It was a photograph he didn’t take; no one here took it” (145).² None of these chapters is ekphrastic; the chapters not describe verbally some visual representation or work of art. Instead, these chapters narrate the moment or situation in which Geryon takes the photo. Because the attention turns to the instigating moment in the process of representation rather than to what is captured by that process, the novel refuses ekphrasis. The context, not the object, is described, and yet the description creates the absent photograph by pointing to it. Strikingly, the instant of recording the image is absent from the text; our attention turns to the context of the photographic process and misses the moment when the shutter clicks. Just as a photograph, according to Metz and Barthes and Sontag, excises a moment from the stream or continuum of experience, so too does this text excise the photograph from the coherence of the experience in the narrative.

The peculiarity of the narrative’s shift into photographically packaged moments raises the questions: Why is this part of the narrative framed through photographs, or, more precisely, photographing? Why do the titular photographs emerge only at the end point in the “Romance,” since Geryon has been at work on this photographic autobiography for many years?³ What sort of end do they spell?

The easy answer to the question why the “Romance” ends in photographs is that Geryon’s a photographer, this is his story, and the photographs’ surfacing indicate Geryon’s growing mastery over recounting his autobiography. But this answer is complicated before we even arrive at the photographic ending, precisely because “Autobiography of Red” has no single referent and each form of the autobiography carries with it its own peculiar time. There are the autobiographies marked by the time of production: Geryon’s first autobiography in the form of a sculpture, as his mother’s overheard phone conversation informs us (35), and the photographic essay form that Geryon’s autobiography takes not quite midway through the book (60) and which is elaborated for nearly thirty years beyond the adolescent moment when the shift to photography takes place. Indeed, the composition of the latter runs parallel to the trajectory of the Romance entitled “Autobiography of Red,” displacing the titular referent. There are also the autobiographies which are marked by the retrospective temporality of narration: the story of Geryon as the protagonist of the Romance, and the stories of Geryon as a composite of ancient and postmodern mythic monsters that make up Carson’s novel’s beguiling range of reference. This montage of possible autobiographies of red renders the photo-essay autobiography as a largely absent object that we only glimpse at telling moments. Geryon’s self-authored autobiography thus becomes like Barthes’s Winter Garden photograph, an absent image hypotypotically organizing the verbal exploration of the meaning of photography and time.

The turn to photograph chapters at the end of the novel should be understood in relation to the end of the nineteenth chapter, set on the morning when Herakles first breaks up with Geryon. The mid-novel chapter thus marks what ought to have been the end of the romance, had Geryon not carried the torch for his lost love for decades more. The last lines of chapter XIX directly reference the autobiography as object, observing that “in Geryon’s autobiography/ this page has a photograph of some red rabbit giggle tied with white ribbon./ He has titled it ‘Jealous of My Little Sensations’” (62). The breakup happens when they should be still in their youth, not middle age; only the last lines describe the autobiography from the retrospective time of the narration. This is an unspecified future time–when taking the photographs is anterior to assembling and titling them–different from the time of the breakup or the photographing, which is implied to be his adolescence. The temporal rupture marks the trauma of Herakles’s breaking up with Geryon, yet the event can only be inferred from the actions and responses of the two in this chapter. The turn to the photo-autobiography at the end, moreover, recapitulates the Romance’s concluding turn towards photographic chapters and makes the object stand in for the event. That Geryon had been lying in bed planning this autobiography the very morning of the breakup (60) indicates that the autobiographical project is going on in parallel with the unfolding events of the romance (in the sense of affair). The question is then why we only become aware of this parallel register of representation at this time, and so briefly. While this paralleling connects Geryon’s photography with his romance, it also points to the layering of time that photography enables, and suggests that Geryon has trouble giving up the romance because it has come unstuck in time. Photography becomes the way that Geryon learns to deal with his own monstrous sense of the timelessness of the romance. Through Geryon’s example, Carson demonstrates how photography’s temporality is not an end, an arrival at stasis, but an experience of duration; with this move she also aligns photography with love.

These closing lines of chapter XIX unquestionably mark a temporal disjuncture in the chapter’s narration that echoes the fragmentation of time Metz, among others, finds in the photograph’s power. The title of the chapter, “From the Archaic to the Fast Self,” contains within it the ambiguity between stasis and dynamism that Carson’s theory of photography unfolds through its verbal photographs. If on first read the “fast self” is the one speedily slipping away (as youth does), the phrase also describes the self made fast, as if fixed in the photographic medium. The temporal displacement of a photograph is moreover enacted in this particular narrational turn, in the prolepsis to the moment of narrating the story from some future point. This morning/this chapter, which initiates Geryon’s struggle to represent himself by the (to Geryon devastating) breakup with Herakles, is also the first moment that mentions a photograph and its title. The disruptive temporality of this chapter is our first hint that this photographic novel of development will not be following the usual progressive trajectory. The autobiography thus starts from its middle to rework the problem of ending by folding proleptically upon itself.

Yet this photograph is odd for other reasons as well. The synaesthetic paradox of a photograph of a rabbit giggle foregrounds the text’s concern with the way representation works and with the limits of photographic representation. The monstrosity of showing sound provides an apt figure for the kind of temporality the photograph evokes–the impossibility of conveying the past to the future except through a description that can only induce us imaginatively to concoct the impossible temporal plenitude. Geryon is a photographer who aims for the edge between sound and sight, while Carson’s verbal photographs mark a similar synaesthetic edge in their image-pressure on the word. The introduction of radical sensory difference in this text’s depiction of photography indicates one way in which Carson is breaking away fixed forms of representation, just as Stesichoros breaks from Homeric epithet. The monstrosity of Carson’s photography, however, unfixes vision as the privileged and singular medium of the photograph, suggesting that we rethink photography as a synaesthesia of touch and sight, or sound and sight, much as written language is.

The synaesthetic density of description in Carson’s poetic theory of photography offers insight into thinking the relation of photography and narrative. Might photography’s fragmentation and the complex temporal layering it enables seduce narrative away from linearity to embrace collage? (The film Memento‘s photographic and retrojected narrative offers a telling example of how photography assimilates narrative to its own time). If photography excises a moment from a continuum of experience, can photographs even tell a story? Sontag suggests that perhaps it cannot, arguing that we never understand anything from a photograph because it is excised from the flow of experience.⁴ Her claim, however, hinges not only on the fragmentary nature of the photograph, its capacity to atomize reality, but on the presumption that such atomization impedes narration or any other form of linkage among elements. Carson is not simply pushing the limits of photography from the visual into the verbal but in her emphasis on the fragment, and her formal reliance on verse, she also pushes the limits of narrative and its tendency to work against atomizing forces, as if challenging Sontag’s claims directly. By ending in photographs “Romance” disperses rather than culminates the narrative, and opens up the possibility that an autobiography, a narrative, or a photograph might not end in death. At every level of this text, Carson invites us to consider how fragments narrate; fragments are if anything more likely to be taken up into narrative relations as we seek to put a story to them to fill out their whole. But should we perceive that filling-in as positive or as negative space? Fragments in a series, especially those that purportedly relate in some way beyond mere juxtaposition, can produce relations complex enough so as to organize the fragments and their gaps into meaning.

Photographs, if they can be said to narrate, would seem to do so primarily in the narrative mode of summary, telling in far less time than it takes the events to unfold. This presumes, however, that we can take in visual representation instantaneously, rather than slowly over time.⁵ Do photographs ever actually function as scene, telling the story in the same amount of time as it would take for the events to happen? In this novel’s case, the absence of the visual image slows down the telling and its relation to the event in order to produce the more immediate and intensified experience of scene. At a narrational level, the shift in this romance toward photographic moments at the end marks a turn from summary into scene, a recalibrating of the relation between story and discourse. But one must also consider why the photographs themselves, or their descriptions, swap the concrete for the abstract; this shift in focus implies a turn from some actual experience, some material presence before the camera, to the processing of the meaning of that materiality. That the final chapter is not a photograph but “Flashes” marks an endpoint to this trajectory: “flashes” are still material but they are also ephemeral, and photography could be said to be the trace of that material ephemerality. We are to attend not to the object but to the tension between the object illuminated in its moment and the network of gestures, meanings, signs that link that time/space to the present moment of photographic reception. The increasing abstraction of the photographs’ captions directs our attention toward time, which the narrative shift to photographs underscores in its focus on the interrelated processes of showing and seeing (and their dissimilar temporalities).

By its end, the romance presents a doubled mode of narration, foregrounding the seeing as well as the telling (or narration-as-showing). The opening of this second order, however, also coincides with the introduction of mechanical perception and representation into the human activity of creation–a monstrous encounter indeed.⁶ Where the story and the photograph might have recorded or represented the same events in parallel but disparate media, this doubling means that the narrative records the event of photographic recording (if that is what narrative or photography does). The leap from shutter click to shutter click is less disruptive; moving from photograph to photograph logically accounts for the progression through the chapters.

As the narrative turns explicitly photographic, becoming less a tale of events in the hero’s life and more a tale of the taking of pictures, Geryon inserts himself into the mode of representation alongside the narrator, minimizing his role as the subject of representation and being instead the instigator of the process. At once not only are the readers distanced from the tale into which they had been absorbed, becoming more aware of its layers of mediation both visual and narrative, but Geryon himself is distanced from his photographic objects. At the end of the chapter that comes just before the photograph chapters Geryon thinks, “I am disappearing. . . but the photographs were worth it” (135), as if the next sequence of chapters is the residue or remnant from his disappearance (a reversal of the photograph’s gradual manifestation on the page under the darkroom’s red light). Geryon is travelling with his ex, Herakles, and Herakles’s new boyfriend Ancash–so no wonder he feels rendered invisible, and struggles with negotiating the appropriate distance. Ordinarily–that is, if we were simply absorbed in the identification with the protagonist and the events he experiences–we might say that the camera serves prophylactically, protecting Geryon from being too involved in the subject of the story and photography. But that would only be if the object of the narrative and the object of the photography in this text were the same–and they are not.

Rather, I suggest that the role of photographing at this point is apotropaïc: it serves to extend and subtend what is happening, to stave off the end of the narrative. Indeed, Sontag argues that photographing is not merely passive observation, but active participation in a scene: “it is a way of at least tacitly, often explicitly, encouraging whatever is going on to keep happening” (12). So Geryon’s photographs, and the titular torsion towards them, carve out a space for him to participate in the narrative itself, not only its events but its telling, just as much as the photographs’ emergence in the narrative signals his own self-realization. At the same time, photographing wards off–pace phototheory’s deathly obsession–the end.

The photo finish of this novel, then, defers the end of the story as much as of Geryon’s relation to Herakles, and in doing so it transforms both. His photography helps him establish a new relationship to Herakles as well as to Ancash, and not just by giving him something to do while tagging along with them. Photography is what enables Geryon’s Bildungsroman: his autobiography is a story of formation or development as a photographer. A recidivist fling with Herakles at the climax of the “Romance”–for which Ancash gives Geryon a walloping–serves to convince Geryon that he has something other than his lovelorn connection to Herakles for which to be responsible: he has his creative vision to proliferate. This proliferation, the novel’s photo finish, redefines “end” not as resolution or culmination but as expansion or dissemination. The very last chapter, “The Flashes in Which a Man Possesses Himself,” returns us to the scene of photographing and compares it to the fires of a bakery oven; Ancash sees the flames, Herakles (lustily) the bakers, and Geryon a volcano over which the three of them soar, “immortality at their faces,/ night at their back” (146). Without a camera, Geryon nonetheless pictures the moment in a flash of inspiration. Photography, at the end of the Romance, has become fully insinuated into actuality, as the box/lightsource/recording mechanism/image configuration of the men’s figures silhouetted by the oven suggests.

But the book’s culminating photographic turn also speaks to larger truths for novels in the age of the image. It’s not just that, as Sontag claims, “everything exists to end in a photograph,” but that this end must be understood to transform narrative, becoming an aim rather than a stopping point. In this case the end shows Geryon’s turn towards the actual, it shows him learning how to make something of himself without the camera, and demonstrates that the end of photography is an aim rather than a finality. If the end is in a photograph, or series of photographs, and the constant flutter of the shutter is an attempt to stave off that end, then ending becomes a set of relations or a matrix sustaining a meaningful tension. On this view, narrative’s typical death drive is subverted or diverted by the recourse to photography.⁷

II. Punct-Time

In his recent reading of Barthes’s punctum as an anti-theatrical aesthetic, Michael Fried argues that the punctum emerges through the difference between seeing and being shown. “The punctum, we might say, is seen by Barthes but not because it has been shown to him by the photographer, for whom it does not exist” (546). The difference in the agency of the presenter–human intention or accident–implies that photography can be pitted against narrative just as Sontag had speculated. That is, the antitheatricality of photographs means that they mark an impasse in the narrative relation between photographer and observer: they cannot see the same object, and indeed what moves the observer is something to which the photographer is impervious. On the other hand, Fried’s suggestion that the punctum emerges in this gap between showing and seeing evokes a visual dialectics that can engage narrative differently, folded along the lines of the observer’s relation to the object itself.

Although this antitheatrical mode entails “depicting figures who appear deeply absorbed in what they are doing, thinking, and feeling and who therefore also appear wholly oblivious to being beheld” (549), and thus invites us back in to a realist or even mimetic practice of representation, the insurmountable misalignment of the photographer and the observer that the gap between showing and seeing produces diverts us from the mimetic. Yet the indexical claim of photographs remains; photographs refract the difference between mimesis and indexicality. The materiality of the image certainly plays a role in this refraction. As Mary Ann Doane points out, “the historicity of a medium is foregrounded, not escaped” as we look at old photographs and films (144). Precisely because time does not stand still in a photograph, the peculiarly layered temporality of photographs means that for all their apparent guarantee of being anchored in reality, and for all their evocation of realist descriptive codes, what photographs let us see is not what they show. If photographs are agential machines, not just clocks, for seeing, how might they serve as monstrous witnesses to an event?

Exploiting this misalignment, Carson’s book is avowedly not mimetic; it plays on the opacity as well as on the transparency of the surface of representation–the beauty of the line of poetry or the power of the figure is as wounding as any thing, event, or experience it tells of–even as it foregrounds the accident of witnessing, the chance embedded in seeing rather than being shown. Fried’s contention about the punctum as, in essence, what the photographer is blind to, articulates the paradox of Carson’s photographic thematics of witnessing, although her work goes beyond his in attending to what the more tangible or palpable effects of that witnessing are. Opening out from the visual to the tangible, Carson’s photographs explore the tension between the opacity of the representational surface and the power to move–witnessing being a form of seeing that touches one, tangibly brings one into a hermeneutic circuit even as it keeps one on the outside of the experience witnessed. In their appeal to “what moves me” Carson’s photographs say “this” or “here,” employing the deictic shifters of language to secure the photograph’s indexical nature.

The synaesthetic power of the punctum, thus, is central to what Carson brings to a theory of photography. Although Barthes posits the punctum as that accident that pricks, bruises, or is poignant to the photograph’s viewer (27), and he articulated the punctum as the most tangible effect of the photograph, the punctum is not so much something present in the photograph as it is the performative of the photograph. In Barthes’s hands, the punctum rather subtly becomes the site where narrative attaches itself to the image: “on account of her necklace, the black woman in her Sunday best has had, for me, a whole life external to her portrait” (57), he confesses. The punctum is precisely where narrative intersects with the photograph; what grabs or strikes us about a particular image is where we start to speculate on a host of other interpretive relations extending from the photograph. Narrative enters where the visual transubstantiates into the felt.

Perhaps because this last part of Carson’s “Romance” lays before us a series of photographic puncta, projecting a sensation beyond the moment of the text, the photograph chapters grow increasingly to be about time. The first photograph chapter concerns itself with the time it takes a stoned person to set up a photograph; it is permeated with overt but also fairly straightforward markings of time. Only later does time emerge more paradoxically in the photographs:

In the photograph the face of
Herakles is white. It is the face
of an old man. It is a photograph of the future, thought Geryon months later when he
was standing in his darkroom
looking down at the acid bath and watching likeness come groping out of the bones. (144)

This is a narrative of the punctum. Geryon’s realization arrives in the temporal mode that Barthes locates in the photographic punctum–a simultaneous “this will be and this has been,” a sense of the future anteriority of death. What strikes Geryon here is the likeness as it emerges in its unlikeness. As Barthes notes, “this punctum, more or less blurred beneath the abundance and the disparity of contemporary photographs, is vividly legible in historical photographs: there is always a defeat of Time in them” (96). This reading of the punctum suggests that the apotropaïc turn to photography at the end of the novel is not a resolution so much as a transformation, a conversion of something with a definite temporal end into something that can defeat time. The punctum provides a transversal across time through the photograph. For this reason, it offers a vector for narrative.

Fried’s reading intimates that every photograph could come to have a punctum and could come to be antitheatrical insofar as its meaning unpredictably unfolds through the passage of time. Time–through the persistence or duration of the photograph–opens up surprises in the photograph, renders seen what is not shown. This view counters the exclusion of narrative from photography in Sontag’s work, for Sontag’s objection to photographs having narrative capabilities served only insofar as it viewed photographs in the instantaneity of the present.

Carson’s verbal photographs, however, provide a different fold of time, a more layered temporality, revealing the processes of narrative alongside a montage of temporalities. The anachronicity of the passage from Carson is striking; in the present of developing the photograph, Geryon discerns that the image, which would be already lodged in the past, having been taken, is actually taken from the future. Like a photograph’s fragmenting disruption of the stream of lived time, this temporal disturbance in the narration marks the moment from which Geryon looks back on his obsession from the safe distance of having resolved it. In addition, the narrative prolepsis shifts us into the moment of seeing the image rather than the moment of taking the image, in stark contrast to the time of the narration of the rest of the photograph chapters.

The disparity calls attention to how the present of narration is implicated in the look at the photograph. The present of looking at the photograph recalls that the image is perpetually thrown or projected into the present. The photograph, as Metz noted, is always hearkening from sometime else. Because of its multiple, complex temporality of simultaneously now and then, the photograph can be construed as a fragment that disrupts a moment’s contextual set of spatio-temporal relations, which insofar as they evoke narrative, fill in and smooth over the disjunction. Although Fried wants to suggest that “it would be truer to Barthes’s less than fully articulated argument to think of the punctum of death as latent in contemporary photographs, to be brought out, developed (as in the photographic sense of the term), by the inexorable passage of time” (561), such a view rests heavily on the portrait photograph (just as Barthes relies on this genre), and thus keeps the thematics oriented towards death as the key figure for temporal change. Does a landscape or monument die in a photograph? Indeed, such depiction may be the only way for us forgetful beings to comprehend such a death. While of course photographs can reveal landscapes that are no longer there, this return to the theme of the death in/of the photographic subject, the ending of everything in a photograph, marks a familiar anxiety over the death or disappearance of the Subject in the postmodern era. Is not everything we make, actually, an embodiment or projection of our own death, and photography just realizes that a little more insistently? What then is unique about photography’s baleful end time? Metz’s discussion of the radical decontextualization of space and time that photography instigates challenges us to rethink the end of photography for what is shown. Yet the important thing we gain in thinking the temporality of the punctum is the idea that photographs continue to develop, even after they are “fixed” onto the page.⁸ If the punctum hinges on what we can see in a photograph, it thwarts the terminal sense of the “end” of a photograph through the unceasing return of seeing, and establishes the means by which narrative can enfold the image.

Notwithstanding the significance of the final photos of the “Romance,” it is the theory of photography that Carson gives us outside the “Romance” section that might help us not only to capitalize on Metz’s and Fried’s readings but divert us from a death-driven interpretation of photography. The novel’s first theory of photography is found in the description of Stesichoros’s poem in the very first section of the text: “The fragments of the Geryoneis read as if Stesichoros had composed a substantial narrative poem then ripped it to pieces and buried the pieces in a box with some song lyrics and lecture notes and scraps of meat. The fragment numbers tell you roughly how the pieces fell out of the box” (6-7). On the one hand, this description rather strikingly compares to how photographic images fall out of the box of the camera, their numbered positions on the strip of film (to choose that archaic form of the film camera) or on the index print showing their order of appearance and hearkening back to an implicitly linear temporal order of their taking. Of course, individual photographs would not be tied to that linear emergence from the box; they are always independent of that order, selected for their various purposes and iterated elsewhere.

The radical fragmentation and dissonant juxtaposition described in what I’m calling Carson’s first theory of photography colludes with how Metz and Barthes perceive photography’s mode of representation, for a photographic image will always hearken back metonymically to some other space and time and object from which it hails, whose light waves it records. Just as we presume Stesichoros’s now fragmented poem recapitulates a whole text, so too are photographs seen to be fragments from a past, coherent experience now indexically posted to a future moment. This metonymy, however, rather than tethering to wholeness, fragments the holism of the photograph’s recording of the real. Those metonymic temporal linkages, moreover, invoke narrative’s peculiar conjunction of the present of narration-time and the past of narrated-time. The photograph is always an object embedded in different, contingent relations, as varied as meat and lecture notes and song lyrics; its intervention in the world disrupts the presumption of spatio-temporal continuity, and displacing even the non-photographic objects in “reality” around it. As Metz claims, the essence of the photograph is the fragment, “an instantaneous abduction of the object out of the world into another world, into another kind of time” (158). While Metz wants us to understand this “object” as the thing photographed, reading him with Carson suggests that the abducted object is in fact the photograph itself. The abduction of the object, however, disrupts the relations in that first world, because the future anterior promise of the photograph warrants that it will come back to haunt the scene of its inception.

The moment when Geryon develops the image of Herakles’s face in the darkroom is striking because its narration is so temporally disruptive, just like a photograph. The moment comes at the end of the photograph chapter, “Photographs: Like and Not Like”; the first line describes the photograph: “It was a photograph just like the old days. Or was it?” (142). At first we may think this is a more existential claim than the line (for example from a previous chapter) that describes a photograph of a dead guinea pig on a plate, and this difference signals that the photo montage has shifted from the concrete to the abstract. And we can understand this existential claim to tie in with the story’s development: Herakles has cheated on Ancash by sleeping with Geryon, so Geryon tries out that relationship from the old days and realizes it is not just like then. (Indeed, when Ancash confronts him, asks him how it felt, Geryon says “degrading” [144], although whether the feeling is what has changed or Geryon has changed is notably ambiguous.) But what has also happened is that the concrete description of the image has been displaced from the first line to the end of the chapter, while the first line captures the subjective reaction Geryon has to the image. Thus, here the narrative displays or rather stages the punctum. It is not our punctum, for the same reason that Barthes ostensibly will not reveal the Winter Garden photograph: it won’t strike or wound us.⁹ By showing the effects of the punctum, the unexpected or startling revelation of Herakles’s old-man face, the narrative lets us see Geryon’s ambivalence about Herakles, or even his desire to be free of him, which he cannot admit himself (what the photographer, in this instance, was blind to). This staging is concomitant with the fact that the narrative’s scope is now moving out beyond the moment Geryon took the photograph to complete the plot arc of picture-taking, showing us how the image turns out as well as how Geryon first reacts to it. The opening up of an arc of time, of duration, enables both the showing of the punctum’s effect (on Geryon, and on us through that focalization) and unfolds the immediacy of photography to the mode of temporal distance that Fried posits as making the punctum possible. The punctum Geryon experiences marks him as different from, if only incrementally, the photographer who could not see Herakles’s aged face at the moment of the shutter click.

If the penultimate photograph chapter displaces its photographic concreteness, slipping into the guise of existential or abstract claims but–as the chapter develops as the photograph develops–reasserting its investment in the concrete or “real,” this chapter claims its solidarity with the previous photograph chapters. The last (explicitly) photograph chapter, on the other hand, seems to describe an impossible image: “It was a photograph he didn’t take; no one here took it,” captions the image linked with the seventh chapter, “Photographs: #1748” (145). Yet this photograph is in a sense the most real of all those in the novel, or at least the most honest, as none of these purely fictional images were ever actually taken. It prepares us for the final chapter of the romance, which leaves behind the photograph–although not photography, or the photographic event–altogether. In this transition the way we understand the photograph to represent changes; we exchange what it is possible for photographs to show for what they let us see. Carson thus provokes us to imagine photography without or beyond the photographer.

The frankness of the chapter “Photographs: #1748” suggests why the photographs take over the romance’s narration in the end–indeed, shows why this text exists to end in a photograph. This end-moment, this climax of the narrative is inextricable from the incision of the photograph, even if that incision is itself fictional. And so this moment too, even though it is not even fictionally photographically recorded, nonetheless must be framed imagistically; the essence of photography has so fully overtaken the narrative that all of the text’s representations must be on photographic terms, in the tension between seeing and showing that the photograph so monstrously encapsulates in its time of development. And yet, rather than give in to serving visuality, the novel becomes the image the verbal portrayal would represent; the novel lets us see something beyond what it shows. Carson seems not to give us the photographs as visual objects, nor, I would argue, does she really give us the verbal representation of a visual image, in part because she is depicting the moment of representing, not the content of representation. Yet in so doing, she gives us a new kind of photograph. As Barthes uses the punctum to show us something beyond visual representation, to communicate a being-moved that is neither visual nor verbal but–because it is bodily–synaesthetically linked to both, Carson takes us to a level of photography beyond deixis. Its innovation is not unrelated to the novel’s being in verse, for verse intimates more than prose does, insofar as prose, like a certain kind of documentary aspect of photography, essays to give us the full picture and disavows the impossibility of that promise, whereas verse always holds back from full verbalization.

What the photograph purports to show is something impossible–Geryon’s self-portrait on his flight into the volcano:

He peers down
at the earth heart of Incchantikas dumping all its photons out her ancient eye and he
smiles for
the camera: “The Only Secret People Keep.” (145)

Like the previous photographs, the image records the shutter’s click, but here, because the camera turns on the photographer, the subject or event registered by that click is recorded as well. Notably, the camera must be aligned with the volcano, “dumping all its photons out her ancient eye.” The scene is that with his camera Geryon records being seen by the volcano. Or is it?

This photograph chapter is called #1748, unlike the previous photographic chapters which all are subtitled by words. The photograph, however, appears to be titled “The Only Secret People Keep,” although the title only emerges in the chapter, as the narrative reclaims the moment of the shutter click from its position as the caption. This displacement of photograph caption into narrative underscores the curiosity of the numbered chapter. The #1748 refers to the number of the Emily Dickinson poem that serves as the epigraph to the “Romance” part of the Autobiography. The “Romance”–and here I invoke not just the section of this book but also the genre–tells of Geryon’s travel adventures and thematically links the myth of the yazcamac, the people who came back from being thrown into the volcano, who are thus eyewitnesses to immortality, with Dickinson’s poem which begins, “The reticent volcano keeps/ His never slumbering plan–” and ends, “The only secret people keep/ Is Immortality” (qtd. in Carson 22). The title of the photograph is the penultimate line of the poem, which tempts us with the question, is the impossible photograph of Geryon flying into the volcano supposed to be an image of Immortality? To affirm so would be to turn Carson’s warping of the axiomatic link between death and photography towards a positive end that suffers the persistence of the representation of the subject long after the subject has passed. Certainly a photograph’s persistence out of its own time and space, its long-term iterabilities, suggests that photographs might instantiate not death but immortality. But the photograph itself bears an inevitable degradation in its material existence–no more a recipe for immortality than Ozymandias’s monument. Barthes’s refusal to republish the Winter Garden photograph is not merely that “it exists only for me” but that “it cannot in any way constitute the visible object of a science” (73)–as if a science in some way precludes a capacity to wound. But what is the empirical object here? Despite his ostensible refusal to reveal the image, Barthes does, consistently, verbally, let us see it all through the second part of the book: that verbal description is the photograph for us, and has its own punctum effect. The poignancy of the Winter Garden photograph is as invisible as the photograph itself, yet both become objects of our knowledge in some way. As what matters, what endures, that objectivity or that visibility seduces us to link a photograph to immortality rather than to mortality; but on the contrary, it is the more ephemeral element of the photograph’s evocative sensations that tenders the photograph over to immortality.¹⁰

The impossibility of the image the volcano snaps of Geryon, its arrival as a final chapter in a series that has become increasingly abstract, tantalizes us with the question of whether immortality is secret because it is not visible. Is this last chapter an image of immortality? Tempting as this interpretation may be, I think this is not the most interesting question to pose, partly because it presumes a kind of representational logic that hinges on metaphor and eschews the metonymic workings of photography. Rather we might inquire: What kind of immortal witness are the dead in the photographs, who reach out to touch us not as subjects but as the punctum’s temporal projection? What secret are they not keeping by their metonymical testimony? Are secrets only silences, or are they things that are hidden from view, buried? Insofar as the punctum comes from the other side of the camera, instantiating the photograph as the obverse of reality, it conceals as much as it reveals. What is the photographer blind to–what is the tain of the photograph?

The tain, which is what, itself invisible, disappearing or folding behind the image, makes the image work, is distinct from that detail in the image we might not readily see. For instance, what is not quite apparent to us in this photograph from Carson is the apparatus, caught up as we may be in the gesture of representation. The immortal photograph Geryon takes in his flight over Incchantikas is for Ancash to remember him by: “This is a memory of our / beauty. He peers down” (145). But the equipment Geryon has taken is a tape recorder. On his flight, he hits “record.”

The fact that the climax of the novel hinges on the recording of experience–encapsulated by the taking of the photographs, not by the looking at them–suggests that ultimately this text is not about the death-drives of narrative, moving toward resolution of a discombobulated equilibrium, but about narrative possibilities of the life-drive and its combinatorial force; the flashes of inspiration titling the final chapter of the “Romance” are not just metaphorical. The struggle is also Geryon’s struggle over whether and how to be taken. Who will take Geryon’s picture? Who will take Geryon? These two questions are imbricated in the novel, so as to transform the death-drive of photography into love. For Geryon to be taken, to be loved, he must love himself, become real, throw himself into experience–Carson reformulates such stock self-help-book themes to show how the real, the actual, comes after the photograph, not before it. The novel pursues Geoffrey Batchen’s question, “when is a photograph made?” through the parallel Bildungsroman paradigm to turn it, palinodically, towards “when is experience unmade?” The very fragmentation and temporal disruption of the photograph, its presumptive immediacy disavowing the deferral of the image’s coming into being, its inherent Nachträglichkeit, generates our experience even as it seems to document it. The tape recorder, which Geryon flicks on as he flies over the volcano, has become his apotropaïc defense; he won’t give up his monstrosity, his imbrication with the mechanical registering of experience, so easily. Precisely because of its interest in the paradoxical, even monstrous, combinations of sound and the visible, verbal and visual, cameras and tape recorders, the Autobiography remains a narrative about photography’s ability to produce experience moebiously, recombining life and story and their relation with a twist, rather than fixing, as Metz posits photography does, a slice of time in a sort of petit mort. The fragments of time or reality that Metz and others perceive as photography’s essence are also what makes possible a series of recombinations that overcome such a fixity. Photographs offer not motion but motility.

III. What a Difference a Tain Makes

The claim that the novel’s depiction of the photographs refuses ekphrasis might seem surprising, particularly given the novel’s rewriting of ancient Greek mythology, where ekphrasis was invented. I make this claim not only to suggest that the novel is doing more than describing photographs, even imagined ones, but to emphasize the change in relations of representation that the book’s theory of photography introduces, how it contests the presumably descriptive mode of photography itself. Just as Stesichoros changes the mode of representation through his more creative and open-ended use of adjectives, so too does Carson challenge our conventional understanding of the photographic relation through her non-ekphrastic photographs.

The story of how Geryon resolves his unrequited romance with Herakles and becomes an eyewitness to immortality is enmeshed in a parallel, second-order story of how these fragments, these photographs, come to be and how they relate to Geryon’s life in complex, often anachronistic ways. The conventional, subject-focused tale of Geryon’s transformation into an active agent in his own representation thus renders him instead a secondary character in the objects’ narrative. Such splitting recapitulates photography’s own twofold functioning: the human agency of the photographer and the mechanical action of the camera or tape recorder.¹¹ The novel’s negotiation between human agent and instrumental object mirrors the narrative of photography itself as a representational process. The tain of the photograph might come to be understood as the third term in this deconstruction that interrupts mimetic or indexical relation of subject and object.

Monique Tschofen ponders the question that Carson’s first chapter poses in subtitle: “What Difference Did Stesichoros Make?” and replies that through his use of adjectives “one ‘difference’ Stesichoros makes is thus to find a way of using language that invites us to perceive with all of our bodily senses–to make us feel” (39). “He lets us see that words say but that they also show, that they make us think, but they also make us feel” (40), Tschofen argues. Her insights tie in with the notion of punctum as a specific kind of synaesthesia at work in these verbal photographs, as Carson plays off the felt and the thought, the sensible and the intelligible in her photo chapters. Carson’s sensible approach commingles sound and sight just as language itself does, and helps us account for the monstrous hybrid of Geryon’s recurring synaesthetic experiences (it’s not just during his tape-recorded photographic flight at the end; much earlier, for instance, he frets over the noises colors make, roses “roaring across the garden at him,” the “silver light of stars crashing against/ the window screen,” grass clicking [84]).

If in the narrative of the taking of the picture what strikes us is the click of the shutter, a click we can hear no more than we can see the scene before us, that click is also the moment when in the making of a photograph a narrative is sutured. Barthes relies on narrative to explain why or how the punctum wounds or moves him; narrative comes to mediate the synaesthetic experience of seeing and feeling. That same moving is at work in Carson’s oscillation between the events of making and looking, between the sensory appeal of language and what it renders intelligible. Carson’s language is unquestionably sensual, not the least because its poetic form foregrounds the sensory, while the artful concreteness of the diction gives texture and vivid dimension to the language. Yet that sensory appeal produces a punctum. How are we struck, as Geryon is struck, by Herakles’s likeness emerging in the photographic bath? It is, of course, not a question of we but of I: what I am struck by as I read these photographs is the deadpan tone of “pants leg.”

Tschofen points out, furthermore, that Carson views Stesichoros’s invention of the palinode, the counter-song, as his contribution to narrative, as a second difference he makes. Let us similarly give weight to the fact that Barthes launches his discussion of the Winter Garden photograph as a palinode. He ends Part One with the suggestion that his examination of public photographs thus far has honed his understanding of how his desire works, but has not enabled him to discover the nature of photography: “I would have to make my recantation, my palinode” (60). Does the palinode form explain the absence of the mother’s photograph, perhaps better than Barthes’s parenthetical determination that we could not see how he sees this photograph? It certainly helps explain why we are blind to that photograph. The absent referent provides the palinode: Stesichoros’s ancient fragmented text, the Winter Garden photograph, Geryon’s autobiography. The palinode serves as the backing, the tain, which brings the image on the surface, the ode, into sharper focus.

While Tschofen astutely turns the question of the difference Stesichoros makes to “what difference does Anne Carson’s writing make?” (40), her answer invites more photographic development. Drawing on Carson’s claim about her own work that “words bounce,” Tschofen suggests that “words bounce when they connect with other words and with the people who use them” (41). Through this “bounce,” Tschofen suggests, “Carson shows us ways to break free from the constraints of the past” while she simultaneously “asks us to connect with it” (41). If we take this “bounce” of words to be akin to the “bounce” of a light beam off the tain of the mirror, the return path of the palinode, the parallel opens up to emphasize the transformations in understanding that such a “bounce” entails. Moreover, Tschofen’s insistence on what difference Carson’s writing makes as a dual temporality that both frees us from the past and connects us to it is strikingly isomorphic with the photograph’s temporality, its simultaneous fragmentation from the originary temporal flow and its indexically seducing us back to that past, even when we never experienced it directly.

Tschofen’s reading of the significance of the palinode picks up implicitly on this idea of bounce, and she does so through Geryon’s own figuration as a photographer, suggesting that he is “a creature of reversals destined to go back to the beginning and revise his own ending” (44). Stesichoros’s palinode took back the story he made that ticked off Helen and made her blind him; the palinode thus narrates from what cannot be seen. The construction of the ode and the palinode sets up a relation between stories that opens up the ending, which typically resolves into stasis or equilibrium, into a circuit of meaning strung in the tension between seen and unseen, as well as the dialectic of shown and seen. A counter-song bounces or reverberates with the song it counters, and in that reverberation reveals new aspects, undoing some of the initial meanings, underplaying or redeploying others, but opening up space for the palimpsestic blurring of the original in relation to the new song. It is not unlike the way memory works by photographs; the pictures come to palinodically erase the event we actually experienced. We complete the ode and turn to the palinode, which counters the story told in the ode. Perhaps this helps explain why, after the photographic chapters, the book turns to an interview with Stesichoros, since an interview offers a forum in which to bounce ideas around.

The interview as a form is anti-narrative, dialogical, and in this instance paradoxical in its relation to what has come before. Like a photograph, an interview usually comes after some event, some achievement, as a kind of post-hoc representation that also takes on its own autonomy, its own iterations. Rather than give any clear insight into what happened in the Romance, however, Stesichoros tells of his seeing. Yet his seeing is really Gertrude Stein’s seeing: an atelier in 1907 with paintings covering the walls right up to the ceiling (147), where “naturally I saw what I saw” and “I saw everything everyone saw” (148), phrases that echo Stein’s Everybody’s Autobiography, where she notes that “my eyes have always told me more than my ears. Anything you hear gets to be a noise but a thing you see, well of course it has some sound but not the sound of noise” (89). Stein describes her previous autobiography (of Alice B. Toklas) as “a description and a creation of something that having happened was in a way happening again but as it had been which is history which is newspaper which is illustration but is not a simple narrative of what is happening not as if it had happened not as if it is happening but as if it is existing simply that thing” (312).

In this passage, Stein transforms description–what photographs are conventionally understood to be doing in their mechanical seeing–into creation. The concatenation of disparate things that that “happening” is to be–newspaper, illustration, history–recalls Stesichoros’s meat scraps and song lyrics and lecture notes in the box with his poem fragments. And like meat scraps and lecture notes and song lyrics, the illustration, newspaper, and history are all fragments that refer to or conjure both something else, something meaningful, and the items in themselves. Similarly, Carson’s description of Geryon creates his process of creating, produces a text “as if it is existing simply that thing.”

In that interview, Stesichoros not only sees as if he were Gertrude Stein but also speaks like her: “What is the difference between a volcano and a guinea pig is not a description why is it like it is a description” (148). This claim bookends the theory of photography from the first section. If asking to what object the title “Autobiography of Red” refers complicates referentiality in the text, either by multiplying or differently connecting the title and the referent(s), it does so in order to begin to articulate this theory of photography as a problem of likeness, not a solution that solidifies a representation to its real object. If the theory of photography finds the photograph to be inherently fragmentary, then that too helps us to see better why photography would be a problem of likeness. As a problem of likeness, photography is not based in likeness but in difference. And if we lose the idea that photography comes from likeness, can we shake free of the idea that photography’s end is inextricably linked with death, rather than with the recombination of the likenesses?

It is therefore no accident that this version of Geryon’s story is a romance, not a tragedy. It is about the possibilities and potentialities for recombination rather than about the force of destiny played out within the tragic unities of time, space, action. As a romance it is a story of the tangled complications and combinations of love, and is also a romance in its engagement with the fantastic or supernatural–such as red-winged monsters flying over volcanoes to take pictures. Its notion of photography itself is also romantic, whether photography is theorized as a supernatural process for manipulating time, or a way to access a ghostly presence of real objects. The most important thing Carson’s text does is redefine photography not in relation to death but in relation to love, and the theory of photography embedded in Stesichoros’s Steinian sentence is crucial to that redefinition. “What is the difference between a volcano and a guinea pig is not a description why is it like it is a description.” (148).

Photography is typically construed to be about likeness, to produce a likeness; our habitual reliance on its capacity to document is one example of this presumption.¹² As Sontag notes, “the photographic purchase on the world, with its limitless production of notes on reality, makes everything homologous” (111). Even though we know darn well its capacity for distortion, the photograph’s power to describe lets it be taken for a mirror. As we do with the photograph, we habitually think that the mirror is a reflection of the world, of reality. We use the metaphor of the mirror to indicate some unmediated representational process. In our everyday presuppositions about photography’s capacity to represent, as when we see photographs on someone’s desk or in the newspaper, we presume that the image in the photograph is pretty much like what it depicts. But if that were the case, we would not have that disorienting reaction to our own photograph (do I look like that?) or eagerly play back digital images we’ve just taken to see how they look. This disorientation or impatience speaks to a fundamental truth about likeness of /in a photograph: it is not a similarity, but a radical difference that must be bridged by the description that accounts for “why is it like it.”

On this view, photography is a metonymic practice that fundamentally questions why is it like it. Barthes concurs, at least as far as metonymy goes; he begins Camera Lucida by considering that a photograph is a transmission of light waves that touch their subject and bounce back to be registered on the photographic film before they touch our eyes (3). Sontag, on the other hand, uses an implicitly metonymic view of photography to challenge our sense of how it produces likeness: “A photograph is not only like its subject . . . it is an extension of that subject; a potent means of acquiring it, of gaining control over it” (155). The photograph is radically contingent on its original context while nonetheless asserting some relational, even referential claim to have an originary or anterior object. Yet the indexicality of the photograph–on which both Barthes and C.S. Peirce rely–misleads us into thinking that photographs have a relation to the object. Photographs describe only insofar as they say why two completely disparate things–guinea pigs and volcanoes, for instance, or a photograph and its object–are like. If that likeness is based on contiguity or, rather, on a set of contiguous relations from object to camera to photograph, it nonetheless still poses a question. Indeed, indices, as Doane notes, “have no resemblance to their objects, which, nevertheless, cause them” (133). The question for photography, and for the Autobiography of Red, is how likeness could be founded on the contiguity rather than on the relational or referential claim.

Contiguity, the underpinning of the figure of metonymy, is about spatial relations; the photograph’s indexicality attests to a particular spatial configuration, viz., the presence of the photographed object in relation to the camera and the photographing subject or agent. By contrast, metaphoricity turns on a kind of likeness, a striking similarity in a field of difference that does not require the same spatial distinction. So the problem of likeness would seem to hinge on metaphorics. Certainly the sense that metaphor transports meaning across difference seems to encapsulate what a photograph does, temporally speaking: it transports meaning, an image, across a differential field of time and space. Yet when we try to say “why is it like it,” why the photograph is like its represented object, we look to the insistence on the photograph’s indexicality to guarantee its connection to that displaced time and space. As Peter Geimer observes, the indexicality of photography is repeatedly figured metaphorically, through the trace, as if the photograph operates like the photogram, which records the physical contact of the object itself on the light-sensitive medium, rather than recording a pattern of lightwaves. Geimer avers that “in the case of photography we must be careful to speak of continuity and touching in a rather narrow sense of the words. Or does the appearance of a ray of light qualify as direct physical contact . . . ? Does light ‘touch’ the object upon which it shines? Is a lit surface an ‘imprint’ of something?” (16). Yet while Geimer puts pressure on the tactile impression of the index (the footprint, the weathervane, the death mask), he does not give up entirely on contiguity, for contiguity makes possible the chance event, the contingencies captured by the photograph in its making. Poised between the mechanical and the human agent, and uncertain of how long it will take to make a photograph–a second for a click or decades for the image to be selected for printing or for the image to be seen–“photographers are only partly aware of what they are doing” (19).

Geimer’s questions open up the space (if you will) to think through the contiguity of photography by acknowledging and embracing the synaesthesia between the visual and the tactile that Carson’s photographs anticipate and articulate so clearly. The indexical relation of the photographic object suggests to the observer that vision is material contact, rendering the seen as something fundamentally touching. This understanding of the contiguity of photographs frees us from “the old idea that some aspect of the depicted scene has gone into its photographic double” (Geimer 23), without relinquishing the idea that photographs have the power to attest which makes them so compelling. The indexical relation of the beholder to the object photographed suggests that we search for likeness along metonymic lines, to discern what touches. Likeness in photography thus hinges on metonymy rather on simile. Barthes’s sense of his visual connection to Napoleon, mediated through the photograph of Bonaparte’s brother, constructs the photograph as a long-durée rearview mirror.

A mirror works because of its tain, the thin layer of silver backing on the glass that gives the glass its special reflectivity, that makes it a mirror and not a window. The tain of the mirror blocks our view but at the same time makes it possible to see differently. It alters–arguably creates–the visual dialectic, redirecting light waves from the object mirrored to the subject beholding; often, those are the “same” entity (although as Lacan suggests, they are not). The tain not only returns the gaze blindly but enables us to see behind ourselves. A mirror, through the tain, thus provides us with a metonymical relation to ourselves or mediates our metonymical relation to distant objects. I’m interested in this figure of the tain for what its analogy to photography reveals about the visual, given that photography has such a strong convention of direct representation, of being a mirror to the world. The mirror functions reassuringly as deixis. What, then, is the tain of the photograph?

Although–or rather, because–silver is used in the printing of black and white photographs, where it forms the patterning on the page like the black of print letters or the colors whose lightwaves are reflected in the mirror, it is not the tain of the photograph. Silver composes the materiality of the photographic image rather than serving to redirect or re-destine the mirror image. In the gelatin photograph, silver operates like a metaphor, organizing samenesses (of tone or pattern or line) in a field of difference in order to convey meaning. In the mirror, silver functions metonymically, bending the spatial relations of light into a fold, a new set of contiguities. This elucidates the function of the tain: it works metonymically to fold space into new relations. It is the touch that redestines the image.

Carson’s thematics suggest that the tain of the photograph is not silver but red: red is the color of the negative strip, and the color of the darkroom light, in which the image emerges in its chemical bath, to be fixed onto the paper. Red is what we do not see in the process of the image’s development but what lets us see the image’s development and production. That same red light is the color of a volcano’s lava flow, the earthly liquid glow emanating from below the solid black fragments of rock that break apart in the pulsion of the volcano’s eruption (another illumination of material production). When Geryon flies over the volcano and witnesses the red glow, which redirects his life trajectory and maybe even makes him immortal, the push from below of the volcanic eruption is akin to, isomorphic with, the eruption of the image onto the photographic page. The chapter in which Geryon watches Herakles’s face emerge in the photographic bath under the red light also recounts the moment when that photograph was taken: it is no coincidence that Herakles had looked then at Geryon and said “Volcano time?” (144). The unmarked ellipsis in the text between Herakles’s comment and the photograph’s emergence nonetheless erupts to redirect the timing of the story (the shift from moment of shutter click to time of processing) and the meaning of Herakles’s question (is it a reference to Ancash’s having exploded at Geryon? To Ancash’s telling Geryon to use those wings and fly over the volcano? To the repetition of their previous plans to journey to a volcano? Is the time of volcano time a projection of the future or of the past or a queer time that is neither?). In the same way, photographs have their own volcano time, have erupted into our reality, emerging from the red bath into the light of day and disrupting the surface of that daily experience. As Sontag posits: “Instead of just recording reality, photographs have become the norm for the way things appear to us, thereby changing the very idea of reality, and of realism” (87). Red keeps the film blind to the manufacturing process, but also figures as what we do not see as we make images our reality. The read photograph redirects our gaze at reality and realism.

Sontag’s assertion does several things: it invites us to rethink Metz’s claim about photography’s power to fragment reality, a view that remains subtended by a theory of likeness (that the only way photographs fragment reality is if they bear some likeness to it); it suggests how photographs are aligned in relation to narrative (i.e., with rather than against) through their normative power to subordinate our seeing to what is shown; and it advises why we might want to understand photography through Carson’s purely verbal text. For it is the power over seeing that Sontag discerns in photography’s authority over realism that elucidates the difference of Carson’s argument about the difference Stesichoros makes. In the forcefulness of their representational relation, photographs impart an extreme form of likeness. The chain of making–Geryon’s making photographs as his autobiography, the narrative’s shift to the level of Geryon’s photograph making, and Carson’s remaking of Geryon’s story–not only challenges the idea that photography records reality, but opens up gaps within which the question “why is it like it” resonates. We pose this question when we see beyond or other than what we are shown–that is, when the punctum marks the opening for the duration of the photograph to assert itself whether through narrative or through synaesthetic condensation of a feeling into what we see. Carson’s verse photographs do both. What wounds Barthes, if not Barthesian readers, is the temporal distance mapped by the image, a distance always resonant as loss (Camera Lucida is a work of mourning). What wounds us as Carson’s photographic witnesses is the richness of what is left intimated but unsaid, the circumstances of the making of the image for what they suggest about the unshown image. Carson takes the antitheatricality Fried finds in Barthes’s photography theory to a new level of anti-mirroring, rendering the tain of the photograph more dynamic than quicksilver. Carson’s photographs propose that the tain of the photograph is the palinode that enables us to ask “Why is it like it?”

The mirroring that photographs purportedly do describes yet also atomizes reality to such an extent that they invite a fascinated speculation or deduction from the evidence before one. Sontag is concerned that the pervasiveness of photography belies its lack of access to the world, to knowing the world, to understanding. “Strictly speaking,” Sontag tells us, “one never understands anything from a photograph” (23). This claim works simultaneously to refute the access to reality that photography’s documenting function promises, as well as to account for a necessary fascination with a photograph, that even if a photograph instantaneously shows us its subject, it takes time really to see what is in a photograph. What one understands of a photograph comes from the gap in the image’s relation to the world. One may never understand anything a photograph shows, but one can understand something from what one sees in a photograph. That seeing is meaningful because of the temporal gaps and layers introduced by the photograph. If we reconsider the claims by Metz and others that as photographs fragment time, isolating moments one from another, they conceal how that moment, event, or object functions, we can revisit how we might understand something from a photograph, at least from some photographs. The recombinatorial power of the fragment is, importantly, a generative feature, and emerges from the question of “why is it like it?” as the force of (photographic) description.

Just before she concludes her essay in which she makes the claim with which I begin, Sontag observes that, “in contrast to the amorous relation, which is based on how something looks, understanding is based on how it functions. And functioning takes place in time, and must be explained in time. Only that which narrates can make us understand” (23). That Autobiography of Red is indeed a romance, a story about an amorous relation, explains why it so forcefully engages the problem of how photography looks, and why it must torque appearance figured as the photograph in words. Sontag sets the photograph as instantaneous appearance in opposition to narrative as a temporal understanding. But because as a romance Autobiography of Red is also a quest to understand that relationship, and Geryon seeks that understanding through photography and through a narrative that becomes photography, Sontag’s opposition ought to be reconsidered. The fragmentation of Carson’s narrative photographs paradoxically initiates a theory of photography in an ancient poet, but does so in order to revisit how we have understood temporality to work in the photograph: time’s linearity and the disruption of that linearity by the photograph structure the metonymic relation of the image to its object. The verbal photographs demonstrate that the very contingency of photography, its simultaneous excision and interpellation of fragments of space in time, necessitates narrative–indeed, cannot shake it off. A photograph however lost from its original object inserts itself into a new narrative relation, underpinned by time’s metonymy and propelled by the question of likeness.

Which brings us back to the problem of the tain. The tain of the mirror helps transform light from wave to image, intervenes with contiguity to create likeness, bringing out the information or data that lightwaves carry. The tain of the photograph is that which intervenes to change the direction of the light’s trajectory–the narrative’s trajectory. The tain of the photograph, then, shows that the photograph is not an end, only a redirection: from image to narrative, from material to immaterial, conveying a play on the ambiguity of “like”–not just a question of likeness but of liking. The tain of the photograph, like the palinode, folds the narrative away from an ending, away from its death-drive towards fixity and stasis. The redirection participates in a transformation, and narrative lodges within transformation. If this is the autobiography of Red, it is because it is the story of the tain of the photograph, the obverse workings of photography as a practice of love. This is why no “real” photographs appear in the text. The tain of the photograph is what makes these verbal constructions photographs. It has less to do with the mythic indexicality of the subject’s lightwaves registering on emulsion, and more to do with posing the photographic question of why is it like it, which is itself produced by the photograph’s layered, volcanic temporality. Photographs cannot account for their production, cannot represent the red light of their tain. If “red” is the tain of the photograph, it is not only the special light that enables us to see the image as it emerges, or the film itself as it is manufactured, but the Doppler-shift of time moving away from us. We are the ones anchored in the present, while the moment captured in the snapshot is itself in motion, working along the complex temporality of the duration of the image, as the afterlife of a moment. The “red” of the figure of the photograph’s tain is the touch of distance itself. The self-written story of this tain, then, provides the account of how intractably narrative folds into the monstrous matter of making.

The tain or palinode of the photograph redirects our look at the “real world” and turns us instead to the sensation of the narrative image. If, today, everything exists to end in a photograph, that end bends the trajectory of indexicality beyond an affirmation of thereness. What “Autobiography of Red” “refers” to, then, is the transformative power of this reflection. It is and is not the life story of Geryon, red-winged monster photographer; it is and is not the photographic montage Geryon makes about his life; it is and is not the process of narrating that tells the story of photography’s transformation of the real into something that makes us ask, why is it like it?

Notes

1. There is no shortage of narrated photographs in postmodern literature. From Bob Perelman’s poem “China,” which purports to caption photographs of Chinese scenes, to the climax of John Edgar Wideman’s Two Cities the absent photograph may be the quintessential figure of postmodern representation, providing the occasion for the collapse of narrative into description.

2. There are two senses of “take” in the last caption; not just the idiomatic expression of clicking the shutter to record the photograph, but also the possibility of appropriating an image, abducting it from its time or, rather, since the gesture is cast in the negative, a refusal to bring it along and thus leaving it behind.

3. Chapter VIII, “Click,” narrates a youthful Geryon determinedly focused on taking a picture of his mother while she’s trying to find out “who is this new kid you’re spending all your time with?” (40). It’s the beginning of Geryon’s relationship with Herakles, so while the chapter hinges on the taking of the picture, the picture-taking is subordinated to the story of Geryon’s silence about the relationship and his feelings. (In fact, Geryon “had recently relinquished speech” [40].) It’s a silence that nonetheless speaks to readers. Such earlier references to photographic action remain distinctly different from the ending photographic chapters.

4. Sontag claims that “photographs do not explain: they acknowledge” (111), yet at the same time she underscores that they conceal as they reveal. Sontag aims to undermine the commonly held notion that photography is “an instrument for knowing things” (93). In her view, the “knowledge gained through still photographs will always be some kind of sentimentalism, whether cynical or humanist” (24); with Barthes, this sentiment is transformed into the powerful notion of the punctum. Sontag’s opposition of understanding and photography aligns narration and time against the image (23).

5. Arguably, this is what happens in Antonioni’s Blow-Up, where the photographer comes to realize over the course of the weekend what the picture shows, in the same time frame that the murder mystery it seems to represent takes place. The development of the murder’s mystery parallels the time of the development of the film into image.

6. Walter Benjamin notes that the first photographs “present the earliest image of the encounter of machine and man” (678).

7. See Peter Brooks’s reading of Freud’s Beyond the Pleasure Principle in Reading for the Plot for an exposition of this death drive in relation to narrative.

8. Geoffrey Batchen explores this dynamic at length in “Taking and Making,” which opens with the question, “When is the photograph made?” and examines the selection of different prints by photographers depending on the aesthetic trends of the moment, for example Steiglitz’s holding off for twenty-seven years before printing an image he took around 1889, and then not exhibiting it until 1921. Batchen concludes that photographs “exist only as a state of continual fabrication, constantly being made and remade within twists and turns of their own unruly passage through space and time” (106).

9. Of course, Barthes’s Winter Garden photograph is so memorable precisely because it does wound us. Moreover, our perception of it changes as we read and re-read Camera Lucida in precisely the way that Fried’s reading of the punctum as development invites. But this absent photograph only wounds us because it is a verbal photograph; because of the significance of that photograph to Barthes’s palinode, that is the only way in which its punctum can be revealed.

10. Photography theory’s obsession with death is thus really a fixation on the persistence of the afterlife of the image, what Doane describes as “the inescapable necessity of matter, despite its inevitable corrosion, decay, and degeneration” (146). The immortality of photographs is therefore not lodged in the materiality of the image on the paper, but in the punctum and its power to affect us. Along similar lines, Doane’s reading of Gombrich and Krauss on the question of what a medium is leads her to posit that “the experience of a medium is necessarily determined by a dialectical relation between materiality and immateriality” (131).

11. Bazin notes that with photography, “for the first time, between the originating object and its reproduction there intervenes only the instrumentality of a nonliving agent” (13). He thus emphasizes the objective aspect of photography and downplays the agency of the photographer. As Sontag has observed, the question of what the photographer really adds is certainly still significant, but by elucidating the paradoxes of the figure of the professional photographer she underscores the importance of human agency in photography. See her “Photographic Evangels” chapter.

12. Siegfried Kracauer, for instance, foregrounds this aspect by beginning his essay on photography with a discussion of the likenesses of a film diva and of a grandmother (47-48). While he contends that as time passes, the significance of likeness fades as a photograph archives the elements it documents, he concludes that this residual organization of elements in old photographs is in fact not an organization yet at all, but rather that “the photograph gathers fragments around a nothing” (56) underscores my larger concern in this essay with fragmentation and photography.

Works Cited

• Antonioni, Michaelangelo. Blow-Up. MGM Studios. 1966.
• Attridge, Derek. “Roland Barthes’ Obtuse, Sharp Meaning” Writing the Image after Roland Barthes. Ed. Jean-Michel Rabaté. Philadelphia: U Pennsylvania P, 1997. 77-89.
• Barthes, Roland. Camera Lucida: Reflections On Photography. Trans. Richard Howard. New York: Hill and Wang, 1981.
• Batchen, Geoffrey. Each Wild Idea: Writing Photography History. Cambridge: MIT P, 2001.
• Bazin, André. “The Ontology of the Photographic Image.” What Is Cinema? Vol. 1. Sel. and trans. Hugh Gray. Berkeley: U California P, 1967. 9-16.
• Benjamin, Walter. The Arcades Project. Trans. Howard Eiland and Kevin McLaughlin. Cambridge: Belknap, 1999.
• Brooks, Peter. Reading for the Plot: Design and Intention in Narrative. New York: Vintage, 1985.
• Cadava, Eduardo. Words of Light: Theses on the Photography of History. Princeton: Princeton UP, 1997.
• Carson, Anne. Autobiography of Red: A Novel in Verse. New York: Vintage, 1998.
• Dickinson, Emily. The Complete Poems of Emily Dickinson. Ed. Thomas H. Johnson. Boston: Back Bay, 1961.
• Doane, Mary Ann. “Indexicality and the Concept of Medium Specificity.” differences 18.1 (Spring 2007): 128-52.
• Fried, Michael “Barthes’s Punctum.” Critical Inquiry 31.3 (Spring 2005): 539-74.
• Geimer, Peter. “Image as Trace: Speculations about an Undead Paradigm.” Trans. Kata Gellen. differences 18.1 (Spring 2007): 7-28.
• Kracauer, Siegfried. “Photography.” The Mass Ornament: Weimar Essays. Ed. and trans. Thomas Y. Levin. Cambridge: Harvard UP, 1995. 46-63.
• Metz, Christian. “Photography and Fetish.” The Critical Image: Essays on Contemporary Photography. Ed. Carol Squiers. Seattle: Bay P, 1990. 155-64.
• Peirce, C.S. Collected Papers of Charles Sanders Peirce. Ed. Charles Hartshorne and Paul Weiss. Vol 4. Cambridge: Harvard UP, 1931-1958.
• Perelman, Bob. “China.” <www.murgatroid.com/china.html>
• Sontag, Susan. On Photography. New York: Noonday P, 1977.
• Stein, Gertrude. Everybody’s Autobiography. Cambridge: Exact Change, 1993.
• Tschofen, Monique. “‘First I Must Tell about Seeing’: (De)monstrations of Visuality and the Dynamics of Metaphor in Anne Carson’s Autobiography of Red.” Canadian Literature 180 (Spring 2004): 31-50.
• Wideman, John Edgar. Two Cities: A Love Story. Boston; Mariner, 1999.

Arkady Plotnitsky
Theory and Cultural Studies Program
Department of English
Purdue University
plotnit@purdue.edu

Robert Hughes’s article offers an unexpected perspective on Alain Badiou’s work and its impact on the current intellectual and academic scene, a cliché-metaphor that (along with its avatars, such as performance or performative, also a pertinent theoretical term) may be especially fitting in this case, given that Badiou is not only a philosopher but also a playwright. What makes Hughes’s perspective unexpected is its deployment of “trauma” as the main optics of this perspective. While the subject and language of trauma have been prominent in recent discussions, they are, as Hughes acknowledges, not found in Badiou’s writings nor, one might add, in the (by now extensive) commentaries on Badiou. Hughes’s reading of Badiou in terms of trauma rearranges the “syntax” of Badiou’s concepts, as against other currently available readings of Badiou, even if not against Badiou’s own thinking, concerning which this type of claim would be more difficult to make. In this respect Badiou’s thought is no different from that of anyone else. One can only gauge it by a reading, at the very least a reading by Badiou himself, for example, in Briefings on Existence (which I shall primarily cite here for this reason and because it offers arguably the best introduction to his philosophy).

Before proceeding to Hughes’s argument, I sketch the conceptual architecture of Badiou’s philosophy from a perspective somewhat different from but, I hope, complementing that offered by Hughes. The language of conceptual architecture follows Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari’s view of philosophy, in What is Philosophy?, as the invention, construction of new concepts (5). This definition also entails a particular idea of the philosophical concept. Such a philosophical concept is not an entity established by a generalization from particulars or “any general or abstract idea” (What is Philosophy? 11-12, 24). Instead, it is a conglomerative phenomenon that has a complex architecture. As they state, “there are no simple concepts. Every concept has components and is defined by them . . . . It is a multiplicity” (16). Each concept is a conglomerate of concepts (in their conventional sense), figures, metaphors, particular elements, and so forth, that may or may not form a unity; as such, it forms a singular, unique configuration of thought. As a philosopher, Badiou is an inventor, a builder of new concepts, just as Deleuze and Guattari are, even when these concepts bear old names, as do some of Badiou’s key concepts, such as event, being, thought, and truth.
 

A distinctive, if not unique, feature of Badiou’s philosophy, as against that of most other recently prominent figures, is the dominant role in it of mathematics, in particular of mathematical ontology. It is true that major engagements with mathematics are also found in Lacan and Deleuze, both of whom had a considerable philosophical impact on Badiou’s work. There are, however, also significant differences among these thinkers in this respect, and it is worth briefly commenting on these differences in order to understand better Badiou’s use of mathematics and mathematical ontology. For Badiou, to use his “equation,” “mathematics=ontology” (Briefings 59), and “ontology=mathematics.” (Badiou’s first identity is not mathematical, and hence these two identities are not automatically the same, but they appear to be in Badiou.) Reciprocally, Badiou wants to give mathematics a dimension of thought, specifically of ontological thought, which he distinguishes from other, most especially logical, aspects of mathematical thinking. “Mathematics is a thought,” a thought concerning Being, he argues in Briefings on Existence (45-62). It is, accordingly, not surprising that Badiou is primarily interested in foundational mathematical theories, that is, those that aim at ontologically grounding and pre-comprehending all of mathematics, such as set theory introduced by Georg Cantor in the late nineteenth century, and in Badiou’s more recent works, the category and topos theories, as developed by Alexandre Grothendieck in the 1960s. The latter offers a more fundamental mathematical ontology, encompassing and pre-comprehending the one defined by set theory. Indeed, it might be more accurate to rewrite Badiou’s equations just stated as “mathematical ontology=ontology” and “ontology=mathematical ontology” (where mathematical ontology could be either set-theoretical or topos-theoretical). In other words, Badiou ultimately deals with mathematical ontology rather than with mathematics, and deals with it philosophically and not mathematically, beginning with defining it as irreducibly multiple “the multiple without-One” (the multiple minus One?), to be considered presently (Briefings 35). The equations just stated are still produced by philosophy, and not by mathematics, and the very argument that mathematics is a thought is philosophy’s task, even though and because mathematics as ontology “functions as a [necessary] condition of philosophy” (54). Necessary, but not sufficient! For, as will be seen, while it is also “about identifying what real ontology is,” philosophy, especially as thinking of “event” or “truth,” exceeds ontology, since an event is always an event of “trans-Being,” in part, against Heidegger, at least early Heidegger (59). Both “event” and “truth” are defined by Badiou in relation to what he calls “situation,” as something from within which, but also against which or in discontinuously, an event emerges. It is this excess that defines Badiou’s inequality, which may be symbolically written as “ontology=mathematical ontology < trans-Being=philosophy.” Making ontology mathematical and thus also more Platonist is already a non-Heideggerian gesture, deliberate on Badiou’s part. Heidegger prefers pre-Socratic thought, abandoned, albeit still concealed in Plato’s philosophy as well. One may thus write another pair of equations–“philosophy=thinking the event” and “thinking the event=philosophy”–which may, moreover, be accompanied by those involving literature or poetry. This “thinking the event” might also be equal to literature, at least a certain type of literature or of literary thought. “Literature=philosophy,” then, and, by the same token, a certain redux of Heidegger in Badiou? As I discuss below, and as Hughes’s article suggests as well, to some degree this may be the case. This relation between literature and philosophy in Badiou’s thinking the event may, however, also be undecidable, in Jacques Derrida’s sense rather than in that of Kurt Gödel in mathematical logic. Derrida’s undecidability refers to something that can “no longer be [unconditionally, once and for all] included within philosophical (binary) opposition,” in this case, to our inability to decide unconditionally whether a given thinking, such as that of the event in Badiou’s sense, is either literary or philosophical (Positions 43). It can be either, or sometimes both simultaneously, in different circumstances, even for the same thinker. Gödel’s undecidability refers to the impossibility of proving certain propositions to be either true or false by means of the systems within which they are formulated, a concept that is crucial for Badiou in its own right.
 

In contrast to Badiou, the role of mathematics, most centrally topology and geometry, in Deleuze or Deleuze and Guattari is less defined by mathematical ontology, especially in the foundational, such as set-theoretical sense dominant in Badiou. Deleuze’s or Deleuze and Guattari’s ontologies may be seen as conceptually modeled on certain mathematical objects, such as dynamical systems or Riemannian spaces. (The actual definitions of these objects are not important at the moment.) This modeling, resulting in a kind of philosophical semblance or simulacrum of the mathematical concept used is, however, different from Badiou’s ontological equations. In Lacan’s case, it would be difficult to speak of any specifiable ontology, mathematical or other, at the ultimate level, that of the Lacanian Real. In other words, in approaching the Real, Lacan is attempting to think that which cannot be given any specifiable ontology. The Real exists and has powerful effects upon either the Imaginary or the Symbolic, but cannot be represented or conceived of in specific terms. Lacan’s use of mathematical, such as topological, objects or concepts is defined by this epistemology of the Real as irreducibly inaccessible, even while it has powerful effects upon what can be accessed or represented. For example, it may shape the topological configuration of unconscious thought, as defined by the Symbolic. But then this move beyond ontology is found in Badiou as well, and even defines thinking what is ultimately most decisive: thinking “thinking the event” and philosophy itself as nonontological, for “it is also important for [philosophy] to be released from ontology per se” (Briefings 59). Indeed, this “release” involves a version of Lacan’s Real, a major inspiration for Badiou’s thought. In Lacan and Badiou alike, the Real may be seen as materially existing, in a form of nonontological ontology, as it were, insofar as it cannot given a specifiable ontology, for example a mathematical one. It is worth stressing that, in general, the mathematical and infinitist grounding of his ontology notwithstanding, Badiou’s philosophy is materialist, just as is that of Lacan, Deleuze, or Derrida. For all these thinkers thought, including mathematics, is a product of the material conditions and energies of our existence–from inanimate matter to living matter to our bodies to the cultural, including political, formations shaping our lives.

 
Hughes does not miss the significance of Badiou’s “reengagement [as against the immediately preceding philosophical tradition, especially as manifest in Hegel, Nietzsche, and Heidegger] of philosophy with mathematics and set theory” (“Riven” ¶1). He does not, however, pursue, does not engage with, this reengagement. Such an engagement would allow Hughes to offer a richer and deeper consideration of the problematics of Badiou’s philosophy. On the other hand, this non-mathematical restaging of Badiou’s thought is not altogether surprising and, to some degree, allows one to perceive and articulate aspects of this thought sometimes hidden behind the mathematical dimensions of his argumentation. Besides, one might also argue that, while certain mathematical (set- or topos-theoretical) ontology essentially grounds Badiou’s thought and is helpful in understanding it more deeply, his thought is ultimately not mathematical. It is fundamentally philosophical, even, again, as concerns ontology, since equating it with mathematical ontology is itself philosophical and not mathematical. His thinking the event or truth is, as just explained, philosophical on his own definition, by virtue of exceeding ontology=mathematical ontology, without, however, abandoning the latter. While justifiably attending to the questions of event and truth, Hughes does not consider this difference between ontology (as equal to mathematics or mathematical ontology) and philosophy (as equal to thinking the event). He is, however, right to place Badiou within a philosophical tradition of thinking about art, ethics, and politics defined, on the one hand, by the post-Heideggerian French thought of Lacan, Levinas, Blanchot, and Derrida, and, on the other, by thinkers at the origin of Romantic thought (“Riven” ¶3). He is also right to relate this thinking to literature, at least implicitly, and again specifically to Romantic literature, as well as to Romantic philosophical thought. I return to these subjects later. My point at the moment is the essentially philosophical rather than mathematical nature of Badiou’s thought (there is hardly any mathematics in the sense of its technical, disciplinary practice in Badiou), and also the nature of philosophical thought itself, as against mathematics, but not against mathematical thought. If “mathematics is a thought,” mathematics is also not only mathematics (in the sense of its technical practice) but also a philosophical thought, and hence reaches beyond ontology on the philosophical side. This philosophical dimension appears especially at the time of “crises,” defined by Badiou as largely synonymous with “events.” As Badiou writes, “mathematics thinks Being per se,” or ontology, “save for the rare moments of crisis” (Briefings 59). At such moments it must move toward thinking the “event” which, according to Badiou’s definition, would make it philosophy or at least philosophical. According to Badiou, “a ‘crisis’ in mathematics [as ontology] arises when it is compelled to think its thought as the immanent multiplicity of its own unity,” and “it is at this point, and only at this point, that mathematics–that is, ontology–functions as a necessary [but, as I have said, not sufficient] condition of philosophy” (Briefings 54). This conjunction gives a crucial significance to the reciprocity between mathematics, as ontology, and philosophy as thinking the event or/as crisis, first, I argue, in mathematics itself, understood in broader (rather than only ontological) terms at the moment and, hence, beyond the purview of Badiou’s argumentation concerning mathematics. Secondly, given that at stake in Badiou’s statement is philosophy as such, this reciprocity between mathematics as ontology of the irreducible multiple and philosophy in thinking the event as crisis, and hence the discontinuity of the event, is according to Badiou irreducible in philosophy and, it follows, in Badiou’s thought. This reciprocity between the multiple and the discontinuous in Badiou is my main point here and guides my argument from this point on.
 

As I see it, what defines Badiou’s philosophy most essentially, what he is most essentially a philosopher of, is above all a philosophy of the multiple, specifically of the ontologically multiple: ontology=the set-theoretical ontology=the irreducibly multiple without-One. This is a particular view or interpretation of mathematical ontology that is not necessarily shared by mathematicians and philosophers working in foundations of mathematics, even if it is ultimately true (in the sense of being potentially irreducible). Indeed, Badiou would not speak of interpretation here. According to him, “mathematics has the virtue of not presenting any interpretations,” and “the Real [understood close but not identically to Lacan’s] does not show itself as if upon a relief of disparate interpretation.” Instead, Badiou sees the situation in terms of different “decisions of thought” concerning what exists (e.g. made in the case of set-theory in terms of constructible sets, large cardinals, or generic sets), the decision through which thought “binds [one] to Being,” “under the imperative of an orientation [of thought]” (Briefings 56-57). The concept itself of “orientation of thought” becomes an important part of Badiou’s ontological thinking (53-54). That Badiou’s ontology of mathematics (which, again, equals ontology in general) is that of the multiple without-One is, however, not in doubt: this is his ontological and political orientation and his decision of thought. He is a philosopher of the irreducibly multiple. I would also add, however, that he is equally a philosopher of the radical discontinuity, ultimately beyond ontology (although it enters at the level of ontology as well) by virtue of its connections, via the concept of event, to “trans-Being” and hence to philosophy. It is true that, as the title of Badiou’s arguably most significant work, Being and Event (L’être et l’événement), would suggest, he can more properly be defined as a philosopher of being and event, and of their conjunction. It would be difficult to argue against this view. But central as both of these concepts are to his thought, the architecture of both is essentially defined by the concepts of multiplicity and discontinuity. Indeed, we can describe these concepts in parallel terms, or again by way of two equations, being=the irreducibly multiple, the multiple-without One, and, defined by Badiou as trans-Being, the event=the radical discontinuity. In general in Badiou, as elsewhere in philosophy, the architecture of each concept is also defined by its relation to other concepts and, hence, by the entangled network of these concepts. Not unlike those of modern physics (such as Einstein’s famous E=mc²), Badiou’s equations encode the considerable architectural complexity of the concepts involved or of their relationships. Bringing the roles of multiplicity and discontinuity in Badiou into a sharper focus allows one to understand the architecture and mutual determination of his concepts more deeply, in part through the connections, along both lines (multiplicity and discontinuity), between Badiou’s thought and that of other key contemporary figures. Thus, while these thinkers’ thought is different, even as concerns multiplicity or discontinuity, as a philosopher of the multiple Badiou is close both to Deleuze and to Derrida, and as a philosopher of the discontinuous he is closer to Lacan, de Man, Levinas, and, again, Derrida–but not Deleuze. For even though Badiou draws inspiration from Deleuze as a thinker of the multiple, one of his discontents with Deleuze’s “vitalist ontology,” as he calls it, appears to be the insufficient role of discontinuity there, as against, for example, Immanuel Kant’s “subtractive ontology.” As a thinker of discontinuity, Kant is also a precursor of Levinas, Lacan, Derrida, and de Man.
 

Hughes’s article correctly stresses the role of discontinuity and, correlatively (they are not the same), singularity in Badiou’s thinking of event, truth, and ethics, and the Lacanian genealogy (the Real) of this thinking, or its qualified connections to Levinas. (It seems to me that Hughes equates “truth” and “event,” too much [“Riven” ¶5], which, indissociable as they may be, they are not quite the same in Badiou.) Beginning with its title (“Riven”), Hughes’s article centers primarily on the role of discontinuity in Badiou, especially that between “situation” and “event,” via what Badiou calls “the nothing of its all” or the non-empty void linked to the Lacanian Real. Apart from a brief discussion of “a set of component elements or terms” involved in “the theatergoer’s encounter with Hamlet” (¶9), the article gives little, if any, attention to the role of multiplicity in Badiou, at most mentioning it in passing, perhaps because the article’s argument bypasses the mathematical-ontological aspects of Badiou’s thought. Not coincidentally and, given its significance for Badiou, even remarkably, the term “ontology” is never mentioned in the article, except in a book title by Slavoj Zizek (who does not miss it!) in the bibliography. However, Badiou’s thought is irreducibly defined by the ontology of the multiple and, again, the equally irreducible combination of the multiple and the discontinuous, in particular the trans-ontologically discontinuous. The singularity of the event and the truth always arises from and, through the non-empty void of the Real, grounds the multiple (mathematical or other) of the situation and give rise to a new multiple. This dynamics of the interplay between the Real and the multiple gives the structure and the history of a situation and an event (again, always exterior to the situation from within which it appears) the architecture of “the multiple of the multiple,” a persistent locution in Badiou. According to Badiou, given that “philosophy will always be split between recognizing the event as the One’s supernumerary coming, and the thought of its being as a simple extension of the manifold,” “the whole point is to contend, for as long as possible and under the most innovative conditions for philosophy, the notion that the truth itself is but a multiplicity: in the two senses of its coming (a truth makes a typical multiple or generic singularity) and in the sense of its being (there is no the Truth, there are only disparate and untotalizable truths that cannot be totalized)” (Briefings 62; emphasis added). This statement clearly reflects a crucial significance of the relationships between the discontinuity of the event and the multiple of being in Badiou. One cannot totalize all truths, and each truth is itself an untotalizable multiple within the singularity of its event. This situation (in either sense) requires, for Badiou, “a radical gesture,” which also manifests philosophy’s faithfulness to Lucretius, in whose (physical) ontology of the multiple without-One “atoms, innumerable and boundless,/ flutter about in eternal movement” (De rerum natura II: 496; Briefings 62).
 

The multiple is everywhere manifest in Badiou’s thought and is expressly emphasized by Badiou as central to the ontology he aims to establish. This view is confirmed by the proposition, cited above, concerning mathematical thinking: at the time of a crisis, “its thought as the immanent multiplicity of its own unity” (Briefings 54). Given Badiou’s view of mathematical ontology as multiple-without-One, this can only be read in terms of the ultimate impossibility of this unity. (Otherwise the point would merely restate Leibniz, who is among Badiou’s precursors here, as are Hegel and Kant [Briefings 141]). This multiplicity defines Badiou’s ontology and always enters an “event,” by definition always an event of crisis, “each time unique,” or, in Derrida’s title phrase, “each time unique, the end of the world” (Chaque fois unique, la fin du monde; published in English as The Work of Mourning). In the ethical plane, this emphasis on the irreducibly multiple serves both Badiou and Derrida (and in both cases, if differently, against Levinas) to think the events (plural) of “evil,” all evil. Some among such events are equally evil, but each nevertheless is unique, as well as irreducibly multiple as concerns the ontology involved, thus doubling the multiple. Indeed, as will be seen, as a multiple without-One, this ontological multiple is already doubled, is already the multiple of the multiple, which gives Badiou’s overall situational ontology the form of the multiple of the multiple of the multiple. It follows that there is no single or absolute, absolutely radical evil, no matter how horrific or difficult to confront or even to imagine evil events may be and how much we try, as we must, to prevent their occurrence; there are other evil events and forms of evil that are comparable (in their evilness), but again each is different (Ethics 61-67). The (mathematical) ontological multiplicity found within an event or the situation that brings the event about always makes it political, as against Levinas’s thinking of the ethical. Badiou elegantly reads certain specific actual political and mathematical “orientations” in terms of each other, in particular by mutually mapping the theory of generic sets and what he calls “generic politics” as “something groping forward to declare itself,” both defined by the multiple without-One (Briefings 55-56). The same political complexity also defines other (more “positive”) “events,” political, cultural, mathematical, scientific, aesthetic, erotic, and so forth:

the French revolution in 1792, the meeting of Héloïse and Abélard, Galileo's creation of physics, Haydn's invention of the classical musical style [vis-vis the Baroque] . . . But also: the cultural revolution in China (1965-67), a personal amorous passion, the creation of Topos theory by the mathematician Grothendieck, the invention of the twelve-tone scale by Schoenberg." (Ethics 41)

Ethics

Badiou’s concept of the “situation,” defined by the analogous complexity of the interaction between the singular and the multiple (e.g. Ethics 16, 129), always entails the possibility of an eruptive event, such as those just mentioned, which, reciprocally, can only emerge in relation to a situation. This eruptive singularity of the event can, accordingly, only be comprehended philosophically, by the (trans-Being) thought of philosophy and not by (mathematically) ontological thought, but it cannot be considered apart from ontology and its irreducible multiple.

The conceptual architecture just outlined makes Badiou a philosopher both of the irreducibly multiple and of the irreducibly discontinuous. Badiou rarely invokes the term “discontinuity” itself. The concept is, however, clearly central to his thought, in particular as concerns “event,” as each event is, again, always defined by the radical, unbridgeable, end-of-the-world-like discontinuity of a crisis (but is always an opening to the irreducibly multiple). Invocations of discontinuity are found throughout Badiou’s writing, and Hughes lists quite a few of them, “riven, punctured, ruptured, severed, broken, and annulled,” which he links to trauma (“Riven” ¶10). This is sensible, because trauma always entails discontinuity. On the other hand, the latter is a more general concept, as is “event,” and Badiou uses both concepts more generally as well, in part by linking them to multiplicity. In order to understand how the multiplicity of ontology and the discontinuity of event work together in Badiou, I turn to set theory, as opening “the very space of the mathematically thinkable” (Briefings 42).
 

As we have seen, according to Badiou, “ontology” [including in its irreducible multiplicitous form] is nothing other than mathematics [of set theory or, later, topos theory] itself,” or again, mathematical ontology=ontology, ontology=mathematical ontology (40). Given my limits here, I confine this discussion mostly to a naïve concept of set, naïve” being an accepted term in mathematics in this context. A set is a collection of certain usually abstract objects called elements of the set, such as, say, the numbers between 1 and 10, which is a finite set, or of all natural numbers (1, 2, 3, 4, etc.), which is an infinite set, a countable infinite set, as it is called. There are also greater infinities, such as that of the continuum, represented by the numbers of points in the straight line. The resulting ontological multiplicity or manifold is, Badiou argues, unavailable to unification, to the One, and, as will be seen presently, this multiplicity is also inconsistent, while nonetheless enabling a set-theoretical ontology. While, on the one hand, “the set has no other essence than to be a manifold” and while, with Cantor, we recognize “not only the existence of infinite sets, but also the existence of infinitely many such sets,” that is, sets possessing different magnitudes of infinity, “this infinity itself is absolutely open ended” (41). In particular, it cannot itself ever be contained in a set. There is no “the One” of set theory, because the set of all sets does not exist or at least cannot be consistently defined, in view of the well-known paradox related to the question of whether this set does or does not contain itself as an element. (It is immediately shown not to be the set of all sets in either case.) Set-theoretical multiplicity is both ultimately uncontainable by a single entity or concept and is inconsistent, because of the impossibility of giving it the overall cohesion of a whole and because, as will be seen presently, it contains systems that are expressly inconsistent with each other in view of Gödel’s incompleteness theorems. According to Badiou: “Ontology, if it exists has to be the figure of inconsistent multiplicities as such. This means that what lends itself to the thought of ontology is a manifold without a predicate other than its own multiplicity. It has no concept other than itself, and nothing ensures its consistency. . . . Ontology is the thought of the inconsistent manifold, that is, of what is reduced without an immanent unification to the sole predicate of multiplicity” (36, 40). Accordingly, “ontology, or the thinking of the inconsistent pure multiple, cannot be guaranteed by any principle” (39). In view of these considerations, Badiou’s “initial [philosophical] decision was to contend that what can be thought of Being per se is found in the radical manifold or a multiple that is not under the power of the One, . . . [in] a ‘multiple without-One.’ . . . The multiple is radically without-One in that it itself consists only of multiples. What there is, or the exposure to the thinkable of what there is under the sole requirement of the ‘there is,’ are multiples of multiples” (35, 40). Or via Plato’s Parmenides, which already grapples with this situation and its “inconsistent multiplicity,” what we encounter here is “an absolutely pure manifold, a complete dissemination of itself” (46).
 

While Badiou, thus, establishes his ontology on the basis of more general set-theoretical considerations, its crucial further dimensions are revealed by Gödel’s famous discovery of the existence of undecidable propositions in mathematics and by Paul Cohen’s findings (along the lines of undecidability) concerning the mathematical continuum. The latter is, as I said, defined by the order of the infinite larger than the countable infinity, 1, 2, 3, . . . etc., of natural numbers, but in view of Cohen’s theorem it is ultimately undecidable whether there is something in between. Gödel’s concept of an undecidable proposition is arguably his greatest conceptual contribution. An undecidable proposition is a proposition whose truth or falsity cannot, in principle, be established by means of the system (defined by a given set of axioms and rules of procedure) in which it is formulated. The discovery of such propositions by Gödel (in 1931) was extraordinary. It undermined the thinking of the whole preceding history of mathematics (from the pre-Socratics on), defined by the reasonable idea that any given mathematical proposition can, at least in principle, be shown to be either true or false. We now know, thanks to Gödel, that such is not the case. For Gödel proved–rigorously, mathematically–that any system sufficiently rich to contain arithmetic (otherwise the theorem is not true) would contain at least one undecidable proposition. This is Gödel’s “first incompleteness theorem.” Gödel made the life of mathematics even more difficult, and more interesting, with his “second incompleteness theorem” by proving that the proposition that such a system, say, classical arithmetic, is consistent, is itself undecidable. In other words, the consistency of the system and, hence, of most of the mathematics we use cannot be proven, although the possibility that the system and with it mathematics may be shown to be inconsistent remains open.
 

Given the undecidablity of certain propositions inevitably found in any sufficiently rich axiomatic system, one can in principle extend the system in two incompatible ways by accepting by a decision of thought such a proposition as either true or false. This allows one to have two different systems–incompatible with each other, but each “consistent” in itself. Since, however, Gödel’s first theorem would still apply to each system, new undecidable propositions will inevitably be found in each. This makes the process in principle infinite, that is, potentially leading to the infinite multiplicity of mutually inconsistent systems, each of which, moreover, can never be proven to be consistent in view of Gödel’s second theorem. This situation becomes especially dramatic in the case of Cantor’s famous continuum hypothesis, which deals with the question: How many points are there in the straight line? It states, roughly, that there is no infinity larger than that of a countable set (such as that of natural numbers: 1, 2, 3, etc.) and smaller than that of the continuum (as represented by the number of points on the straight line). The answer to this question is crucial if one wants to maintain Cantor’s hierarchical order of (different) infinities, and hence for the whole edifice of set theory. The hypothesis was, however, proven undecidable by Cohen in 1963. Accordingly, one can extend classical arithmetic in two ways by considering Cantor’s hypothesis as either true or false, that is, by assuming either that there is no such intermediate infinity or that there is. This allows one, by decisions of thought, to extend the system of numbers, arithmetic, into mutually incompatible systems, in principle, infinitely many such systems–a difficult and for some an intolerable situation. The question of how many points are on the straight line cannot be determinately answered.
 

Instead of seeing this situation as difficult and even intolerable, Badiou finds in it both a support for his program and a special appeal or even beauty. As he writes:

As we have known since Paul Cohen's theorem, the Continuum [h]ypothesis is intrinsically undecidable. Many believe Cohen's discovery has driven the set-theoretic project into ruin. Or at least it has "pluralized" what was once presented as a unified construct. I have discussed this enough elsewhere for my point of view on this matter to be understood as the opposite. What the undecidability of the Continuum hypothesis does is complete Set Theory as a Platonist orientation [in Badiou's sense]. It indicates its line of flight, the aporia of immanent wandering in which thought experiences itself as an unfounded confrontation with the undecidable. Or, to use Gödel's lexicon: as a continuous recourse to intuition, that is, to decision. (99)

The appeal to Deleuze’s concept of “line of flight” is worth noting. This view of the situation also shapes Badiou’s understanding of Plato’s thought, juxtaposed by him to conventional, especially conventional mathematical, Platonism. Plato’s thought, Badiou argues, is interested primarily in “the movement of thought,” and “the undecidable commands the perplexing aporetic style of the dialogues. This course leads to the point of the undecidable so as to show that thought precisely ought to decide upon the event of Being: that thought is not foremost a description or construction, but a break (with opinion and/or with experience) and, therefore, a decision” (90). For Plato, as for the truly Platonist set-theoretical thinking, and for Badiou, “it is when you decide upon what exists that you bind your thought to being” (57). These statements bring together, in a firm conceptual architecture, Badiou’s key concepts, invoked here, from the ontology of the multiple to thought to Being to event and through it, the interconnective discontinuity between ontology and philosophy.

This conceptual and epistemological architecture is set up in Being and Event. Badiou retraces it (with some new inflections, especially along the lines of topos theory) in Briefings on Existence: A Short Treatise on Transitory Ontology (published in French in 1998). The book is not cited by Hughes, perhaps because it largely reprises Being and Event, apart from its discussion of topos theory. It is arguably the best available condensation of Badiou’s philosophy, apart from the ethical problematic to which Badiou turns in Ethics, which also appeared in French in 1998. Briefings on Existence establishes the architecture just sketched by starting, in the “Prologue: God is Dead,” with the radically materialist grounding of our being and thought, that of mathematics and set theory, or of the infinite, included. Chapter 1, “The Question of Being Today,” situates the question of Being in this framework of materiality and infinity, but now in relation to the ontology of the irreducible and inconsistent manifold or multiple, the multiple without-One, grounded in the axiomatics of set-theory, which is considered, as “a thought,” in Chapter 2, “Mathematics as a Thought.” With this argument in hand, Badiou is ready to define “the event as trans-Being” in Chapter 3. This definition establishes the crucial difference between mathematics as ontology (but again, their equation is stated and legitimated by philosophy), and philosophy as that which, while also “all about identifying what real ontology is,” is ultimately released from ontology. Indeed, philosophy is a theory of what is “strictly impossible for mathematics” and “a theory of event aimed at determining a trans-being.” As I said, however, one might want to replace mathematics with mathematical ontology here, thus leading to an inequality defined earlier: “ontology=mathematical ontology < trans-Being=philosophy.” According to Badiou, thus also defining “event” (as the concept is conceived in Being and Event):

On the other hand [as against the ontological determination defined by set or topos theory], a vast question opens up regarding what is subtracted from ontological determination. This is the question of confronting what is not Being qua Being. For the subtractive law is implacable: if real ontology is set up as mathematics [mathematical ontology] by evading the norm of the One, unless this norm is reestablished globally there also ought to be a point wherein the ontological, hence mathematical, field is de-totalized or remains at a dead end. I have named [in Being and Event] this point the "event." While philosophy is all about identifying what real ontology is in an endlessly reviewed process [such as from set to topos theoretical ontology], it is also the general theory of the event--and it is no doubt the special theory, too. In other words, it is the theory of what is subtracted from ontological subtraction [such as that found in Kant's subtractive ontology]. Philosophy is the theory of what is strictly impossible for mathematics. (60)

Being and Event

This is a crucial point, a crucial thought. The distinction between the special and general theory of the event may be best understood, in part via Bataille (restricted vs. general economy), as that between the representational theory of the event and the theory that reveals something in the event, or the truth, that exceeds, irreducibly, any representation or any specific ontology. This thought governs the remainder of Badiou’s argument in the book, developed via analyses of philosophical frameworks (Plato, Aristotle, Spinoza, Kant, and Deleuze), and set- and topos theoretical mathematics.

It is also in this “space” of the relationships between Being and trans-Being, the space defined by the non-empty void of the Real (in Lacan’s sense, extended by Badiou), that Badiou, in closing the book, also re-establishes the relationships between Being and appearing (153-68). In Lacan and Badiou alike, the trans-Being of the Real is conceived as the efficacity of both Being and appearing, or even of trans-Being of the event. Badiou, thus, also brings together his faithfulness to (the true) Platonism and his faithfulness to a reversal of Platonism, and thus to modern philosophy (163), in order to reveal “Being itself in its redoubtable and creative inconsistency. It is Being in its void, which is the non-place of every place” (169). Given this relation to appearing, Being comprises, from its two different sides, both the multiple without-One and the void, and in both of these aspects it is produced, as an effect or set of effects, by the efficacy of the Real. The appearance of Being is traced through an important discussion of the relationships between mathematical ontology and mathematical logic, via topos theory. These relationships and Badiou’s view of mathematics as a thought and ontology, as against logic, are important in this context and for Badiou’s thought in general. Here suffice it to say that logic is linked to appearance, thus also giving the double genitive to the phrase “logic of appearance,” and mathematical ontology is related to Being, is Being. The configuration of Being and appearing, just defined, is that of “event,” which Badiou’s use of mathematical ontology helps him establish in order to move beyond ontology to philosophy. As Badiou writes:

This [the configuration just described] is what I call an "event." All in all, it lies for thought at the inner juncture of mathematics [as ontology] and mathematical logic. The event occurs when the logic of appearing [the double genitive sense] is no longer apt to localize the manifold-being of which it is in possession. As Mallarmé would say, at that point one is then in the waters of the wave in which reality as a whole dissolves. Yet one also finds oneself where there is a chance for something to emerge, as far away as where a place might fuse with the beyond, that is, in the advent of another logical place, one both bright and cold, a Constellation. (168)

Badiou’s appeal to Mallarmé signals that, along with being the space of philosophy (the space with which it is concerned and which it also occupies), this space also appears to be, in Blanchot’s title phrase, the “space of literature” (the same parenthesis applies). It is the space from which, in a non-reversing reversal of Plato, mathematics, which only relates to Being or ontology, is exiled or rather into which it is only partially allowed as a tenant, as against poetry, which inhabits this space as a resident alongside philosophy. This orientation and decision of thought also brings Badiou closer to Heidegger, especially the later Heidegger, when the ontological projects of Being and Time (and several projects following it) are replaced with a certain conjunction of thinking and being, via Parmenides’s fragment, “The Same is Both Thought and Being,” which Badiou invokes (52). (The English translation is that of Badiou’s French translation, different from Heidegger, and indeed the translation of this statement is itself a decision of thought.) At this stage of his thought, the true “thinking” [denken] is fundamentally linked by Heidegger to the thinking and language of poetry. The proximity between Badiou and Heidegger thus reemerging is tempered by differences (no equation here), most essentially because mathematical ontology and the equation “mathematical ontology=ontology=the multiple without-One” is retained by Badiou, as against Heidegger (on both counts: mathematics and multiplicity). This equation remains crucial, even if one can now add an inequality ontology< poetry=philosophy (as thinking “event”), or perhaps with poetry and philosophy in the undecidable relationships (in Derrida’s sense) to each other. Either way, mathematics, poetry, and philosophy are brought together, in a Constellation.
 

A reader of Badiou, or of Hughes’s article, would not be surprised by the presence of literature in this space, any more than by the presence of this space in literature, by its becoming, in Blanchot’s title phrase, the space of literature, defined by Blanchot along similar lines (of the discontinuity of the event). Hughes’s article, to which I am now ready to return, deserves major credit for its exploration of the role of literature in Badiou’s thinking of the event (ethical, aesthetic, or other), and additional credit for relating the situation and the event of Badiou’s thought to the Romantic tradition, indeed to many Romantic traditions, which also form a multiple without-One. Hughes is also right to bring these aspects of Badiou’s thought to bear on Badiou’s thinking (of) subjectivity and the ethical, and the connections (proximities and differences) between this thinking (or Badiou’s thought in general) and that of Lacan and Levinas. Hughes’s “ventur[ing]” a (re)formulation of Badiou’s ethical maxim as “one must poeticize” is compelling, especially given that the true ethical imperative (under the full force of which we come rarely, according to Badiou) is by event and truth. As Hughes says: “One might venture it as a new formulation of Badiou’s ethical maxim: One must poeticize. That is, one must exceed one’s situation and assume an ethical relation to the event by striving to name it through poetry. As the Romantics intuited and as Badiou’s philosophy formulates much more precisely, poetry and ethics, like poetry and truth, are not to be disentangled” (“Riven” ¶21). This is, I think, quite true, as is the more general claim that Badiou “is suggesting a special role for poetry in the elaboration . . . of truth [in his sense]” (¶21).

 
It appears to me, however, that Hughes disentangles too much both from mathematics and from mathematical ontology, as the ontology of the multiple and the political without-One, and from ontology in general in Badiou. Hughes’s invocation of Poe’s “The Purloined Letter” on his way to his conclusion just cited is apposite here: “We might think of this [this special role of poetry] as somewhat akin to the insight of Poe’s Dupin, who says, referring to the Minister [a poet and a mathematician] who has purloined the royal letter, that “as a poet and mathematician, he would reason well; as mere mathematician, he could not have reasoned at all” (¶22). We might recall that Poe’s “The Purloined Letter” and Lacan’s reading of it in his “Seminar on ‘The Purloined Letter’” engage the question of the relationships between poetry and mathematics. However, could the Minister think as a mere poet, at least as sharply as Dupin, who out-thinks him? Perhaps he could not, at least if we read the story through Badiou’s optics, where the thinking of the Real is at stake, and Poe does not say that the Minister could either. In fact, both Lacan’s and Derrida’s readings (in “Le Facteur de la Vérité,” in The Post Card) place Dupin in a position that is more akin to that of a philosopher in Badiou, as both a poet and a mathematician. Part of Derrida’s critique of Lacan is that, unlike Dupin/Poe, Lacan does not think the multiplicity and dissemination of writing in his reading. One might add that Lacan also places the whole case too much in the Symbolic register, thus both reducing the multiple to the Oedipal and, as it were, forgetting the Real. In any event, in my view Badiou’s ontology of the multiple without-One and its political underpinnings and implications could have sharpened and enriched Hughes’s analysis of the ethical and/as literary problematics in Badiou. Hughes invokes the multiple only briefly in his discussion of a theatergoer’s encounter with Hamlet in Being and Event (“Riven” ¶12).
 

Consider, for example, how the connections between Badiou and Levinas appear from the perspective of Badiou’s mathematical ontology of the multiple. Hughes does note the potential role of the mathematical considerations for Badiou, including as concerns the difference between him and Levinas. Thus, he says:

Badiou's mathematical grounding and conceptualization of alterity, his "numericalities" of solipsism and the Infinite, his set-theoretical elaboration of the event, and his insistent recourse to the category of truth as the grounds for the specifically ethical force of alterity and the infinite--all this is quite foreign to Levinas's sensibility . . . This [along with other factors that I omit for the moment, given my context] also gives Badiou a broader scope for thinking the ethical in places--art, science, politics--where Levinas's writings do not often venture. (¶22; some emphasis added)

Hughes, however, does not take advantage of the mathematical aspects of Badiou’s thought, in particular “his set-theoretical elaboration of the event,” which entails and enacts the multiple without-One and, within it, the political, as considered here. As a result, Hughes’s analysis ultimately leaves Badiou’s thought within the domain of rupture, discontinuity, inscribed “through tropes of trauma” (¶23). The Levinasian ethical situation (the term can be given Badiou’s sense as well) is defined by an encounter with the radical, irreducible alterity of the Other (Autrui), which should not be simply identified with a person or a subject. (This alterity is not unlike that of Lacan’s Real in epistemological terms, but is different in ethical terms, is ethical.) It may be noted that Badiou, and some of his followers, tend to over-theologize Levinas’s thinking on this point. Contrary to Badiou’s argument in Ethics, while Levinas’s thought has significant theological dimensions, the Other as Autrui is not theological, even if it is modeled on theology, and as such may be better termed, via Heidegger and Derrida, “ontotheological.” For the moment, the appearance of the Other is the event that transforms the situation (again, in Badiou’s sense) in which each of us finds oneself when the Other appears. This appearance (including in the sense of phenomenon) redefines our world, or home, since, according to Levinas, we must welcome the Other with hospitality (Totality and Infinity 27). Levinas’s conception is more complex because the event of the appearance of the Other has always already occurred, thus making ethics and its infinity precede totality, which Levinas often sees as defining philosophical thought. These complexities do not, however, affect my argument here.

In contrast to Levinas, for Badiou any ethical event, good or evil, or beyond good and evil, while it may involve an encounter with the other (no capital), cannot be defined by the alterity of the Other as Autrui (with capital O or A) in Levinas’s sense. Any situation or any event is defined by and defines (but cannot be contained by) the mathematical and, correlatively, political ontology of the multiple without-One, by Badiou’s infinite. As such, it is not only without totality, but also without Levinas’s infinity, which appears as a form of totality from where Badiou stands, since it is defined by the One (as the Other), rather than by an infinitely multiple without-One. Accordingly, in an ethical event, as in any other event, we always confront the Real and its alterity through the manifold or the multiple, whether we do it together with others or/as in encountering an other (and hence, as against Levinas, still always together and never apart within the multiple). Subjectivity, it follows, is this political multiplicity as well, and hence every subject is a multiple without-One. By the same token, “the truth itself is but a multiplicity: in the two senses of its coming (a truth makes a typical multiple or generic singularity) and in the sense of its being (there is no the Truth, there are only disparate and untotalizable truths that cannot be totalized)” (Briefings 62; emphasis added). An ethical or any other situation or any event is always political, infinite yet multiple, multiple without-One, without any possibility of unity or totality. Because of the role of the political multiple-without One of Being, always involved in an event, the multiple is irreducible in the trans-Being of the event as well. There is no event, no encounter, ethical or other, that can ever be ontologically single; it can only be singular in the sense of its uniqueness or discontinuity relative to its situation, on the one hand, and to other situations and events, on the other. Hence the political is irreducible in and defines the ethical, rather than being grounded in the Levinasian ethical Other. In his Adieu to Emmanuel Levinas, Derrida offers a respectful and subtle, but firm, critique of Levinas along similar lines, although there are also differences between Badiou and Derrida, specifically insofar as there is no ontological infinite (in Badiou’s sense) in Derrida. It also follows that, while Hughes is right to stress the singularity of the event and its alterity or exteriority to the situation, it is not possible to speak as Hughes does along more Leibnizean lines of the Oneness of the situation in Badiou or to read “its all” “as the Oneness of one’s multifarious elements” (“Riven” ¶12).
 

To some degree, the argument just given also applies to Lacan’s use of the Real, in part in juxtaposition to Badiou’s concept of the Real or how this concept can be used and developed, and has been used and developed by Badiou. That is, Lacan’s use of the Real may also be seen as to some degree bypassing the multiple and the political, and centering primarily on individual subjectivity or intersubjectivity and on the ethical, as innovative and radical a move as the introduction of ethics into psychoanalysis might have been. Apart from other key differences (such as those those having to do with the role and architecture of language, signification, desire, the Imaginary and the Symbolic), Lacan’s claims concerning the ethical are not as strong as those of Levinas. Indeed, by being placed within the triangularity of the Oedipal (transformed, as against, Freud, via the economy of the signifier) and hence within a certain Oedipal politics, Lacan’s ethical order or subjectivity is at least implicitly political. Nevertheless, one can speak of a certain curtailment of the multiple and/as the political, and Deleuze and Guattari have criticized Lacan along these lines in Anti-Oedipus. It appears to me that on this point, too, Hughes’s analysis can be deepened and must, to some degree, be adjusted. Let me reiterate that, even apart from being an extraordinarily powerful concept in its own right, Lacan’s Real is crucial for Badiou and even irreducible in his philosophy (including in his sense, as discussed above). Hughes, accordingly, is correct to give major attention to this significance, specifically in the context of Badiou’s ethical thinking, and to link Lacan’s Real and its connection to language to the problematics of literature and Romanticism, and to the way both think “the void of the real” (“Riven” ¶13). The concept is indeed especially significant, as Hughes argues, for Badiou’s concept of event, as always the event of trans-Being: the “trans” of this “trans-Being” is essentially linked to the Real in Lacan’s sense, or rather–and this is my point here–in Badiou’s sense. For it seems to me that Badiou’s deployment of Lacan’s Real is assimilated into his thinking though the multiple and the political without-One, or it follows without-Three (the Oedipal three), as much as without-Two, the ethical Two of Levinas, which is still ultimately the One (Lacan’s Three is three). The Real cannot by definition be reduced to ontology–any ontology but especially Badiou’s mathematical ontology–any more than can an event and its trans-being, grounded in (as arising from) the Real. I would argue, however, that this disruptive work of the Real, as understood by Badiou, cannot be dissociated from the multiple without-One. The Real acts upon this ontology and disruptively transforms its multiplicity by giving rise to events, but only into another multiplicity.
 

Now, is this transformation traumatic? Or, more generally and more pertinently to Hughes’s argument, how does Badiou’s concept of event relate to that of trauma, especially as considered by Lacan, via the Real? Badiou does not appeal to and does not primarily, if at all, think the event as trauma. As Hughes states, “to be clear, ‘trauma’ is not a word Badiou himself employs . . . he uses an array of others to describe his subjects–riven, punctured, ruptured, severed, broken, annulled, and so forth” (¶10). Hughes gives his reasons for his appeal to trauma. One might ask, however (and this question appears to be missing in Hughes’s article): Why does Badiou not appeal to trauma? Although Badiou’s ontology of the multiple could be brought to bear on this question as well, the main reason for Badiou’s avoidance of trauma, I contend, lies in the nature of trauma as being primarily, fundamentally about the past event and its primarily negative, traumatic impact on the (post-event) future. By contrast, even though he grounds his concept of event in a Lacanian concept of the Real, Badiou appears to be primarily concerned with the future, and moreover with the positive, transformative future of events (which may of course have occurred in the past). This futurity is part of the architecture of Badiou’s concept of event, and defines actual events–of whatever kind and whenever they occur–as futural events. Let us revisit Badiou’s list of events cited earlier: “The French revolution in 1792, the meeting of Héloïse and Abélard, Galileo’s creation of physics, Haydn’s invention of the classical musical style, . . . the cultural revolution in China (1965-67), a personal amorous passion, the creation of Topos theory by the mathematician Grothendieck, the invention of the twelve-tone scale by Schoenberg” (Ethics 41). These events may have been traumatic and may have left their traumatic effects or traces, but it is their futural impact, as creating new situations, that is above all at stake for Badiou, even in the case of a personal amorous passion, or love. Indeed, there is no need to say “even,” for passion and love are about the present and future, even though they can and sometimes do have traumatic effects. Lacan’s concept of the Real easily allows Badiou to give it this futural dimension because, apart from Badiou’s mathematical (ontological) and political extension of the Real, it is indeed a more general concept rather than something that isirreducibly connected to trauma. It is true that, according to Lacan, “the function . . . of the real as encounter . . . first presented itself in the history of psycho-analysis in a form that was in itself already enough to arouse our attention, that of trauma” (Four Fundamental 55). That, however, need not mean and, I would argue, does not mean that the function of the Real is limited to trauma, even in Lacan or in psychoanalysis; quite the contrary, and Badiou is right to take advantage of the broader sense of Lacan’s extraordinary concept in defining his conception of the event.

 
The futural orientation (also in Badiou’s sense) of his thought of the event is, however, a more complex matter. For this orientation not only poses a question for Hughes about his reading of this concept in terms of or via tropes of trauma, it also poses a question for Badiou from the traumatic side of the Real. The significance of this futural orientation of thinking the event is undeniable, including in our understanding of history, and hence the past, as shaping our present and future. But the past, the ghosts of the past inevitably haunt us, many ghosts of many pasts, for this ontology is multiple without-One, too–that of the multitudes of the living and the dead, each with its own end of the world, unique each time, both multiple and unique. It is, yet again, literature that give us perhaps the best image of this multitude of the unique multiples, that of a snowfall–a multitude of snowflakes, each with its unique designs (its unique multiple) and unique trajectory of fall and eventual melting down. It does so in Joyce’s thinking an event of trans-Being, human (the passion of love), literary, and political, in ending, uniquely and multiply ending, “The Dead” and Dubliners: “the snow falling and faintly falling, like the descent of their last end, upon all the living and the dead,” of Ireland and of the world. “All the living and the dead,” each unique and multiple, as snowflakes in a snowfall. “All the living and the dead”–past, present, and future.

Works Cited

• Badiou, Alain. Being and Event. Trans. Oliver Feltham. London: Continuum, 2005.
• —. Briefings on Existence: A Short Treatise on Transitory Ontology. Trans. Norman Madarasz. Albany: SUNY P, 2006.
• —. Ethics: An Essay on the Understanding of Evil. Trans. Peter Hallward. London: Verso, 2001.
• Blanchot, Maurice. The Space of Literature. Trans. Ann Smock. Lincoln: U of Nebraska P, 1989.
• Deleuze, Gilles, and Félix Guattari. What is Philosophy? Trans. Janis Tomplinson and Graham Burchell III. New York: Columbia UP, 1996.
• Derrida, Jacques. Adieu: To Emmanuel Levinas. Trans. Pascale-Anne Brault and Michael Naas. Stanford, CA: Stanford UP, 1999.
• —. Positions. Trans. Alan Bass. Chicago: U of Chicago P, 1981.
• —. The Post Card. Trans. Alan Bass. Chicago: U of Chicago P, 1987.
• —. The Work of Mourning. Trans. Pascale-Anne Brault and Michael Naas. Chicago: U of Chicago P, 2003.
• Hughes, Robert. “Riven: Badiou’s Ethical Subject and the Event of Art as Trauma.” Postmodern Culture 17.3 (May 2007).
• Joyce, James. Dubliners. New York: Norton, 2005.
• Lacan, Jacques. The Four Fundamental Concept of Psychoanalysis. Ed. Jacques-Alain Miller. Trans. Alan Sheridan. New York: Norton, 1977.
• —-. “Seminar on ‘The Purloined Letter.’” Écrits. Trans. Bruce Fink. New York: Norton, 2006.
• Levinas, Emmanuel. Totality and Infinity: An Essay on Exteriority. Trans. Alphonso Lingis. Pittsburgh: Duquesne UP, 1969.
• Lucretius, Titus Carus. De Rerum Natura. Oxford: Aris & Phillips, 2008.

Robert Hughes
Department of English
Ohio State University
hughes.1021@osu.edu  

“Can we be delivered, finally delivered, from our subjection to Romanticism?” asks the French philosopher Alain Badiou (b. 1937), with an evident sigh (Conditions 158f, Theoretical Writings 22e).¹ A peculiar question, it would seem, for an epoch often eager to declare itself at once post-Romantic and postmodern. For Badiou, however, Romanticism denotes not an historical moment now long past, but a philosophical gesture whose reach extends through both analytic and Continental philosophy as well as through contemporary theory: an almost fatal and complete “disentanglement” of philosophy from mathematics (Conditions 159f, Theoretical Writings 22e), coupled with the rise of the “age of the poets,” when philosophy was sutured to art as the only possible “body of truth” (Petit Manuel 12f, 3e).² For the first tendency, Badiou cites G.W.F. Hegel; for the second, Friedrich Nietzsche and especially Martin Heidegger, its acme. We should not misinterpret Badiou’s sigh, however. When he seeks to overcome Romanticism through the reengagement of philosophy with mathematics and set theory, when he seeks to desacralize the Romantics’ Infinite through its mathematization, he is not thereby seeking to bury Romanticism’s rediscovery of poetry as a mode of thinking. Certainly it is true that Badiou’s project strives to re-entangle philosophy and mathematics. He succeeds, I think, and in this respect, Badiou may indeed be said to have overcome Romanticism. Nevertheless, as we shall also see, poetry is essential to Badiou’s thinking of truth and remains at the very heart of his project, whether he is writing of mathematics or Mallarmé, ethics or aesthetics. So while Badiou would contest any claim that poetry alone has a purchase on truth, in important ways his own project reaffirms the Romantic schema in art: poetry and truth are not to be disentangled. One term implies the other.

My aim here is not to elaborate a full philosophical description of Badiou’s relation to Romanticism–Justin Clemens has already begun such work in his admirable book on the Romanticism of contemporary theory. Nor do I wish to quibble over the use or usefulness of “Romanticism” as a label to describe an historical tendency of thought. Rather, what I would like to do in the present essay is to trace out a series of propositions concerning art, ethics, and subjectivity, which derive from the Romantics and which Badiou places at the heart of his own project. Badiou is important to considerations of art, ethics, and subjectivity because, among other reasons, his work stands as the most serious effort by a dedicated philosopher to develop a philosophy consistent with the fundamental insights of Lacanian psychoanalysis.³ As our guiding thread, we will follow the way Badiou uses trauma, conceived in a Lacanian sense, as a trope in thinking about art and its relation to ethics. Thus, my discussion broaches two key questions: in what way does it make sense for Badiou to think of the event of art in terms of trauma, and what does this imply for the nature of ethics in Badiou’s philosophy? We shall begin with a general consideration of art and ethics derived primarily from two of Badiou’s books of the 1990s: his Ethics (1993) and his Handbook of Inaesthetics (1998). As we move further into Badiou’s thought, we will turn to two somewhat earlier writings, to Being and Event (1988) and to the 1989 essay on Beckett, in order to see why trauma was a useful trope for Badiou in particular–that is, for a post-Heideggerian, post-Lacanian thinker informed by set theory and striving for a post-Romantic philosophy of the event. As we will see, Badiou opens up an ethic of art and also suggests a larger trend in the history of aesthetics since the Romantics that locates the force of art as bearing upon a traumatic subjectivity–a force thus at once ethical and existential.
 

Finally, Badiou is often positioned, by himself and by others, as a thinker at odds with the mainstream of Continental and Anglo-American thought. This he certainly is in many respects–as in his remarkably compelling elaboration of set theory as the cornerstone of his philosophy. But if we trace out the logic of his tropes, we are reminded that he is, after all, situated within a tradition of thinking about art, ethics, and subjectivity–whatever we might wish to call this tradition, whether Romantic or post-Romantic, Lacanian or post-Lacanian, Heideggerian or post-Heideggerian–and that he shares certain strands of this tradition not only with his older contemporaries such as Emmanuel Levinas, Maurice Blanchot, and Jacques Derrida, but also with thinkers at the origin of Romantic thought: Friedrich Schiller, Friedrich Schlegel, Percy Shelley, Ralph Waldo Emerson, and others.

I. The Event of Art: The Hole of Truth and the Punctured Subject

 
We begin, then, with Badiou’s conception of the work of art. Despite the several novels and plays he has written,⁴ it is evident that Badiou’s ultimate commitment is to philosophy, so it is not altogether surprising that for him, as for Heidegger and many other philosophers, art is a matter of truth. Badiou, however, has a rather idiosyncratic notion of “truth,” and since it refers neither to the veridicality of propositions nor to Heidegger’s aletheia, this claim requires a little unpacking.
 

Badiou opposes what he calls “truth” to the domain of objectivity and ordinary knowledge. Indeed truth, in the very essence of its operation, “constitutes a hole [un trou] in forms of knowledge,” as he puts it in several places, and he associates it with the Lacanian real.⁵ Thus truth, for Badiou, is the name of an exceptional event and a process that forces a break with the everyday course of knowledges and situations and consequently brings into being a “subject” where there was formerly just a human animal, a mere inhabitant of a given situation.⁶ Before turning to consider some of Badiou’s examples, let us briefly note that a truth in the first instance is an event, a flash, an irreducible singularity, and subsequently is marked by the continued fidelity of the subject who constitutes the site of that truth. This second moment of the truth, the fidelity, is understood as a continuing commitment by the subject to bear witness to the event that was its first moment and to relate henceforth to his or her particular situation from the perspective of that event, to think according to its radical truth, and to invent, in consequence, a new way of being and acting in the situation (L’éthique 61f, 41e). It is a crucial point for Badiou: for him, truth is productive, inventive, creative, anticonservative; it is “the coming-to-be of that which is not yet” (L’éthique 45f, 27e).

 
There are, for Badiou, four fundamental procedures of truths: art, science, politics, and love. Or, to put it in terms more typical for Badiou: the poem, the matheme, the politics of emancipation, and the encounter with the disjunction of sexuation (Conditions 79f, Manifeste 141e). Badiou gives a number of images of an event of truth. In the Ethics book, his favored examples of such events in art come from the history of music and, less frequently, from theatrical experience. Elsewhere, he writes of modern poets, including Hölderlin, Mallarmé, Beckett, and Celan. But in the Ethics book, he returns repeatedly to Haydn’s invention of the classical musical style and remarks that it is characteristic of any event of truth in that it

is both situated–it is the event of this or that situation–and supplementary, thus absolutely detached from, or unrelated to, all the rules of the situation. Hence the emergence of the classical style, with Haydn . . . concerns the musical situation and no other, a situation then governed by the predominance of the baroque style. It was an event for this situation. But in another sense, what this event was to authorize in terms of musical configurations was not comprehensible from within the plenitude achieved by the baroque style; it really was a matter of something else.

You might then ask what it is that makes the connection between the event and that ‘for which’ it is an event. This connection is the void [le vide] of the earlier situation. What does this mean? It means that at the heart of every situation, as the foundation of its being, there is a ‘situated’ void, around which is organized the plenitude (or the stable multiples) of the situation in question. Thus at the heart of the baroque style at its virtuoso saturation lay the absence [vide] (as decisive as it was unnoticed) of a genuine conception of musical architecture. The Haydn-event occurs as a kind of musical ‘naming’ of this absence [vide]. For what constitutes the event is nothing less than a wholly new architectonic and thematic principle, a new way of developing musical writing from the basis of a few transformable units — which was precisely what, from within the baroque style, could not be perceived (there could be no knowledge of it). (L’éthique 92-93f, 68-69e)

L’éthique

The Haydn-event, as Badiou calls it, inaugurated the configuration of classical style, from Haydn himself to its saturation point with Beethoven; it inaugurated a truth that, whether consciously or subconsciously, whether more or less articulately, befell the composer in the first instance, and then also listeners and subsequent composers who had been likewise situated within the baroque, but who thereafter found themselves seized by this same revolutionary truth concerning musical architecture as the hitherto unnamable vanishing point or void of the baroque. It is a “truth,” precisely, in that this truth of the Haydn-event is the same for all, even as it unfolds or proceeds within differing particular compositions or performances of music. Within a given situation (and all truths are so situated), there is no one truth for person a and a different truth for person b. For that matter, within a given situation, there is no one truth for culture g and a different truth for culture d. And, yet again, there is no objective truth out there in the world, waiting to be discovered by any who would see it. As the Haydn example illustrates, truth is an event that proceeds in a given situation (L’éthique 63f, 42e), here the symbolic field of the musical baroque, but this truth is the same truth for all who bear witness to it (46f, 27e).

For Badiou, this event of truth implies an ethics in the way it calls upon the subject whom it befalls to continue to bear witness to this truth by engaging one’s life, one’s decisions, and one’s existence, in a continuing reinterpretation that is through this event and according to its truth. Badiou refers to this second moment in the process of a truth as a fidelity. “To be faithful to an event,” he writes, “is to move within the situation that this event has supplemented, by thinking . . . the situation ‘according to’ the event” (L’éthique 62f, 41e). Alban Berg and Anton von Webern, to take other of Badiou’s examples, were faithful to the event that was Arnold Schoenberg’s invention of the twelve-tone technique in musical composition. Thus, they “[could] not continue with fin-de-siècle neo-Romanticism as if nothing had happened” (62f, 42e). Likewise, as he also notes, much contemporary art music constitutes a fidelity to the great Viennese composers of the early twentieth century. The fidelity, in which the subject continues the truth process beyond its initial event, accepting the obligation “to invent a new way of being and acting in the situation” (62f, 42e), is the ethical decision to which the subject must continually commit him- or herself (or not).

 
The course of an artistic truth thus has three moments. The first moment is the inaugural event of art, which then, in the second moment, persists through the choice of continuing, in the subject’s fidelity to the event. The truth comes to a certain end, in the third moment, only when its configuration has become saturated and it has exhausted its own infinity, as Badiou puts it (Petit Manuel 89f, 56e). In the exhaustion of a truth, its component works succeed less and less in inquiring into the truth in which they themselves participate. A configuration, as he puts it in his Handbook of Inaesthetics, “thinks itself in the works that compose it” (28f, 14e)⁷ and when it ceases to think itself, when its component works no longer succeed in inventively inquiring into the procedure of that configuration, then that truth comes to an end.
 

What I especially want to highlight here in Badiou’s description of the event and process of a truth, and in the ethic of truths that follows from it, is the position of the subject who, we can say, is called upon to dwell with a trauma.⁸ Committing oneself to Schoenberg’s tonal innovations may not seem such an onerous ethical calling, and is hardly traumatic in the everyday sense, but we might recall that truth, for Badiou, is essentially a hole. It pierces a given order of knowledge, but it also pierces those who are faithful to it. Someone who bears witness to an event of truth can, for example,

be this spectator whose thinking has been set in motion, who has been seized and bewildered by a burst of theatrical fire [un éclat théâtral], and who thus enters into the complex configuration of a moment of art. (L’éthique 66f, 45e)

L’éthique

The subject’s seizure in the work of art is an old theme for philosophy, but here there is no repose, no restful contemplation of the beautiful, no subjective harmony as in Kant’s third critique.⁹ Instead, our spectator has been seized and bewildered by–what?–a burst of theatrical fire (!), and thereby enters into the complex configuration of a moment of art. Theatre spectators on the edge of their seats, he writes,

demonstrate a prodigious interest in what they are doing — in the advent of the not-known Immortal in them, in the advent of that which they did not know themselves capable of. Nothing in the world could arouse the intensity of existence more than this actor who lets me encounter Hamlet . . . . Nevertheless, as regards my interests as a mortal and predatory animal, what is happening here does not concern me; no knowledge tells me that these circumstances have anything to do with me. I am altogether present there, linking my component elements via that excess beyond myself induced by the passing through me of a truth. But as a result, I am also suspended, broken, annulled, dis-interested [suspendu, rompu, révoqué: dés-intéressé]. For I cannot, within the fidelity to fidelity that defines ethical consistency, take an interest in myself, and thus pursue my own interests. All my capacity for interest, which is my own perseverance in being, has poured out . . . into what I will make of my encounter, one night, with the eternal Hamlet. (L’éthique 71-72f, 49-50e)

L’éthique

In Badiou’s theater-going subject we see a curious tension between, on the one hand, the subject’s being “altogether present” in a way that seems familiar to Romantic and Heideggerian thinking about the promise of art, and, on the other hand, in the very same moment, the subject’s being “suspended, broken, annulled, dis-interested”–and, earlier, “riven, or punctured [imperceptiblement et intérieurement rompu, ou troué]” (L’éthique 67f, 46e). For Badiou the subject is, in the very instant of its coming to be, already in “eclipse,” as if the subject itself, in the event of art, were to appear in the flicker of its own vanishing or void. Thus a poem, for example, summons one–but summons one to give oneself over to, or dispose oneself to, its poetic operations and commits one to think according to its thought instead of according to the pursuit of one’s own interest (Petit Manuel 51f, 29e). Thus, the reader of a poem, as Badiou writes in relation to Celan, must “will his or her own transliteration” (58f, 34e), as if the letters of one’s aesthetic subjectivity, the “letters of one’s body,” as Willy Apollon calls it,¹⁰ were to be offered up to the event and cast into a foreign idiom. Although for Badiou fidelity to the event involves a conscious willing, the first instance of the truth event seems distinctly traumatic in his trope. “To enter into the composition of a subject of truth,” as he puts it, “can only be something that befalls you” (L’éthique 74f, 51e; trans. modified). Insofar as the will may later enter into Badiou’s ethics, fidelity is a commitment, whether knowingly or unknowingly, to sustain oneself in a certain relation to that originary traumatic eclipse of the subject.

II. A Thing of Nothing: Ethics and the Phantom Excess

To be clear, “trauma” is not a word Badiou himself employs; as we have seen, he uses an array of others to describe his subject–riven, punctured, ruptured, severed, broken, annulled, and so forth. These terms, if we consider them in a Lacanian register, suggest physical trauma in the “imaginary” sense of the corps morcelé, the fragmented body that implies a notion of trauma as a sort of mirror-stage in reverse. But how, more precisely, do these tropes, which we group under the rubric of trauma, bear upon Badiou’s theory of the subject, especially upon the subject in the event of art–and why does it make sense to place all of this under the heading of Ethics? The answers have something to do with the theoretical edifice elaborated by Jacques Lacan, who is significant for Badiou for four principal reasons: for initiating a modern thinking of love,¹¹ for insisting on the importance of the category of the subject in philosophical thought (Manifeste 24f, 44e), for developing a conception of the real at the heart of human subjectivity,¹² and for repeatedly asserting that mathematics is the science of the real (Conditions 185f; Theoretical Writings 107e). We will see that insofar as Badiou develops a theory of the subject consistent with the Lacanian subject instituted through trauma, for Badiou the stakes of this “trauma” are ultimately read not in the imaginary, but at the limit of the symbolic and the real. But let us approach these questions of the subject and what we are calling trauma a little more deliberately, since Badiou is approaching these matters not from the exigencies of the analytic clinic, but rather from the interest of philosophy–and specifically of a very particular philosophy grounded in mathematical set theory.
 

We can begin by considering more carefully and more particularly the structure of the subject implied by Badiou’s description of the theatergoer who encounters in Hamlet both the utmost intensity of existence as well as, in the same instant, a certain annulment. As Schoenberg was an event for the composers and audiences of the late Romantic style typified by Mahler, Hamlet may equally be considered an event in the history of literature–for example by demonstrating the possibility of a modern, post-Attic tragedy, or by turning to national or non-classical sources as fit topics for tragedy, or by more explicitly locating the real event of the play in the obscure existential drama of a character’s deepest interior. But Hamlet is also an event situated within an I–that is, within Badiou’s theatergoer in his or her particularity:

I am altogether present there [Je suis là tout entier], linking my component elements via that excess beyond myself [l’excès sur moi-même] induced by the passing through me of a truth. But as a result, I am also suspended, broken, annulled, dis-interested. For I cannot, within the fidelity to fidelity that defines ethical consistency, take an interest in myself, and thus pursue my own interests. All my capacity for interest, which is my own perseverance in being, has poured out . . . into what I will make of my encounter, one night, with the eternal Hamlet. (L’éthique 71-72f, 49-50e)

L’éthique

Structurally speaking, the key aesthetic event for Badiou here is an encounter between, on the one hand, the presence and finite “altogetherness” enjoyed by the theatergoer, wherein his or her component elements are linked into One, and on the other hand an excess beyond this altogetherness, the infinity of the eternal Hamlet, that passes through the subject, annuls the theatergoer in his or her situation, and demands some kind of accounting of what the subject will “make of the encounter.” Is there not something paradoxical about this altogetherness which encounters an excess beyond itself–for how can someone be, precisely, all-together, if there is some other element that remains in excess of the all?

Badiou’s Being and Event (1988) is devoted to a much more technical and complete description of “situations” generally and, by implication, of the seemingly paradoxical structure of the situation in which the theatergoer’s encounter with Hamlet takes place. We might take the theatergoing individual him- or herself as a “situation,” a structured whole composed of a set of component elements or terms: the particulars of one’s history, one’s sense for family and romantic obligations, one’s tastes, one’s regard for literary and theatrical history, one’s openness on a given night to the drama of Shakespeare’s Hamlet, and a multiplicity of other elements chance has thrown together. Any or all of these elements may be highly complex, but they are “consistent” in the sense that, however complex they may be, they are included in how one represents oneself to oneself (in what Badiou calls “the state”), or, more basically, they simply belong to one’s situation, present but prior to any question of representation. They compose that of which the situation consists. One’s taste, for example, may be composed of a vast array of sometimes-conflicting influences and voices coming from one’s culture, one’s circle of friends, one’s reading, the quirks of one’s personal history, both conscious and subconscious, and so forth. Whatever their origins and however internally incoherent they may be, they are all counted as being situated in the theatergoer as elements of his or her own taste. In this sense, the situation is defined by its all, the Oneness of one’s multifarious elements. Moreover, each of these elements, insofar as it counts as belonging to the situation, has been acted upon by some kind of a logic, a regime or rule that produces the situation by determining what counts as belonging to it. By contrast, the occurrence of an event, which in Badiou’s sense is always an event for a given situation, poses the question of what lies outside the jurisdiction of this regime, when, according to the law of the situation, everything that counts, everything presentable, lies within it–hence its Oneness, its all-togetherness.

 
Badiou argues that in the event of art (or science, or politics, or love), the Oneness of the situation is indeed disrupted by some unpresentable, supplementary thing that, within the law of the situation, counts as no-thing. Intriguingly, Badiou also claims in Being and Event that this void, or “nothing” of the situation, lies at the very heart of poetic movement in particular as a kind of impasse or impossibility:

Naturally, it would be pointless to set off in search of the nothing. Yet it must be said that this is exactly what poetry exhausts itself in doing . . . . [P]oetry propagates the idea of an intuition of the nothing in which being would reside when there is not even the site for such intuition . . . because everything is consistent. The only thing we can affirm is this: every situation implies the nothing of its all. But the nothing is neither a place nor a term of the situation. For if the nothing were a term that could only mean one thing; that it had been counted as one. Yet everything which has been counted is within the consistency of presentation. It is thus ruled out that the nothing . . . be taken as a term. There is not a-nothing, there is “nothing” [Il n’y a pas un-rien, il y a « a rien »], phantom of inconsistency. (L’être 67-68f, 54-55e)

L’être

While every situation “implies the nothing of its all,” the situation itself cannot, by definition, provide a way to bring this void point into knowledge, since there is no consistency to the void of the real, and since even intuition lies under the rule of the situation which, by definition, has no law capable of discerning (or “counting”) anything in excess of itself. In the face of this encounter with alterity, poetry since the Romantics has tried to say what cannot in fact be said, to present what cannot in fact be presented–as if a fullness of being might be approached, the phantom of inconsistency banished, by causing the indiscernible “nothing” supplementary to the situation to assume a visible consistency.

This, then, is what justifies the term “traumatic” as a general trope for Badiou’s description of the ethical subject in the event of art. It is not just that the coherence of the situation is punctured or riven by something radically alterior to itself, something that threatens to undermine or reorganize the configuration of the existing situation–this might be a commonsensical, imaginary description of trauma–but that this radical alterity constitutes a hole in the order of language. Indeed, from a Lacanian perspective, Badiou’s event is precisely traumatic insofar as it marks an encounter with the irreducible real at the heart of the signifier and the symbolic order.¹³ Badiou’s “nothing” or void shares a number of key structural features with Lacan’s concept of the traumatic encounter with the real: its “extimacy” to the subject, its essential resistance to signification, and its radical potential for introducing something new. Lacan’s real is located in “extimate”¹⁴ relation (167f, 139e) to the subject in that the real is at once situated as the “traumatic nucleus” (Le Séminaire XI, 66f, 68e), governing the syntax of the subject, utterly interior and intimate to it, and is at the same time radically supplementary, that is, exterior and excluded from it. So when in his Ethics seminar Lacan describes that which, in the real, suffers from the signifier (150f, 125e), he situates it “at the center precisely in the sense that it is excluded . . . strange to me while being at the heart of this ‘me’” (87f, 71e; author’s translation). Moreover, because the real as such cannot be assimilated to the order of the signifier (55f, 55e), the “trauma” of an encounter with the real is witnessed precisely in its “opacity” and its “resistance to signification” (118f, 129e). Finally, due to the very fact that the real constitutes an impasse in the logic of the signifier, the encounter with the real “admits something new, which is precisely the impossible” (152f, 167e )–admits, that is, something impossible in the order of the signifier as it has hitherto been governed. For these reasons, surely, and perhaps others, Badiou himself describes, at the heart of his event of art, an ethic of a “truth” that is also, in a precise Lacanian sense, “an ethic of the real” (L’éthique 74f, 52e).¹⁵

 
Badiou is not ordinarily one to follow philosophical trends that place language per se at the center of philosophical inquiry, but there seems no way to escape this problem of language in thinking the event.¹⁶ One believes that there has been an event, that something new has happened, that there is something beyond the One of the situation, and yet, from within the horizon of the situation where one discerns, thinks, and speaks, one cannot name the event, one can only surmise an appropriate “generic” procedure that would faithfully work to incorporate the event into the situation. Even the particular nature of this “something new” remains indiscernible:

A subject, which realizes a truth, is nevertheless incommensurable with the latter, because the subject is finite, and the truth is infinite. Moreover, the subject, being internal to the situation, can only know, or rather encounter terms or multiples presented (counted as one) in the situation. Yet the truth is an un-presented part of the situation. Finally, the subject cannot make a language out of anything except combinations of the supernumerary name of the event and the language of the situation. It is in no way guaranteed that this language will suffice for the discernment of a truth, which, in any case, is indiscernible for the resources of the language of the situation alone. It is absolutely necessary to abandon any definition of the subject which supposes that it knows the truth, or that it is adjusted to the truth. Being the local moment of the truth, the subject falls short of supporting the latter’s global sum. Every truth is transcendent to the subject, precisely because the latter’s entire being resides in supporting the realization of the truth. The subject is neither conscious nor unconscious of the true.

The singular relation of the subject to the truth whose procedure it supports is the following: the subject believes that there is a truth, and this belief occurs in the form of a knowledge [un savoir]. I term this knowing belief confidence. (L’être 434-435f, 396-397e)

L’être

The subject is called upon to support the realization of a truth. He or she has “confidence” that there is in fact a truth and that something new has happened in the situation. But from the standpoint of the situation itself, the subject can speak only a kind of nonsense in relation to this event, knitting together a language out of existing terms inadequate to the situation and to “the supernumerary name of the event.” The name of the event, “Hamlet” in our example, or “Schoenberg,” is supernumerary in the sense that it has no conceptual referent within the situation. Of course “Hamlet” as a proper name designates a Danish prince, a character, and a play (to say nothing here of Hamlet’s phantom father). It is also used antonomastically to refer to an event–yet this it does in the most nebulous fashion, as if “Hamlet” were neither name nor signifier, but a kind of conceptless signifier-surrogate used to indicate the whatever-it-was-that-happened one night at the theater. Likewise, “Schoenberg” may be used as an antonomasia for innovations in musical composition such as atonality, dodecaphony, and serialism, which may in turn be more precisely described, but fidelity to the truth of the “Schoenberg event” surely exceeds the instance of even its inventor, running its course through Olivier Messiaen, Pierre Boulez, and György Ligeti to younger and more recent composers like Kaija Saariaho, Erkki-Sven Tüür, and Helena Tulve–each of whom has departed from anything like atonal, twelve-tone, or serialist orthodoxies, while still, arguably, being faithful to the Schoenberg event and, certainly, committed to composing within a tonal space made possible by Schoenberg’s work. In this sense, “Schoenberg,” too, is used in place of a signifier to indicate the nebulous whatever-it-was-that-happened to the tonal system in classical composition with the appearance of Pierrot Lunaire (1913). These names, Hamlet and Schoenberg, together with the signifiers one associates with them, strive to refer to something that exceeds the situation. In order to do so, the subject must rework or redirect existing terms to “displace established significations” and thereby support a truth for a situation that at present cannot discern it (L’être 437f, 399e). If, for Badiou, a truth makes a hole in knowledge, it likewise marks a babble-point in relation to the present language of the situation.

The fidelity of the subject, then, is exposed to chance, grounded in nothing, unsupported by knowledge, and nonsensical to the eyes and ears of outsiders. It calls for a decision to commit to an interpretation of an event and it requires the ethical subject to assume a course of action (a “procedure”) faithful to that event from among choices that, within the best knowledge of the situation, are strictly undecidable. This is true because, from within the situation where he or she is located, the subject has no recognized way to decide whether there has even been an event, no way to adjudicate whether one interpretation of the event (supposing there to have been one) is superior to another, and no way to know with certainty whether a given procedure is a proper and faithful response to the event that the subject supposes has taken place.¹⁷ Thus one commits oneself on a chance, a wager, and, like Badiou’s Mallarmé, casts one’s die. As Badiou writes,

If poetry is an essential use of language, it is not because it is able to devote the latter [language] to Presence; on the contrary, it is because it trains language to the paradoxical function of maintaining that which–radically singular, pure action–would otherwise fall back into the nullity of place. Poetry is the stellar assumption [l’assomption stellaire] of that pure undecidable, against a background of nothingness, that is an action of which one can only know whether it has taken place inasmuch as one bets upon its truth. (L’être 213-214f, 192e)¹⁸

L’être

Against Heidegger’s nostalgia for lost presence, and surpassing the presence and altogetherness of his own theatergoer, Badiou asserts that poetry and art find their true and ethical task in supporting a pure action: the coming into being of a subject and, with it, the truth that occasions the subject. Poetry is itself, in the poet as in the reader, the casting of a die among undecidables, set against a background of nothingness. Hence poetry is intimately aligned with the subject, which Badiou defines as “that which decides an undecidable from the standpoint of an indiscernible” (445f, 407e), and with ethics, which, similarly, comes down to an imperative: “Decide from the standpoint of the undecidable” (219-220f, 197e).

In his Ethics book, Badiou gives his ethical imperative a more Lacanian ring. Lacan’s “ethics of psychoanalysis” is well known, both through his great 1959-1960 seminar of that name and through the writings of Slavoj Zizek.¹⁹ Lacan formulates his ethical dictum with a characteristic, concentrated simplicity: do not cede ground on your desire (Le Séminaire VII, 368f, 319e; author’s translation). For Lacan, this ethical position bears upon symptom formation: giving up on one’s desire, forsaking this one Good, produces the Evil of symptoms. In his own Ethics book, Badiou echoes Lacan, his “master” (L’éthique 121e) as he calls him, when he articulates his own ethic of truth: do all that you can to persevere in that which exceeds your perseverance. Persevere in the interruption. Seize in your being that which has seized and broken you (L’éthique 69f, 47e). Both Lacan’s ethic of psychoanalysis and Badiou’s own ethic of truth are ethics of the real and call for a certain persistence in one’s relation to that real. Truth and ethics bear upon a certain relation with the real of language: the indiscernible truth of music beyond musical syntax, the unnamable truth of a poem beyond communication and hermeneutic concerns of reference and interpretation. This truth event, which has broken and seized the subject, requires the subject to commit to a decision regarding what cannot be decided, articulated, or known. One must give oneself over to the event, contend with the situational anxiety of the void, and persevere in this relation to chance and the real. And if, through this process, one is obliged to cast one’s lot with something that ruptures the very situation in which one lives, this is surely all well and good for a philosopher who, after all, defines the Good as “the internal norm of a prolonged disorganization of life” (82f, 60e).

III. Badiou on Levinas, Love, and the Poetic Naming of Ethics

Badiou’s use of trauma as a trope aligns him not only with Lacan’s ethics of the real, as we have just seen, but also, to a more limited extent, with the work of Emmanuel Levinas, who in his late years often employed trauma as a trope for describing the ethical encounter with the face of the Other.²⁰ Badiou’s own thinking of ethics arrives at a moment when the conceptualization of ethics in the academy has been brought decisively under Levinas’s name, first through the sponsorship of Jacques Derrida, Luce Irigaray, and Jean-François Lyotard, and then through its appropriation by the rhetoric of contemporary multiculturalist politics. The Ethics book is evidently among Badiou’s best-selling volumes and clearly his most sustained statement on ethics, and, though he might there seem to claim a counter-Levinasian position, in fact the polemical thrust of that book belies his closeness to the Jewish thinker. Even in the Ethics book, his brief account of Levinasian ethics as an ethics of difference, or an ethics of the other, stands as a moment of scrupulous care and respect, before he turns to address what he considers the misappropriation of Levinasian thought by multiculturalism, which, Badiou argues, is committed to a conventional conception of “otherness,” one cast in ethnographic or demographic terms rather than in properly phenomenological terms (or pre-phenomenological terms, one might say), as with Levinas. Later, when he highlights (and distances himself from) Levinas’s theological grounding of the ethical alterity of the other in the infinite alterity of God, Badiou’s pique lies with what he sees as the easy moralism of multiculturalist ideologues and the fashion they have made of the “ethics of the other” as, precisely, a pious discourse divorced from true Levinasian piety (L’éthique 41f, 23e). In short, Badiou’s reader must make a careful distinction between his polemical adversaries in the Ethics book, since his true quarrel lies elsewhere than with the “coherent and inventive” (40f, 23e) work of Levinas. Levinas’s work may disappoint Badiou for orienting itself ultimately via religious axioms, but he defends it as “strikingly distant” from the “catechisms” of multiculturalism (37f, 20e).
 

Badiou makes a more interesting and direct claim for Levinas’s importance in an off-hand remark in his Manifesto. There, writing of the history of philosophy since Hegel, he claims that philosophy has come to misapprehend the nature of its own work and has ceded its task, at various moments, by “suturing” itself to one of its four conditions: according to Badiou, Anglo-American philosophy has sutured itself to the promise of positivist science as the sole procedure of truth, Marxism has sutured philosophy to the promise of emancipatory politics as the sole procedure of truth, and, faced with philosophy’s sutures to science and to politics, Nietzsche and Heidegger gave philosophy over to the poem. Now, just as the attentive reader begins to wonder whether there were no overly enthusiastic philosophical partisans of love, Badiou offers a strangely phrased afterthought: “It may even be added,” he writes, “that a Levinas [un Levinas], in the guise of the dual talk on the Other and its Face [visage], and on Woman, considers [envisage] that philosophy could also become the valet of its fourth condition, love” (Manifeste 48f, 67e). This is certainly a curious statement and one wonders what is meant by it, since love is not usually considered a central term for Levinas. What, for Badiou in particular, can be the relation between love and Levinas, the eminent thinker of ethics? What is love as, precisely, a condition or truth procedure for philosophy? Why, finally, do some of Badiou’s most sustained discussions of love as a condition of philosophy appear amid discussions of art–for example in discussion of the works of Samuel Beckett,²¹ or in his intriguing remarks on the novel as an art form essentially coupled to love?²²

 
Badiou, whose most serious philosophical work is thought through mathematics, perhaps unsurprisingly describes the course of an amorous truth as supporting a subjective movement through three distinct “numericalities.” The numericality of love, according to Badiou, is counted thus: one, two, infinity. That is, love is essentially the production of a truth about the Two (Manifeste 64f, 83e), pertaining ultimately to difference as such (Theoretical Writings 146e). Love is a riving of the One of solipsism in an encounter with the Two of the amorous couple that opens, like a passage, upon the plethoric Infinite of the sensual world:

In love, there is first the One of solipsism, which is the confrontation or duel between the cogito and the grey black of being in the infinite recapitulation of speech.²³ Next comes the Two, which arises in the event of an encounter and in the incalculable poem [le poème incalculable] of its designation by a name. Lastly, there is the Infinity of the sensible world that the Two traverses and unfolds, where, little by little, it deciphers a truth about the Two itself. This numericality (one, two, infinity) is specific to the procedure of love. We could demonstrate that the other truth procedures–science, art, and politics–have different numericalities,²⁴ and that each numericality singularizes the type of procedure in question, all the while illuminating how truths belong to totally heterogeneous registers. (“L’écriture” 363f, 33e)

Prior to the encounter of love, there is only solitude: the everyday situation of the ego and, as Levinas argues, “the very structure of reason” (Le temps et l’autre, 48f, 65e). The Two of love, by contrast, inaugurates an extraordinary event, in Badiou’s sense of the term, insofar as it is a

hazardous and chance-laden mediation for alterity in general [une mediation hasardeuse pour l’altérité en general]. It elicits a rupture or a severance of the cogito‘s One; by virtue of this very fact, however, it can hardly stand on its own, opening instead onto the limitless multiple of Being. We might also say that the Two of love elicits the advent of the sensible. The truth of the Two gives rise to a sensible inflection of the world, where before only the grey-black of being had taken place. Now, the sensible and the infinite are identical . . . . (“L’écriture” 358f, 28-29e)

The aesthetic tropes of Badiou’s description are remarkable–not just his evocation of the Infinite of love through citation of sensual scenes from the oeuvre of one of the great literary writers of the twentieth century, but Badiou’s own affirmation that such scenes are, in themselves, “poems,” regardless of their prose form (“L’écriture” 359f, 29e). His language is also remarkable, and strongly reminiscent of Levinas when Badiou writes of the encounter with alterity as a “rupture” of the cogito’s solitude, together with the sense that the ethical consists in persisting, in being faithful to this evental encounter with alterity.²⁵ Let us examine these two points about Badiou’s language more closely.

Badiou’s use of aesthetic tropes can be understood if we recall the almost impossible role of language necessary for the faithful elaboration of a truth within a situation that cannot discern or name it. When, therefore, we read above that the Two, the heart of the amorous event and the opening of the ethical subject to the alterior and the Infinite, “arises in the event of an encounter and in the incalculable poem of its designation by a name,” or when we read in a different essay that “one must be poetically ready for the outside-of-self [il faut poétiquement être prêt au hors-de-soi]” (“Le Recours” 100f, 75e), Badiou does not here indicate a unique role for poetry in the elaboration of an amorous truth. Rather, Badiou is suggesting a special role for poetry in the elaboration of any kind of truth. We might think of this as somewhat akin to the insight of Poe’s Dupin, who says, referring to the Minister who has purloined the royal letter, that “as poet and mathematician, he would reason well; as mere mathematician, he could not have reasoned at all” (“Purloined Letter” 691). Regardless of the truth procedure in effect, whether scientific, political, artistic, or amorous, fidelity to a truth event requires a naming that, in turn, can only proceed indirectly, through the language resources of the poetic act, which Badiou suggests are uniquely capable of introducing alterity into the language of a situation:

For the nomination of an event . . . an undecidable supplementation which must be named to occur for a being-faithful, thus for a truth–this nomination is always poetic. To name a supplement, a chance, an incalculable, one must draw from the void of sense, in default of established significations, to the peril of language. One must therefore poeticize, and the poetic name of the event is what throws us outside of ourselves, through the flaming ring of predictions. (“Le Recours” 100f, 75e)

The poem, then, is more than the heart of the artistic event, whatever its medium. It is also the composition of a supernumerary name for the unnamable and undecidable event of truth, composed out of the language of the situation. More than this, it is poetry that “throws us outside of ourselves” to surpass in subjectivization the solipsism of the One and to open upon the Two of love and the true Infinite of the sensible world. One might venture it as a new formulation of Badiou’s ethical maxim: One must poeticize. That is, one must exceed one’s situation and assume an ethical relation to the event by striving to name it through poetic word. As the Romantics intuited and as Badiou’s philosophy formulates much more precisely, poetry and ethics, like poetry and truth, are not to be disentangled.

One would not wish to overstate the similarity between the ways Badiou and Levinas conceive of the ethical. Badiou, for his part, considers himself resolutely committed to what he thinks is a Greek–philosophical, mathematical–mode of thinking ethics, whereas Levinas, for his part, is very self-consciously committed to what for Badiou is a non-Greek, Jewish–theological–mode of thinking the ethical. Thus, Badiou’s mathematical grounding and conceptualization of alterity, his “numericalities” of solipsism and the Infinite, his set-theoretical elaboration of the event, and his insistent recourse to the category of truth as the grounds for the specifically ethical force of alterity and the infinite–all this is quite foreign to Levinas’s philosophical interests. And, as we have already seen, Badiou displays little sympathy for Levinas’s grounding of the ethical nature of alterity within Jewish tradition, so that Levinas’s often Abrahamic sense of alterity with, as Levinas himself muses (Autrement 195n1f, 197-98n27e), its potential caprice and persecutory command, is absent when Badiou writes of the subjective commitment to forsake the pursuit of one’s own interest, will one’s own “transliteration,” and live and think according to the alterior truth of the event that has befallen one. Finally, where Levinas concentrates his thinking at the intersection of phenomenology and theology, writing little on love as such, less on literature and politics, and nothing at all on science, Badiou makes it a matter of principle to circulate his thinking among the four “procedures of truth” as he himself defines them: the scientific (as in Being and Event), the artistic (as in the Handbook of Inaesthetics), the political (as in Metapolitics), and the amorous (as in the essays on Beckett and on the Lacanian description of sexuation). This also gives Badiou a broad scope for thinking the ethical in places–art, science, politics–where Levinas’s writings do not often venture.
 

Nonetheless, we have also seen that both Badiou and Levinas, when they present their work on ethics, write through tropes of trauma, as a way of thinking subjectivity as the rupture of the solipsism of the cogito in an encounter with alterity, difference, and the infinite. This is indeed very significant. If Badiou stands together with the Romantics (and Lacan) to posit, at the heart of the work of art, a subject who contends with a constitutive void or “nothing” or hole, Badiou and Levinas (and again Lacan) stand against hundreds of years of philosophical thinking by imagining at the core of ethics a subject who has been riven and punctured in relation to a singular, traumatic event. When Badiou salutes Levinas as a thinker of love,²⁶ as he does in his Manifesto, he is recognizing Levinas’s rigor in thinking the event of love as an ethical movement from the One of solipsism, through the encounter with alterity (the Two), to the Infinite, even if Badiou is also, at the same time, working from an Infinite conceived through mathematics (not theology), and also underlining his own critique that Levinas’s suture of philosophy to the condition of love unduly neglects other possible procedures for truth–the political, the scientific, and the artistic.

 
Badiou’s implicit critique of Levinas’s thinking of ethics–that it correctly elaborates certain structures of an ethical event in one procedure (love) only to turn a blind eye to the event in any other procedure (artistic, political, scientific)–is analogous to his critique of Romantic philosophies of art. Romantic theories of art, in Badiou’s view, correctly locate the position of truths as immanent to the work of art–so that, for the Romantics, art is not thought to point to a truth that exists outside of art, as when it is called upon to illustrate a truth situated in politics, science, or love. Rather, the truth of art is intrinsic or internal to the artistic effect of works of art. As Badiou and the Romantics agree, art is not about a truth; art is a truth. However, the Romantics, in Badiou’s view, fail to recognize the singularity of the truth produced by art; they fail to see that the particular truth activated in the artwork is specific to art alone, and thus “irreducible to other truths, be they scientific, political, or amorous” (Petit Manuel 21f, 9e). We will grant Badiou his point here: it is hard to imagine any thinker, Romantic or otherwise, who would fully prefigure Badiou’s declaration that there are four “procedures of truth” and that every truth is the truth of a given situation strictly within one of these four procedures, either artistic, political, scientific, or amorous. These are surely among the most fundamental and original features of Badiou’s own philosophy.

 
But I would argue that there is another debt, unacknowledged, that Badiou’s thinking of art owes to the Romantics: the description of art as addressed to a subject constituted through a foundational, traumatic encounter with a “nothing” or void of the real. This seems to me the key Romantic gesture in the thinking of art: from Schiller’s irremediable “dismemberment of being” (586g, 43e)²⁷ and Emerson’s declaration in “The Poet” that man “is only half himself” and must therefore poeticize to address his fundamental void of being (448), to Heidegger’s later view that one must bear poetic witness to being to attain a greater degree of being oneself (Erläuterungen 36g, 54e),²⁸ to Lacan’s claim that the work of art renews the subject’s relation to the real (Le Séminaire VII, 169-70f, 141e), Romantic theories of art, like Badiou’s own, proceed from the given of a subject that faces the void and elaborate a theory of art specifically as addressing that unspeakable ontological hole.

 
What Badiou contributes to Romantic philosophies of art is a new rigor in elaborating the event of this situated void, and especially in thinking it through the innovations of mid-twentieth-century set theory. Thus, where the early Romantic thinkers of the event of art work more or less intuitively, as both poets and theoreticians of poetry themselves, where Heidegger works out of dormant linguistic possibilities, and where Lacan works through empirical observation and practical clinical interest,²⁹ Badiou gives a much fuller philosophical grounding to those earlier developments toward a Romantic theory of art.
 

Additionally, by grounding his event of art in set theory, Badiou is able to further prise apart the theory of a subject constituted in traumatic relation to an originary event from the pathos or horror customarily associated with trauma and loss. This matter has already caused some misunderstanding in Badiou’s critical reception. Perhaps because of his narrow focus on Badiou’s book on Paul, or perhaps because he is quick to appreciate manifestations of horror, Zizek far overstates the case when he claims, in The Ticklish Subject, that Badiou’s “main point” in his elaboration of the subject is to “avoid identifying the subject with the constitutive Void of the structure” (159).³⁰ Zizek, so it would seem here, regards the void as necessarily horrific and, missing the sense of horror in Badiou,³¹ wrongly minimizes the extent of Badiou’s actual theoretical engagement with the traumatic real. As we have already seen, although Badiou spends much effort describing the second moment of an evental truth, its poeticization in the subject’s “fidelity,” he also gives a full description of the subject in that first moment of facing the “nothing”–a fact highlighted by those many terms suggesting physical trauma: “suspended, broken, annulled,” “riven or punctured,” “a rupture or a severance,” and so forth. In Being and Event, he is quite plain: while “a truth alone is infinite” (433f, 395e), “the subject is finite” (434f, 396e). Indeed, this very incommensurability faced by the finite subject gives it its specific sense: overwhelmed, annulled, inarticulate–and persistent nonetheless.
 

Yet, however overstated, we might also say that Zizek’s argument nevertheless points to an important difference in tone that distinguishes Badiou from his more Romantic theoretical forebears in thinking the real of art. The thrust of Badiou’s philosophy resists attaching any Romantic pathos to this “trauma” of the finite subject as he or she contends with the void and the incommensurable, infinite truth. To be sure, the traumatic structure of the subject is not a dry fact for Badiou–the very passion of his writing on the topic recognizes its drama. But in contrast with the pathos or nostalgia inherent in Emerson and Heidegger when they present the fundamental absence at the heart of human subjectivity, and in contrast to the rawness and destitution of Antigone when Lacan presents the subject’s ethical bearing of the real, for Badiou the traumatic structure of the subject is part and parcel of the very event he celebrates for being inventive, creative, “the coming-to-be of that which is not yet” (L’éthique 45f, 27e), indeed the only way for something new to appear within a situation. The point is that, in what is for Badiou “the event of truth,” the subject, which is indeed finite and, yes, traumatically riven and babbling, is nevertheless able to participate in a fidelity to something that exceeds his or her own finitude and is thereby able to accede to an ethical, more properly human, subjectivity. So Badiou’s ethics and his theory of art aim to represent an escape from the suffering body, an escape from the animal, an escape from the contemporary organization of moral life around the figure of the victim.³² If we speak of trauma with regard to Badiou’s subject, it is neither to rally the reader’s pious sympathies nor to invoke his or her horror on behalf of the subject. Rather, as we have seen, “trauma” highlights certain features of Badiou’s subject to place his theory of art in limited relation with that of the Romantics, to display his debt to Lacan’s traumatic real in particular, to clarify his critique of Levinasian ethics, to highlight the role of the poetic naming of the void in any “procedure of truth” and to refute the critique offered by Zizek by demonstrating that one need not read the void in Lacanian theory as horror.

Notes

1. Throughout the essay, page numbers followed by “e” refer to the English translations; those followed by “f” refer to the French-language editions.

2. Jacques Rancière, in his “Aesthetics, Inaesthetics, Anti-Aesthetics,” rightly contests ascribing to the German Romantics (as Badiou seems to do) any claim that art alone is capable of truth (Hallward 220).

3. Badiou names Lacan an “anti-philosopher,” but his estimation of the importance of Lacanian thought for contemporary philosophy is nevertheless the very highest. As he writes in his Manifesto: “the anti-philosopher Lacan is a condition of the renaissance of philosophy. A philosophy is possible today, only if it is compossible with Lacan” (64f, 84e).

4. Almagestes (1964), Portulans (1967), and Calme bloc ici-bas (1997); also a short story, “L’Autorisation” (1967), and a romanopéra, L’Echarpe rouge (1979), according to Peter Hallward’s very helpful bibliography in the English translation of Ethics (151-59e). Badiou’s plays include Ahmed le subtil (1994), Ahmed se fâche, suivi par Ahmed philosophe (1995), and Citrouilles (1995); the writing of the first of these seems to have been underway as Badiou was writing his Ethics in the summer of 1993. Evidently there are other theatrical pieces, too: in the prologue to his book on Paul, Badiou mentions one from the early 1980s called The Incident at Antioch (1f, 1e).

5. See his Manifesto 60f, 80e; also L’éthique 63f, 43e; and Conditions 201f, Theoretical Writings 123e. The relation between truth and knowledge is a complex one for Badiou. For present purposes, we might think of knowledge as something like the degraded and distinct afterlife of a truth–degraded because, following Lacan, Badiou asserts that “a truth is essentially unknown” (Conditions 201f; Theoretical Writings 123e) and that “what we know of truth is merely knowledge” (Conditions 192f; Theoretical Writings 114e), and distinct, because, as this paragraph makes plain, knowledge as such no longer enjoys the status of truth and is precisely what is disrupted and reorganized by the appearance of a new truth.

6. Correspondingly, as Badiou notes in his interview with Lauren Sedofsky, “most of the time, the great majority of us live outside ethics” (“Being by Numbers” 124).

7. Badiou’s claim here echoes the very influential description of “the literary” made by Friedrich Schlegel: that literature is an interrogation of its own status (for example, in Athenaeum Fragments, numbers 116 and 255). Badiou may be familiar with this claim from the work of his colleagues, Philippe Lacoue-Labarthe and Jean-Luc Nancy, whose The Literary Absolute is concerned with the aesthetics of Schlegel and of the Jena Romantics. Badiou cites Lacoue-Labarthe and Nancy’s book (but does not name Schlegel) in his Ethics (112f, 84e).

8. For Badiou there is the possibility (the necessity, really, because no truth procedure is solipsistic) for a collective subjectivity. In brief, all those who bear witness to a given truth event enter into the composition of one subject (64f, 43e). Hence Berg and Webern, for example, together with other witnesses to the Schoenberg event, compose but one subject. Badiou (and Hallward, his translator for the Ethics) write of the subject in the singular (however multiple its composition in terms of human individuals); I shall follow suit.

9. In the Critique of Judgment (1790), Kant is, of course, writing of the beautiful very generally, not specifically of beautiful art (indeed his examples are natural ones: flowers, birds, crustaceans). See the General Comment on the First Division of the Analytic for a compact description of subjective harmony in the beautiful and §27 for remarks on “restful contemplation” in the beautiful.

10. Apollon elaborates his concept of the “letters of the body” in several essays included in the After Lacan collection, most explicitly in the chapter of that name, “The Letter of the Body” (103-15).

11. Lacan is the thinker of love named most frequently by Badiou: “I moreover know of no theory of love having been as profound as [Lacan’s] since Plato’s, the Plato of the Symposium that Lacan dialogues with over and over again” (Manifeste 63f, 83e). The final section of the present essay returns to Badiou’s conceptualization of love.

12. Here is how Badiou describes the Lacanian real in an interview with Peter Hallward that serves as an appendix to the English translation of Ethics: “What especially interested me about Lacan was his conception of the real . . . . And in particular, this conception of the real as being, in a situation, in any given symbolic field, the point of impasse, or the point of impossibility, which precisely allows us to think the situation as a whole, according to its real” (121e).

13. See Lacan, Le Séminaire XI, 51f, 52e and 54f, 55e, where Lacan describes “the real as trauma,” as his editor, Jacques-Alain Miller, writes in the topical subheading. Lacanians in general tend to regard the key theoretical insight of the talking cure as the intuition that language, always and inevitably, carries some supplement of trauma at its core. For a fascinating discussion of how it is that language–in certain respects absolutely heterogeneous to the unrepresentable real–nonetheless implies an element of the traumatic real, readers might usefully consult three essays by the Gifric analysts in Québec: Willy Apollon’s “The Letter of the Body,” Danielle Bergeron’s “Violence in Works of Art, or, Mishima, from the Pen to the Sword,” and Lucie Cantin’s “The Trauma of Language,” all available in their After Lacan collection.

14. A neologism.

15. Eleanor Kaufman’s article proposing to contrast the ethics of Badiou with the ethics of Lacan is, of course, correct to observe that Badiou’s ethics and Lacan’s are not the same thing and do not cover the same territory. This is so in part because Badiou is a philosopher dedicated to thinking the ethics of a situated/supplementary truth, whereas Lacan is a training analyst describing for his students an ethics (and aesthetics) that proceeds from a set of practical, clinical facts concerning the subject’s relation to jouissance, the signifier, and the drive. But Badiou and Lacan are not so far apart either, as my own essay suggests. Kaufman’s strenuous claim that the ethics of Badiou and Lacan are incompatible and opposed seems to rest on her impression that Badiou’s position is essentially a conservative one, rather than one dedicated to radical, innovative truths, as Badiou would claim on his own behalf (L’éthique 61f, 41e). Thus, for Kaufman, Badiou’s “systematic” style of thought reflects an allegiance to the “system” of a given situation (145); thus, too, for Kaufman, Badiou fails to allow for exceptions that change the rule, so that his ethics is dedicated to faithfully following rules (145); thus, finally, in locating ethics (and truth) in art, love, politics, and science, Kaufman’s Badiou is under the misapprehension that he has delimited all experience–or, at least, her Badiou is “unequipped” to deal with anything that cannot be mapped out within the four “conditions” that give rise to ethics (146). These misreadings of Badiou (as I see them) nonetheless imply one point of genuine contrast between the ethics of Lacan and of Badiou: for Badiou the object of ethics (that which his ethical subject pursues with faithful tenacity) matters much more than for Lacan, for whom the subject’s particular object of desire is less important than the subject’s “access to desire” generally–that is, apart from the particularity of this or that object (Le Séminaire VII, 370-71f, 321e). Contra Kaufman, one might read Peter Hallward’s introduction to his Think Again collection for an illuminating and concise presentation of the essential anti-conservatism of Badiou’s thought (7-12). For a much fuller treatment of Badiou’s effort to think the possibility of novelty, see Adrian Johnston’s outstanding piece “The Quick and the Dead” and its sequels: Zizek’s essay “Badiou: Notes from an Ongoing Debate” and Johnston’s reply, “Addendum: Let a thousand flowers bloom!”

16. Claire Joubert has objected to this de-emphasis on the linguistic in Badiou’s ethics and is correspondingly skeptical of the “compossibility” Badiou claims with the Lacanian subject which was theorized out of Lacan’s encounter with semiology in the 1950s (4). Badiou does develop his theory of subjectivity and ethics through the essential categories of semiology–presence and absence–even if he does so through set theory (as in what “counts” and what is void), rather than through Saussurean linguistics. By the 1970s Lacan himself was moving away from semiological formulations and increasingly toward mathematical models in describing his subject and the workings of the talking cure.

17. Distinguishing truth from opinion (or from a mere simulacrum of truth) appears to be a key difficulty in the elaboration of Badiou’s project thus far. Badiou himself commits the problem to the care of philosophy and regards it as the central task of philosophy–the ethical task of philosophy–to seize the truths that appear in art (and in science, love, and politics) and to announce them and distinguish them from mere opinion (Petit Manuel 28-29f, 14-15e). In this way, philosophy, too, faces the real, but it also contributes to the elaboration of truths within sense. Ernesto Laclau, in his incisive essay on Badiou, seems not to be comforted by the aid of philosophy in sorting out the success of such wagers. As Laclau puts it, one can hardly look to the logic of the situation itself to identify its true void as an event of truth; nor, in the case of a pseudo-event, can one really look to the pseudo-event to declare itself as mere simulacrum. In short, as we have also seen above, there seems to be no place within Badiou’s theoretical edifice from which to decisively enunciate a truth/simulacrum distinction (Hallward 123-26).

18. In this “Mallarmé” chapter from Being and Event, Badiou does not explicitly develop his thoughts on Mallarmé’s stellar imagery in the poem, “Coup de dés,” but it seems plain that, here as elsewhere for Badiou, “stellar” carries a Mallarméan resonance (see also Deleuze 11f, 4e and Petit Manuel 89f, 56e).

19. Zizek’s best-known essay on Badiou, “The Politics of Truth, or, Alain Badiou as a Reader of St Paul,” is largely staged in terms of Lacan’s Seminar VII: The Ethics of Psychoanalysis. See The Ticklish Subject (127-70). Zizek specifically cites Lacan’s ethical formula (ne pas céder sur son désir) at least twice in the same volume (153, 297).

20. Levinas employs the term throughout his late masterwork, Otherwise than Being (1974), where “trauma” appears in a number of contexts, from the way the transcendent encounter with alterity befalls the chosen ethical subject prior to will (10f, xlii-e and 95f, 56e), to the ethical exposure of the subject to sensibility and to pain in particular (82f, 48e), to the violence and unrepresentability in the “non-relation” of subject and other (196-197f, 123e and 195n1f, 197n27e), to the general problem of an ethics that strikes one from a place outside of being (225f, 144e). One might also recall Levinas’s answer to Philippe Nemo’s first question (“How does one begin thinking?”) in the Ethics and Infinity (1982) interviews: “It probably begins through traumatisms or gropings to which one does not even know how to give verbal form” (11f, 21e).

21. “L’écriture du générique: Samuel Beckett.”

22. “Qu’est-ce que l’amour?” On this point regarding the novel, see 254f, 264e.

23. This is a reference to Beckett’s short prose piece entitled “Lessness” (1970), which describes the endlessness of a landscape, ash grey under a grey sky, which Badiou reads as “the place of being” (“L’écriture” 334f, 6e).

24. In his book on Metapolitics, Badiou gives some brief, cryptic hints concerning the numericalities for politics (whose first term is the infinite, in the sense that politics “summons or exhibits the subjective infinity of the situation,” rejecting all finitude), for science (whose first term is the void), and for art (whose first term is a finite number). He also remarks that “the infinite comes into play in every truth procedure, but only in politics does it take the first place.” Further, and again cryptically, “Art presents the sensible in the finitude of a work, and the infinite only intervenes in it to the extent that the artist destines the infinite to the finite” (Theoretical Writings 154e).

25. Peter Dews, in his very interesting essay “States of Grace,” also remarks, briefly, on the similarity of such structures in the thought of Badiou and Levinas (Hallward 113-14).

26. Given his particular philosophical perspective, it makes sense that Badiou also regards psychoanalytic theory after Lacan as, above all, an elaboration of the Two of sexuation–and love, as Badiou writes, “is that from which the Two is thought” (Manifeste 63f, 83e). Hence, for Badiou, psychoanalysis after Lacan “is the modern treatment of the condition of love” (Manifeste 24f, 44e).

27. Curiously, Ralph Waldo Emerson, in his essay “The American Scholar,” uses a similarly vivid trope, describing man as a sort of monstrous amputee (53-54).

28. To be clear, I am not claiming that Heidegger, any more than Lacan or Badiou, is a thoroughgoing Romantic; only that Heidegger’s views specifically on art derive from the tradition initiated by the Romantics.

29. One might say that Lacan’s entire theory of art, as it appears in the Ethics seminar he gives his clinical trainees, aims to work through a practical puzzle: why it is that, in the course of an analysis, when the analysand approaches something he recognizes as “aggressive towards the fundamental terms of his subjective constellation,” he will, with predictable regularity, make reference to some work of literature or music (Le Séminaire VII, 280f, 238-239e; my translation).

30. For a superb treatment of Zizek’s relation to Badiou (and an outstanding treatment of Badiou’s relation to materialist thought in the tradition of Althusser), see Bruno Bosteels’s careful two-part essay in Pli, “Alain Badiou’s Theory of the Subject: The Recommencement of Dialectical Materialism?” See also Zizek’s rejoinder to Bosteels, “From Purification to Subtraction: Badiou and the Real” (Hallward 165-81), a much stronger essay than his earlier venture in The Ticklish Subject. In the newer essay, Zizek offers a more appreciative account of Badiou’s engagement with finitude and the real, though he misstates the case when he writes that the

ultimate difference between Badiou and Lacan thus concerns the relationship between the shattering encounter of the Real and the ensuing arduous work of transforming this explosion of negativity into a new order. For Badiou, this new order “sublates” the exploding negativity into a new consistent truth, while for Lacan, every Truth displays the structure of a (symbolic) fiction, i.e. no Truth is able to touch the Real. (Hallward 177)

It is not clear to me that Zizek has located a genuine dispute here. Badiou’s subject may indeed be tasked with “sublating” the truth into a new order of language, logic and sense, but Badiou also seems well aware that the status of the truth as real is lost in that very process and has instead lapsed into mere knowledge–albeit a new knowledge with (if one may put it this way) a still vibrant relation to the truth as real. Readers may recall a claim this essay cited earlier: “what we know of truth is merely knowledge” (Conditions 192f; Theoretical Writings 114e). I am intrigued, however, by Zizek’s idea that a kind of formalization, as an approach to the real, might allow Badiou to surpass the “Kantian” impasse that Zizek sees in the way Badiou manages the gap between situational knowledge and real truth and between finite animal and immortal subject (Hallward 174, 178). Regarding Zizek’s critique of Badiou’s Kantianism, see Johnston’s “There is Truth, and then there are truths–or, Slavoj Zizek as a Reader of Alain Badiou.”

31. Badiou’s clear sense that horror is not a necessary Lacanian association for the void or hole of the real is shown when he discusses the inaugural trauma of the subject in a 1991 paper presented to the Department of Psychoanalysis at the Paul-Valéry University: “We are so accustomed to thinking of castration in terms of horror that we are astonished to hear Lacan discussing it in terms of love” (Conditions 197f; Theoretical 120e).

32. Badiou’s examples in his Ethics include a range of contemporary moral discourses, from multiculturalism to Western humanitarianism to a certain formation of human rights discourse. Badiou’s philosophical objections to these moral discourses are fourfold. First, the centrality of the image of victimhood poses evil as primary and poses good as merely reactive and remediary. Second, the image of suffering (with the emotion of horror it produces) cripples thought and reason, including any truly progressive analysis of oppression. Third, in making a fetish of human suffering, such discourses take as their object only the most animal aspect of humanity and do not recognize the human being defined by his or her potential for situation-transcending thought and action. Fourth and finally, the set-apartness of any group under the exceptional name of “victim” participates in the anti-universalist gesture which for Badiou makes possible (as in the case of the European Jews) the group’s oppression to begin with. This fourth objection, or rather its example of the European and Israeli Jews in the twentieth and twenty-first centuries, has inspired a rather spirited public exchange in Les temps modernes (Dec. 2005 to Feb. 2006), where Badiou was accused of anti-Semitism. Eric Marty subsequently published his polemic as Une querelle avec Alain Badiou, philosophe (Gallimard, 2007).

In the short interview with Nicolas Weill in Le Monde, 15 July 2007, Badiou defends himself concisely against the charge of anti-Semitism and presents to a general reader his defense of universalism as emancipatory. Badiou’s philosophical claim is that, in an event, the ethical subject identifies the void of the existing situation as pertaining universally within that situation, informing its every aspect. Truth, we recall, is always universal for Badiou: a truth is true for all. In a pseudo-event, as in the revolutionary break claimed by the Nazis, the universality of the void is disavowed and the void itself displaced onto an exceptional set of particular elements (L’éthique 99-100f, 74e). For the Nazis, Jews (and others) filled this function and were subsequently, brutally, “voided” to speciously assert plenitude (rather than a void) in a situation that named German Jews as exceptions to the “German people.” Badiou sees a contemporary moral plenitude or prestige attached to the word “Jew,” and insofar as it refers to the sufferings of Jews in the Holocaust, it participates in that same gesture of setting apart a subset of elements as exceptional and subject to its own moral “truth.” Badiou is not at all dismissive of man’s “animal” suffering. He is not making a general, philosophical objection to collective action in pursuit of justice. He is not contesting the historical suffering of Jewish people or their rights to live in Israel. Rather, he is arguing that brutality and oppression are often banal cruelties “beneath” good and evil, having no relation to any situation-transcending event. He is arguing that any true political good proceeds from a universalist avowal of the real of a situational void, not a particularist displacement of the void. And he is arguing that a properly human politics proceeds out of an ethical fidelity to a singular, radical truth that inventively addresses the state of the situation and holds forth the promise of producing something new in relation to that situation.

Works Cited

• Apollon, Willy. “The Letter of the Body.” 1989. After Lacan: Clinical Practice and the Subject of the Unconscious. Ed. Robert Hughes and Kareen Malone. Albany, NY: State U of New York P, 2002. 103-15.
• Badiou, Alain. “Being by Numbers: Lauren Sedofsky Talks with Alain Badiou.” Artforum (October 1994): 84-87, 118, 123-24.
• —. Conditions. Paris: Éditions du Seuil, 1992.
• — . Deleuze: « La clameur de l’Etre ». Paris: Hachette, 1997. Deleuze: The Clamor of Being. Trans. Louise Burchill. Minneapolis: U of Minnesota P, 1999.
• —. “L’écriture du générique: Samuel Beckett.” 1989. Conditions. 329-66. Trans. as “The Writing of the Generic” in On Beckett. Ed. by Alberto Toscano and Nina Power. Manchester, England: Clinamen, 2003. 1-36.
• —. L’éthique: Essai sur la conscience du Mal. Paris: Éditions Hatier, 1993. Trans. as Ethics: An Essay on the Understanding of Evil. Trans. Peter Hallward. London: Verso, 2001.
• —. L’être et l’événement. Paris: Éditions du Seuil, 1988. Trans. as Being and Event. Trans. Oliver Feltham. London: Continuum, 2005.
• —. Manifeste pour la philosophie. Paris: Éditions du Seuil, 1989. Trans. as Manifesto for Philosophy. Trans. Norman Madarasz. Albany: State U of New York P, 1999.
• —. Petit Manuel d’Inesthetique. Paris: Éditions du Seuil, 1998. Trans. as Handbook of Inaesthetics. Trans. Alberto Toscano. Stanford UP, 2005.
• —. “Qu’est-ce que l’amour?” Conditions. 253-73. Trans. as “What is Love?” Trans. Justin Clemens. Sexuation. Ed. Renata Salecl. Durham: Duke UP, 2000. 263-281.
• —. “Le Recours philosophique au poème.” Conditions. 93-107. Trans. as “Philosophy and Art” in Infinite Thought. Ed. Oliver Feltham and Justin Clemens. London: Continuum, 2003. 69-82.
• —. Saint Paul: La fondation de l’universalisme. Paris: Presses Universitaires de France, 1997. Trans. as Saint Paul: The Foundation of Universalism. Trans. Ray Brassier. Stanford: Stanford UP, 2003.
• —. Theoretical Writings. Trans. Ray Brassier and Alberto Toscano. London: Continuum, 2004.
• Bergeron, Danielle. “Violence in Works of Art, or, Mishima, from the Pen to the Sword.” 1997. After Lacan: Clinical Practice and the Subject of the Unconscious. Ed. Robert Hughes and Kareen Malone. Albany: State U of New York P, 2002. 181-92.
• Bosteels, Bruno. “Alain Badiou’s Theory of the Subject: Part I. The Recommencement of Dialectical Materialism?” Pli 12 (2001): 200-29.
• —. “Alain Badiou’s Theory of the Subject: The Recommencement of Dialectical Materialism? (Part II)” Pli 13 (2002): 172-208.
• Cantin, Lucie. “The Trauma of Language.” 1993. After Lacan: Clinical Practice and the Subject of the Unconscious. Ed. Robert Hughes and Kareen Malone. Albany: State U of New York P, 2002. 35-47.
• Clemens, Justin. The Romanticism of Contemporary Theory: Institution, Aesthetics, Nihilism. London: Ashgate, 2003. 192-215.
• Emerson, Ralph Waldo. Essays and Lectures. New York: Library of America, 1983.
• Hallward, Peter, ed. Think Again: Alain Badiou and the Future of Philosophy. New York: Continuum, 2004.
• Heidegger, Martin. Erläuterungen zu Hölderlins Dichtung. 1944. Sechste Aufl. Ed. Friedrich-Wilhelm von Herrmann. Frankfurt am Main: Vittorio Klostermann, 1996. Trans. as Elucidations of Hölderlin’s Poetry. Trans. Keith Hoeller. Amherst: Humanity, 2000.
• Johnston, Adrian. “Addendum: Let a thousand flowers bloom! — Some Brief Remarks on and Responses to Zizek’s ‘Badiou: Notes from an Ongoing Debate.’” International Journal of Zizek Studies 1.2 (2007): 1-18.
• —. “The Quick and the Dead: Alain Badiou and the Split Speeds of Transformation.” International Journal of Zizek Studies 1.2 (2007): 1-32.
• —. “There is Truth, and then there are truths–or, Slavoj Zizek as a Reader of Alain Badiou.” International Journal of Zizek Studies 1.0 (2007): 141-85.
•  
• Joubert, Claire. “Badiou and the Ethics of Prose: Revaluing Beckett.” Polart–poétique et politique de l’art (30 July 2004): 1-17.
• Kant, Immanuel. Kritik der Urteilskraft. 1790. Ed. Gerhard Lehmann. Stuttgart: Philipp Reclam, 1963. Trans. as Critique of Judgment. Trans. Werner Pluhar. Cambridge: Hackett, 1987.
• Kaufman, Eleanor. “Why the Family is Beautiful (Lacan Against Badiou).” Diacritics 32.3-4 (Fall/Winter 2002): 135-51.
• Lacan, Jacques. Le Séminaire, Livre VII: L’éthique de la psychanalyse, 1959-1960. Ed. Jacques-Alain Miller. Paris: Éditions du Seuil, 1986. Trans. as The Seminar of Jacques Lacan. Book VII: The Ethics of Psychoanalysis, 1959-1960. Ed. Jacques-Alain Miller. Trans. Dennis Porter. New York: Norton, 1992.
• —. Le Séminaire, Livre XI: Les quatre concepts fondamentaux de la psychanalyse, 1964. Ed. Jacques-Alain Miller. Paris: Éditions du Seuil, 1973. Trans. as The Seminar of Jacques Lacan. Book XI: The Four Fundamental Concepts of Psycho-Analysis. Ed. Jacques-Alain Miller. Trans. Alan Sheridan. New York: W.W. Norton & Co., 1978.
• Levinas, Emmanuel. Autrement qu’être ou au-delà de l’essence. 1974. Paris: Kluwer Academic/Le Livre de Poche. Trans. as Otherwise than Being or Beyond Essence. Trans. Alphonso Lingis. Boston: Kluwer Academic Publishers, 1991.
• —. Éthique et infini: Dialogues avec Philippe Nemo. 1982. Paris: Fayard/Le Livre de Poche. Trans. as Ethics and Infinity: Conversations with Philippe Nemo. Trans. Richard A. Cohen. Pittsburgh: Duquesne UP, 1985.
• —. Le temps et l’autre. 1947. Paris: Quadrige/PUF, 2001. Trans. as Time and the Other. Trans. Richard A. Cohen. Pittsburgh: Duquesne UP, 1987.
• Poe, Edgar Allan. “The Purloined Letter.” 1844. Poetry and Tales. New York: Library of America, 1984. 680-98.
• Schiller, Friedrich. Über die ästhetische Erziehung des Menschen in einer Reihe von Briefen. 1795. Sämtliche Werke. Band V: Erzählungen; Theoretische Schriften. Herausgegeben von Wolfgang Riedel. München, Germany: Deutscher Taschenbuch Verlag, 2004. 570-669. Trans. as On the Aesthetic Education of Man. Trans. Reginald Snell. Mineola, NY: Dover, 2004.
• Schlegel, Friedrich. Athenäums-Fragmente. 1798. Kritische Schriften und Fragmente [1798-1801]. Studienausgabe. Band 2. Herausgegeben von Ernst Behler und Hans Eichner. Paderborn, Germany: Ferdinand Schöningh, 1988. 105-56. Trans. as Athenaeum Fragments. In Philosophical Fragments. Trans. Peter Firchow. Minneapolis: U of Minnesota P, 1991. 18-93.
• Zizek, Slavoj. “Badiou: Notes from an Ongoing Debate.” International Journal of Zizek Studies 1.2 (2007): 1-15.
• —. “The Politics of Truth, or, Alain Badiou as a Reader of St Paul.” The Ticklish Subject: The Absent Centre of Political Ontology. London: Verso, 2000. 127-70.

Jeffrey T. Nealon
Department of English
Pennsylvania State University
jxn8@psu.edu

I. Literature

On a recent trip to the library to find an essay that a visiting speaker was going to talk about, something odd (and a bit embarrassing) happened to me. I got the call number for the volume, and bee-lined directly to the library’s “P” shelves (the Library of Congress designation for language, literature and literary criticism/theory). But I found that the whole section had been moved–there were students working on laptops in the corner where literary criticism and theory used to be. I eventually found the volume I was looking for, along with some old friends like my own first book (a proud alum of PS 228, Class of ’93), relocated in the 5th floor stacks. I later asked the humanities librarian, when I saw him at the talk: “Hey, when did the ‘P’ section get moved to the 5th floor?” “2002,” he answered, a bit incredulously. I could see him wondering: this guy makes his living as an English professor, but he hasn’t been in the literary criticism section for years?
 

It struck me as puzzling as well. When I was in grad school–not that long ago–just about everything I needed to know was in the P section. I knew those shelves like the back of my hand. But I guess it is true that, in Library of Congress terms, for my work in recent years it’s been all B’s, H’s, and J’s (Philosophy, Social Science, and Politics), hardly any P’s–both in terms of the theory and criticism that I read, and in terms of the work that I publish. At first I thought that this was simply an anomaly of my research agendas; but an overwhelming number of colleagues I’ve since talked to about this experience have similar tales of the swerve around P. Others of course have different preferred Library of Congress designations for their research: the vast D through F shelves for the department historians, Q and R for science studies, more H and J for the queer theorists and cultural studies people, as well as a healthy smattering of G and T (geography and technology). And even those whose work remains firmly on the language and literature shelves admit that much of what goes into their books on literature requires research from other places: history, sociology, social science, not to mention the unclassifiable archival research that informs so much of the work on the P shelves. In short, even the scholarship on the language and literature shelves isn’t “literary” in quite the same way it was even a decade ago. There’s plenty of superb “theory” and “criticism” being produced in and around English departments, but the adjective “literary” seems oddly out of place when it comes to describing it–inapplicable as much to the work of historians (“don’t call us literary historians,” a colleague warns) as to theorists (editors at Rowman and Littlefield quickly wrenched the word “literary” out of the title of my co-authored textbook, The Theory Toolbox–marketing death, they said).

 
This swerve around P is probably something that most people reading this will recognize, in one way or another. And rather than coming before you to celebrate or denounce the demise of the “literary,” I’d like to think about how and why this situation came about, and how it may or may not be related to another story that’s making the rounds in literature departments, the so-called “death of theory.” To anticipate, I’ll suggest that research in and around language and literature is no longer “literary” most obviously in the sense that it’s no longer primarily concerned with producing interpretations of existing or emerging literary artifacts. This–let’s call it for now “anti-hermeneutic”–thrust is additionally the transversal line that connects the decline of the literary to the demise of “big theory.” As Jane Tompkins had pointed out in the heyday of theory, specifically in her 1980 collection Reader-Response Criticism, even as theorists fought seemingly life-and-death battles against new critical formalism, in the end those battles had the paradoxical effect of intensifying a crucial tenet of formalism: namely, what Tompkins calls “the triumph of interpretation” (219). Whether Wallace Stevens was all about organic unity or whether he was all about undecidability, either way it was interpretation all the way down.

 
Of course, there’s a semantic confusion involved when one argues that literary theory was and is beholden to interpretation, insofar as big theory in North American literature departments got off the ground in the 1970s precisely through its critique of new critical notions of literary meaning. The attempt or desire to go “Beyond Interpretation,” as Jonathan Culler names it in a 1976 essay, was part and parcel of the attempt to go beyond New Criticism. As Paul de Man writes, for example, with criticism’s departure from the universe of new critical reading, “the entire question of meaning can be bracketed, thus freeing the critical discourse from the debilitating burden of paraphrase” (28)–from any mimetic or thematic notion of meaning–and thereby allowing new horizons of interpretive possibilities. Which is to say that literary theory of the 1970s and 80s hardly abandons the project of interpretation wholesale–J. Hillis Miller famously insisted that “‘deconstruction’ is . . . simply interpretation as such” (230)–but the era of literary theory crucially shifts interpretation’s emphasis from the “what” of meaning (new criticism’s “debilitating burden of paraphrase”) to the “how” of meaning, the strangely “enabling” task of infinite interpretation. In retrospect, it seems clear that the era of poststructuralism was characterized by a decisive intensification of attention to the process (rather than the product) of interpretation. This interpretive mutation from what to how comprised “the triumph of theory.”
 

However, as theory triumphed over content- and theme-oriented criticism (as reading or interpretation became unmoored from older, new critical or structuralist versions of meaning), it’s important to recall that “meaning” nevertheless remained the privileged site of poststructuralist critical endeavor; in fact literary “meaning,” far from remaining a thematic unity hidden away within a rarified realm of dusty books, becomes in the poststructuralist theory era the slippery lure for “readings” of all kinds, the hermeneutic gesture exploded throughout the literary and social field. Despite the overt and constant critique of univocal meaning within literary theory (or more likely because of this critique’s ubiquity), the hermetic or insular notion of univocal meaning remains the structuring other buried within poststructuralist celebrations of interpretation’s open-endedness, a kind of shadow passenger who must always be kept at bay by interpretation. Interpretation, in short, becomes the enemy of univocal meaning in the theory era–but that old-fashioned sense of meaning still thereby remains a central concern, if only as that which is to be warded off by the critical act. (What, one might wonder, are the tasks or results of poststructuralist reading if they are not first and foremost gestures towards interpretation as an interminable enterprise?) As Culler writes in his 2006 defense of theory as poetics, The Literary in Theory, “One could say that literary studies in the American academy, precisely because of its commitment to the priority of interpretation as the goal of literary study, was quick to posit a ‘poststructuralism’ based on the impossibility or inappropriateness of the systematic projects of structuralism, so that interpretation, albeit of different kinds, might remain the task of literary studies” (10-11).
 

This decisive mutation from the what of hermeneutics to the how–in shorthand, from revealing meaning to performing readings–doesn’t simply abandon the structural position of “meaning” in the hermeneutic enterprise. Far from fading into the background, the interpretive act here swallows up everything: even death (as de Man provocatively insisted) becomes a displaced name for a linguistic predicament. Meaning is reborn, even as it arrives stillborn in each and every reading. Interrupted, reading-as-interpretation nevertheless continues–and it lives on even more strongly in its new-found assurance that the text will never be totalized. Meaning remains the impossible lure, the absent center, the lack or excess that continues to drive the critical enterprise. Textual undecidability of this variety has been very good to literary criticism. Instead of producing the nihilism and critical irrelevance that many traditionalists feared, the jettisoning of meaning-as-content was in retrospect absolutely necessary in order for poststructuralist hermeneutics to succeed. Open-ended interpretation was the practice that launched a thousand successful tenure cases (including mine). In the era of big theory, the stakes among competing methodologies were high, but they remained interpretive stakes.
 

Indeed, we need to recall that the MLA “theory wars” were characterized not so much by disputes between interpreters of literature and those who held that there was some other thing or set of things that critics should be doing in and around the literary; rather, the theory wars were largely internecine battles among interpretive camps or methods. Perhaps the most striking thing about some of the larger methodological claims from the “big theory” era is the way they feel now like clunky advertising campaigns or the remnants of a marketing war in which various methodologies jockey for market share, often deploying slogans that would seem to us now to be hilariously “totalizing”–something like your local bar’s claim to have “the best hot wings in the universe!” Perhaps the most infamous of these claims comes about in the aftermath of de Man’s reading of Proustian metaphor and metonymy in 1973’s “Semiology and Rhetoric”: “The whole of literature,” de Man writes, “would respond in similar fashion, although the techniques and patterns would have to vary considerably, of course, from author to author. But there is absolutely no reason why analyses of the kind suggested here for Proust would not be applicable, with proper modifications of technique, to Milton or to Dante or to Hölderlin. This in fact will be the task of literary criticism in the coming years” (32). From the vantage point of the present, it’s a little hard to believe that the “task of literary criticism in the coming years” could have been so earnestly and seriously (or perhaps winkingly and ironically?) presented as the application of one method among others.
 

Indeed, it’s hard to imagine someone today arguing that we should dedicate ourselves to the task of re-reading the canon according to the protocols of a particular interpretive approach (Geneva School phenomenology, Butler’s gender performativity, Foucaultian biopower, or Shlovsky’s Russian Formalism), but such claims were in fact ubiquitous in the era of big theory. Recall Fredric Jameson from The Political Unconscious (1981): “My position here is that only Marxism offers a philosophically coherent and ideologically compelling resolution to the dilemma of historicism . . . . Only Marxism can give us an adequate account of the essential mystery of the cultural past” (19). Jameson thematizes his entire project in this book as the articulation of a “properly Marxist hermeneutic” (23), responding to the “demand for the construction of some new and more adequate, immanent or antitranscendent hermeneutic model” (23). One could go on multiplying these kinds of claims from the big theory era, recalling for example that the subtitle of Henry Louis Gates’s The Signifying Monkey (1988) is nothing less comprehensive than “A Theory of African-American Literary Criticism,” or recalling the claims made for certain kinds of interpreters–resisting or otherwise–in reader-response criticism.
 

My point here is not to underline the hubris of the North American theory era, but to suggest that the big claims of big theory were underwritten by a disciplinary apparatus in and around literature departments that was completely beholden to interpretation (especially in terms of research publication). Whether it was deconstruction, Marxism, African-American criticism, or almost anything else, the era of big theory was an era of interpretative models that fought for the status as the most powerful and universally applicable one–the “winner” being the critical method that could succeed in festooning the pages of the most journals with its inventive new readings of texts. As Josue Harari writes in his hugely successful 1979 anthology Textual Strategies, “method has become a strategy” (72). As Harari continues describing his anthology of strategic interpretive methods, “I have presented the various critical struggles at play among contemporary theorists. It remains to inscribe these strategies in a more global framework, to put them in a ring of criticism, as it were, and to determine how the rounds are to be scored” (68-9). And back in the day, scoring those rounds amounted to judging which was the most persuasive “new” interpretation of a given text. The era of big theory constituted a decisive intensification, rather than a reversal or abandonment, of literary meaning and its discontents.
 

While it’s taken a quarter-century, contemporary criticism at this point seems to have fully heeded Tompkins’s 1980 call for research to swerve away from interpretation and reconnect to what she calls “a long history of critical thought in which the specification of meaning is not a central concern” (201): a criticism based not so narrowly on the interior or formal relations among discourse and meaning, but focused instead on “the relations of discourse and power” (226). Tompkins’s “break with formalism” (226) seems plausible enough as a description of recent history in literary criticism and theory (when was the last time you heard a junior job candidate do an actual close reading of a poem?), and one could at this point begin multiplying anti-hermeneutic references: critical theories invested in Deleuze and Guattari, Foucault, Gumbrecht, the later Jameson, Irigaray, Franco Moretti’s sociology of literary forms, or Bourdieu’s work on cultural capital; virtually the whole of fields like cultural studies, rhetoric, science studies, globalization studies, and a strongly resurgent (in fact, hegemonically dominant) “old” historicism in literary studies. One could add the decidedly other-than-hermeneutic thrust of artistic formations like the “unreadable” postmodern novel, almost all contemporary American poetry (both the so-called workshop tradition–which relies largely on communicating subjective affect rather than semantic meaning–and more experimental traditions), contemporary painting, performance art, and so on.
 

While something like Tompkins’s account of recent American literary critical history seems plausible enough to me (tracing a path from the hegemony of research questions concerning textual interpretation or meaning to the reign of questions about literature’s inscription in history, discourse, power, or the everyday), I’d like to supplement or combine it here with a wholly different account of the swerve around the literary, Alain Badiou’s in Manifesto for Philosophy. I’d like to do so not only because of the interest of Badiou’s account of continental philosophy’s current state, but also because hybridizing Tompkins’s account with Badiou’s may actually help to re-situate or re-imagine a future for the literary. In short, it seems to me that on Tompkins’s account (and others like it), the literary remains the marker for a kind of stale, apolitical formalism obsessed with questions of interpretive meaning and little else; if one accepts this rendering of recent critical history, it’s hard to be concerned about the passing of the literary, and/or equally hard to imagine any productive research future for the adjective “literary” in “literary criticism and theory.”
 

The question of meaning is, and I think will remain, the bread and butter of classroom practice in literature departments; in particular, the undergraduate theory class will continue to function as an invaluable introduction to interpretive protocols for some time to come. For faculty research, however, I think it’s a different story: while research surrounding the mechanics and production of meaning (and/or its flipside undecidability) experienced a boom during the big theory years, it’s almost impossible only a few years later to imagine a publishing future that consists of new interpretations of Pynchon, Renaissance tragedies, or Melville. Contra much of the reactionary hope invested in the passing of “big theory” (“Finally, now we can go back to reading and appreciating literature, without all this jargon!”), the decisive conceptual difference separating the present from the era of big theory is not so much a loss of status for theoretical discourses (just look at any university press catalog and you’ll be quickly disabused of that notion), but the waning of literary interpretation itself as a viable research (which is to say, publishing) agenda.
 

In the end, it is the taken-for-grantedness of literary interpretation’s centrality, rather than a wholesale disciplinary rejection of something called theory, that separates our present from the era of big theory. And if there’s no “next big thing” coming down the theory pike, it’s precisely because such a notion of “next big thing” (like feminism, deconstruction, or new historicism in their day) has tended to mean the arrival of a new interpretive paradigm. There’s no new interpretive paradigm on the horizon not so much because of the exhaustion of theory itself (there are many under-explored interpretive models or theorists) but because the work of interpretation is no longer the primary research work of literature departments. There will be no Blanchot revolution, televised or otherwise.
 

To put the same problem somewhat differently, in the era of big literary theory there was a certain unease at the perceived increasing distance between classroom practice and research publication–producing close readings in classrooms, deconstructing them in journals. But in the present context, that perceived “gap” seems like a positive continuity, because back in the day, at least it was the same general operation–interpretation–at work both in the Introduction to Literature class and in PMLA. But if the work that we’re publishing these days is increasingly driven by questions that seem foreign to interpretive classroom practice, that should give us pause–if for no other reason than to consider how the future of our discipline might be related to the practices that dominated its recent past. It is, in the end, precisely in the name of re-imagining a future for the “literary” that I turn to Badiou’s account of its demise in recent philosophy.

II. Philosophy

While Badiou’s work is becoming well-known in North America–the Chronicle of Higher Education recently tagged him as a potential “next big thing” in the theory world, surely the kiss of death (see Byrne)–a brief discussion of some of his thought is relevant in this context. Against the thematics of the twilight of philosophy, and against all messianisms, Badiou calls for thinking’s revitalization, primarily through an emphasis on what he calls a “positive,” non-sacramental relation to infinity–a relation that, for Badiou, is on display most forcefully in the axiomatic thrust of mathematics. In returning to what he sees as the Greek origins of philosophy–he goes so far as to call his thinking a “Platonism of the multiple” (Manifesto 103)–Badiou locates four “conditions of philosophy”: “the matheme, the poem, political invention, and love” (35). Western philosophy is said to have begun in Greece with these four topics (science, literature, politics, desire), and for Badiou “the lack of a single one gives rise to [philosophy’s] dissipation” (35), which isn’t to say its end. Philosophical thinking is in danger whenever it becomes tied too closely and exclusively to one of its four-fold conditions. The danger, for Badiou, is “handing over the whole of thought to one generic procedure . . . . I call this type of situation a suture. Philosophy is placed in suspension every time it presents itself as being sutured to one of its conditions” (61). So, for example, Marxism has often been too sutured to the political condition–here Badiou even implicates his own earlier Maoism (76)–while analytic philosophy has on the whole sutured itself too closely to the scientism of the matheme. “Philosophy,” in its simplest definition, is for Badiou “de-suturation” (67), the interruption of an exclusive thought-suture to either politics, science, love, or the literary. Hence, Badiou calls his a “subtractive” thinking, one that subtracts itself from constrictive sutures, to reconnect with the multiple.
 

The most totalizing suture of recent philosophical times, Badiou writes polemically, is not the political or the scientific-mathematical, or even privatized “love,” but the poetic, the literary suture. As he insists, today “it so happens that the main stake, the supreme difficulty, is to de-suture philosophy from its poetic condition” (67). Badiou rather cannily chooses Heidegger as his main foil in this argument. Even Heidegger’s staunchest proponents would agree that the literary is in fact the ground of his thinking; he has relatively little compelling to say about politics, mathematics, or love for that matter–or, more precisely, anything compelling that he might have to say about those topics would have to run through the poetic, as this suture is the ontological ground of the space of possibility in Heidegger’s thinking. Anything that emerges does so in Heidegger through the structure of the literary opening, that privileged path to the meaning of Being.

 
Of course, my two exemplary accounts of the literary’s demise (Tompkins’s and Badiou’s) do not map seamlessly onto one another, for a whole host of disciplinary, historical, and geographical reasons. Most obviously, one might point out that the lion’s share of American literary theory (or most continental philosophy, for that matter) isn’t or never was so Heideggerian as Badiou’s account would seem to suggest. However, much of the “big theory” era in literature departments did, I think, share the bond that both Badiou and Tompkins point out: the questions of “meaning” or interpretation as the ultimate horizon of inquiry. This hermeneutic thrust was prominently on display in virtually all big theory in literature departments, even in the polemically new historicist work of people like the boundary 2 New Americanists, as well as in much of the early new historicist work in English literature (think here of a great book like Jonathan Dollimore’s Radical Tragedy, which deploys its historical materialist mix of religion, ideology, and power primarily to produce startling new readings of Renaissance tragedies). Likewise, however anti-Heideggerian much Tel Quel thinking may have been, it did nonetheless protect the horizon of hermeneutics (the literary suture) as the royal road to larger philosophical and cultural questions. Like Tompkins’s call for literary criticism to reconnect to a non-hermeneutic tradition, then, Badiou’s critique of the poetic suture in philosophy is less a spring-green avant gardism (calling for a radical new direction in thought), than it is an attempt to return critique to a series of other questions, ones not treated well within the poetic idiom. As Badiou writes, “Descartes, Leibnitz, Kant or Hegel might have been mathematicians, historians, or physicists; if there is one thing they were not, it was poets” (70).

 
Contrary to Tompkins’s diagnosis of literary criticism circa 1980, however, Badiou doesn’t treat the poetic suture of neo-Heideggerian thought primarily as an ideological swerve away from the real or from crucial questions of its day–politics, power, gender, etc. For Badiou, the poetic suture is not primarily the offspring of a false or deluded consciousness concerning the centrality of literature: “there really was an age of poets” (70)–Badiou dates it from Hölderlin to Celan, 1770–1970–when the central problems of philosophy were worked out most forcefully and concisely in poetic texts. Literary works for a long time presented us with our most crucial philosophical enigmas: “the most open approach to the question of being,” “the space of compossibility least caught up in the brutal sutures” of political coercion, “the enigma of time” (70), and of course the undulations of love and desire. Badiou, in other words, hardly seeks to dismiss the power of the poetic suture in philosophy: “Heidegger’s thinking has owed its persuasive power to having been the only one to pick up what was at stake in the poem, namely the destitution of object fetishism, the opposition of truth and knowledge, and lastly the essential disorientation of our epoch” (74). On Badiou’s account the literary became central to a whole era of thought not primarily because of the ideological investments of its proponents (the general claim that’s not too far below the surface of Tompkins’s critique of formalist fetishizing of the poem), but precisely because the literary spoke most forcefully and succinctly to a whole set of crucial questions (political and otherwise): literature’s critique of object and commodity fetishism (the poem’s anti-instrumental resistance to appropriation), poetry’s singular epistemological force (the impossibility of assigning it an “objective” meaning), and the literary’s testimony to the existential disorientation of the era. These were all crucial philosophical questions that could be accessed in their most intense manifestations primarily through the literary or hermeneutic suture–through the question of meaning and its discontents.
 

Badiou’s concern is less to debunk the prestige, ideology, or inherent interest of the literary relation to philosophy, but to explore or emphasize what we might call the “cost” of a primary suture onto the literary–how it recasts or downplays thinking’s relations to what Badiou sees as its other properly philosophical themes (the political, love, and the mathematical – scientific). If, as Badiou insists, “ultimately, being qua being is nothing but the multiple as such” (“Being by Numbers,” n.p.), then the literary suture can do little more than endlessly demonstrate or gesture toward this multiplicity, in what Badiou suggests is a primarily theological register. Poetry, he insists, functions largely as the “local maintenance of the sacred” (Manifesto 57), as repository of hidden meaning or the marker for infinite possibility. Badiou, on the other hand, takes his primary task to be the “secularization of infinity,” which is why for Badiou the mathematical language of set theory becomes a privileged one. It drains infinity or the multiple of its Barthesian “jouissance”: “that’s the price of a deromanticization of infinity,” he writes. Quite simply, “Mathematics secularizes infinity in the clearest way, by formalizing it” (“Being by Numbers”). The project for Badiou is less guaranteeing the openness of infinity (which was the primary job of the literary during the age of the poem), than it is mobilizing said infinity (the job that characterizes politics, science, love).
 

This, unfortunately, is also where Badiou’s account begins to become unhelpful for rethinking a genealogy of recent developments in the history of literary criticism and/or philosophy, as his mathematical impulse is driven in large part by an attempt not to connect thinking to this or that transversal field, but to insist on philosophy’s (absolute) autonomy as that discourse dedicated to the ahistorical “truth” best represented by mathematics: “I propose to tear philosophy away from this genealogical imperative” (Manifesto 115), he writes. “To forget history–this at first means to make decisions of thinking without returning to a supposed historical sense prescribed by these decisions. It is a question of breaking with historicism to enter, as someone like Descartes or Spinoza did, into an autonomous legitimating of discourse. Philosophy must take on axioms of thinking and draw consequences from them” (115). For Badiou, this ahistorical thrust must break with poetic suture, precisely because the poetic comprises (as its inherent strength) a thinking “vis-à-vis,” always in relation to the object or the world (rather than the ahistorical truth) as the bearer of the multiple.

 
Unfashionable as it surely is, Badiou’s Platonism of the multiple is just that, fidelity to a “truth without object” (Manifesto 93): “The task of such a thinking is to produce a concept of the subject such that it is supported by no mention of the object, a subject, if I might say, without vis-à-vis. This locus has a bad reputation, for it invokes Bishop Berkeley’s absolute idealism. As you have realized, it is, yet, to the task of occupying it that I am devoted” (93). As much as I appreciate (and to a large extent agree with) his sizing up of the “cost” of thinking’s primary suture onto the literary, this absolutist notion of the “subject” and ahistorical “fidelity” (to the originary “truth-procedure” or the founding “event” of truth) is where I get off the Badiou boat, desperately seeking again the literary bateau ivre. Badiou’s thinking here seems to put us all somewhere in the vicinity of the quarter deck of the Pequod, consistently menaced by a kind of dictatorial subjective decisionism masquerading (as it so often does) as absolute fidelity to the ahistorical truth. As Badiou writes, “there is no ethical imperative other than ‘Continue!,’ ‘Continue in your fidelity!’” (“Being by Numbers”)–perhaps one could translate it as “Keep on Truckin”? As the outline of a potential ethics, this notion of single-minded fidelity toward an ahistorical “truth without object” for me summons up the words of a great literary figure who himself most rigorously refused the world of relation (the vis-à-vis): “I would prefer not to.”
 

Badiou’s North American popularity, such as it is, may come from his sledgehammer critique of liberalism: in an American political world where the moniker “leftist” is virtually synonymous with “flip-flopper,” Badiou’s self-founding subject and Maoist political “fidelity” solve some of the problems that traditional liberalism creates for politics. If nothing else, Maoism is good for things like knowing what the truth is, or the only correct way to find it; tenacious commitment and fidelity to the cause; knowing which side you’re on (an intensified version of Schmitt’s friend/enemy distinction comprises virtually the whole field of Badiou’s “prescriptive politics”).[1] It also offers a virtual guarantee that what you’re doing at any given point can be called “authentic resistance” (insofar as someone in the truth is by definition fighting the good fight against the enemy). Despite the guard rails that Badiou consistently throws up against a purely subjective decisionism (e.g., that truth procedures must be “generic,” thereby open to all), one might argue that his thought remains not so much haunted as it is grounded by a decisionism or voluntarism.

 
The “plus” side of Badiou’s Maoism is, ironically, that it looks like a pretty good description of Bush Administration practices (the war on terror is “without vis-à-vis” indeed!); but at the end of the day, one person’s universal and ahistorical “truth-procedure” is–a thousand references to Plato, Leo Strauss, Hayek, or the Koran notwithstanding–inexorably another person’s doxa. This conceptual slippage (between the individual and the group, the universal and the particular, absolute truth and mere opinion) is, of course, the central problem around which liberalism configures itself; but as tempting or satisfying as it might be to jettison the inherent slipperiness of political events in the name of an absolute subjective and group commitment, this comes only at the cost of intensifying the fundamental problems of liberalism (and, indeed, the central problems of the contemporary economic and political world): fidelity toward those who share my commitment, and little but suspicion for all the others. What we might call the “Badiou cocktail”–as Daniel Bensaid suggests, a potent mix of “theoretical elitism and practical moralism” (101)–hardly offers much of a hangover cure from liberal political theory’s failures and historical disasters. While there are myriad problems with contemporary liberalism (or even more so neo-liberalism), the most pressing among them is hardly that liberalism displays too little moralism, decisionism, or elitism. So why be interested in Badiou’s account at all? Or what can it offer us over and above something like Tompkins’s swerve around the literary?
 

It seems to me that Badiou offers a way to think the literary again as one of a series of other crucial topics (love, science, politics, etc.), without literature’s having to carry the burden of being the privileged or necessary approach to those other questions. I think that Badiou is right when he suggests that literary interpretation has been the primary suture of our recent past, and that this suture has proven costly or ineffective when it’s exported wholesale into other fields of inquiry. Politics, science, and love (one might add here most art forms in general) are hardly realms where “meaning” of a literary kind makes much difference, and it can be a bit of a “disaster” (Badiou’s word) to confuse political or mathematical questions with questions of literary interpretation. But, and this seems to be the most serious problem with Badiou’s account, such an over-reliance on the literary suture can hardly be rectified by absolutizing the mathematical or scientific suture: that “solution” seems to intensify the problem by insisting again on the autonomy of one suture over the others. (Indeed, the problem may be insisting that there are only four sutures, when in fact it seems that, mathematically speaking, there would have to be “n” sutures, an infinite number, just as there are “n” friends and “n” enemies within the political realm.[2] But in some ways Badiou remains right on target. We do at this point need to desacrilize the interpretive, but without handing over the whole operation to Badiou’s solutions: the matheme, the self-grounding subject, the ahistorical truth, a prescriptive “with us or against us” politics. This kind of hesitation or critique undoubtedly makes me a Badiouean enemy, a liberal accomodationist. So be it. I think Foucault critiques the friend/enemy distinction best: “Who fights against whom? We all fight each other. And there is always within each of us something that fights something else . . . . [at the level of] individuals, or even sub-individuals” (Power 208).[3]

III. Literature and Philosophy

While I subscribe fully to neither of the general accounts that I sketch above, it seems to me that Badiou’s philosophical account of the literary’s demise, hybridized with Tompkins’s literary-critical one, offers us some provocative ways to think through the future of the literary and its possible future relations to philosophy. First, while these two accounts diverge in significant ways, they both suggest that the hegemony of the “literary” in recent theory is in fact better understood as the hegemony of “meaning” (and its flipside, undecidability); likewise, both accounts agree that hermeneutics doesn’t and shouldn’t saturate the category of the “literary.” The first time around, in the era of big theory, the disciplinary relationship between literature and philosophy was pretty clear: literary studies needed interpretive paradigms, which it found in philosophy; and philosophy needed some real-world application, a place to show examples of what it could do, and it found this oftentimes in literature. Either way, the relation between philosophy and literature in the era of big theory was almost wholly a narrow hermeneutic one, having to do with the mechanics, production and (im)possibility of meaning.

 
Against this narrowly interpretive sense of literature, I suggest that the literary can, in a more robust sense, comprise a thinking “vis-à-vis without meaning.” While this probably sounds a little odd–what’s literature without the question of meaning?–it always seemed equally strange to me that literary studies found itself so completely territorialized on this question of meaning, when virtually no other art form or art criticism is as obsessed by it. “What does it mean?” seems like the wrong question to ask, for example, about music or sculpture, not to mention performance art or post-impressionist painting. And it’s always seemed to me likewise a puzzling (and, finally, zero-sum) question to put to Joyce’s texts or to Shakespeare’s.
 

Indeed, the strength of literature, contra Badiou, lies in its constitution of a strong–infinitely molecular–brand of thinking the vis-à-vis, of thinking about and through the world of infinite relation. The mistake or Achilles heel of the literary suture, though, was that in the era of big literary theory, this inherently positive, multiple, machinic, and molecular thinking was overthrown by questions of “meaning”–which is to say, questions about the neo-theological play of presence and absence. Such a hermeneutic thinking of the multiple is always and necessarily tied to the lack or absence of a kind of neo-objectivist one (multiple interpretations being thought in hermeneutics primarily through a founding absence, the flown god or the death of the author). The “presence” of this thing called meaning is always already made possible by the chiasmic “absence” of some thing or things (the spectral materiality of the signifier, the haunting of other interpretations, the originary dispensation of being, etc). As its primary Achilles Heel, the hermeneutic suture commits you to showing first and foremost what literature can’t do (it can’t mean univocally), rather than what it can do (a thousand other things). Such hermeneutic literary theory is inexorably a thinking based on lack. Find the gaps, fissures, or absences, and there you’ll find either a secret trace of lost or impossible plenitude (the hidden subtext of meaning), or a hollowing out of the text so as to render it multiply undecidable. And, as much as it pains me to say this, it is those strictly-speaking interpretive questions (that painstaking tracing of the chiasmic reversals of presence and absence of meaning in a text) that are at this point dead ends in literary research. Don’t believe it? Try deconstructing the hell out of an Emily Dickinson poem, and send the results to PMLA–see what happens.

 
By way of a caveat or disclaimer, it seems to me that the future of the literary is not at all a matter of finding ways simply to abandon the theoretical discussion of literature that was inaugurated by new criticism and intensified in the era of big theory. To my mind, that’d be a huge mistake because, after all, new critical interpretation was the thing that took the backyard conversation that was “literature” and made it into a research profession, for better or worse. My provocation here, if I have one at all, is simply asking theoreticians to rethink the possible sets of relation among literature and philosophy, other than in the key of interpretation. This is a call that has already been well heeded by our literature department colleagues: historicists, environmental critics, public intellectuals, and myriad others are producing vital and interesting work in and around literature, outside the mechanics of meaning. However, the department theorist–mon semblable, mon frère et soeur–seems these days to be mired in a kind of funk, too many of us driven by a sense that our heyday has passed, leaving us stuck with a hard drive full of Heideggerian readings of The Anglo-Saxon Chronicle (I actually have such an essay, should anyone care to read it), or bereft of journals interested in our inventive uses of Agamben to interpret The Scarlet Letter.
 

But enough mourning for Big Theory.[4] So much does, in fact, depend on “a red wheelbarrow / glazed with rain water / beside the white chickens”–so much more than meaning depends on the sense of irreducibly multiple relation that is this thing called literature. And as Badiou suggests, at this point in the history of the literary, a release from the hermeneutic suture may in fact be what poetry “wants”: its primary job should, perhaps, no longer be to provide exemplary fodder for interpretive methods or to offer examples of philosophical truths. I can already feel a kind of query or invitation from the reader: “Yes, I’ve had it with bland historicist job talks concerning novels written by pirates, or tracking what Frederick Douglass did on the weekend, and would love to think theoretically about the literary again. How about an example of the kind of reading you’re talking about–using, say, Heart of Darkness as a sample text? Show us what your paradigm can do–take it out for a test drive on Conrad.” No dice. That whole sense of offering an example reading or a critical template is, as I’ve argued above, itself a relic of the “big theory” era that I’m asking theorists to consider fleeing. I’m not interested in founding a new interpretive school here, nor in prescribing hot topics for critique. I’m simply insisting that, despite claims to the contrary, the literary–and with it literary theory–is or should be alive and well, but only if we abandon our nostalgia for the primary suture of the interpretive itself, and turn literature and literary theory back to the multiplicity of uses and questions that characterize our engagements with other forms of expression–to reinvigorate the myriad transversal theoretical connections among literature and philosophy, outside the interpretive suture. It’s already happening in a widespread way: just look at the table of contents for any recent “good” journal and you’ll see plenty of theoretically-inflected work, but very little of it begins or ends with the question of literary “meaning.”
 

Maybe in fact the current state of affairs–the swerve around P–commits theorists to revisit the critique of “interpretation” that got literary theory off the ground in the first place, and to locate there a series of roads less traveled. I think here of moments like Michel Foucault’s call, at the beginning of 1969’s Archaeology of Knowledge, not to treat historical monuments and archives as documents (delving ever more into the question of the past’s “meaning”), but to treat documents and archives as monuments, to remain at the descriptive level of the document itself rather than attempting to ventriloquize archives or render texts “meaningful” through an interpretive method of some kind (see pp. 6-7). Or one could recall Deleuze and Guattari’s provocations in A Thousand Plateaus, where “the triumph of theory” goes by the much less grandiose name “interpretosis . . . humankind’s fundamental neurosis” (114). Their symptomology of this malady goes like this: “every sign refers to another sign, and only to another sign, ad infinitum . . . . The world begins to signify before anyone knows what it signifies; the signifier is given without being known. Your wife looked at you with a funny expression. And this morning the mailman handed you a letter from the IRS and crossed his fingers. Then you stepped in a pile of dog shit. You saw two sticks positioned on the sidewalk like the hands of a watch. They were whispering behind your back when you arrived at the office. It doesn’t matter what it means, it’s still signifying. The sign that refers to other signs is struck with a strange impotence and uncertainty, but mighty is the signifier that constitutes the chain” (112). There remains, in Deleuze and Guattari’s world, much interesting that can be said about stepping in a pile of dog shit or being summoned by the IRS; but what those events mean–inside or outside the context of a novel–is hardly the only place to begin or end a theoretical inquiry. In the search for lines of flight, one could even return to Culler’s “Beyond Interpretation,” and its proleptic response to those who still today yearn for the “next big thing” in literary theory: “there are many tasks that confront contemporary criticism, many things that we need if we are to advance our understanding of literature, but if there is one thing we do not need it is more interpretations of literary works” (246). In fact, Culler’s 1976 diagnosis of “The Prospects of Contemporary Criticism” seems a fitting (if largely unheard) caveat for the decades of literary theory that would follow: “the principle of interpretation is so strong an unexamined postulate of American criticism that it subsumes and neutralizes even the most forceful and intelligent acts of revolt” (253).

 
I fear that many of us in the theory world–people in literature departments who “do theory” for a living–have been slow to engage fully with changing research practices in literature departments. Nobody in music theory, architecture theory, or art theory ever really asks what the work of Beethoven, Brunelleschi, or Jackson Pollock means. These days, maybe that question doesn’t make much sense for literary theorists either.

Notes

1. As Hallward writes, Badiou’s “problem with Schmitt’s concept of the political, in other words, is that it is not prescriptive enough. Politics divides, but not between friends and enemies (via the mediation of the state). Politics divides the adherents of a prescription against its opponents” (774). That’s right, the official political theorist of the Third Reich was too soft–“not prescriptive enough“– in his thinking of the friend/enemy distinction.

2. Infinity, at the end of the Badiouean day, is akin to the il y a of Levinas, the given multiplicity of the world that we have to “evade” if we are to be ethical subjects (see Nealon 53-72). For his part, Badiou writes that “Most of the time, the great majority of us live outside ethics. We live in the living multiplicity of the situation” (“Being by Numbers”). For Badiou, as for Levinas, infinity or multiplicity is something that has to be escaped rather than deployed otherwise (a la Deleuze) or mapped (à la Foucault): “The set of a situation’s various bodies of knowledge I call ‘the encyclopedia’ of the situation. Insofar as it refers only to itself, however, the situation is organically without truth” (“Being by Numbers”). All claims to radicality notwithstanding, this is the profoundly conservative heart of Badiou’s thought: Truth either has to be autonomous and absolute, or there’s nothing but the chaos of the bad infinite. That sentiment is, it seems to me, the driver not of philosophy, but of philosophy’s (eternal?) enemy, dogmatism.

Unlike Levinas’s, Badiou’s ethics is (literally) not for everyone. In “Being by Numbers,” Badiou is asked by an interviewer about the ethics of the ordinary person, who doesn’t care much for universal “truth”: “But can one seriously confide and confine ethics to mathematicians, political activists, lovers, and artists? Is the ordinary person, by definition, excluded from the ethical field?” He responds not in a Foucaultian way (with the sense that we are all hailed by literal encyclopedias of truth-procedures), but with this: “Why should we think that ethics convokes us all? The idea of ethics’ universal convocation supposes the assignment of universality. I maintain that the only immanent universality is found in the truth procedure. We are seized by the really ethical dimension only inside a truth procedure. Does this mean that the encounter of ethical situations or propositions is restricted to the actors of a truth procedure? I understand that this point is debatable” (“Being by Numbers”). It’s “debatable” whether most people are capable of ethics or truth? That really is Platonism for a new age.

It seems equally clear that Badiouian “events,” those drivers of change in the historical and political world, are exceedingly rare and addressed narrowly to certain quite unique individuals–people like Badiou, one would assume, who are long on smarts and short on modesty: “Actually, I would submit that my system is the most rigorously materialist in ambition that we’ve seen since Lucretius” (“Being by Numbers”).

3. Badiou is, of course, no fan of Foucault, though given sentiments like the following, it’s hard to imagine he’s read Foucault closely: “Foucault is a theoretician of encyclopedias. He was never really interested in the question of knowing whether, within situations, anything existed that might deserve to be called a ‘truth.’ With his usual corrosiveness, he would say that he didn’t have to deal with this kind of thing. He wasn’t interested in the protocol of either the appearance or the disappearance of a given epistemic organization” (“Being By Numbers”). Foucault was of course obsessed by nothing other than the appearance and disappearance of epistemic organizations (sovereign power, social power, discipline, biopower), which he called “ways of speaking the truth.” Though of course the only “truth” worth the name in Badiou is ahistorical and subjective, and here Foucault can be “corrosive” indeed: “Truth is a thing of this world: it is induced only by virtue of multiple forms of constraint. And it induces regular effects of power . . . . The problem is not changing people’s consciousness–or what’s in their heads–but the political, economic, institutional regime of the production of truth” (Power 131, 133).

4. Maybe literary theorists need to heed something like Badiou’s call to philosophers: “Philosophy has not known until quite recently how to think in level terms with Capital, since it has left that field open, to its most intimate point, to vain nostalgia for the sacred, to obsession with Presence, to the obscure dominance of the poem, to doubt about its own legitimacy . . . . The true question remains: what has happened to philosophy for it to refuse with a shudder the liberty and strength a desacralizing epoch offered it?” (Manifesto 58-9).

Works Cited

• Badiou, Alain. “Being by Numbers: Interview with Lauren Sedofsky.” ArtForum (Oct. 1994). Accessed online 15 April 2006 < http://findarticles.com/p/articles/mi_m0268>.
• —. Manifesto for Philosophy. Trans. Norman Madarasz. Albany: SUNY P, 1999.
• Bensaid, Daniel. “Alain Badiou and the Miracle of the Event.” Think Again: Alain Badiou and the Future of Philosophy. Ed. Peter Hallward. London: Continuum, 2004.
• Byrne, Richard. “Being M. Badiou: The French Philosopher Brings His Ideas to America, Creating a Buzz.” Chronicle of Higher Education. 24 March 2006. Accessed online 25 March 2006.
• Culler, Jonathan. “Beyond Interpretation: The Prospects of Contemporary Criticism.” Comparative Literature 28.3 (1976): 244-56.
• —. The Literary in Theory. Stanford: Stanford UP, 2006.
• Deleuze, Gilles, and Félix Guattari. A Thousand Plateaus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia, Volume 2. Trans. Brian Massumi. Minneapolis: U of Minnesota P, 1987.
• de Man, Paul. “Semiology and Rhetoric.” Diacritics 3.3 (1973): 27-33.
• Dollimore, Jonathan. Radical Tragedy: Religion, Ideology, and Power in the Drama of Shakespeare and His Contemporaries. Chicago: U of Chicago P, 1984.
• Foucault, Michel. The Archaeology of Knowledge. Trans. AM Sheridan Smith. New York: Pantheon, 1972.
• —. Power/Knowledge. Ed. Colin Gordon. Trans. Colin Gordon et al. New York: Pantheon, 1980.
• Gates, Henry Louis. The Signifying Monkey: A Theory of African-American Literary Criticism. Oxford: Oxford UP, 1988.
• Hallward, Peter. “The Politics of Prescription.” SAQ 104.4 (2005): 769-89.
• Harari, Josue. Textual Strategies: Perspectives in Post-Structuralist Criticism. Ithaca: Cornell UP, 1979.
• Hillis Miller, J. “The Critic as Host.” Deconstruction and Criticism. Ed. Harold Bloom, et al. New York: Seabury, 1979. 217-54.
• Jameson, Fredric. The Political Unconscious. Ithaca: Cornell UP, 1981.
• Nealon, Jeffrey T. Alterity Politics: Ethics and Performative Subjectivity. Durham: Duke UP, 1998.
• Tompkins, Jane, ed. Reader-Response Criticism: From Formalism to Post-Structuralism. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins UP, 1980.

Carrie Noland
Department of French and Italian
University of California, Irvine
cjnoland@uci.edu

“Is it possible to express emotions without the movement of the face?”
 
–Bill Viola

During the last fifteen years of his life, roughly from Phenomenology of Perception of 1945 to the lectures on “Nature” of 1958-61,¹ Maurice Merleau-Ponty developed a theory of the gestural that has provided a fruitful new direction for continental philosophy. By combining a set of unique commitments–to Husserlian phenomenology, to Gestalt psychology, to Marxist materialism–Merleau-Ponty inaugurated a school of thought that associates human understanding not with cogitation but with embodied cogitation: he is interested in the body’s implication in what the mind thinks it knows. Indeed, it has become almost banal to claim that Merleau-Ponty is the philosopher par excellence of embodiment.² But what has been far less frequently acknowledged is the degree to which that embodiment is conceived by Merleau-Ponty in terms of the gestures the animate human form can execute, the movements by means of which that body explores the world. Phenomenology of Perception is, almost from the first page to the last, a meditation on the role of the gestural in acts of embodied perception and cognition. Gestures clearly hold a privileged place in Merleau-Ponty’s philosophical and aesthetic writings, but what he means by the word is not always easy to discern. In Phenomenology of Perception, The Structure of Behavior, and the lectures collected in Nature: Lectures and Course Notes, “gestures” (“gestes”) cover the same ground as Mauss’s “techniques of the body,” especially when treated in the context of the acquisition of habit. Elsewhere, though, “un geste” appears as a rather amorphous type of sign, a smile, for instance, but also a way of clenching the brows, scratching an itch, playing a keyboard, or applying paint.³ It would seem that gesturing, for Merleau-Ponty, is the inescapable medium in which animate forms navigate environments and enact intentions. Gestures are therefore, for him, the link between a naturally given body/world and an existential/cultural situation. Neither produced entirely by culture, nor imposed inevitably by nature, gestures are a culture’s distinctive way of conjugating what Merleau-Ponty once called the body’s “general power.” Gestures are a social manifestation of the body’s biologically driven “cleaving” to the world.⁴
 
It is perhaps due to this crucial, intermediary position of the gestural that it has become an important category for contemporary theorists of the body, especially those interested, as is Merleau-Ponty, in examining how cultural, organic, and technological forces interact to give birth to embodied beings. Nowhere has this interest been more pronounced than in the area of new media theory. In fact, new media theory has become a locus for a renewal of interest in Merleau-Ponty’s writings, just as the aesthetic objects privileged by new media theorists frequently thematize, register, and even dissect the gestural dimension. Although performance studies and dance ethnography have made headway in championing the contributions of Merleau-Ponty, it is arguably in the area of new media theory that his insights have been most fruitfully explored. José Gil, Mark Hansen, Brian Massumi, Brian Rotman, and Sha Xin Wei each argues persuasively that phenomenology’s approach to embodiment promises to correct a technological determinism that in the past has rarely considered the role of situated performance in humanity’s commerce with machines. One of the most provocative thinkers of the gestural is the video artist Bill Viola, whose works have not incidentally been at the center of a number of studies by new media theorists. Like Merleau-Ponty, Viola finds in the performance of gestures a key to how socialized beings manage to convey spontaneous, unscripted meanings through sedimented forms. It is productive to analyze Viola and Merleau-Ponty side by side, for Viola throws into relief aspects of the phenomenological project, especially with regard to the significance of the gestural, that have not previously received attention, while Merleau-Ponty suggests a new and provocative reading of Viola’s works.
 
The analyses I generate here of both Merleau-Ponty and Viola go somewhat against the grain of current scholarship. By focusing on the gestural, I upset a trend in new media theory that associates embodiment not with motricity but instead with a far more mysterious entity called “affect.” Throwing the spotlight on affect in his 1983 Image-Mouvement, Gilles Deleuze in effect inaugurates this trend, leading a generation of young scholars back to texts by Henri Bergson (and, to a lesser extent, William James) that emphasize the mind’s debt to the body understood largely in terms of sensation.⁵ “Movement” also emerged as an important term, but always in its abstract form, associated with change and passage, something the body does in time (bodies “move,” as Massumi underlines), but subordinated nonetheless to affect (bodies “feel,” he adds) (1).⁶ As a consequence of this priority accorded to affect, new media theorists have too frequently credited affectivity–an affectivity divorced from specific motor sequences–with the capacity to lend human subjects independence from both the species-related response mechanisms and social conditioning so central to Merleau-Ponty’s own speculations. However, in Bergson’s work, to which Merleau-Ponty is also indebted, affectivity and motility are not only profoundly intertwined, but the latter is accorded an ontological priority with respect to the former. In a passage from Matter and Memory that has become a kind of touchstone of some new media theory, Bergson establishes the role of bodily affects in the process of embodied perception, arguing that the body’s interoceptive sensations mediate its interaction with external stimuli. Waves of affect, he writes, “interpose themselves between the excitations that I receive from without and the movements I am about to execute” (17). In other words, the body is a source of sensory feedback that intervenes between the external world and the internal world either to filter out or to focus on certain elements of the exciting environment.
 
Bergson also makes it clear that this affective filter serves perception, which is in turn invariably action-oriented and intentional. In passages far less frequently cited by new media theorists, Bergson insists on “the utilitarian character of our mental functions, which are essentially turned toward action” (16; emphasis added). He states that “perception as a whole has its true and final explanation in the tendency of the body to movement” (45), and that therefore all aspects of perception–the absorption through the sensory organs of an external stimulus, the affect it produces within the body, and the memories of past actions which it evokes–work together to provide a motor response. To that extent, perception must always be seen as “an elementary question [posed] to my motor activity” (45; emphasis added). In most cases, the nervous system formulates a response over time; it requires an “interval” which becomes, in Bergson’s language, “a center of indetermination” (Bergson 64; Deleuze 92). During this interval in which the motor body seeks the appropriate way to respond, there is certainly an experience of qualitative, affective states; however, more crucially for Bergson, this interval is also filled with nascent motor actions proposed by a body attempting to choose which habit, which embedded motor memory (skill, or “I can”), will best serve the demands of the present moment.⁷ Voluntary (“represented”) memory works in tandem with motor (enacted or “lived”) memory to produce a response that is not entirely predictable and yet is supported by the past: “The progress by which the virtual image [the representation of movement, or voluntary memory] realizes itself is nothing else than the series of stages by which this image gradually obtains from the body useful actions or useful attitudes” (131). Humans are thus not machines, they do not execute automatic reactions, precisely because, although “turned toward action,” they mediate their actions through another layer of experience that Deleuze associates with affect, Bergson with memory, and Merleau-Ponty with what he calls a kinesthetic “background” (“fond”) that includes skills and the kinesthetic memory of performing them.⁸
 
It is important that when Bergson introduces “affection” it is not as a variety of emotion but as the experience of pain. Elaborating on affect for the first time, he writes: “There is hardly any perception which may not, by the increase of the action of its object upon our body, become an affection, and, more particularly, pain. Thus we pass insensibly from the contact with a pin to its prick” (53). This affect-image, or “prick,” is itself a “source of positive action” (55); the affect is “nothing but the effort of the damaged element to set things right–a kind of motor tendency in a sensory nerve” (55-56). Most decidedly, affect does not alone fill up the interval, the space in between. Instead, “choice is likely to be inspired by past experience, and the reaction does not take place without an appeal to the memories which analogous situations may have left behind them” (65).
 
Deleuze is faithful to Bergson with respect to his account of affectivity, but, significantly, he neglects Bergson’s emphasis on motor memory as it interacts with affect to shape the subject’s ultimate course of action. In fact, Deleuze tends to exaggerate the role of affect, attributing to it the capacity to produce, on its own, the action that is “unpredictable” and “new” (“quelque chose d’imprévisible et de nouveau” 91). For Bergson, in contrast, affect is only a “tendency” that aids the organism in preparing itself for a more meditated response. In Bergson, affect is associated with bodily states such as pain, while in Deleuze it takes on the color of emotion. Deleuze goes so far as to identify the human face (as opposed to the pinprick on the skin) as the locus of affection, or at least as the site where it is displayed. By identifying self-affection with the cinematic close-up, Deleuze makes it seem as though affect were entirely an affair of large-screen emotions, and that it is these emotions that ultimately govern the way a subject will respond. However, Bergson himself makes it clear that while an affect such as pain may play a role in producing an attitude toward virtual action, memories of past actions are what capture and filter the sensory information in the first place and continue, throughout the interval, to offer their skilled answers in response to pain.⁹
 
Merleau-Ponty develops to a far greater degree what Bergson assumes as a given, namely, that human subjects are primarily engaged in answering a motor question with a motor response by searching through a catalogue of movement memories or gestural routines. In fact, Merleau-Ponty returns to Bergson in Phenomenology of Perception to confirm that “attention to life is the awareness we experience of ‘nascent movements’ in our bodies” (90-91). It is possible to approach works in new media in such a way as to recall Bergson’s original emphasis on “nascent movements,” an emphasis too often forgotten in the reduction of the interval to “self-affection.” This can be attempted even in the case of new media artists famous for heightening our awareness of the affect supposedly recorded on the screen. For instance, although Bill Viola has been treated by theorists as an artist concerned with the emotional intensity communicated through the screen to the viewer, it can be shown that he is equally interested in the gestural routines that frame the emotions his filmed subjects perform. In my analyses of Viola’s “The Passions,” a series of digitalized video installations first exhibited in 2003, I reinstate the significance of muscle memory in the productive moment of indetermination by focusing on the relation between gesture and affect, rather than on affect alone. In doing so, I aim to reanimate the notion of embodiment that new media theory has borrowed from Bergson and from Merleau-Ponty. I balance a celebration of affect as autonomous resistance to sedimentation by revealing affect’s reliance on the habitual muscular articulations Merleau-Ponty diagnoses in the Phenomenology as “I can”s. In my readings, embodiment is not simply a matter of sensory feedback, or “self-affection”; rather, embodiment is a dynamics inflected by social patterning and thus impossible to theorize without reference to gestural regimes.
 

“opening up the spaces between the emotions”

 
Bill Viola’s “The Passions” series, first exhibited in its entirety at the J. P. Getty Museum, consists of twenty-one video installations, almost all in color, mounted on various types of LCD and plasma screens.¹⁰ According to the artist, “Quintet of the Astonished” (see Figure 1) was the first piece composed, the avatar from which the other installations were generated.

Figure 1: “Quintet of the Astonished” Bill Viola, 1998. Used by permission of the artist.

At the time of its composition (1998), Viola was in residence as a Fellow at the Getty Research Institute. He had already been studying the Renaissance paintings housed in the Getty collection, but when he was invited to participate in an exhibition at the National Gallery in London, he decided to base his commissioned piece on a painting the National Gallery owned, Hieronymous Bosch’s “Christ Mocked” (see Figure 2).

Figure 2: “Christ Mocked” Hieronymous Bosch, ca. 1490-1500 © The National Gallery, London.

Imitating the compositional grouping (but not the verticality) of Bosch’s painting (c. 1490-1500), Viola placed five actors into a tight arrangement in which they could dramatically change their postures over time without invading one another’s intimate emotional space.[11] The figures in “Quintet of the Astonished”–four men and one woman–transpose the four darkly-clad tormentors and the one fair Christ-figure in Bosch’s painting. Viola filmed the five actors with high-speed 35-millimeter film (with frame rates of up to 384 frames per second instead of the normal 24), which he then transferred to video, thus creating a sixteen-minute-long video strip out of approximately one minute of real-time performance. The display conditions of “Quintet of the Astonished” were also carefully controlled: the color video was rear-projected onto a screen, measuring 4′-6″ long by 8′ wide, mounted on a wall in a dark room. The influence of “Christ Mocked” can be seen in Viola’s choice of colors, lighting, and the framing of the screen, which was recessed in space, evoking a small chapel in a cathedral.
 
Similar to the other three “Quintets” that would eventually emerge from the same inspiration (“Quintet of Remembrance,” “Quintet of the Unseen,” and “Quintet of the Silent”), the “Quintet of the Astonished” portrays only the upper half of the body of each actor (pelvis to head), with a special emphasis–as in the painting–on the hands. Indeed, as can be witnessed by observing the short clip available at the Getty website (<www.getty.edu/art/exhibitions/viola/index.html>), the actors’ hands attract the viewers’ attention as much as, if not more than, their facial gesticulations. At one point during the sixteen-minutes that compose “Quintet of the Astonished,” a hand with four fingers spread wide occupies the center of the screen; if we compare the composition with that of “Christ Mocked,” we see that this hand has been placed at the location where in the Bosch painting we find the corresponding four folded fingers that rest on Christ’s shoulder. A visual echo of these folded fingers can also be found on the left-hand side of the frame, where a male figure rests his hand on the shoulder of the pale female figure that recalls Bosch’s Jesus. In the video, the outstretched fingers in the center of the frame remain immobile for a long time, but the two hands of the figure on the right-hand side, and one hand of the figure in the right-hand corner next to him, sway back and forth distractingly, evoking the intensity of the posture assumed by the figure in the lower right-hand corner of the Bosch canvas.
 
In his preparatory notes to “Quintet of the Astonished,” Viola writes that he hoped to capture “a compressed range of conflicting emotions from laughing to crying”; the emotions were to “come and go so gradually,” Viola continues, that it would be “hard to tell where one begins and the other leaves off” (qtd. in Walsh 33). In a later interview, Viola explains that he was less interested in a dramatic portrayal of the emotions per se than in the transitions from one emotion to the next. He asked his actors to move fluidly and gradually through sorrow, pain, anger, fear, and rapture in such a way as to “ope[n] up the spaces between the emotions” (qtd. in Walsh 200). In order to achieve this effect, Viola gave his actors two sets of instructions: they could either “work from the outside in,” as in the technique analyzed by movement theorist Paul Ekman, “or from the inside out,” as in Method acting.[12] The first choice would put the body “in a place that will engender emotion,” and the second would create “an emotional life within that is then expressed outwardly.”[13] Although the two approaches to the connection between (externally observable) bodily movement and (internally felt) emotion derive from two different theories of acting, they both presuppose a causal relation: what happens emotionally finds its correlate in kinesis. According to Viola’s account, his directorial style emphasized the inner-toward-outer Method approach, for he refrained from choreographing the actors in any way and simply gave them an emotion to express. Actors “were free to invent whatever gestures and expressions suited their individual tasks,” recounts one observer (Walsh 36). This statement is belied, however, by the placement of the actor’s hands, which intentionally (one cannot but assume) evoke the hand positions of the figures in the Bosch painting.
 
Although Viola is clearly interested in the physicality–almost athleticism–of the exercise, no accounts I have found attend with anything like thoroughness to the pelvis-to-head embodiment of the labeled emotions. For instance, Mark Hansen’s readings of “The Passions” in “The Time of Affect” and New Philosophy for New Media concentrate exclusively on the facial gestures and the transitory phases between them, phases that reveal, according to Hansen (following Deleuze), “the unpredictable . . . and the new” (New Philosophy 6).[14] Viola locates a space of freedom in the excess of affect over categorical emotion, that is, in the fuller “field of intentionalities” revealed by the transitional phases captured on the screen. In his readings, Hansen relies faithfully on Bergson’s concept of a self-affecting organism, but he strips this self-affection of its relation to “the movements [the subject is] about to execute,” and thus to the “motor intentionalities” identified by Merleau-Ponty. To some extent, Hansen can do so because he takes in only the facial gesticulations, which correspond more neatly, at least according to some, to distinct categorical emotions (and thus disclose, under deceleration, their ambiguous “in betweens”). Ignoring the physical manifestations of feelings (or, rather, performed feelings) in the shoulders, hands, and sternum of the actors, Hansen assumes that the strong emotions Viola seeks to capture, such as joy (“laughing”) and sorrow (“crying”), are registered and communicated by facial features alone.[15] The face, according to Hansen, displays a kind of semiotics of emotion, and it is between these facial signs that we should locate unpredictable and new affects. In Hansen’s account, the larger body gestures, such as the waving of the hands back and forth in the right-hand corner of the frame, do not maintain the same tight relation to expressive values (such as joy, or grief), nor do they seem to have the potential to release the unscripted “in betweens.”
 
If we were to watch the actors’ performance in real-time, we would see a rapid succession of emotions that would probably appear as exaggerated grimaces, a kind of facial typology or catalogue of stereotyped emotional expressions. But we would also observe violent and rapid upper body movements and be made far more aware of the actor’s choreographic blocking.[16] Slowing down the frame speed has the effect of revealing the in-between facial gesticulations, but it also discloses the enchained movements, and the ambiguous pauses between enchained movements that the body makes as it moves toward the expression of a violent emotion. Specifically what the viewer believes to have witnessed while observing these transitional, in-between states may in fact depend a good deal on the training the viewer has received. For instance, as a scholar of video and film, among other media, Hansen focuses primarily on the facial expression of the actors, what he terms their “affective tonality” (“Time of Affect” 611). In contrast, when a phenomenologist trained in the tradition of Merleau-Ponty observes the actors, it is more likely the muscular tonicity rather than the emotional tonality of the gesticulating bodies that catches the eye. In my own case, for instance, the facial gesticulations appear in the context of the subjects’ larger body movements. Trained as a dancer, I am struck by the changes in posture, the shifts in weight, the strange angles at which the head is carried, the degree of tension in the hunched shoulders, the compositional play of arm positions, the vectors created by the finger, as well as the dynamics of facial muscle tone. Further, as a former performer, I view these figures bringing the Bosch painting to life as performers, not subjects engaged in spontaneous emotional release. Studying them closely, I attempt to imitate their blocking: I learn their roles, copying the large body movements such as shoulder crumpling, hand lifting, and mouth contorting. Yet, try as I might, I cannot produce through sheer will the twitch of a facial muscle or the trembling of a cheek. In that regard, Hansen is correct when he insists that new media technologies can expose to sight elements of aliveness (he says “affectivity,” I say “motility”) that are performed without volition.
 
It could be argued that what we witness when we observe Viola’s videos is not a performance that actually took place and that therefore it is incorrect to designate Viola’s subjects as “performers.” From this perspective, the bodies we see on the screen are not real bodies but only digital photographic reproductions of real bodies manipulated in post-production to appear in guises otherwise not exposed to view. Yet however distorted the images may seem, they have not been digitally transformed. That is, the bodies filmed did indeed execute the twitches, tremblings and contractions that are only visible to the observer when the execution of their movements has been slowed down. A trained actor’s body has actually executed the movements that radical deceleration allows us to see. Furthermore, it is to those bodies and their movements that we, as spectators, kinesthetically respond. True, many of the actors’ facial gesticulations and upper body movements have not been voluntarily produced and are therefore not “performed” in the sense of being intentionally constructed to express a particular categorical emotion. But these movements are nonetheless human movements available as potentials belonging to the human kinetic disposition. They cannot be considered skills per se, but they are the building blocks of skills. They are decidedly not products of digital remediation, pure manipulations of playback that no human body could perform.
 
I would insist in addition that these involuntary facial gesticulations escaping both categorization and real-time perception occur–and on some level are experienced by the subjects–as tension in the jaw or as the sudden release of constriction in the brow. That is, they are kinesthetically available but culturally meaningless. This distinction is important, for in some cases the in-between gesticulations can be felt by the body performing them even if they are not voluntary gestures invested with meaning. Although people cannot always voluntarily reproduce twitchings and tremblings, some varieties of twitch or tremble can in fact be reproduced by trained actors or mimes. An observant and skilled performer will be able to train herself to imitate, for instance, those involuntary contortions of the face that a human subject makes upon awaking from sleep; the acquisition and willed reproduction of such normally involuntary forms of motility is a large part of an actor’s métier. I am not claiming that Viola’s actors are in control of or consciously experience the finer shifts in their musculature during the in-between phases the video exposes, but rather that such shifts are experienced somatically and remain accessible, under certain conditions, as movement material from which performances–and even cultural signifiers–can later be made.
 

“on the basis of the animal’s embodied history”

 
The muscular dynamics I perceive could be seen to belong to what Merleau-Ponty calls the “autonomous” body, the “prepersonal” body that “gears itself” or “cleaves to” the world, even before the subject assumes a perceptual, cognitive, sexual, or emotional attitude toward it (Phenomenology 97). For Merleau-Ponty, as for Bergson, there is always a crucial connection between affect (that which is felt) and movement (that which is performed), that is, between the anticipatory, protentive attitudes and the nascent motor actions the body, cleaving to the world, prepares to make. The clenching of the brow and the twitching of the cheek do not only express an indefinable emotion; they are also elements of a nascent motor project, one that contributes to the realization of intentions on the order of the kinetic. The body’s sensations of itself (its “self-affections”) may indeed, as Hansen states, provide a constant flow casting itself forward before the actual initiation of activity (in the protentive moment); however, the body also has its own intentionality, which is “essentially turned toward action” upon the world (Bergson 16). This motor intentionality (or what Merleau-Ponty sometimes calls a “motor project”) relies for its execution on already acquired skills, the “I cans,” that a situated, socialized body is capable of performing. For Merleau-Ponty, the moving body has a prior claim on the world, or rather, the world demands movement of the body, and this incontrovertible exigency produces movement patterns that will determine–as actualized gesture in the present but also as a history of gesturing in the past–the production of the unpredictable motor response.
 
Recent research in cognitive psychology and neurobiology tends to support Merleau-Ponty’s schema, which subordinates all varieties of intention to the motor body. In a 2003 essay, the phenomenologically-oriented neuroscientist Francisco Varela asserts that movement is the trigger for all further perceptual, sensory, and affective activity: “Whenever motion is an integral part of the lifestyle of a multicellular [organism],” he writes, “there is a corresponding development of a nervous system linking effector (muscles, secretion) and sensory surfaces (sense organs, nerve endings)” (89).[17] Varela takes it as axiomatic that “cognition depends on the kinds of experience that come from having a body with various sensorimotor capacities . . . themselves embedded in a more encompassing biological and cultural context” (“Reenchantment” 329). This context is composed of the kinetic dispositions of the animate body (the biological context) combined with its history of realized movements. Protention, on the neural level, he explains further, is “incoherent or chaotic activity in fast oscillations . . . until the cortex settles into a global electrical pattern . . . selectively binding a set of neurons in transcient aggregate . . . a creative form of enacting significance on the basis of the animal’s embodied history” (333; emphasis added).
 
What Varela suggests here is that the sensorimotor capacities of the body are not entirely free and independent but rather underwritten by neural circuits laid down by past actions (“the animal’s embodied history”). At the same time, however, there is creativity in the act of making significant (or making significant in a different way) a past action with respect to the situation at hand. Varela hypothesizes that when the subject is confronted with a new situation that does not appear to conform to a previous one (and that therefore might not be resolved by rehearsing past actions), the neural circuits suffer what he calls a “microbreakdown.” During this “microbreakdown,” or neural reorganization, the system hesitates, searches among a “myriad of possibilities,” multiple ways of creating new aggregates, connections, circuits, and eventually, behaviors. What is called upon here, though, is a creativity that is partial and responsive, still enchained by the kinetic dispositions and realized gestural routines (the “embodied history”) of the organism itself. Neural connections are not made in a vacuum, Varela asserts, but instead with reference to the organism’s physiological possibilities for flexion and its acquired “I cans.” The motor resolution to the “microbreakdown” is always performed within a cultural, intersubjective context. The number of possibilities for realized neural connection, albeit extensive, is nonetheless limited by the pressure of the social, the requirement that the movement be a legible (appropriate) interpretation of an environmental challenge. Thus, when Viola asks, “is it possible to express emotions without the movement of the face?” he is asserting, as is Varela, what one contemporary philosopher has called “the primacy of movement.”[18] To this extent, Viola adds his voice to a growing chorus of cognitive scientists, such as Varela, and developmental psychologists, such as Daniel Stern, who have actively sought to extend and corroborate experimentally the tradition of phenomenology inaugurated by Husserl and Merleau-Ponty.
 
Stern and Varela are essential references here, for they both counter, in provocative ways, the current preference in new media theory for analyzing the role of affect rather than gesture in the exfoliating independence of the self. Addressing the relation between movement–in this case, the earliest gestures performed by the neo-natal infant–and the meanings these movements soon assume, Stern introduces in The Interpersonal World of the Infant a distinction between “vitality affects” and “categorical affects” that has proved significant for dance and new media theorists. The distinction is especially pertinent for analyzing the works of Viola, for it neatly summarizes the difference between a named emotion–the anger or joy the actor has been asked to perform–and the in-between gesticulation–twitching, trembling, or clenching–that I have been relating to a kinetic, motor order of action. Stern locates a domain of sensibility in the newborn infant that he associates with the infant’s “vitality,” its first interoceptive experiences in and outside of the womb. “Vitality affects” are the body’s sensations of itself as an animate form, one that is constantly in movement.[19] Stern spells out clearly that “vitality affects” are not “feelings” in the sense of “anger, fear, or rapture.” Instead, “vitality affects” involve kinesthetic distinctions, such as between jerky and smooth, taut and relaxed, corresponding precisely to the clenching and releasing movements I pointed out in Viola’s “Quintet of the Astonished.” According to Stern, these kinesthetic discriminations are the true background of both cognition and affective (in the sense of emotional) experience. In The Interpersonal World of the Infant Stern proposes that “all mental acts . . . are accompanied by input from the body, including, importantly, internal sensations . . . . The body is never doing nothing” (xvii; emphasis added). According to Stern, the motor body is at every moment supporting and informing mental processes in some way, by assuming or holding a posture, by displacing itself in space, by contracting or relaxing its muscles. “Envision Rodin’s Thinker,” he proposes:

He sits immobile, posing his head on his hand and an elbow on his knee. True, he is not moving, but there is extraordinary tension in his posture, suggesting active, intense proprioceptive feedback from almost every muscle group. This feedback, along with the thinker's presumably heightened arousal, provides the background feeling against which his specific thoughts are etched. (xvii-xviii)

 
For Stern, then, “background feeling” is produced by “intense proprioceptive feedback” and kinesthetic sensation (“extraordinary tension”), not necessarily by emotional tone.[20]. Stern’s kinesthetic and proprioceptive “background” can be productively compared to what Merleau-Ponty calls “praktognosia,” or kinesthetic background, a non-cognitive (or better, non-verbal) knowledge composed of signals the body receives all the time. These “body signals” are received in the womb, in the crib, seated in a chair: they issue from what Stern calls an “as-yet-unspecified self,” they are the “background music of an autonomous body that, under certain circumstances, can become louder and enter our awareness” (xviii). These signals are indeed a type of affect, but they are related more to motor intentions than to formulated feelings or desires. If one of Viola’s actors were to become aware of the tension in her shoulders (even while concentrating on the emotion the tension accompanied), she would be accessing the normally muted “background feeling” underlying her thoughts and emotions. (And it is only by focusing her attention on such a kinetic arousal or “vitality affect” that she might develop the capacity to repeat the movement voluntarily.) Although vitality affects eventually become linked to specific emotions, the tension in the shoulders could conceivably be experienced as just that: a rapprochement of the shoulder blades at a particular spot on the upper back. As Stern points out, our movements, before we attach meanings to them (or, more accurately, before meanings are attached to our movements in an intersubjective milieu), are indeed capable of providing us with a rich somatic awareness of executing them. Executing movements, then, can allow us not only to feel emotions but also to feel ourselves in the act of performing them. The performance of emotion through motor action renders a kinesthetic knowledge of what it feels like to move as well as a heightened sensitivity to our motor projects. Somatic attention to movement qualities can bring us back into contact with embodied “proto-signification” before it acquires what Merleau-Ponty calls a “figurative significance” or emotional charge (Phenomenology 225).[21]
 
“Vitality affects” precede “categorical emotions,” according to Stern; initially, an amplified somatic awareness is, Stern conjectures, the only type of awareness the neonatal has. It precedes full-fledged consciousness of self yet it is the basis upon which all future experiences of emotion and acts of cognition will be built. For this reason vitality affects are different from the more culturally-inflected “categorical emotions” that Darwin identified. Vitality affects are the earliest and most primitive cultural organization of the sensorimotor apparatus. The “emergent self” that entertains these affects is precisely that: emergent, in the process of being constituted as a distinctive, bounded, socialized body according to “embodied schemata” developed with slight differences by each culture.[22] It is important to note that for Stern, the movements the human body performs and the vitality affects with which these movements are associated, undergo almost from birth some degree of cultural organization, a point to which we shall have occasion to return. Unlike Hansen, who insists on the radical openness of the sensorimotor body to situational contingencies, Stern recognizes the extent to which cultural patterning imprints itself upon even the earliest gropings of the human infant. Stern observes, however, that while “vitality affects” are associated primarily with the “emergent” subjectivity of the infant, they nonetheless remain available to humans throughout their adult lives, albeit in a less pure, more semanticized form. In a formulation relevant to my later argument, Stern proposes that under certain conditions we may become aware of these “elusive qualities” of kinesis, such as “explosive,” “surging,” “fleeting,” and “fading away” (Stern 54). As in the case of the actor’s métier, layers of sensorimotor organization that are normally inaccessible (“pre-reflexive”) can at times become the matter of a reflexive consciousness. The “categorical” and the “vital,” the culturally meaningful and the kinesthetically meaningful, are constantly in a relation that can be revealed through the application, as we shall see, of specific techniques.
 

groping through the space of the present

 
Turning to “Anima,” another installation from “The Passions” (see Figure 3), we can see how Viola addresses, artistically, Stern’s distinction between the categorical and the vital, emotions and kinesthetic experience.

Figure 3: “Anima” Bill Viola, 2001 Used by permission of the artist.

In this color video triptych, three actors express by gesture four categorical emotions–joy, sorrow, anger, and fear–but at a technologically decelerated pace that reveals the “in-between” gesticulations, the constant movement or aliveness, linking one to the next.[23] Recorded in a single take, “Anima” originally lasted one minute; extended through digital manipulation, the finished piece is comprised of over eighty-one minutes of playback time. Strangely, the name “Anima” evokes the categorical, fixed posture, rather than the vital, or forever-in-continuous-motion. At first glance, “Anima” would seem to refer us either to the word “soul” or else to an equally transcendent register, that of Carl Jung’s archetypal female, associated with the “humors,” or moods and feelings. At the same time, however, “Anima” strongly suggests the word “animation.” The tension in the title between “Anima” as archetypal fixity and “Anima” as pure mobility is reflected in the piece itself, which involves a set of emoting (rather than talking) heads.
 
As Hansen observes in “The Time of Affect,” the faces in “Anima” appear to be “registering an overabundance of affective information” (594). But while these faces may indeed be supersaturated with emotion, engaged in displaying “interstitial microstages of affectivity,” they also unveil a surprising diversity of movement possibilities available to the human face. Again, whereas I am struck by the lugubrious or sudden shifts in the underlying muscle tone of the faces, Hansen remains fixated on their “emotional tone” (587). To Hansen’s eye, Viola’s technologically manipulated playbacks bring us to confront a “constitutive vitality” (613) in excess of our perceptible emotional states. But if we are to remain faithful to the dialectics of Merleau-Ponty’s phenomenological approach–as well as to Stern’s insistence on the “emergent” semantics of kinesthesia–then contact with our “constitutive vitality,” whether visual or somatic, would be strictly impossible. In existential terms, there is no lived vitality purified of all socialization, no life-force that could be manifested by an actor–or seized by a spectator–that wasn’t already organized into recognizable expressions, or gestural routines. The form of vitality that the actors might be experiencing in these “in-between” states has to be, in Stern’s and Merleau-Ponty’s view, an emergent signification, a motility in the process of being shaped by the cultural (expressive) weight it will soon bear and toward which it is ineluctably moving. To give just one example drawn from “Anima,” the play of rippling muscles on the actor’s cheeks might not be immediately equivalent to any one of the categorical emotions the actors were asked to reproduce. However, these (as yet) non-taxonomized micro-gestures, these in-between phases through which the muscles pass, are nevertheless already directed toward, moving toward, the legible gestures between which they fall. To that extent, they remain elements of skilled practice, points on a movement continuum that the gesture, as sign, splits into fragments.
 
It is entirely plausible that during the performance of a gesture such as a pout or a grin, that is, during the in-between phases we witness in “Anima,” there occur any number of microbreakdowns, moments when the features of the face (the continuously rippling muscles) could depart on alternative motor paths. The execution of the gesture could thus be seen in Husserl’s terms as a layered instant composed of both retentions–the body’s grasp on that which was just performed–and protentions–the body’s grasping for that which it could enact in the future. Merleau-Ponty’s contribution to the phenomenology of embodiment could be said to lie precisely here, in the application of Husserl’s paradigm of time consciousness to motor, rather than to cognitive, intentionalities. Merleau-Ponty understands movement to be, like thought, shot through with retentive patterning, the sedimentation of previously executed gestural routines, and at the same time future-oriented, groping through the space of the present in search of those movements that will best address the demands of the next lived moment.
 
In kinetic terms, however, this does not mean, as Hansen would have it, that the protentive, anticipatory element of the lived present “intends the new prior to any impression or perceptual present” (New Philosophy 252).[24] Merleau-Ponty is clear on this point: protention can only prepare for the future by relying on the actions of the past. (What counts as this past, however, still needs to be defined.) In Varela’s view, protention, as an activity of the neural system, has to depend on “already established circuits, each of which is generated by gestures the human animal has the resources to perform. Although Varela wishes to maintain the creative moment in the neural grasping toward “a myriad of possibilities,” he concedes that it is “out of the constraints of the situation and the recurrence of history, [that] a single one is selected” (“Reenchantment” 334). In other words, the continuum of rippling facial muscles will be tamed into a legible grimace or smile. Merleau-Ponty is even more restrictive in this regard, for he adds that constraints are not only cultural (the facial gesture must be legible) but biological as well: that is, constraints derive both from “the situation” and from the nature of the animate form, the anatomical capacities for certain types of ambulation and joint flexion that are reflected in the varieties of neural connection that can be made.
 
Ultimately, what we witness in “The Passions” is the pull of two forces, each of which contributes to the uniqueness and yet repeatability of the gesture. The “vital” and the “categorical” are linked together in decelerated video images: on the one hand, the in-between movement that Merleau-Ponty dubs a “protosignification,” such as a twitch or a tremble, and, on the other, a fully legible signification, an iterable, acquired gesture, such as a beaming grin. My own viewing of the installations reveals not a body freed from “I cans,” not a mass of “vitality as such,” but rather a motor body in the process of organizing itself within an intersubjective situation to play the role to which it has been assigned. After all, what we are looking at in “Anima” is a troupe of actors who were told to imitate a given set of nameable emotions. The things their faces do may not always be subject to classification, but the salient point is that their in-between muscle movements are nonetheless part of the body’s directedness toward the performance of a certain task: here, the emoting of nameable emotions according to established (aestheticized, perhaps even commercialized) modes of communicating them.
 

the hold of the habitus

 
If we take Merleau-Ponty seriously, then we have to conclude that the moving body cannot be captured, by any technology whatsoever, in an entirely non-oriented state for the reason that it is always in the process of moving toward socially meaningful gestures in an intersubjective milieu. Making meaning, for Merleau-Ponty, is inescapable, but paradoxically it is also an acquired skill. Such skills, or “I cans,” are the way an organism “gears itself” to an environment, the way it makes this environment meaningful in the first place.[25] Without a defined set of motor capacities establishing our proprioceptive and kinesthetic being-in-space, the world around us lacks meaning for our body. According to Merleau-Ponty, then, affects are epiphenomena of movement, and not the reverse: “Our bodily experience of movement is not a particular case of knowledge” Merleau-Ponty insists; “it provides us with a way of access to the world and the object, with a ‘praktognosia,‘ which has to be recognized as original and primary” (Phenomenology 162). Merleau-Ponty thus provides a convincing understanding of protention as drawing not from a self “prior to any impression” but rather from “praktognosia,” the body’s embodied knowledge, a resource of “I cans” that cast before us a set of movement possibilities capable of making sense of a given world. For Merleau-Ponty, we are only “open” to the unpredictable arrangement of circumstances because we have autonomous bodily functions–such as breathing, focusing the eyes, and grasping with the hands–that “gear” us to an environment. This paradox is central to a rigorous, dialectical phenomenology, the paradox that we are only “free” because we are capable of being enchained, that we can only see because anatomy, training, and experience cause us to see a certain way (139).
 
For Merleau-Ponty, what makes us capable of spontaneity is not the limitless capacity of the neural system to create new movements but rather the limitless capacity of the neural system to connect the movements human anatomy allows, to enchain human possibilities of kinesis in new ways.[26] “Human” always includes both anatomical and social elements. As we have seen, it is impossible for Merleau-Ponty to imagine a movement entirely pure of cultural inflection simply because such a movement (even an autonomous one) is never performed outside of an intersubjective space. The “freedom” to innovate, to produce “the unpredictable” and “the new,” then, should be seen to derive not from a projection of “emotional tone” ahead of bodily performance and beyond learned response; instead, such “freedom” could be attributed to the untapped movement potentials of the human animate form, potentials that are emergent and in the course of being explored. On this reading, the subject’s motor body does not contain limitless new ways of moving but rather new ways of moving that have not yet been organized by a single culture. The subject’s body knows more about movement, both as kinetic possibility and kinesthetic experience, than any one cultural habitus allows the subject to name. We could imagine, for instance, that at least some of the involuntary facial contortions produced by the actors in “Anima” derive from movement potentials consistent with the human kinetic disposition that have not yet been invested with cultural meaning. But they could conceivably achieve the status of meaningful, voluntarily produced gestural signs in a culture other than our own. These ways of moving (and the neural connections underlying them) might be inscribed in a habitus, but they are nonetheless inscribed on a deeper, phylogenetic level, on the level of the kinetic dispositions of bipedal anatomy. This in no way implies an a-historical biological determinism for, as Merleau-Ponty repeatedly states in the late lectures in Nature, the explicit limits of bipedal anatomy remain unknown and subject to continuing exfoliation in an intersubjective milieu.
 
It is significant, of course, at what point a gestural routine (an “I can,” habit, or skill) intervenes in the acculturation of the body. As anthropologists from Mauss to Bourdieu have observed, a gestural routine learned early on can influence in seemingly inescapable ways the body’s motor being.[27] Later training and observation, however, might eventually allow us access to alternative movement capacities, options that will themselves be limited by the personal history of the singular body, its injuries and the peculiar shape of its bones. Many of those movement possibilities exist as virtual pathways, movement logics that could be pursued, even within the gestural routines we already possess.[28] Most of the time, as Drew Leder has remarked, the subject remains ignorant of kinesthetic feedback and therefore of the alternative logics the body might pursue. Following the lead of Heidegger, Leder calls the normative state of the body “ecstasis,” a condition in which we execute gestural routines with the sole intention of accomplishing specific tasks (like smiling). But the awareness of movement is not eradicated by its “absenting”; instead, this awareness merely recedes into the “background” (Leder 21), potentially available to be called up again. In the wake of Leder, dance ethnographer J. Lowell Lewis has proposed that situations of skill acquisition are particularly ripe with occasions for heightened kinesthetic awareness, and thus provide a more immediate contact with both the socially acquired “I cans” and the movement possibilities they fail to privilege. “The hold of the habitus is not absolute,” writes dance theorist Deidre Sklar; in fact, that hold may be “broken, inviting opening beyond routine.” Against Bourdieu’s objection that anything beyond the habitus cannot be an intentional object of consciousness, Leder, Sklar, and Lewis maintain that this “beyond” can, through the application of culturally-elaborated practices, become an intentional object of motor consciousness.[29]
 
It is thus arguable that normally absented motor intentions, those nascent motor actions never fulfilled but fleetingly proposed, are precisely what we witness in “Anima” and “Quintet of the Astonished” at the moment when the actors pass from one emotional expression to the next. That is, these actors are drawing on a kinesthetic “background,” a continuum of motility that they will eventually parse or differentiate into gestures we recognize as fully meaningful in our shared cultural context. Clearly, Viola’s subjects are not in the process of learning a new skill, and thus they are not necessarily exercising a heightened consciousness of what their bodies, at every stage, are doing. Yet the camera recovers the consciousness of a process that the subjects themselves may not have, a consciousness of a process through which the body discovers within itself a movement, a virtual “I can,” that is not immediately exploited but that could eventually be bent to the service of a meaningful cultural performance. It is during the transitions between recognizable gestures that the body’s history emerges as a resource for kinesthetic experience, motor action, and, in the case of expressive gestures, signifying power. What Viola’s videos show is that legible, categorical forms of expression (gestural signifiers for particular emotions) possess, when performed, a quantity of motility that exceeds the recognizable form of the signifier, the parsed gestural sign.
 
The videos of “The Passions” series also show that this excess motility, the body’s “vitality,” is not free of the structures of signification, the legible forms and routines, toward which it is moving and into which it will eventually resolve. For this reason, it is not possible to identify a movement that is not traveling toward the legible form it will ultimately embrace. The tension between the categorical and vital, the legible and its excess, is also a tension between conventional meaning and what Merleau-Ponty calls “gestural meaning.” The term “gestural meaning” is a catechresis for a meaning that falls between iterable terms and that opens up a new space in the system of signs. The “gestural meaning” of a movement is that element of its phenomenalization that troubles the structures of signification in which it is caught, not, however, because “gestural meaning” is outside of these structures entirely, but because it is in the process of conforming to them. Arguably, movement practitioners are especially attuned to this gestural excess, the “beyond” of routine, and can accordingly intervene more successfully in the process of conformity, derailing–if only briefly–the resolution of kinesis into sign. Telling a story about skills with skills (as Gregory Bateson might put it), the trained movement practitioner may appropriate to a greater extent than other people do the kinetic possibilities of the individual body, redirecting movement toward sequences previously undefined.[30] What we see in Viola’s videos, however, is not the choreographer’s dramatic and purposive reinvention of the moving body, but the material out of which such reinventions are made.
 

the architecture of the hand

 
If we insist on naming the “in between” gesticulations perceptible to viewers of “Anima” “microstages of affectivity,” that is, if we emphasize affect over kinesis, then we imply that at every moment the filmed subjects move they are expressing rather than doing something with their bodies. But what if we were to pull our focus out of the affectivity we think we see as we regard Viola’s images and retrain that focus on the gesticulations themselves? Could the lived present then be treated as primarily a movement phenomenon, as I believe Merleau-Ponty wished it to be, a phenomenon to which movement analysis should be applied? How would this change in emphasis affect our approach to Viola’s performing bodies? What other works would have to fall within our purview if we were to take this analytical turn, and how else might we want to look at them?
 
It is noteworthy that the installation in “The Passions” series that has received the least critical attention is “Four Hands” of 2001 (see Figure 4).

Figure 4: “Four Hands,” Bill Viola. Used by permission of the artist.

Here Viola mounts four small LCD flat-panel display screens on a shelf (the dimensions are 9″ x 51″ x 8″). On each screen Viola projects moving images of a pair of hands: those of Bill Viola’s son, his wife, his own hands, and the hands of an elderly actress named Lois Stark (intended, perhaps, to evoke his mother who had recently passed away). The Getty catalogue informs us that “Four Hands” was shot with a black-and-white low-light film. In the frame, we see only the subdued iridescence of taut or creased skin as it moves over the spiny bones of the hands. Peter Sellars describes the scene beautifully in “Bodies of Light,” one of the critical essays included in the Getty volume: a “series of gestures,” he writes, “are shared across the ‘four hands’”–really, four pairs of hands–“in sequencing that remains slightly elusive. Sometimes a gesture initiated by a son is taken up by the mother; sometimes the mother is teaching and leading her son” (161).
 
Although in the finished work the emphasis is clearly on the transmission of symbolic gestures from one generation to the next, Viola tells us that his initial inspiration came from images of isolated individuals in the act of gesturing, such as “The Annunciation” by Dieric Bouts of the Netherlands (see Figure 5), the seventeenth-century English chirogrammatic tables of John Bulwer in which hands are cropped and placed into grids (see Figure 6, engraving from Chirologia, or the Natural Language of the Hand, of 1644), and paintings of Hindu and Buddhist mudras (see Figure 7). Viola’s account of his sources has somewhat misled his critics into believing that the sharing of gestures in “Four Hands” underscores their universal quality as opposed to what Sellars clearly seizes: the passing down of a gestural habitus from mother to son.

Figure 5: “The Annunciation” Dieric Bouts, 1450-55 © The Getty Museum

Figure 6: Chirologia, 1644. John Bulwer, Chirologia; Or the Natural Language of the Hand.

Figure 7: Hindu Mudras. Bill Viola: The Passions (253)

In his own comments on “Four Hands,” Viola recounts how he determined which gestures to include, explaining that he sought to display those that are found in many cultures and religious traditions. He had been struck, for instance, by the resemblance between the depicted gestures of Christ and those of Buddha, but wanted to lift them out of their narrative contexts, present them solely as embodied signs capable of evoking on their own the intense emotions with which they seemed to be infused. Viola asserts that certain gestures are universal and innate, that human physiognomy, like that of animals, assumes shapes that signify in ways determined by genetic endowment rather than cultural conditioning.[31] He does not entertain the theory that different cultures might provide alternative gestural vocabularies for the expression of a particular emotion, a theory that is advanced, in contrast, by Merleau-Ponty, for whom culture and nature are always clasped in an inextricable embrace. However, in “Four Hands” Viola’s claim that the meaning of performed gestures is universal and innate is undercut by the scenes of transmission the video registers. Embedded in the sequential structure of the piece is the implication that such gestures are transmitted and acquired in an intersubjective setting, as a result of acculturation, miming, apprenticeship, and dialogic response. The mother and son, especially, appear to be miming each other’s hand gestures, communicating in a motor language that develops through exchange, performance, appropriation, and variation. The unity of the two hands is broken by responsive differing, just as in intersubjective situations two subjects might perform the same gestures but in slightly modified ways, qualitatively contrasting with, replying to, the dynamics, velocity, and tonicity of the other’s performance. The transmission scene of “Four Hands” implies that gestural vocabularies are at least partially acquired (rather than received at birth) and derive at least some of their meaning from the context in which they are performed. “Four Hands” illustrates perfectly Merleau-Ponty’s contention that no sign is completely divorced from a biological substrate or immune to cultural re-shaping. The separation between pairs of hands (each pair appears on a linked but detached screen) suggests the subject’s independence; he or she has chosen to express a signification in this manner, and thus the gesture must bear some relationship to its symbolic meaning if it is chosen for that purpose so frequently and by so many hands. At the same time, the easily discernable orange cables connecting one screen to the next like an umbilical cord foreground the interdependence of the subjects and their gestural responses: Would the son make the same gestures as the mother if they were not linked by apprenticeship, furnished with occasions for the teaching and learning of expressive means?
 
Ultimately, the architecture of “Four Hands” is ambiguous, allowing both readings their due: the performed gestures can be seen as necessary and innate or, alternatively, conventional and acquired. But what “Four Hands” demonstrates unequivocally is that the in-between microgestures, displayed during the interval and captured by the eye are not undirected “waves of affect” or “emotional flows.” In contrast with the highly dramatic–even melodramatic–facial and upper-body gesticulations of the actors in “Anima,” the quieter, monochromatic hand gestures performed in “Hands” announce far more clearly their approaching conformity to the categorical and the legible gestures of established gestural sign languages or mudras. Thus it is more difficult to claim that the “in-between” movements are fully free of cultural conditioning, an illustration of protention inventing movement without any recourse to the sedimented past. When we watch the hands moving in and out of defined, chiseled forms, we become aware of the activity of hands not as they search freely in a limitless continuum for the next pose, but rather as they move through a catalogue of nascent motor actions toward the categorical, legible pose. “Four Hands” exemplifies the thesis that Viola’s work reveals not vitality as such, the “feeling of being alive” in some abstract form, but instead motility in its dialectical essence, at once illegible kinesis and “proto-signification,” the body as it edges slowly toward the codified expression of a culturally established, arbitrary, and conventional meaning.
 
More than any other work in the exhibition, then, “Four Hands” exacerbates the tension between legibility on the one hand and, on the other, the ambiguous qualities of kinesis that exceed codified gestural forms. Because we are looking at hands, not at faces, we tend not to experience an intense affective identification with the image but instead engage in a detached, aesthetic contemplation of the architecture created by muscle, flesh, and bone. That is, in “Four Hands” the potential for a de-anthropomorphizing gaze is exponentially increased because the hands stand alone; they have been cropped from the expressive faces which, as Deleuze has argued, prove to be such a strong magnet for human affect. Once affect is not the theme and intense affective engagement no longer the solicited response, Viola’s works can reveal a story about indetermination as a set of nascent motor actions drawing from kinesthetic memories that cast our next move before us. Viola’s achievement is to have succeeded in capturing praktognosia itself, the kinesthetic “background” to being that Merleau-Ponty identifies with the gestural, situated meaning of our acts.
 

the rewarded destinations of the face

 
In conclusion, I want to return to the question raised at the beginning of this essay concerning the source of the unpredictable and the new. If, as I have been arguing, self-affection is both triggered and hemmed in by the culturally specific gestural routines on which we rely to act, then to what process or force can we attribute innovation, resistance, and the emergence of the previously unknown? If not affect, then what? A partial answer is indicated by Merleau-Ponty when he turns to the issue of gestural conditioning (the acquisition of a habitus) in the chapter entitled “The Body as Expression, and Speech.” Here, Merleau-Ponty offers the example of the infant’s smile as one of the earliest instances in which the given, autonomous body first confronts the pressure of cultural norms. When the smile is proffered, he notes, it is merely one gestural possibility among others emerging from the bone and muscular structure of the human face. But in an intersubjective setting, this movement possibility takes on a specific meaning; under normal conditions, the infant who repeats the now meaningful smile will receive reinforcement from surrounding adults: “a contraction of the throat, a sibilant emission of air between the tongue and teeth, a certain way of bringing the body into play suddenly allows itself to be invested with a figurative [cultural rather than biological] significance which is conveyed outside us” (Phenomenology 225).
 
In this passage, Merleau-Ponty identifies a social dynamic that has been confirmed in more recent studies, such as those of the child developmental psychologist Andrew Meltzoff. In tests conducted with newborns, Meltzoff recounts, it was found that starting around twelve days after birth, infants regularly protrude the tongue “in imitation of an adult model” (qtd. in Sheets-Johnstone 247). Meltzoff claims that sticking out the tongue is something infants simply do from birth; it is one of their earliest “I cans,” detached from an assigned meaning, the closest thing we know to a precultural reflex. Sticking out the tongue first appears to the infant as a feeling of movement (the movement of tongue on lips) and only later takes on cultural meaning as infants find their behavior repeated on the faces of their caregivers. Infants even begin a few days later to correct their ways of protruding the tongue; if at first they protrude the tongue in order to explore the tongue’s dimensions and sensations, its “vitality affects” for their own sake, soon they will be seeking to approximate more exactly the behaviors they observe in others around them.[32] Apparently, self-correction efforts inspired by the observation of others have the secondary effect of reducing the number of other gesticulations performed, or postures assumed; socially-motivated self-correction causes the muscles of the face (or body) to tend toward the execution of only a certain, culturally-specific, even family-specific vocabulary of gestures. From very early on, then, the “in-betweens” (such as those we witness in Viola’s “Passions” series) are not entirely free of cultural inflection; once even minimally socialized, the infant is less likely to engage in playful exploration of a fuller range of movement possibilities because only some of these possibilities have been experienced as culturally significant; only some of them have become the rewarded destinations of the face. However, that does not mean that, on the way to these destinations, the body has not passed through, or will not continue to pass through, many culturally non-invested gesticulations that could become, under the right circumstances, the movement matter of other types of performance. The process of correction that Meltzoff identifies implies that the body is born with a very extensive “motor power,” as Merleau-Ponty puts it, a motor power capable of generating a host of gestures that will eventually have meanings and a host of gestures that will not. Further, and most importantly, every gesture that will be granted meaning in a cultural milieu will also, always, be merely another movement possibility, providing an experience of kinesis, a gestural materiality upon which “figurative significance” has contingently come to rest.
 
Finally, Merleau-Ponty’s discussion of infant language acquisition illustrates well the way in which kinesis, rather than affect alone, offers the possibility for gesticulatory innovations beyond the gestures prescribed by any one cultural system. In “Indirect Language and the Voices of Silence,” Merleau-Ponty depicts language acquisition as a process of continual self-reduction, the “self” defined here as the vocal apparatus and its physiological, we might almost say material, possibilities of manipulation. “The important point,” stresses Merleau-Ponty, “is that the phonemes are from the beginning variations of a unique speech apparatus, and that with them the child seems to have ‘caught’ the principle of a mutual differentiation of signs and at the same time to have acquired the meaning of the sign” (“Indirect Language” 40). If the child can grasp the difference, in an intersubjective setting, between “babbling” and sounds that bear intersubjective meaning, then this child knows on a kinesthetic level how to do more than she will be required to do by any one given culture. The “principle” the child discovers is that a sound gains its meaning not purely from what it is, or purely from what it feels like to produce it, but rather from the way it differs from another sound. As well as learning the differential, conventional meaning of the phonetic clusters, then, the child also feels the not-yet classified or rewarded sensations produced by pronouncing these clusters, the qualitative continuum of movement she has been forced to segment into communicative or operational units. She has felt something that cultural representations do not allow her to store as perceptual image (or as nameable, categorical emotion) but only as motor memory, part of a “kinesthetic background” from which the future–as protentive projection–will later emerge. Physiological potentialities of the lips, throat, tongue, and vocal chords will be “repressed” (Merleau-Ponty’s word) but they will remain as prior inscription on the level of motor experience, that is, on the level of kinesthetic memory of past action. The child can draw on these lived “I cans” belonging not to culture but to the apparatus, if given the opportunity to do so.
 
Perhaps inspired by Merleau-Ponty, Julia Kristeva also turns to infant language acquisition to explain the acculturated body’s gesticulatory, expressive, and affective excess. In a clinical research experiment recorded in “Contraintes rythmiques et langage poétique,” Kristeva studies the sounds produced by infants between four and six months of age. At this point, infants are engaged in a process of self-correction similar to that observed in Meltzoff’s study on sticking out the tongue, only here, they try to shape (and parse) a continuum of unintelligible vocalizations into the significant phonemes of a single human language. With the help of audiotape, Kristeva trains her ear to hear the sounds in between the phonemes of French, or, alternatively, Chinese (the cultural backgrounds of her clinical subjects). The sounds she hears in between recognizable phonemes belong to the extensive “motor power” of the human vocal apparatus, the physiology of which offers a range of sound-making movements capable of being conjugated into any one of the existing 6000 languages humans use–or even other languages not yet invented. And it is important to preserve this space of the not-yet-invented, the to-be-organized-into-culture, for, as Merleau-Ponty observes time and again, we do not know what nature beyond culture is. We do not even know what our own anatomy allows. “The psychophysiological equipment,” underscores Merleau-Ponty, “leaves a great variety of possibilities open, and there is no . . . human nature finally and immutably given” (Phenomenology 219-20). On this reading, a human being’s past, or “the animal’s embodied history,” as Varela puts it, includes culturally specific gestures acquired in infancy and skills learned later on, but also movements sketched out perhaps only once, available to the apparatus, the “equipment” with which we are born. All of these varieties of kinesis fall under Merleau-Ponty’s capacious category of “I cans.” The individual’s motor repertory is thus not limitless, but it is certainly richer than any single culture can encode. We are a self-disclosing motility, the parameters of which undoubtedly exist but are not yet charted. They are certainly in excess of where each culture places them. This gestural excess, this “gesticulatory” excess of physical movement over cultural meaning is the protentive aspect of human being in time. It is this excessive, self-disclosing motility that, I suggest in conclusion, provides the conditions for the emergence of the unpredictable and the new.
 
But to what extent can the neonatal or even prepersonal body play a role in creating new forms of motor actions once the habitus has left its mark? How can we become aware of our own “kinesthetic background,” how can we reflect on the prereflexive self? Like Stern, Leder, Sklar and Lowell Lewis, Merleau-Ponty maintains that we indeed have numerous opportunities to return to and sensorily recapture the “vitality affects” or kinesthetic “background” investing our socially legible gestures with situated meaning. According to Merleau-Ponty, we can shift our attention from the meanings we are making to the kinesthetic sensation of making them, thereby revealing an alternative approach to the body as “proto-signification,” a materiality upon which meanings will be inscribed. Merleau-Ponty refers to these moments as “dropping away,” periods of extended attention to performance, when the semantic value of a word, for instance, recedes into the background and instead the “verbal gesticulation” is perceived as “a certain use made of my phonatory equipment” (Phenomenology 469).[33] If we can manage to separate ourselves momentarily from our semantic projects, not only do we hear the noise of the sound-clusters we call words, but, more importantly, we seize the cultural organization of sound at the level of what it feels like, qualitatively, to produce it.
 
Extending Merleau-Ponty’s insight, the anthropologist Thomas J. Csordas has proposed that every culture offers its own set of “somatic modes of attention,” skilled practices that encourage subjects to access this kinesthetic layer of knowledge and experience. “Somatic modes of attention,” he writes, “are culturally elaborated ways of attending to and with one’s body in surroundings that include the embodied presence of others” (244).[34] (His examples range from yoga and meditation to love-making, charismatic healing, and learning to dance.)[35] What Merleau-Ponty dubs “the tacit cogito, myself experienced by myself,” is available through culture’s own technologies of self-monitoring, somatic modes of attention that are themselves, of course, limited by the languages in which they are couched. We can only have a framed apprehension of that which resists already available cultural frames.
 
Perhaps there is no complete escape from acculturation, no blissful “dropping away” from acquired routines. Paradoxically, however, each culture provides routines to counter routines, a set of procedures to reveal the gap in another set. Through slow motion technologies or somatic techniques that make us more aware of the continuum from which gestures have been cut, it is possible to increase one’s sensitivity to the gap, to lie in wait for the emergence of that short but pregnant in-between, or interval, that the next step on the chain both renders possible and leaves behind. The freedom to produce the new and the unpredictable should not be attributed to protention as a total, unalloyed openness to the unknown, a projection of “emotional tone” or affect ahead of bodily performance and beyond learned response. Instead, such freedom to innovate should be seen to derive from our rich mnemonic store of socially acquired “I cans” as well as the proto-signifying resources of bipedal anatomy, that is, from an as yet unexhausted set of kinetic dispositions that are in the course of being explored, either to be pressed into the service of already established gesture vocabularies or, in privileged cases such as choreography, to be expanded into a logic of their own. Viola’s works are indeed precious, for they expose alternatives to conditioning that emerge as we move from the past toward the always already will be.

Notes

 
1. These lectures have been collected and published in La Nature: notes, cours du Collège de France.
 
2. Despite Michel Serres’s claim in Les Cinq sens that Merleau-Ponty largely ignored sensation and thus the role of the sense organs in shaping understanding, most philosophers, dance theorists, and anthropologists would agree that Merleau-Ponty is preoccupied with the question of the subject’s sensual engagement with the world. With respect to kinesthesia in particular, Merleau-Ponty was influenced by Husserl’s ideas concerning the primacy of movement and kinesthetic sensation. For a helpful rendering of these ideas in English, see Varela, “The Specious Present,” and Petit.
 
3. See especially “Cézanne’s Doubt” and “Indirect Language and the Voices of Silence.” It could be objected that Merleau-Ponty confuses expressive facial gestures with instrumental gestures or gestural routines. But there is reason to approach both varieties of gesture as skills, a point Ingold has recently argued persuasively. Ingold insists that even “speaking should be treated as a variety of skilled practice” (292); for him, verbalizations and facial signs are expressive gestures that are culturally acquired rather than biologically innate.
 
4. The notion of the body “cleaving” to the world comes from Husserl; see Petit 220.

5. See especially Part I, chaps. 6-7; see also Le Bergsonisme.
 
6. Massumi is wonderfully suggestive in his treatment of movement, but he does not analyze specific movements or movement patterns and their relation to the production of sensation.
 
7. Bergson devotes a chapter to motor memory and its tendency to seek resemblances between past responses and present solicitations (“Of the Recognition of Images: Memory and the Brain,” 77-131). He distinguishes motor memory (images of habits, or gestural routines, “lived and acted” [81]) from intellectual memory (“representations”). The former enacts memory by directing the body toward a possible action, whereas the latter, which Bergson renames “attention,” pictures a possibility in thought: “To call up the past in the form of an image, we must be able to withdraw ourselves from the action of the moment, we must have the power to value the useless, we must have the will to dream. Man alone is capable of such an effort” (83).
 
8. By “kinesthesia” is meant the body’s sensation of its own movement. With reference to Schneider, Merleau-Ponty writes: “The patient either conceives the ideal formula for the movement or else he launches his body into blind attempts to perform it, whereas for the normal person every movement is, indissolubly, movement and consciousness of movement. This can be expressed by saying that for the normal person every movement has a background [fond] and that the movement and its background are ‘moments of a unique totality’” (Phenomenology 127; emphasis added). Subsequent studies on this pathology have identified Schneider as the “de-afferented subject,” one who lacks a “body schema” (another way of understanding what Merleau-Ponty means by kinesthetic “background”). See, in particular, the work of Gallagher and Cole. Hansen mobilizes their research to argue that contemporary new media artists amplify the body schema, rendering subjects more aware of the role of kinesthetic feedback in their actions; see Bodies in Code.
 
9. I am reducing here a very complicated argument in which Deleuze divides Bergson’s “image” into three types: roughly, the “movement-image” (the first image of the stimulus filtered in such a way that the organism can react according to its interest); the “perception-image” (the response based on memories of previous actions); and the “affection-image” (the response based on interoceptive feedback). See Image-Mouvement 91-96. In L’Individuation psychique et collective, Gilbert Simondon recasts Bergson’s tri-part schema in the following way: Bergson’s first moment, in which potential movements are sketched out by the organism, becomes the unconscious (“a fundamental layer of the unconscious which is the subject’s capacity to act” [la capacité d’action du sujet]); the second moment, in which affect mediates the response, becomes the subconscious (“the layer of the subconscious which is composed essentially of affectivity and emotion” [affectivité: et émotivité]); and the third moment, the end result, becomes consciousness, or the realized action (99). For Simondon, individuality is located in the second moment, the intermediary layer of subconscious affection. He therefore focuses his inquiry solely here: “An analysis of what we call psychic individuality must center on affectivity and emotion” [Une analyse de ce que l’on peut nommer l’individualité psychique devrait donc être centre autour de l’affectivité: et l’émotivité]). Accordingly, he neglects to consider “unconscious” kinetic potentials as constituting the very movement history of the subject, a history that I claim is equally central to the unique psychic and somatic composition of the subject. Nearly all of affect studies has emulated Simondon’s approach, one supported by Deleuze’s early work on Spinoza in which he separates “affections” (sense impressions) from “affects” (emotions) and privileges the former. See Deleuze, Expressionism in Philosophy: Spinoza.
 
10. For a full list of titles, see the Getty exhibition catalogue, Bill Viola The Passions; all further references cite this volume.
 
11. The actors–John Malpede, Weba Garretson, Tom Fitzpatrick, John Fleck, Dan Gerrity–sometimes grasp each other, but they remain wrapped up in their own emotional and physical space.
 
12. Ekman has found that technically “putting-on” facial gestures is a more effective way to create emotional states than is searching the soul for emotional equivalents, as in Method acting. See Ekman, Levenson, and Friesen, “Autonomic Nervous System Activity” and “Voluntary Facial Action.” For an application of Ekman’s ideas to the acting, see Schechner, “Magnitudes of Performance.”
 
13. Weba Garretson, describing Viola’s process in an interview (qtd. in Walsh 35).
 
14. For Hansen, affectivity “comprises a power of the body that cannot be assimilated to the habit-driven, associational logic governing perception” (7). As a “framing function” (8) belonging to the body at any moment in history, “affectivity” can help explain the surging forth of agency, innovation, and resistance within and despite the material conditions of culture, within and despite, that is, the standardizing regimes of power that have appeared so inescapably coercive to Judith Butler and to Michel Foucault. Differentiating his own view from those of Jonathan Crary and Gilles Deleuze, Hansen writes that “the frame in any [technologically produced] form,” such as the photograph or the video signal, “cannot be accorded the autonomy Deleuze would give it since its very form (in any concrete deployment) reflects the demands of embodied perception, or more exactly, a historically contingent negotiation between technical capacities and the ongoing ‘evolution’ of embodied (human) perception. Beneath any concrete ‘technical’ image or frame lies what I shall call the framing function of the human body qua center of indetermination” (8). I am indebted to Hansen’s critique of Deleuze, but I add that this frame is socially constructed as well as physiologically informed.
 
15. See Hansen’s discussion of the face and its privileged relation to the communication of affect in “Affect as Interface.” Hansen is clearly influenced here by Deleuze’s discussion of the human face in Image-Mouvement.
 
16. See, for example, the blocking of the arms and torso in Bill Viola’s “Silent Mountain” (2001), also included in “The Passions.”
 
17. He continues: “The fundamental logic of the nervous system is that of coupling movements with a stream of sensory modulations in a circular fashion.”
 
18. Sheets-Johnstone reads phenomenology (especially Husserl) in a way that both complements and complicates Hansen’s own understanding of the relation between time consciousness and motility.
 
19. Stern understands affect differently from Deleuze, but captures Bergson’s emphasis on pain and discomfort, qualities of sensation related to bodily states.
 
20. Stern is collapsing here a difference that some theorists chose to maintain between “kinesthesia” and “proprioception.” The latter has more to do with being able to estimate the body’s spatial orientation and position with respect to some external coordinate. For more on this distinction, see Pieron. Stern defines the emergent self with respect to a sense of constant movement, even if this movement is that of the organs.
 
21. “The knitting of the brows intended, according to Darwin, to protect the eye from the sun, or the narrowing of the eyes to enable one to see sharply, become component parts of the human act of meditation, and convey this to an observer”; the shift from a reflex motion to a signifying gesture is described by Merleau-Ponty as a moment when the body “suddenly allows itself to be invested with a figurative significance which is conveyed outside us” (225).
 
22. The vitality affects that relay the body’s sensations back to itself are not entirely pre-cultural but rather the first matter upon which cultural distinctions play. According to Stern (as well as Merleau-Ponty), the autonomous body is never available to us in its precultural purity, but we can, as I discuss in this essay, catch glimpses of its resonance in the “embodied schemata” by which it is caught and brought into cultural (perceptual/cognitive) being. On “embodied schemata” (smooth versus rough, up versus down) as early cultural imprinting, see the groundbreaking work of Mark Johnson, The Body in the Mind.
 
23. The actors in “Anima” are Page Leong, John Fleck, and Henriette Brouwers. “Anima” was completed in 2000; it measures 16-1/2″ x 75″ x 2″ and is mounted on three LCD flat panels–small computers with the maker’s name, logo, etc., covered by a frame.
 
24. Hansen continues: “The future is unknown, and therefore consciousness can only depend upon itself.” Compare this to Massumi’s conclusions in Parables of the Virtual, which are closer to mine:

If the body were all and only in the here and now, unlooped by dopplerings, it would be cut off from its "was's," not to mention its "would have been's" and "may yet be's." How could a body develop habits and skills? Are these not pastnesses primed in the present for the future? . . . . A body does not coincide with its present. It coincides with its potential. The potential is the future-past contemporary with every body's change. (200)

 
25. “Consciousness is being-towards-the-thing through the intermediary of the body,” he states (Phenomenology 159).
 
26. For a reading of Merleau-Ponty (and phenomenology more generally) that supports my own, see Patocka. I thank Mark Hansen for directing me to this work, one which, as far as I have been able to ascertain, has not yet been translated into English.
 
27. See especially Bourdieu, Outline of a Theory of Practice. One finds the same division between macro-conditioning and micro-conditioning in analyses by Brecht (see Brecht, Ihde, and Howes).
 
28. On the virtual body and its exfoliation, see Massumi and Gil.
 
29. For Bourdieu, bodily hexis is “embodied history, internalized as a second nature and so forgotten as history” (The Logic of Practice 56).
 
30. This is how Bateson defines creativity.
 
31. Theorists of gesture still ask whether the meanings of certain facial expressions are consistent across cultures (and thus can be considered universal and innate). McNeill summarizes the relevant research up to 1992 in Hand and Mind: What Gestures Reveal About Thought; Kendon provides another overview in Gesture: Visible Action as Utterance that focuses on the relation between speaking and gesturing. See especially 327-54, where he discusses arguments offered by Ekman and Friesen, who follow Darwin in believing that expression of emotion is innate (1972), and those of Kita and Ozyürek and McNeill, who are convinced that culture plays a much larger role in determining how emotion is communicated through gestures. In contrast, Sheets-Johnstone claims in “Corporeal Archetypes and Power: Preliminary Clarification and Considerations of Sex” that there are indeed universal gestures; she draws on research in primate behavior to demonstrate that there are species-specific gestures universally employed in similar situations. These gestures can thus be seen as “natural,” or biologically driven (in Body and Flesh).
 
32. Commenting on Meltzoff’s study, Stern adds that blind infants will perform the same gestures as not-blind infants during the first few months, but when they do not have the experience of seeing these gestures mirrored in the faces of their caregivers they stop making them or make them at culturally inappropriate times.
 
33.

One day I "caught on" to the word "sleet," much as one imitates a gesture, not, that is, by analyzing it and performing an articulatory or phonetic action corresponding to each part of the word as heard, but by hearing it as a single modulation of the world of sound, and because this acoustic entity presents itself as "something to pronounce" in virtue of the all-embracing correspondence existing between my perceptual potentialities and my motor ones . . . . This is why consciousness is never subordinated to empirical language, why languages can be translated and learned . . . . Behind the spoken cogito, the one which is converted into discourse and into essential truth, there lies a tacit cogito, myself experienced by myself. (Merleau-Ponty, Phenomenology 459)

 
34. “The ways we attend to and with our bodies, and even the possibility of attending, are neither arbitrary nor biologically determined, but are culturally constituted” (246).
 
35. As Csordas points out, in “Techniques of the Body” Mauss proposes that there is a “somatic mode of attention associated with the acquisition of any technique . . . but this mode of attention recedes into the horizon once the technique is mastered” (245). The anthropologist J. Lowell Lewis also insists that the period of habit and skill acquisition is particularly rich: “one is constantly monitoring how it feels for the body to do what it is doing, trying out and evaluating different feelings, and measuring the effects of those feelings as action in the world” (229).

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