Category: Volume 24 – Number 1 – September 2013

Manifesto: don’t just do something, sit there!

There is a “quiet revolution” sweeping the Western world.  It is not the revolution of the desperate or disenfranchised in society, nor is it the impassioned conflict of religious fundamentalism, but rather a “peaceful revolution” being led by white, middle-class Americans.  The revolution doesn’t require any particular change in values or economic systems, but simply involves becoming able to relate to those values differently – with more patience, gentleness, and compassion.  In the words of Congressman Tim Ryan, “the mindfulness movement is not quite as dramatic as the moon shot or the civil rights movement, but I believe in the long run it can have just as great an impact” (xvii, xxi).

For a revolution, this movement shows remarkable conservatism.  The leading voices make no demands on followers.  They need not become activists or participate in political struggle.  There are no millenarian cults or mass suicides.  There is nothing to televise.  Instead, in general, the literature suggests that capitalism is not really the problem – indeed, the literature’s architectural embrace of liberalism is entirely consistent with a future society of peace and prosperity for all.  The problem is that people in contemporary societies are suffering from a “thinking disease” (Wilson 164).  The crisis is in the heads of individual people, not in the structures and institutions of society per se.  In the words of one of the founders of modern secular mindfulness, Jon Kabat-Zinn, it’s as though capitalist societies themselves are suffering from a form of ADD, “big time – and from its most prevalent variant, attention deficit hyperactivity disorder.  And it is getting worse by the day” (Coming to Our Senses 153).
 
In other words, society’s sickness is not a material condition that should be treated by physical interventions at the barricades.  The problem is not the distribution of wealth or justice per se.  Rather, society is ailing psychically – it needs therapy.  In the language of Thomas Szasz and Ronald Laing, progenitors of anti-psychiatry, the patient requires a “moral education” to deal with “problems in living,” not the violence of biomedical procedures.  However, it is not even that the revolution requires an ideological intervention to transform societal values.  Instead, it is focussed on the impact of changes in individual psychology: the mindfulness revolution does not aim at ideological change as much as at each of us becoming more in touch with (and more compassionate about) our authentic selves and our genuine relationship with these superstructural features.  The idea is that mindfulness will reinvigorate existing value structures by enabling a more authentic engagement with them.[1]  As Jeff Wilson notes, the mindfulness literature is consistently conservative: “mindfulness authors expect change to come about slowly, peacefully, through the established political system.  They also rarely call for wholesale shifts to a totally new form of economic organization.  A mindful America will still be a consumerist, capitalist nation” (184).  In concrete terms, change is to be accomplished at the level of the individual: social change will be the natural, incremental result when individuals reach more authentic and healthy understandings of the way they feel and think about their (unchanging) place in society.
 
For Kabat-Zinn, this revolution approximates an evolution: he maintains a loosely teleological vision of human history in which the development of the mindful society is a natural outcome (or the culmination) of the development of democratic societies: “In a society founded on democratic principles and a love of freedom, sooner or later meditative practices, what are sometimes called consciousness disciplines, are bound to come to the fore…. It is part of the ongoing evolutionary process on this planet” (Coming to Our Senses 553).  This evolutionary process is supposed to move towards maximal individual self-understanding and freedom.[2]  The rationale behind this diagnosis is that modern citizens have their authentic freedom compromised by being too attached to thinking itself: they spend too much of their time “lost in thought,” ruminating about the past and the future, worrying, dreaming, riddled with anxieties about things that are not happening (and might never happen), depressed and stressed and unhappy.  The modern individual spends more of her life entrapped in her own abstractions than she does actually experiencing the world around her.   People today have learned thought patterns that disconnect them from the world and the people around them – we are self-alienated by our own cognitive patterns.  The mindfulness revolution seeks to pathologize and politicize certain patterns of thought, suggesting that liberating ourselves from these schemas will also emancipate our communities.
 
Of course, it is not the case that the mindfulness movement demonizes all thought, only certain types of thought that involve cycles of rumination.  Mindfulness training generally takes the form of therapeutic interventions designed to transform our patterns of thought.  While the idea that particular styles of thinking can be pathologized with political significance evokes the controversial anti-psychiatry movement, one of the particular characteristics of the mindfulness movement is that it does not target an ostensibly deviant minority of individuals for “correction” by authority, but instead asserts that it is the majority that is somehow muddle-headed and sick.[3]  The hegemonic discourse is the source of toxicity rather than the basis for rectification.  In this case, the political relations implied by the therapeutic model are not the personalised power-relations of the centre and periphery of society (or even relations between state and society) as suggested by the anti-psychiatrists, but rather the disjunction is between the material conditions of capitalism and the psychic conditions of humanity in general: with a few exceptions, we are all muddle-headed about how to live in capitalism in a healthy way.  The mindfulness movement seeks to reveal and resolve a kind of false-consciousness generated by the dynamics of capitalism itself.
 
One of the difficulties of this situation which has not been adequately addressed by the “movement” concerns the political meaning and significance of this (r)evolutionary, therapeutic agenda.  To some extent, this question has simply not been asked because of the movement’s focus on therapeutic efficacy for individuals.  At the very least, the movement suggests two political positions: the first is that mindfulness enables a form of genuinely healthy authenticity that emancipates people from the suffering foisted upon them by capitalism (even while leaving the structures and institutions of capitalism materially untouched); the second is that mindfulness functions as a form of secular religion within capitalism – a contemporary opiate for the people – serving as a new form of ideological domination that enables people to endure the alienating conditions of capitalism without calling for material revolution, redistribution, or institutional change.
 
This essay is a playful attempt to explore the terrain outlined by these two interpretations, utilizing the imaginary contrast between the mindful meditator and the mindless zombie.  In the end, the image of the zombie apocalypse emerges as an ironic manifesto for the mindfulness movement in capitalist societies.
 

Fig. 1. “mindfulness meditation” © Asiascape.org, Leiden University. Ricardo Bessa (Art) and Chris Goto-Jones (concept).[4]

The Mindfulness Movement

When we speak of meditation, it is important for you to know that this is not some weird cryptic activity, as our popular culture might have it.  It does not involve becoming some kind of zombie.  (Kabat-Zinn, Wherever You Go 9)

Even though the literature and teachers of mindfulness are very careful to make it clear that mindfulness is an elusive condition in the modern world, “mindfulness” appears to be everywhere.  Meditation and mindfulness practices have emerged recently out of the provenance of religion or spirituality and into the cultural mainstream of Europe and North America.  We find mindfulness training in high schools, universities, workplaces, and homes for the elderly.  It’s in the civilian sector and in the military.  We see mindfulness clinics for stress reduction (MBSR), cognitive therapy (MBCT), and therapeutic interventions (MBI); and there are mindfulness courses for corporate leadership, creativity, combat effectiveness, and life skills.  The growth of interest in mindfulness-related practices has been called the “attention revolution” (Wallace 2006), the “mindfulness revolution” (Boyce), and even the “dharma evolution” (Michaelson).[5]
 
The cultural importance of mindfulness in contemporary Western societies seems to have reached a level at which it requires consideration as a social movement.  In the USA alone, it is estimated that more than ten million people meditate on a regular basis, with perhaps 20 million having meditated at least occasionally within the last year (Michaelson 10).[6]  Meditation is no longer the preserve of alternative, new-age, or hippie culture, but represents a significant mainstream movement.  As we will see, despite the therapeutic and well-being-oriented context in which it has developed, in some quarters it has even been seen as a plague or a menace.  Most controversially, Žižek, a central interlocutor in this debate, argues that mindfulness is already insinuating itself as an element of the “hegemonic ideology of global capitalism” (“From Western Marxism”).  He suggests that were Max Weber alive today, “he would definitely write a second, supplementary volume to his Protestant Ethic, entitled The Taoist Ethic and the Spirit of Global Capitalism.”[7]
 
The development of mindfulness in Western societies can be mapped through a number of stages: it begins with early encounters with Buddhism and Hinduism as part of Oriental Studies in Europe; it moves through the influence of Zen to the USA, as it emerged from Japan in the early postwar of the twentieth century (in the work of pioneers such as DT Suzuki and then the more eclectic Alan Watts); it then moves through the revolutionary 1960s (and the growth of transcendentalism) into a more widespread and mature growth of Buddhism in the USA (and somewhat in Europe); and finally the practice of mindfulness begins to emerge as (also) a universalizing and secularized discourse in a clinical and therapeutic frame in the 1990s (McCown et. al. 31-58).  However, while interest in meditation and mindfulness has grown rapidly, both in society generally and within the academy, transforming it into an issue of social, political and cultural urgency, there has been relatively little serious engagement with these aspects of the phenomenon.[8]  Instead, scholarship has focused on the clinical, therapeutic, and psychological value of meditation and mindfulness practices – the most pressing research question appears to have been whether or not mindfulness “works” (whatsoever that turns out to mean).[9]  Indeed, it is precisely this focus on mindfulness as a “remedy against the stressful tension of capitalist dynamics” that enables us to “uncouple and retain inner peace and Gelassenheit” while continuing to live in the capitalist system that provides the context for Žižek’s controversial interventions (“From Western Marxism”).
 
That said, in recent years we have seen the gradual emergence of concerns about the intersections between mindfulness, wisdom, and ethics.  These issues cut to the core of the social significance of mindfulness as a movement, but they also expose a deliberate strategy among the advocates of secular mindfulness to avoid questions of ethics in their teachings.  The chief reason for this has been the perceived importance of maintaining a distance between secular mindfulness and Buddhism.  While nobody says that mindfulness practices do not find their roots in Buddhist traditions, the secularization of mindfulness as a kind of “technology of the self”[10] has been seen as vital to its acceptance as a clinical or therapeutic tool in predominantly Christian societies.[11]  Secular mindfulness has self-consciously distanced itself from the ethical traditions that accompany its historical evolution precisely so that it does not risk causing ethical offense in Western societies, where the history of ethics is distinctly other.  This is one of the significant changes following the New Ageism of the 1960s and the Hippie movement.  Ironically, as mindfulness develops into a secular, social movement, it is now this absence of a coherent ethical theory accompanying the practice that is seen by some of its critics as a challenge to public morality.  Is it the case that mindfulness promotes ethical vacuity?  Does it, to paraphrase the assurances of the influential Jon Kabat-Zinn, transform practitioners into zombies?
 
The movement’s secularization strategy reveals a cluster of fears regarding the likely reaction of mainstream Western cultures when confronted with other ethical traditions that are undergirded by deep and sophisticated philosophical foundations.  Žižek refers to a “threat” being experienced by the “Judeo-Christain legacy” even while European technology and capitalism seem triumphant across the globe (“From Western Marxism”).  The threat from “New Age, ‘Asiatic’ thought” is, he suggests, “at the level of the ‘ideological superstructure’” of the European space.  In some ways, then, the strategic choices regarding the development of secular mindfulness (which have been extraordinarily successful) represent an awareness of society’s fear of transnational cultural flows and an emerging globalism more generally.[12]  We might speak, for instance, of a type of “enlightenment peril” that echoes the more racialized “yellow peril” of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries.[13]
 
The move to sidestep this peril has inadvertently provided a space for new fears to emerge regarding the effects of mindfulness meditation on its practitioners.  In the absence of sophisticated Buddhist discourses on questions of agency and morality that emerge from the (often transformative) experience of meditation, many practitioners are left to confront deep fears about themselves and their place in the world; they are staring into an abyss.[14]  Not only do they not have answers to their questions (indeed, it’s conceivable that answers are actually impossible, as we’ll see), but they also have a whole realm of possible “Buddhist” answers negated for them by the very framework within which they are practicing (which was designed to mitigate xenophobia and cultural essentialism).[15]  Perhaps unsurprisingly, fear of what we might discover in deep meditation is also common to Buddhists (which is why there is a rich tradition of texts dealing with this fear in various Buddhist traditions).  In the words of Joseph Goldstein, the co-founder of the Insight Meditation Society in the USA:
 

Meditators sometimes report that fear of liberation holds them back in their practice; as they proceed into uncharted territory, fear of the unknown becomes an obstacle to surrender.  But this is not really fear of enlightenment.  It is rather fear of ideas about enlightenment …. The mind might invent many different images of the experience of liberation.  Sometimes our ego creates images of its own death that frighten us (5, emphasis added).

Fig. 2. “zombie oblivion” © Asiascape.org, Leiden University. Ricardo Bessa (Art) and Chris Goto-Jones (concept).

Zombie Apocalypse as Enlightenment Peril

The idea that the “ego creates images of its own death that frighten us” is conventionally linked to the activity of maya (illusion/delusion) or sometimes mara (the daemon who tricks us into failing on our paths) – the kinds of tricks played on our minds (and by them) to prevent our liberation.[16]  The Buddhist pantheon is replete with daemons and monsters that effectively stand-in for this notion, literally scaring people away from their salvation until their courage, resolve, and discipline are sufficient to overcome these beasts, or their insight is developed so that they can see the daemons for the illusions they truly are.[17]  In this context, it is intriguing that contemporary societies are seeing a concomitant boom in zombies.[18]  The marketplace is flooded with zombie movies, TV shows, books, and videogames.[19]  To what fear does this zombie explosion speak?  Does the zombie apocalypse stand-in for our fear of enlightenment – is this an instance of the “enlightenment peril”?  To what extent is the thrill of “survival horror” the excitement of the righteous violence of slaying such daemons?
 
For some, the fear is simple enough: “Zombies embody the great contemporary fear − and, for some people, the great contemporary fantasy − that we’ll soon be surrounded by ravenous strangers, with only a shotgun to defend ourselves” (Barber).  Yet the idea that the zombie is an alien is undermined by the fact that a zombie is not an alien at all; the horror of the zombie is rather that, in an uncanny way, it is us.[20]  The zombie is a self-alienated human.  The terror of the zombie apocalypse is not the xenophobic fear of alien invasion, but the horror of our own radical (and contagious) dehumanization (perhaps resulting from foreign contamination); it is precisely our imagination of the human condition after the death of the ego.
 
Whether or not we agree that scarecrows are also frightening, Žižek seems to be correct when he says: “what makes scarecrows terrifying is the minimal difference which makes them in-human: there is ‘nobody at home’ behind the mask – as with a human who has turned into a zombie” (Less than Nothing 44-45):
 

This is why a zombie par excellence is always someone we knew before, when he was still normally alive – the shock for a character in a zombie movie comes when they recognize the formerly friendly neighbor in the creeping figure relentlessly stalking them…. [A]t the most elementary level of human identity, we are all zombies…. The shock of meeting a zombie is thus not the shock of encountering a foreign entity, but the shock of being confronted by the disavowed foundation of our own humanity.  (341)

 
While for Žižek this “zero-level of humanity” is reached when we are reduced to our mechanical, purely habitual core, stripped of all “intelligence (language, consciousness, and thinking),” it is by no means certain that we need to understand the zombie as representing this regression.  In their fascinating and provocative “Zombie Manifesto,” Lauro and Embry present the zombie as a radical form of post-capitalist posthumanity; they argue that it is an “antisubject” for whom the foundational subject-object distinction on which the rationality of capitalism depends is destroyed and, with it, the conventional self or ego.  “[T]he zombii [sic] illustrates our doubts about humanity in an era in which the human condition may be experiencing a crisis of conscience as well as a crisis of consciousness” (91-92).  In such an era, the zombie need not represent a regression to a pre-conscious, zero-level of humanity, in which we are ripe for exploitation like animals in the master/slave narrative, but serves as an ironic (and deeply pessimistic) enactment of negative dialectics.  Following Horkheimer and Adorno, Lauro and Embry argue that the zombie stands-in for the post-capitalist agent who has escaped the kind of subjectivity that enables the ideological control of capitalism.  In other words, the zombie is the depressing answer to the question: if the human condition is trapped into capitalism by the mechanisms of its very consciousness, then what kind of posthumanity can be free of it?
 
While Lauro and Embry’s provocations about enlightenment are deeply depressing, it is interesting to reflect that this is precisely why the zombie is a figure of horror, and is not aspirational.  The Zombie Manifesto is as repellent as Haraway’s “Cyborg Manifesto” is attractive. Taking the extra step, then, might we not ask whether the zombie is actually a kind of mara – a monster generated by the subject/object rationality of capitalism precisely to scare us away from resolving to attain a type of consciousness free from that rationality?  Is the image of the zombie a way for capitalism to thwart our attempts to escape the clutches of its instrumental rationality by making our liberation appear as repellent and alien as possible?  As Goldstein notes, “this is not really fear of enlightenment.  It is rather fear of ideas about enlightenment…. Sometimes our ego creates images of its own death that frighten us” (5).[21]  The zombie apocalypse is the vision of the horror of the death of ego par excellence.
 
Lauro and Embry are quick to note that their manifesto is far from utopian: “this essay is not a utopic fantasy in which man is liberated from the subject/object conundrum, nor is it a riotous celebration of the apocalypse that would ensue if humanity were able to get free of the subject/object bind” (91).  Instead, they offer a dystopia:
 

The zombii [sic] thus suggests how we might truly move posthuman: the individual must be destroyed.  With this rupture, we would undo the repressive forces of capitalist servitude.  But at what cost?  The zombii’s dystopic promise is that it can only assure the destruction of a corrupt system without imagining a replacement – for the zombii can offer no resolution. (96)

It is certainly true that it is almost impossible to imagine a way in which zombies could form and sustain a workable society of any kind, [22] let alone present this in a way that would seem utopian to us today.  However, if we take a step back from zombies for a moment (since they represent our fears about enlightenment, not enlightenment itself) and focus on the salient quality of the posthuman that has broken free of capitalism – the establishment of a consciousness that is not encaged by subject/object rationality – it stands to reason that we are not able to envision this posthuman society.[23]  All of our imaginations (and fears) of such an organization are themselves generated by exactly the kind of thinking that will not be a factor in its principles.  Both the utopia and the dystopia are features of our current capitalist society, not of this posthuman future.
 
In other words, our inability properly to imagine a posthuman, post-capitalist society is a feature of the epistemic cage of capitalism.  We might go even further to suggest that the very concept of the utopia/dystopia is tainted with the kind of thinking that needs to be overcome.  In mindfulness-based cognitive therapy (MBCT), this kind of thinking is called “discrepancy-based processing,” because it is based upon our perception of a disjunction between how things are for us now and how we hope/fear they will be in the future (Segal et. al. 178).[24]  Such thinking typically leads to stress-based reactions, such as attachment or aversion, hope and fear.  Such reactions trigger our brains into what Segal, Williams, and Teasdale call a “doing mode,” in which we seek to instrumentalise the world around us into tools that will help us to reach/avoid that future.  This is contrasted with “being mode,” in which people are fully alive in the present moment: “being mode” is the state of mind cultivated in mindfulness practice and meditation (63-77).   We might call this the authentic, zero-level of human consciousness.
 
Ernst Bloch might have recognised this rendition of the utopia as an unimaginable space for which we can hope but not plan; for him, utopia is properly a kind of “not-yet-become” of which we are “not-yet-conscious.”  He sees a difference between the “partial enlightenment” that enables critique of present societies in their own terms and the “genuine enlightenment” that liberates us into the unimaginable.  Our hope for emancipation is real, even if we accept that it must remain impossible for us to envision it.[25]  Horkheimer and Adorno similiarly hold that instrumentalization is a feature of the capitalist cage of reason that must be defeated before enlightenment: in capitalism “reason serves as a universal tool for the fabrication of all other tools, rigidly purpose-directed and as calamitous as the precisely calculated operations of material production, the results of which for human beings escape all calculation.  Reason’s old ambition to be purely an instrument of purposes has finally been fulfilled” (23).  Here, “purpose-directed thinking” and “doing mode” tend together as ethical and therapeutic critiques of human consciousness in capitalist societies.[26]
 
In this way, we might understand a mindfulness manifesto as radically non-utopian, even anti-utopian, and deeply critical.  It calls for people to see past the ways in which their consciousness itself causes them to see the world (as a constellation of sensations and objects on which to enact one’s will towards a purposive end), and seeks to provide them with the means to accomplish this kind of thinking.[27]  In the words of Jon Kabat-Zinn: “Meditation is not about trying to become a nobody, or a contemplative zombie, incapable of living in the real world and facing real problems.  It’s about seeing things as they are, without the distortions of our own thought processes” (Wherever You Go 239, emphasis added).
 
This non-utopian vision calls for people to transform their societies without necessarily calling on them to make any material changes to those societies; the transformation is entirely in the consciousness, provoking rupture from capitalism through freedom from the purpose-directed rationality that fuels it.  This raises the possibility that the post-capitalist society looks remarkably similar to the capitalist one, but that people live in it in freedom rather than in servitude to it.  This vision of the non-utopia seems to subvert the conventions of radical or critical science fictional utopias, in which “cognitive estrangement” organized around a pseudo-rational novum provides the rupture with the extant.[28]  In this non-utopia, however, the rupture is occasioned by the estrangement of cognition (as we know it) itself.  Thus, because of its missionary investment in rational cognition, even so-called “critical science fiction” is revealed as complicit in the ideological trappings of capitalism: it is not free of the distortions of our own throught processes, but rather seeks to utilise these processes to affect change.  In other words, counter-intuitively, the zombie apocalypse as a science fictional dystopic critique actually acts to bolter the capitalist status quo.
 

Fig. 3. “seeing freely” © Asiascape.org, Leiden University. Ricardo Bessa (Art) and Chris Goto-Jones (concept).

“Western Buddhism” and the Post-Self

In his recent provocations about so-called “Western Buddhism,” Žižek picks up on the idea of changeless-change.[29]  He seems torn between fascination and skepticism, which (to be fair) appears to be a fairly characteristic response to this particular ethical dilemma in Buddhism.  Indeed, the integrity (even if not necessarily the authenticity) of this form of transformational experience cuts to the core of the place of faith in Buddhist ethics.[30]  In Pure Land Buddhism, where this idea is powerfully elaborated, the development of a mind of faith (jp. shinjin) is the goal of devotional practice, where this faith is the manifestation of the practitioner’s absolute renunciation of their ‘self power” (jp. jiriki) and thus their complete surrender to the “other power” (jp. tariki) of Amida Buddha.  In Shin Buddhism, which frames this attainment in terms generally familiar to the Mahayana tradition’s sense of the non-dualism between relative and absolute knowledge, this transformation is represented by a bi-directional process: first the practitioner cultivates a so-called pure and egoless mind (through meditation and other practices), effectively travelling to the “Pure Land” and engaging with the absolute, but then the practitioner returns to this world of relative forms to continue life as though unchanged (whilst in reality fully awakened).  This process, to which Žižek (Buddhist Ethic) appears to allude when he refers to the Bodhisattva ideal, is denoted by the intensely dense phrase gensō-ekō (returing to the world):[31] “in one version of Buddhism nothing even has to change materially, only your, let’s call it – even though it sounds too Californian – your attitude.”
 
In these deliberately provocative interventions, Žižek appears to be relatively unconcerned with the potentially tranformative impact of faith in Buddhism.  He is interested in what he terms “Western Buddhism,” which he specifically identifies as being primarily concerned with the practice of meditation itself – he calls this “our Western distortion”: the parsing of Buddhism from its religious structures, its ethical traditions and moral rules, and its reformulation as a kind of technology accompanying the so-called “cognitivist breakthrough” (Buddhist Ethic).[32]  When considering Žižek’s various interventions about Buddhism (which have caused quite a storm amongst Buddhist groups),[33] it is useful to remember that he is explicit about his focus on what he takes to be a “distorted” kind of Buddhism, which he believes has taken root in the “West” for predominantly ideological reasons (or, at least, with powerfully ideological consequences).   Žižek thus locates himself in the heart of an ongoing, emotive, and rather volatile debate about the merits and authenticity of so-called “secular Buddhism,” which has polarised practitioners as well as scholars and many voices in between.[34]  The critical issue for Žižek appears to be what he identifies as the “completely authentic” existential experience that is occasioned by disciplined meditation and self-cultivation (through the deployment of techniques traditionally associated with Buddhism).  This “existential experience,” for Žižek, need not be seen as religious but simply as an empirical moment, a state which one can attain with the kind of practised attention developed in meditation and mindfulness training.  Žižek’s “Western Buddhism” more closely resembles the category of secular mindfulness training than it does Buddhism.[35]  As he sees it, Buddhism is “automatically meditation” in the West, while in traditional Buddhist societies it’s a way of life, a system of ethics, and a commitment to faith.[36]
 
In this way, Žižek arrives at two powerful criticisms of secular mindfulness, both of which resonate with our fear of the zombie apocalypse.  The first is precisely this fear of the ethical implications of the changeless-change that apparently accompanies the attainment of the standpoint of the death of the ego and the collapse of the subject-object dichotomy.  The second concerns the sociological impact of a growing subculture of people (who look just like everyone else) dedicated to living their lives following the death of their conventional egos.  To phrase this in terms of fears: the first is the fear of what a zombie might be uninhibited from doing in our present societies; the second is the fear of what happens to such societies when zombies become an infestation.
 
Unlike Lauro and Embry, Žižek does not primarily see the liberation of the self from the self as the most fundamental form of rupture from capitalism, not even in the irony of the apocalypse.  Instead, Žižek is concerned about the more scientific, empirical problem of verifiability.  If it’s the case that we accept the possibility of a “completely authentic” existential experience that results in a profound (yet invisible) transformation of the self into an enlightened and liberated post-self (or authentic prior-self), surely it becomes important to be able to recognise when this has happened to other people?  While it seems plausible to believe that we are able to recognise this transformation in ourselves, it is difficult to imagine a way of identifying it in another.[37]  Unlike zombies, presumably the mindful post-self does not distinguish itself by staggering through its own decaying immortality, drooling moronically, staring vacantly, and then attempting to eat anyone it encounters.  Presumably.
 
The need to identify the liberation of another into the condition of post-self becomes especially urgent when one considers that such a liberation is immediately (also) liberation from the restrictions and norms of a society premised upon a conventional self (and even liberation from the very principles that established and bolster such restrictions and norms).  The post-self is no longer circumscribed by conventional morality (which has been developed for a society of selves).  It is precisely in this kind of radical liberty that we suppose the emancipatory potential of the post-self resides; through behaviours that subsist outside the frameworks of instrumental rationality associated with capitalism, the post-self manifests and demonstrates the potentials of this liberty for others and hence (assuming that conventional selves can really understand the actions of the post-self) serves as a vanguard in the revolution.  The post-self should be as charismatic as the zombie is contagious; but from the standpoint of mental health provision, it is important to be able to distinguish between the liberated post-self and the simply insane.[38]
 
This shape of argument is familiar within various kinds of Buddhism, especially those that make use of the Bodhisattva as a device for the salvation of all living beings.  The Bodhisattva (an enlightened being who refuses to enter into Nirvana before the salvation of all beings, and so “returns” to the world to assist them in their journeys) is precisely such a liberated agent, to whom the conventions of everyday morality cannot adhere.  The Buddhist canon is replete with stories of Bodhisattva breaking all kinds of laws as “expedient means” (jp. hōben) to encourage people into behaviours or attitudes more conducive to their own eventual enlightenment.  They have been known to lie, cheat, steal, even kill – even appearing as daemons (although I’m not aware of Buddhist zombies) – all activities that appear to contravene the “relative ethics” of the conventional self, but that apparently do not contravene the more “absolute ethics” of the post-self.  The metaphysics of Mahayana Buddhism are founded on the non-duality of these two realms and on the doctrine of original enlightenment (jp. hongaku shisō).
 
Unsurprisingly, Buddhism has produced various responses to this dilemma in its long and sophisticated history.  Twentieth-century history has brought these responses under renewed critical scrutiny, including through the development of the so-called “critical Buddhism” movement in Japan beginning in the 1980s (jp. hihan bukkyō).[39]  In the Buddhist discourse, a key issue has been how to tell whether or not a self has entered the post-self condition (or achieved enlightenment), before taking it on faith that anyone genuinely undergoing this changeless-change would “return” to everyday life free of the egoistic compulsions, interests, and imperatives that lead the rest of us into immorality – hence, taking it on faith that the actions of such post-selves will be (in some sense) ‘good’ for us (not matter how they might appear).
 
In his critique of the ethical dangers of this position, Žižek (Buddhist Ethic) draws upon the rather contentious work of Zen Buddhist “D.T.” (Daisetsu Teitarō) Suzuki, arguing (correctly) that Suzuki’s work reveals a potentially deep complicity between the idea of the consummate changeless-change (found, for Suzuki, in Zen Buddhism) and the possibility of reckless violence and moral monstrosity, specifically during WWII in Asia.  Suzuki’s writings on Zen and martial violence are part of a long (and sometimes rather nuanced) tradition of such writings in Japan, which emphasize the ways in which moral agents are (invisibly) transformed by the experience of enlightenment in such a way that they not only become much more expeditious killers (this form of consciousness makes them technically more proficient at killing) but also removes them from a moral universe within which they can be held responsible for such killing (or in which such killing could be judged as “wrong”).[40]  Žižek quotes Suzuki explaining that the enlightened swordsman is not responsible for the deaths caused by his blade, but rather the sword itself acts as an instrument of justice and mercy – the swordsman is wielded by the sword.[41]  Žižek goes further to suggest that an individual might best demonstrate his enlightenment by behaving monstrously (without feeling bad about it), since to do so would manifest his post-self condition.  Following along these lines, we might ask whether the zombie’s relentless, inhuman violence is the supreme manifestation of its liberation from the conventional human condition.  Does the zombie stand-in for the fear that psychic emancipation from capitalism tends towards Fascism?
 
For most Buddhists and schools of Buddhism, however, this kind of position would seem overly polemical, not least because it deliberately brackets out the issues of faith, moral cultivation, and ethical commitment to compassion and non-violence that lie at the heart of Buddhism as a religion (which Žižek explicitly dismisses as salient factors in the authenticity of the secularized existential transformation we’re interested in).  However, postwar Zen Buddhists in Japan have struggled to understand how/why some rōshi (highly venerated Zen masters who have been certified as enlightened) were able to support the atrocious conduct of the Imperial Army in Asia.  At the very least there appears to be an interpretive conundrum: either it’s the case that the attainment of enlightenment (the attainment of changeless-change) is not accompanied by the attainment of great moral virtue (hence, rōshi could support war crimes in good conscience), or it’s the case that the system used to verify the attainment of enlightenment in Zen Buddhism is essentially flawed (i.e., the rōshi who supported monstrous activities were not really rōshi at all – they were frauds, simply insane, or both).[42]  The possibility that the rōshi were authentically enlightened and supported the war efforts because those efforts were moral and good in ways that may be unintelligible to conventional selves has been considered only in the context of right-wing historical revisionism in Japan, where the question of the historical and moral significance of Japan’s defeat in 1945 remains deeply contested.
 
It seems that Žižek wants to go at least one step further than this Zen soul-searching, not only because he’s uninterested in the religious argument, but also because he is searching for a more scientifically verifiable space of transformation.  Assuming the authenticity of an  existential experience that can be reached through meditation, Žižek wants to know whether there is anything empirically verifiable about the condition of the post-self and whether it is accompanied by moral imperatives.  By scientifically resolving the question of those who fraudulently claim post-selfhood in order to excuse anti-social behaviour (such as precipitating the zombie apocalypse), Žižek seeks to isolate the moral quality of the condition of post-selfhood itself.
 

Fig. 4. “recognizing freedom” © Asiascape.org, Leiden University. Ricardo Bessa (Art) and Chris Goto-Jones (concept).

Drugs, Zombies, and Emancipation

In a particularly intriguing move, Žižek asks what the consequences might be if the shift in consciousness that we’re calling “authentic existential experience” could be accomplished artificially.  Specifically, he ponders the significance of the biochemical attainment of this state of mind through the use of drugs, hypothesizing that such a synthetic experience could “imminently, inherently, fit nirvana.”[43]  In this way, he dismisses (as “totally non-immanent”) the possibility that religious or devotional practices can impact on the quality of the space in which you find yourself qua post-self: “once you are in, you are in; who cares how you got there?”  It is a material site.  The point does not appear to be (although we could also take it to be) that the “accomplishment” of a zombie is usually the result of a viral infection rather than an extended period of meditative discipline.
 
Related to the ostensible materiality of this site (and the European Enlightenment conception of the self that undergirds it) is the question of whether a biomedical intervention could accomplish such an “authentic existential experience” and, if so, should the medical establishment be required to provide it (assuming that it can be agreed that these promote well-being)?  This question rests at the heart of anti-psychiatry, which arose as a movement in the 1960s and 1970s to resist the (bio)medicalising mental and emotional well-being because it opened the door to involuntary treatment of patients, and especially involuntary treatment with drugs, surgery, and electro-shock therapy.  Of course, this kind of “involuntary treatment” is very different from the way in which zombies infect other people involuntarily, but the spectre of involuntary biomedical interventions to bring about an existential condition provokes a consideration of the place of the politics of domination in practices of well-being.[44]
 
Instead of making this engagement with the politics of (bio)medicalizing a therapeutic technology, Zizek makes a remarkably agile move from the dismissal of religious awakening as a basis of ethical quality (in the space of an empirically verifiable transformation to the post-self) to a Star Wars analogy apparently provoked by whispered conversations with Tibetans in Beijing.  However, this move to a science fictional realm provides exactly the kind of provocation that critical science fiction should enable, not only (but also) in the context of our concern with the zombie apocalypse as a kind of inverted science fictional critique.[45]  His point appears to be that the “Force” (to which Jedi and Sith attain when their minds are at peace and in tune with the whole, following sustained cultivation via meditation) operates as a power resource rather than an ethical determinant.  The Force has a “dark side,” but it is still the Force; as a place of existential experience it is unified.  This is not the “dark night” of Willoughby Britton’s psychological study at Brown University but rather the moral darkness that is the concern of the ‘sword of Doom” – although we might concede a correlation between these.
 
From this science fictional springboard, Zizek finds a new way to ask about the ethics of the secular post-self: although there may be a “higher domain of peace” into which we can step to find liberation from the stresses and confusions of capitalist society, “what if something could go terribly wrong in this nirvana domain itself?”  What if the zombie and the mindful post-self are unified in this “domain of peace”?  Here Zizek opens the possibility of the evil of the authentic post-self; indeed, he seems to posit that this possibility is a basic feature of the secular “nirvana domain” in which the self is liberated from itself.  He borrows the agnostic terms of Schelling to paraphrase this insight: “human evil is not because we fell from God; human evil originates in madness reversal, something going wrong in God himself.”[46]
 
In this way, Žižek effectively resuscitates the credibility of the zombie apocalypse as not only an aspect of our ideological horror regarding ideas about enlightenment (that we invent to scare ourselves away from our own liberation), but also as a representation of our fear of the potentials for evil within enlightenment itself.  It seems to me that this is a superb instance of an inverted science fictional critique, in which the device is the estrangement of cognition rather than “cognitive estrangement.”

Don’t just do something, sit there!

The “mindfulness revolution” appears to be gathering pace across the Western world.  While there seems to be a growing scientific consensus about its therapeutic and health-related benefits for practitioners, there remains scepticism and concern about the social, cultural, and political significance of mindfulness as a movement.  Indeed, powerful provocations in this direction by thinkers such as Slavoj Zizek have been largely unanswered, presumably because the secular mindfulness community (such as it is) is largely unconcerned by the political (rather than personal) significance of their practices, while the Buddhist mindfulness communities feel that the secularized debate is not really about Buddhism at all.  There is legitimacy to each of these positions, although the debates are increasingly starting to blur the boundaries between these stakes and communities of interest.
 
This essay has attempted to expose some of the ethical and political issues that arise from the gradual mainstreaming of secular mindfulness, with a particular focus on the kinds of fears that this movement seems to engender.  Playing with the tradition of critical, posthumanist “manifesto” that originates with Donna Haraway and moves through Lauro & Embry, this essay attempts a deployment of Žižek’s zombie (and its apocalypse) as a lens through which to frame our concerns about a future inhabited by mindful post-selves.  It is an ironic and depressing vision.
 
On the one hand, we have the critical stance of Žižek, who argues that mindfulness is essentially a mechanism in the thrall of capitalism.  In a relatively extreme formulation: the mindfulness movement pathologizes the experience of stress that is caused by life under capitalism, suggesting that it requires treatment (a therapeutic intervention) to cure this “thinking disease” so that the patient can continue in the service of capitalist society without breaking.  The emphasis on overcoming our “doing mode” and entering into a more harmonious “being mode” is best understood as a way for us to accommodate ourselves to the stressful and persistent demands of life in contemporary capitalism.
 
Instead of trying to cope with the accelerating rhythm of techno-logical progress and social changes, one should rather renounce the very endeavor to retain control over what goes on, rejecting it as the expression of the modern logic of domination.  One should, instead, “let oneself go,” drift along, while retaining an inner distance and indifference toward the mad dance of accelerated process, a distance based on the insight that all this social and technological upheaval is ultimately just a non-substantial proliferation of semblances that do not really concern the innermost kernel of our being.  (“From Western Marxism”)
 
Not only does secular mindfulness resemble Marx’s “opiate for the people,” replacing more traditional conceptions of religion in the age of rational, secular globalization, but it also “fits perfectly the fetishist mode of ideology in our allegedly ‘post-ideological’ era.”  Here, the fetish allows people in capitalist societies to accept their situation of exploitation and servitude while clinging to a fetish that disavows this signification.  For Žižek, this mindfulness fetish “enables you to fully participate in the frantic pace of the capitalist game while sustaining the perception that you are not really in it; that you are well aware of how worthless this spectacle is; and that what really matters to you is the peace of the inner Self to which you know you can always withdraw.”  The idea of withdrawing or returning home to the self is a basic teaching (and constant refrain) of mindfulness meditation.
 
This fetish seems to adopt the qualities of the hauntic.  Mindfulness, like the popular imaginary of Tibet in the contemporary West, resembles a “fantasmatic Thing … which, when one approaches it too much, turns into the excremental object” (Žižek, “From Western Marxism”).  Here the line between the mindfulness ideal and the apparent mindlessness of the zombie apocalypse blurs into a hauntingly repellent vision of future society, where people have regressed to a “zero-level” of humanity through transformation into psychically-detached creatures of unengaged routine and habit.  This renders mindfulness into the handmaiden of the dystopian capitalist nightmare of the zombie apocalypse.  The mindful and the mindless occupy a unified experiential space.
 
By playing with the question of whether this condition of post-selfhood might be accomplished through biomedicine (narcotics or technology) we can see how this fetish also extends into various (post-)Marxian critiques of psychiatry and therapy in general, where these disciplines seek to encourage accommodation to the madness of capitalism rather than bolstering its opposition.  “Prozac nation” becomes a therapeutic ally of the mindfulness (r)evolution in the framing of the zombie apocalypse.  However, while anti-psychiatrists tend to critique psychiatry for its ideological (and medical) violence against individuals who diverge from the status quo of instrumental reason, the mindfulness movement seeks to embrace, support, and encourage a specific divergence, suggesting that mindlessfulness is of even greater benefit to capital than stressed or anxious conformity to reason.  In either case, the idea that this move constitutes a “treatment” provokes the spectre of domination.
 
For good measure, Žižek also colours his critique with hints of an alien invasion.  Part of the narrative that leads towards the zombie apocalypse involves a foreign infection – like the viral contaminants of most zombie movies.  For Žižek, this “New Age, ‘Asiatic’ thought” has entered into the ideological superstructure of the “Judeo-Christian” West and launched a challenge to hegemony from within (“From Western Marxism”).  This infection has mutated into a distorted form through interaction with local agents, and it is precisely this mutation that has made the infection so dangerous, destructive, and contagious.  The communicability of globalization provides the conditions of the possibility of the zombie apocalypse, combining a primal fear of the loss of self with a cultural fear of the loss of historical centricity.  The conception of self in the European Enlightenment project is displaced by the self of the Asian, Buddhist Enlightenment ideal.  This is the horror of the lone survivor with a shotgun surrounded by hordes of alien(ated) and infectious zombies.
 
On the other hand, we have the radical stance of Lauro and Embry, which enables us to see the cultivation of mindfulness as an emancipatory technology, even in the instance that this leads us to consider the zombie apocalypse.  The emphasis on making a shift from the instrumentalized rationality of “doing mode” to a less subservient and slavish “being mode” is understood as a form of liberation from the hegemonic reason of capitalism (built on a subject/object distinction that provides the parameters of the conventional self) into a form of post-capitalist organization (resting upon the transformation of this subject/object dichotomy into an enlightened post-selfhood).  From this standpoint, attempts to quash the mindfulness movement (including that of Žižek) themselves seem to resemble the patterns of domination in the diagnosis and treatment of mental illness identified by the post-psychiatrists.  Ironically, Žižek’s attack on mindfulness as an opiate of capitalism itself comes to resemble a voice of domination seeking to thwart human (r)evolution.
 
In this instance, then, rather than being the vision of a capitalist dystopia to which we could condemn ourselves through mindfulness practice, the zombie apocalypse becomes the representation of our fears about our emancipation; it serves to frighten us away from the cultivation of precisely the technology that will liberate us from capitalism most fundamentally.  The zombie apocalypse, being a consumer product of capitalism and a popular representation of our ego’s fear of its own dissolution, does not tell us what our lives would be like were we free of capitalism but rather it warns us away from our freedom with the horrors of our bounded imagination.  Zombies are the daemons of mara, tricking us into wanting to remain enslaved by fabricating nightmares that make sense only to slaves.
 
This radical reading of the zombie apocalypse is only able to sustain hope in the most abstract, non-utopian sense.  It rests upon the idea of an empirically verifiable, authentic, and secular existential experience that can be attained through meditation and mindfulness practice.  This experience affects a transformation of the self into a kind of post-self, which may actually be invisible in any material aspect.  It could entail no visible change at all in the organization and conduct of society, but simultaneously involve the complete transformation of the quality of our experience of that society and its signification.  The post-self is distinguished as a form of agency emancipated from the instrumental rationality that characterizes capitalism.  Since such a form of agency is inconceivable and actually unimaginable to the conventional self (bounded as it is precisely by this rationality), the very notion of our ability to depict an attractive utopia or an aversive dystopia is nonsensical.  We simply cannot know what it would mean to be not-ourselves.  All we can expect to see are false utopias and dystopias generated by the attractions and aversions of the “doing self” that seeks its own continuation, even while rupture from that self into a “being self” is (in these scenarios) the only route to radical emancipation.  From the perspective of the mindfulness revolution, even critical science fictional utopias and dystopias are revealed as complicit in capitalism; emancipation relies on the inversion of the logic of such visions and the estrangement of cognition itself.  This is the meaning of the zombie apocalypse as mindfulness manifesto.

Fig. 5. “emancipation?” © Asiascape.org, Leiden University. Ricardo Bessa (Art) and Chris Goto-Jones (concept).

“[The] distinction between ‘repression’ and . . . ‘suppression’ . . . will be enough to disrupt the tranquil landscape of all historical knowledge, of all historiography.”
 
—Derrida, Archive Fever (28)

To paraphrase Wilfred Owen, Thomas Pynchon’s subject is America and the pity of America, a nation doomed perennially to struggle with its own Manichaean personality. Like F. Scott Fitzgerald, Pynchon understands the American schizophrenia: radical idealism and rampant materialism at war within one psychic geography. In his 2013 novel Bleeding Edge, Pynchon observes and perpends the 9/11 climacteric, which he links to certain salient features of an American bi-millennial moment that continues to unfold. In his representation of this recent history, he critiques the Internet and the economic order it serves, but he also engages in a shadow polemic on the responsibilities of the artist to capture truth, whether in historiography or the individual heart. Pynchon embraces the role of Socratic gadfly, fostering self-knowledge that goes beyond the personal and individual. Like others who think rigorously about the past and its shaping of the present and future, he views history as the collective version of that examined life the old philosophers urged on their followers. Although Pynchon often satirizes psychoanalysis (the examined life in its clinical guise), he is not altogether hostile to its amplification as historical or cultural metric: in his work, as in Freud’s, a tragic calculus of repression and neurosis configures “civilization and its discontents.” Nor does he neglect the workings of the unconscious, whose “ancient fetid shafts and tunnels,” briefly evoked in The Crying of Lot 49 (129), lead to the psychic oubliette laid open and plundered in the memorable sodium pentothal episode in Gravity’s Rainbow. In Bleeding Edge, he presents the Deep Web as a virtual unconscious, a “dark archive” beneath the surface Web (58). In his probing of this digital arkhē, Pynchon escorts the reader into an abyss previously explored by Nietzsche, Freud, and Derrida. Like them, he finds repression, death wish, “archive fever,” and the oblivion from which life emerges and to which it returns.
 
The first half of Bleeding Edge unfolds on the brink of an abyss known to the reader but not to the characters. Following the daily lives of a handful of New Yorkers over twelve months in 2001-2002, Pynchon weaves what appear to be portents of cataclysm into an elaborate web, which he then allows to unravel, as if to chasten his own proclivity to paranoid metanarrative. Reg Despard, a videographer commissioned to make a documentary on hashslingrz, an internet company run by the unsavory Gabriel Ice, uncovers irregularities that he brings to the attention of his friend Maxine Tarnow, a certified fraud examiner who has recently lost her license. Not only has Reg blundered into what seems to be an Arab conclave in a secret lab, he has filmed furtive individuals setting up what looks like a Stinger shoulder-fired missile on a New York roof. Maxine, following up, uncovers hashslingrz’s channeling of money to the Middle East, ostensibly on behalf of the national security apparatus. She finds, too, that one of Ice’s people, Lester Traipse, has diverted some of the funds—either to himself or to less appropriate parties in the Muslim world (possibly the northern Caucasus, i.e., Chechnya). When Traipse is murdered, the trail leads to an intelligence agent, Nicholas Windust, who seems to be acting for Ice and the nameless, faceless, more powerful parties he serves. Presently Windust, too, is murdered.
 
But as the poet nothing affirmeth, Pynchon advances no conspiracy theory. Any relation of the novel’s various dark doings to the airliners hijacked and flown into the World Trade Center remains obscure. Which means that readers share with Lot 49’s Oedipa Maas the experience of watching, as it were, a film “just perceptibly out of focus, that the projectionist refused to fix” (20). The author, one discovers, tracks something bigger than the paranoia he famously identifies as postmodernity’s signature pathology. Rather, he undertakes to dramatize epistemic evolution, the subtle ways in which the conditions of knowing complicate what is ostensibly known. Significantly, Pynchon writes “postmodern history” in more than one sense: he writes history in the postmodern era, and he postmodernizes historiography itself. A decade before Hayden White’s paradigm-shifting Metahistory, Pynchon had demonstrated, in V. (1963), an understanding of the perspectival relativity of historical narrative. Half a century later, he continues to interrogate historiography with something like an inquisitor’s severity. “Pynchon’s project,” according to Michael Harris, “is to re-vision and problematize our understanding of the past, to call attention to history as a construct. Thus he “presents history as a narrative with multiple strands” (102). Amy J. Elias similarly calls attention to the “polyvocal” character of Pynchon’s historiography, his writing of “a mystical counter-history to the rationalistic, monovocal Anglo-European history of technocratic capitalism” (133). Pynchon indites the one as he indicts the other.
 
I propose to situate Bleeding Edge within an oeuvre notable for comedic yet tragically inflected representations of history and its strange iterations. Where Hegel, Marx, and Santayana glance briefly at the tendency of history to repeat itself, Pynchon sees in such recurrence the rationale for a postmodern historiography. Thus he dispenses with foundational thinking about the past, disdains historical metanarrative, and eschews teleology. No Geist, then, no historical inevitability—and none of the admonitory solemnity of the pedagogue quoting Santayana: “Those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it” (284). If this bromide comes to mind at all (perhaps as the unstated premise of an historiographical enthymeme), it should generate skepticism: remember what past, whose past? As a character in Chuck Palahniuk’s 2001 novel Choke observes, “[t]hose who remember the past tend to get the story really screwed up” (208). Pynchon, too, reframes the cautionary formula and risks a disabling fatalism: history revolves like Fortune’s wheel, nor can education or reconceptualized historiography arrest its revolutions. We are not to imagine that we can deliver ourselves from history except we recognize and accept its freefall, its freeplay. A curious corollary: historiography that is itself playful can in small measures function as mithridate, inoculating readers against despair. Play figures, too, in artistic storytelling’s engagement with “[c]ontrary-to-the-fact occurrences” that represent, according to the synopsis Pynchon supplied for Against the Day, “not the world” but “what the world might be with a minor adjustment or two.” Pynchon reminds his readers that such representation of the imagined-as-true remains, early and late, “one of the main purposes of fiction.”[1] The author has always delighted in giving grammatical terms—subjunctive, preterite—a political, philosophical or aesthetic meaning. In assorted exercises in the historical subjunctive (especially in Mason & Dixon, Pynchon’s great novel of American becoming), he scrutinizes the past and its iterative cataclysms for traces or intimations of the “better destiny” invoked in Inherent Vice (341). He does so less in the spirit of Antonio Gramsci (“pessimism of the intellect, optimism of the will”) than of Fitzgerald’s Nick Carraway, who saw in Gatsby “an extraordinary gift for hope” (6).[2] But even as he invites the reader to share the hope and to join him in at least imagining some benign mutation in history’s violent self-cloning, Pynchon never strays far from historiographic tough-mindedness. To borrow a phrase from Gravity’s Rainbow, he is at pains to depict the “stone determinacy” of historical mechanism (86), which he replicates in such formal and thematic features as parallel plots, twinned characters, and, at the level of the word, paronomasic play. These elements frame the elaborate mirroring of historical events, the past punning on itself, events and personalities twinned at odd removes and in strange ways—ways undreamt of by Marx, Barbara W. Tuchman, or Giambattista Vico.
 

Paranomasic Historiography

I begin with the tendency of language, at the most basic level, to discover an economy of meaningful replication. In word play, especially the paronomasia that many mistake for puerile facetiation, Pynchon miniaturizes his hermeneutics of history. The delight in paronomasia, a prominent feature of Pynchon’s wit and style, is of a piece with the author’s predilection for doubled or geminate figures. From Dwight Eddins to Tiina Käkelä-Puumala, critics have noted the “gnostic” or “Manichaean” element in the Pynchon imaginary, but without, I would argue, adequate attention to its instantiation at the granular level. Pynchon’s fondness for pairs, twins, and dualities may stem from an instinctive recognition of their being, in effect, inchoate metaphors or puns. Conversely, the author often deploys word play to signal larger, more important analogies. Few writers since Shakespeare, in fact, have been so given to paronomasia. The puns in Bleeding Edge include the identification of Pokémon as “some West Indian proctologist” (131), the law firm of Hannover, Fisk (280), trustafarians (232), Ahrrrh-rated pirate movies (398), and the imbibing of Pinot E-Grigio (20). One winces only occasionally, as when Maxine declares, “I have always depended on the kindness of stranglers” (215). On the other hand, as will be seen, the DeepArcher pun (departure, deep archer) is one of the more serious here. At once demotic and anarchical, paronomasia abbreviates or streamlines predication. Insofar as the homophonic twinning effects conceptual or semantic comparison, a pun is an especially elliptical metaphor—one in which the distinction between tenor and vehicle is blurred. But unlike metaphor, which takes itself seriously, the pun asserts a likeness that, often disguised as absurdity (even silliness), delivers insight the more cogent for seeming accidental (as in the punning Greek adage pathemata, mathemata: sufferings are lessons). When not disclosing distinction in one or both of its elements, such verbal twinning implies their mutual deflation. In the name of a television talk show hosted by the evidently less than coruscating “Beltway intellectual Richard Uckelmann,” one notes an especially trenchant—and funny—example of the pun that disparages or deflates: “Thinking with Dick” (249).
 
Pynchon’s insistent twinning, I would suggest, is often paronomasia made visual: things, rather than words, echo each other in humorous or frightening ways. One can trace this reification of paronomasia back to “Mortality and Mercy in Vienna” (Cleanth Siegel meets, in David Lupescu, a double) and V. (Pig Bodine’s playmates Hanky and Panky, the policemen who affect the Dragnet partnership); but it becomes a stylistic signature in Gravity’s Rainbow, which features Fuder and Fass, Wobb and Whoaton, Whappo and Crutchfield, Takeshi and Ichizo, and so on—homely intimations of a parallel, unseen, spiritual plane, the realm of gnostic metaphysics. The commonplace pairs eventually give way to a more cosmic couple, Enzian and Blicero, the “Primal Twins” who define innocence and corruption in spheres political and historical, sexual and technological, tribal and statist, colonial and postcolonial (727). In Mason & Dixon, in which the Gnosticism recurs in formulations of “[a]s above, so below,” a primal pair occupies center stage, albeit as history’s Rosencrantz and Guildenstern (487, 624, 721). Against the Day, under the aegis of Iceland spar, seems to double its every character, its every object, its every scene.
 
Even at their most seemingly inconsequential, Pynchon’s pairs contribute to larger meanings, as one discovers by reflecting on the recurrent conceit of actors supposedly appearing in biopics as the famous people (often fellow denizens of Hollywood) they happen to resemble. This joke originates in Vineland, with its references to Pat Sajak in The Frank Gorshin Story, Pia Zadora in The Clara Bow Story, Sean Connery in The G. Gordon Liddy Story, and Woody Allen in Young Kissinger. In his introduction to a posthumous collection of work by Donald Barthelme, Pynchon genially prognosticates “a made-for-Cable-TV miniseries” on the life of the recently deceased writer. The Donald Barthelme Story will feature Luke Perry in the title role, with Paul Newman in “a cameo as Norman Mailer” (xxi). In Bleeding Edge, Pynchon imagines Keanu Reeves as Derek Jeter (367), Ben Stiller as Fred MacMurray (433), and Anthony Hopkins as Mikhail Baryshnikov (374). Maxine’s husband Horst, a connoisseur of the genre, gravitates to the “BPX cable channel, which airs film biographies exclusively,” notably endless “golfer biopics” in the run-up to the U.S. Open: “Owen Wilson as Jack Nicklaus, Hugh Grant in The Phil Mickelson Story,” and “here’s Christopher Walken, starring in The Chi Chi Rodriguez Story,” with “Gene Hackman in a cameo as Arnold Palmer” (93-94).
 
The inventor of this running joke, seeing such paired faces as the duplicable parts of fame’s machinery, effects a slowing down, if not a general seizing up, of popular culture’s assembly line. Conflating the cog that propels the machine and the wrench that breaks it, the author transforms pop paronomasia into ludic Luddism. The many facial puns may also be understood as ironic complement to Pynchon’s refusal of his own image: the public’s attempts to twin the author with J. D. Salinger or William Gaddis or Theodore Kaczynski or Wanda Tinasky having miscarried; the author’s celebrated reclusiveness may complicate the casting of any future Thomas Pynchon Story.
 
These jeux d’esprit—the puns, the faux biopics, the various doublings—reveal themselves as the constituent parts, the molecules and cells, of the larger, more clearly consequential binaries of history and story, his story and her story, history and historiography. “Hegel remarks somewhere,” writes Marx, “that all great world-historic facts and personages appear, so to speak, twice. He forgot to add: the first time as tragedy, the second time as farce” (15). In the historiographical economy of Thomas Pynchon, however, the past falls rather short of the Aristotelian standard. Pity and fear remain unpurged; anagnorisis proves elusive. Nor, the propensity for levity notwithstanding, does Pynchon really play the farceur with history’s second acts. The comedic element, tinged with bitterness, figures in Pynchon’s antic historiography, not in the history itself. Birger Vanwesenbeeck notes the paradoxical function of humor in the author’s representations of enormity: “Rather than offering his readers comic relief after long, sustained sequences of dramatic tension—as Shakespeare does in the porter scene following Duncan’s murder in Macbeth, for instance—Pynchon’s picaresque narratives proceed in the opposite direction.” History’s iteration, duplication, or recapitulation involves only an amplification of the original suffering that becomes the more horrific for its comedic (or “farcical”) presentation, often as the parody or pastiche that enlarges the small-bore dualities of paronomasia.
 
Famous for his dualities, his images twinned in Iceland spar, his often Manichaean pairs, Pynchon expects that readers will see in nearly every historical set piece in his fiction its later recurrence or earlier template. Whether chronicling the experiences of Charles Mason and Jeremiah Dixon in eighteenth-century America or those of South-West Africans and their brutal colonizers early in the twentieth century, he reverses Tuchman’s figure of the “distant mirror.” That is, he situates the glass in his own time, not in the past, and so invites recognition of the many ways in which one historical moment conjures itself in the mirror of the reader’s present or near future (prospect converts history into prophesy). Threatening to reify—or, rather, re-reify—itself, the specular simulacrum resists precession. Pynchon casts doubt, then, on a famous thesis regarding the image’s displacement of the real. He sees in historical reality, pace Baudrillard, a repressed that can return, an abreaction at trigger’s edge.
 
Thus in V. the suffering of indigenes at the hands of General Von Trotha and his troops prefigures the more exhaustive Holocaust the Germans would perpetrate at mid-century. In Vineland, the Reagan 80s reveal themselves as the 60s turned inside out. In Inherent Vice, set in 1970, readers discern the seeding of later greed, hatred, racial division and Tea Party ideology. In Against the Day, the struggles among nations and amid populations in the years leading up to World War I find their fearsome parallels in the global balkanization that obtains in the author’s twenty-first-century present. In that novel, too, one recalls the havoc wreaked when the “Vormance expedition” returns to a “great northern city” with a cargo vastly more dangerous than the giant ape or cloned dinosaurs of popular film. The ensuing catastrophe leaves “charred trees still quietly smoking” and “flanged steelwork fallen or leaning perilously” (150). This historical prolepsis gives way, in Bleeding Edge, to a more direct treatment of what happens sooner or later, to “the quaint belief that . . . evil never comes roaring out of the sky to explode into anybody’s towering delusions about being exempt” (424). But even as he foregrounds the 9/11 attacks, he adduces the suggestive parallel—and finds a disturbing abbreviation of the interval between an event and its iteration: the Taliban’s dynamiting of the great fourteen-hundred-year-old Buddhas at Bamiyan preceded by only six months the destruction of the World Trade Center. “Twin Buddhas, twin towers, interesting coincidence” (338).
 
When Bleeding Edge‘s weaponized airliners come “roaring out of the sky,” they replicate the aural annunciation with which Gravity’s Rainbow opens: “A screaming comes across the sky. It has happened before, but there is nothing to compare it to now” (3). That second sentence seems paradoxically to affirm and to deny the historical principle I have characterized as central to Pynchon’s thought and art. The “before” nudges the reader towards a recognition of what has immediately preceded the screaming on high: the detonation of a rocket traveling faster than the sound of its approach. The narrated event is without prologue: “there is,” as yet, “nothing to compare it to.” Like the Rocket, the narrative has introduced itself with what is, as Luc Herman and Steven Weisenburger have shown, the first of many instances of hysteron proteron, the trope of putting the cart before horse (168).
 
Historical insight commonly requires the perspective of many years: the more remote the past, the less contaminated by perceptual bias. But as history accelerates, so must historiography, and one makes no apology for viewing Bleeding Edge, which harks back little more than a single decade, as “historical.” Indeed, as these things go, Pynchon has been remarkably deliberate, waiting for the 9/11 mini-genre to jell in the work of his contemporaries: Art Spiegelman’s In the Shadow of No Towers (2004), Jonathan Safran Foer’s Everything Is Illuminated (2005), Ken Kalfus’s A Disorder Peculiar to the Country (2006), and Don DeLillo’s Falling Man (2007). One can also shelve Pynchon’s novel with fictions that more broadly distill the atmosphere on the eve of 9/11 and on its morrow: DeLillo’s Cosmopolis (2003), Updike’s Terrorist (2006), Claire Messud’s The Emperor’s Children (2006), Mohsin Hamid’s The Reluctant Fundamentalist (2007), and Amy Waldman’s The Submission (2011). Whether or not they attempt to treat the destruction of the twin towers directly, all of these authors ultimately aim at defining an American fin-de-millénium troubled by terrorism international and domestic and by the unmooring of economic and political order.
 
“And upside down were towers,” raves a voice in The Waste Land (Eliot 68). The various fictions focused on 9/11, which one could argue do more to promote understanding of its events than the many works of documentary journalism that have appeared over the years, treat much the same apocalyptic spectacle—the tower struck by lightning—represented in the Tarot deck from which Eliot deals his famous poem. (In an especially elegant passage in Bleeding Edge, Pynchon will create his own urban Tarot— “The Scholar, The Unhoused, The Warrior Thief, The Haunted Woman” (439)—to capture the slow frames that appear as one subway train is overtaken by another.) These fictions feature certain thematic elements that preserve the human scale. The fate of a parent who works in the World Trade Center, for example, figures in the novels of Foer and DeLillo, as well as in Bleeding Edge. Like DeLillo and Kalfus (or, again, Eliot), Pynchon foregrounds a dysfunctional or faltering marriage, perhaps because husband and wife are themselves twin towers that marital discord threatens to bring down.
 
An interest in history’s “many cunning passages” (the phrase is from Eliot’s “Gerontion”) anchors this author’s representations of pasts both remote and proximate. But Pynchon characteristically favors indirect representation of events so immense or infamous as to have created their own mythology. In Against the Day, he refuses to make the Great War his climax; in Mason & Dixon, the Revolutionary War is elided altogether. Nor is Gravity’s Rainbow a war novel per se, its largely European setting in the period 1939-1945 notwithstanding. It features considerable attention to Germany in the prewar period and as the postwar “Zone,” but the war itself figures only as a kind of skiagraphic outline that emerges as the author shades in the dealings of oil, chemical, and weapons cartels; markets black and otherwise; and, from Ned Pointsman to Major Marvy (not to mention Blicero), the ambitions of the unscrupulous. So, too, with Bleeding Edge, in which the millennial climacteric transpires almost in parentheses. History, for Pynchon, is not the big event—it is the matrix from which it springs. In the emphasis on history as everyday experience, Pynchon finds himself in good historiographical company. From Fernand Braudel to Doris Kearns Goodwin, modern historians have represented the past of the common man or woman as much as that of the crowned head—village life as much as this or that big battle. Pynchon has always differentiated history on the demotic street from what transpires in the hothouse of political power.
 
Bleeding Edge, then, is a 9/11 novel with little emphasis on the day’s actual violence; the author does not describe the impacting airplanes, the flames, the jumpers. Amid a chronicle of the months before and after, the fateful 11^th of September comes and goes. The novel’s chronology subsumes a single complete year, from “the first day of spring 2001,” with “every Callery Pear tree on the Upper West Side” displaying “clusters of white pear blossoms” (1), to the moment, the following year, in which the “pear trees have exploded into bloom” once again (475). This vernal recurrence signals the natural corrective to human violence, and Pynchon depicts certain elements of human solidarity as equal to whatever the terrorists perpetrate—and, withal, to whatever chicanery the Bernie Madoffs, the Gabriel Ices, and the Bush-Cheney administration are up to. Maxine and Horst edge toward reconciliation. They provide for their children. Friendships survive. Humane values prove resilient.
 
At the same time that he captures and moralizes the moment of bi-millennial rupture, Pynchon does justice to—emphasizes, even—what it feels like when “dependable history shrinks to a dismal perimeter” (328). Insofar as historiography strives for “you are there” verisimilitude, Pynchon (himself a Manhattan resident) captures the groggy disorientation and the emotional discontinuity of a whole population’s finding itself “down . . . on the barroom floor of history, feeling sucker-punched” (339). History, according to the metaphor here, bears little resemblance to the “watering hole” of genteel euphemism. Like Auden, who in “September 1, 1939” reflects on the outbreak of World War II from the vantage of “one of the dives / On Fifty-Second Street” (86), Pynchon contemplates a fateful September day and briefly characterizes history itself as a place of impaired reflexes and misperceived elevation of spirits, a place in which one risks a dive into the sawdust or, worse, a toppling down stairs into some noisome latrine, like Mr. Kernan in Joyce’s “Grace.” If history is any kind of watering hole, it is the kind infested by crocodiles, a place in which most of those gathered are the food animals, not the predators.
 
Pynchon evinces particular disgust at the authorities’ appropriation of terrible events to “get people cranked up in a certain way. Cranked up, scared, and helpless” (328). At one point, Maxine pauses to mock the “the listen-up-all-you-slackers” moralizing of the right, the sanctimonious assertion that “American neglect of family values brings Al-Qaeda in on the airplanes and takes the Trade Center down” (363). As her friend Heidi Czornak (a professor of popular culture) observes, “11 September infantilized this country” (336).
 
This pronouncement rings true (one has heard it elsewhere—and experienced it). Indeed, if history is an arrangement of specula, one imagines the new national infancy as a version of Lacan’s mirror phase—as understood by, say, Maxine’s surfer-psychotherapist, Shawn. As “airhead” (31) and “idiot-surfant” (423), Shawn resembles Jeff Spicoli, the character played by Sean Penn in Amy Heckerling’s Fast Times at Ridgemont High (1982), perhaps crossed with the spacy protagonists of the “Bill and Ted” movies. California refugee turned shrink, Shawn manages to be every bit as cryptic as—and a good deal more amusing than—the father of his clinical orientation, whose thought he sums up as might Bill and Ted after an “excellent adventure” at the École Normale Supérieure: “total bogosity of the ego” (245). Lacan in a nutshell, the phrase comically historicizes the American character. American identity, like that of the Lacanian subject, is predicated on a false or “bogus” foundation. In Lacan’s account of the mirror phase, the infant mistakes image for self, and this misperception becomes the gossamer plinth of subjectivity, the tragic absence at the heart of ego’s peeled onion. In much the same way, infant America long ago mistook an illusion—the myth of exceptionalism—for the bedrock of identity.
 
If, as Heidi Czornak asseverates, the country has been re-infantilized by late trauma, it must perforce grow up all over again, pass through the phases of maturation described in psychoanalysis, which has itself passed from Freudian infancy to professional maturity in the work of Erikson, Adler, Horney, Lacan, Kristeva, Irigaray, Benjamin, and others. Pynchon takes a somewhat Nabokovian pleasure in depicting the dubious Shawn as part of this apostolic succession, the bleeding edge, as it were, of psychoanalytic theory.  He also describes the cis-atlantic success of Otto Kugelblitz, an imaginary psychotherapist said to have been banished (like Jung) from Freud’s inner circle. Maxine’s sons, Ziggy and Otis, attend a school named in his honor (the older boy ironically shares a cognomen with the immigrant shrink’s own terrible father: Ziggy is a diminutive of Sigmund).
 
A droll-sounding name, Kugelblitz ought to mean “casserole lightning” or “pudding blitz,” but the word is standard German for the mysterious type of atmospheric electricity called, in English, ball lightning. Unlike the familiar flashes that link sky and ground in storms, ball lightning floats or hovers in the air. Though not to be confused with St. Elmo’s Fire or the will o’ the wisp, Kugelblitz does seem to beckon from marshy hermeneutical ground. One errs, that is, to go haring off after the science that theorizes it as something like a miniature Tunguska event, a minuscule “ancient black hole” piercing the atmosphere (Muir 48). In another sense, however, the ball lightning phenomenon reigns over the novel’s meanings the way Iceland spar does in Against the Day. One discerns its significance not in meteorology but in that branch of history devoted to military innovation: late in World War II, along with ballistic missiles (the V-1 and V-2 rockets) and the first jet fighter (the ME-262), the Germans fielded a mobile anti-aircraft gun, ancestor of such shoulder-fired weapons as the Stinger that figures in Bleeding Edge. They called it the Kugelblitz.
 
Pynchon describes education at the Otto Kugelblitz School as organized around “a curriculum in which each grade level” is “regarded as a different kind of mental condition and managed accordingly. A loony bin with homework, basically” (3). The grade levels no doubt complement or look forward to Otto Kugelblitz’s theory of life stages as mental disorders: “the solipsism of infancy, the sexual hysterias of adolescence and entry-level adulthood, the paranoia of middle age, the dementia of late life . . . all working up to death, which at last turns out to be ‘sanity’” (2). As Freud applied his system to the larger shape of society and history (in, for example, Civilization and Its Discontents and Moses and Monotheism), so presumably do Kugelblitz’s stages of life lend themselves to ideas about the phases through which civilization passes (early and late, psychoanalytic theory complements the work of social historians from Vico to Weber and from Gibbon to Spengler and Toynbee). Thus a truly American historiography would chart growth and decline proceeding from “the solipsism of infancy” through the “sexual hysterias of adolescence and entry-level adulthood” and from “the paranoia of middle age” to “the dementia of late life.” American “sanity” in this declension would express itself as a wish for the very consummation toward which Slothrop, according to certain “heavily paranoid voices” in Gravity’s Rainbow, makes his way. It is Mickey Wuxtry-Wuxtry, a Kugelblitz precursor, who “opines” in that novel that Slothrop “might be in love, in sexual love, with his, and his race’s, death” (738).
 
Indeed, versions of the Kugelblitz stages reveal themselves in various ways all across the Pynchon canon. Oedipa Maas glimpses solipsism as the condition from which she (and her fellow white-bread Americans) must somehow exit. Before coalescing as Todestrieb, Slothrop’s erections figure a variety of sexual hysterias as the thousand-year Reich gives way to the American Century. Paranoia, a basic Pynchon theme, seems to crest in Vineland, in the dueling anxieties of left and right in the Reagan years. According to this progression, Bleeding Edge chronicles the dementia of pre- and post-millennium America. Perhaps, too, it recapitulates the prior stages, rather as a spell of variable Washington, D. C. weather is imagined, in “Entropy,” as “a stretto passage in the year’s fugue” (83). Thus the reader samples solipsism in DeepArcher and in the paradoxical isolation created by video games, social media, and geek life generally. Thus “sexual hysterias” lead Maxine’s friend Vyrva to betray her husband with the loathsome Gabriel Ice—and Maxine herself to play fetishistic footsy with Eric Outfield and to couple with the unsavory Nicholas Windust. Meanwhile, the “paranoia of middle age” afflicts every seasoned adult in the story, from Reg Despard to March Kelleher, and 9/11 leaves a “general dementia” in its wake. The “infantilization” that Heidi deplores represents a return—Kekulé von Stradonitz’s great serpent biting its tale—to the polymorphous perverse.[3]

Is It O.K. to Be an Internet Luddite?

The reader who looks for the role of the unconscious in this psychoanalytic fantasia discovers that it has been reconceptualized, historicized, and politicized as cybernetic archive. But before descending into that well of the remembered, the forgotten and the repressed, I should like to consider just how one of its archons, Gabriel Ice, embodies future history. In looking at the strange intersections in this novel of retrospect with prospect, prolepsis, and prophesy, I mean to argue additional dimensions to the historiographical vision that enables Pynchon to depict in the mirror of the past events that have yet to transpire. The author contrives to make his temporal setting “reflect” the proximate future, whether the balance of the Bush-Cheney administration or the prospect (in the election of 2012) of someone like Gabriel Ice in the White House.
 
Pynchon’s story turns on the death of Lester Traipse, who makes the mistake of stealing from Ice, who is both ruthless and “connected.” Worse than the theft itself may be the knowledge it implies of just where Ice’s money has been going—knowledge that will also endanger Maxine and those who aid her investigation. Lester’s body turns up in The Deseret, an apartment building as “karmically-challenged” as the celebrated and infamous Dakota, site of John Lennon’s murder (27).[4] Like the Golden Fang headquarters in Inherent Vice, The Deseret dares the investigator to look beyond its façade. Its name means “honeybee” in the language of the “Jaredites,” a group that supposedly made its way to America after the Tower of Babel’s destruction. They settled in the Lake Ontario region, where Joseph Smith, some four millennia later, claimed to have unearthed, near his home in Manchester, New York, golden tablets bearing inscriptions in “reformed Egyptian” (the Book of Mormon treats these events as historical fact). Pynchon makes no further reference to Mormonism—though he may expect the reader to think of the particular Mormon who would, a decade later, focus the desires of those farthest to the right on America’s political spectrum. Thus the name of the building around which so much of the novel’s action revolves suggests the trace presence in the city—a beachhead, so to speak—of interests that would presently, with the Mitt Romney candidacies (for governor of Massachusetts, for president of the United States), take on a higher profile.
 
Mitt Romney need not live in New York to serve as one of the models for Pynchon’s villain, Gabriel Ice, who owns (or partly owns) The Deseret but does not reside there (142, 260, 371).  That the one is Mormon, the other Jewish, is inconsequential. Both worship only Mammon—and power. During the period depicted in Bleeding Edge, Romney was disentangling himself from Bain Capital, headquartered in Boston. The novel ends a few months before the 2002 Massachusetts gubernatorial election, which Romney would win.  Known for “leveraged buyouts,” Romney preyed on economic vulnerability, taking over failing companies, stripping their assets, pink-slipping employees, and, before selling out, taking out massive loans with which to pay executive bonuses and investor dividends (Taibbi). Ditto Ice: “The book on this guy is he takes a position, typically less than five percent, in each of a whole portfolio of start-ups he knows from running Altman-Z’s on them are gonna fail within a short-term horizon. Uses them as shells for funds he wants to move around inconspicuously” (63). In the aftermath of the dotcom crash of 2000, Ice snaps up surplus fiber-optic cable and other “infrastructure” at fire-sale prices (127). He presides over a kind of cybersecurity Halliburton, hashslingrz, which does a cozy business with the Department of Defense and other, more shadowy entities, notably the C.I.A. He evidently takes an interest in DeepArcher, the program written by Maxine’s friends Justin and Lukas, because it threatens to make the security protocols of hashslingrz obsolete.
 
The latest in a series of villainous Pynchon plutocrats, Gabriel Ice represents the metastasis of capitalist privilege, which, like Shakespeare’s imposthume that inward breaks, incubates a general sepsis. In Pynchon’s early work, the agents of evil tended to seem almost incidental. V. is less a person than a fantasy of historiographic paranoia, the mythic embodiment of the blood-soaked century in which she comes of age. Pierce Inverarity, having died just before Lot 49 opens, is also a phantom. In Gravity’s Rainbow, human villainy is scattered; the twisted Nazi, Blicero, is somehow less loathsome than Ned Pointsman or Major Marvy. Corporate evil also comes in a variety of packages—Shell Mex, Krupp, Imperial Chemicals, IG Farben. But more and more, as the novels follow one another, evil presents itself as focalized through Control and those who promote it in spheres psychic, economic, and political. At a hasty count, I find some 56 instances of the word in Gravity’s Rainbow. Control is the summum malorum of Brock Vond in Vineland, of Padre Zarpazo in Mason & Dixon, of Scarsdale Vibe in Against the Day, and of Crocker Fenway and Vigilant California in Inherent Vice. All devote themselves to twisted, puritanical suppression of the freedom pursued so passionately (or clumsily) in the 1750s, at the turn of the twentieth century, and in the 1960s. Gabriel Ice, his hubris obscurely imbricated with American foreign policy at the beginning of the twenty-first century, merits the loathing he inspires in lesser thugs (Misha and Grisha), who call him “oligarch scum, thief, murderer” (455).
 
The funds he supposedly channels to “anti-jihadists” (375), evidently on behalf of the C.I.A., seem actually to be going to Chechnya—perhaps, inadvertently, to those seeking to effect a Russian 9/11. As the soft-boiled Misha and Grisha explain, Lester Traipse, aided by their boss Igor, was not stealing so much as diverting funds, perhaps mistakenly, to “some not so good” Chechens (461). Such American geopolitical misprision finds its emblem here in the Stinger missile at the center of the strange little tableau filmed by Reg Despard. The never-answered questions about just what its wielders were up to invite answers that take fully into account the vagaries of the secondary and tertiary market for such American weapons (and their knockoffs). A probable leftover of American-sponsored resistance to Soviet occupation of Afghanistan in the 1980s, the missile represents the unintended consequences of Realpolitik (272).
 
As above, so below. The author of Bleeding Edge contemplates, with prejudice, the Internet’s susceptibility to the powerful economic forces that prevail in “meatspace.” Yet Pynchon also recognizes the Internet as the historian’s indispensable resource, an archive. Pynchon’s meditation on the underbelly of the Internet (if one may be permitted an absurd figure) appeared, as it happens, at a moment of considerable journalistic handwringing over the possible downside for a generation unable to unplug (“Is the ipad Bad for Children?” “Is Facebook Making Us Lonely?”).[5] The novel precedes by scant weeks the depictions of Silicon Valley Eloi in Dave Eggers’s The Circle (2013) and the denunciations of popular digital media with which Jonathan Franzen peppers the scholarly apparatus of The Kraus Project, his 2013 edition of Viennese culture critic Karl Kraus’s vituperative essays. But not for Pynchon, I think, the injudicious Jeremiad. Not for him the stridency a reviewer condemns in Franzen’s
 

often . . . disheveled and talky assault on everything the author sees when he opens his laptop or clicks on a television, including, but not limited to, Facebook, smartphones, ‘the high-school-cafeteria social scene of Gawker takedowns and Twitter popularity contests,’ the hipness of Apple products, reality TV, Fox News, Amazon, even the ‘recent tabloidization’ of the AOL home page. (Garner)

Unlike Franzen, who denounces the digital pithing of consciousness in propria persona, Pynchon puts such fulminations into the mouths of his characters. As they inveigh against a variety of cyber-ills, their creator seems to reserve judgment. Though Pynchon clearly deplores the violations to which the fresh green breast of cyberspace has been subjected by advertisers, merchants, and consumers, not to mention “Nigerian” scam artists, one doubts that he wishes some violent cancelation of the Internet—only the occasional frying of the bad guys’ servers (as in Misha and Grisha’s act of vircator Luddism).
 
Maxine, too, reserves judgment, even when (or especially when) subjected to paternal kvetching about digital bad faith: Ernie Tarnow deplores the Internet as
 

this magical convenience that creeps like a smell through the smallest details of our lives, the shopping, the housework, the taxes, absorbing our energy, eating up our precious time. And there’s no innocence. Anywhere. Never was. It was conceived in sin, the worst possible. As it kept growing, it never stopped carrying in its heart a bitter-cold death wish for the planet, and don’t think anything has changed, kid. (420)

Eric Outfield, computer “badass” and foot fetishist, expresses much the same disgust from, as it were, inside Leviathan: “every day more lusers than users, keyboards and screens turning into nothin but portals to Web sites for what the Management wants everybody addicted to, shopping, gaming, jerking off, streaming endless garbage” (432). His anger edges toward that of the true Luddite: “We’re being played . . . and the game is fixed, and it won’t end till the Internet—the real one, the dream, the promise—is destroyed” (432).
 
Justin and Lukas, co-creators of DeepArcher, attempt an escape from what so exercises Ernie and Eric, “the surface Web, all that yakking, all the goods for sale, the spammers and spielers and idle fingers, all in the same desperate scramble they like to call an economy” (357). The DeepArcher software facilitates creation of a world elsewhere, a “history-free” (373) world within a world within a world (as the Deep Web itself lies within and beneath the surface Web, which in turn lies within or alongside the everyday daylight world). Once thought absurd, the old cosmology of a world supported by an elephant standing on the back of a tortoise (and so on in infinite regression) takes on new life in the nesting spheres of cyberspace.
 
A portmanteau word, DeepArcher puns on “departure” and “deep archer,” the one a dream of lighting out for the digital territory, the other something more Apollonian. Both meanings signify the dream of a redemptive spiritual removal. Departure secularizes a beloved end-of-history fantasy of fundamentalists, the Rapture; deep archer, on the other hand, evokes a famous Zen discipline: practice with a bow until, thought banished, it becomes a part of oneself, the arrow flying unerringly to its mark without conscious volition. Readers have encountered these conceits in Pynchon before: fantasies of Rapture proliferate in Vineland, and Gravity’s Rainbow includes among its minor characters the Peenemünde engineer Fahringer, the “aerodynamics man” who works on the guidance problems of the V-2 (that high-tech arrow) by retreating to the forest “with his Zen bow . . . to practice breathing, draw and loosing, over and over.” As he “becomes one with” the arrow, so will he “with Rocket, trajectory, and target” (403). Pynchon reifies this consummation in characters—Gottfried, Slothrop—who become one with the Rocket in a more literal way.
 
Initially uncorrupted by advertising and Control (or by the scary convergence of corporate and governmental purpose), the Deep Web harbors freedom that cannot long go unregulated. Maxine at one point dreams of “some American DeepArcher” (353), a version of that truly cheered land Oedipa Maas and Lew Basnight envision or imagine. Like the People’s Republic of Rock and Roll in Vineland or the great airship Inconvenience in Against the Day, DeepArcher promises escape from Control—whether political or gravitational—but ends up, as they do, merely validating the etymology of Utopia (“no place”). Presently, then, DeepArcher begins to fill up—like America—with the refuse of the old world or, as it is called here, the surface Web, which was always already “based on control,” as Ernie Tarnow observes (420). Advertising and other commercial interests begin turning up, as do those latter-day Thanatoids, the piteous ghosts of 9/11. Some Rapture.
 
Among other things, then, DeepArcher is a variation on a theme—its digitization, so to speak—that Pynchon reframes from novel to novel. In the closing pages of Lot 49, he evokes the America that persists beneath the consumerism, the perpetual sacrifice to the materialist Moloch, “the absence of surprise to life” (170). In Gravity’s Rainbow, Slothrop yearns in exile for a green idea of his homeland. The characters of Vineland and Inherent Vice contemplate the doomed revolution of the 60s, the beach beneath the literal and figurative paving stones. This American subjunctive is at stake, too, in Mason & Dixon and Against the Day. In the one, America is the plain on which reason and the spirit engage in dubious battle; in the other, it anchors the global allegory of geopolitical catastrophe on the millennial horizon.
 
In his musings on the Web beneath the Web, Pynchon adumbrates the cybernetic sublime. The author has wryly regretted (in the Slow Learner introduction) the supposedly obtrusive presence of T. S. Eliot in his early work, but echoes persist. “Burnt Norton” provides language and images well suited to Internet catabasis:
 

Descend lower, descend only
Into the world of perpetual solitude,
World not world, but that which is not world,
Internal darkness, deprivation
And destitution of all property,
Desiccation of the world of sense,
Evacuation of the world of fancy,
Inoperancy of the world of spirit. (179)

Pynchon’s heroine, exploring DeepArcher, hears about a deep “horizon between coded and codeless. An abyss” (357). Continuing her night-sea journey through the Deep Web, she encounters a woman (or someone with a female avatar, for the Internet makes literal the performance of gender) who speaks of “the deep unlighted . . . where the origin is. The way a powerful telescope will bring you further out in physical space, closer to the moment of the big bang, so here, going deeper, you approach the border country, the edge of the unnavigable” (358). That last word carries etymological freight, for “cybernetic” derives from the Greek cubernetes, “steersman.” This nameless interlocutor (whom Maxine momentarily thinks the Archer herself, Zen mistress of Zen masters) wants to “[f]ind out how long I can stay just at the edge of the beginning before the Word, see how long I can gaze . . . till I . . . fall in” (358). She imagines the void beyond the cybernetic.
 
Abyss and Logos. Readers encounter related figures in The Crying of Lot 49, in which Oedipa contemplates a Mexican painter’s vision of universal solipsism. The description of Remedios Varo’s “Bordando el Manto Terrestre” teases the ear with a belated yet oddly resonant independent clause: “all the other buildings and creatures, all the waves, ships and forests of the earth were contained in this tapestry, and the tapestry was the world” (20-21, my emphasis). The verbal template of that last phrase appears in the first sentence of the Gospel According to John: “In the beginning was the Word . . . and the Word was God.” Later, Oedipa brings to consciousness that problematic Logos as she considers the dark velleity that manifests itself as:
 

the toy street from a high balcony, roller-coaster ride, feeding-time among the beasts in a zoo—any death-wish that can be consummated by some minimum gesture. She touched the edge of its voluptuous field, knowing it would be lovely beyond dreams simply to submit to it; that not gravity’s pull, laws of ballistics, feral ravening, promised more delight. She tested it, shivering: I am meant to remember. Each clue that comes is supposed to have its own clarity, its fine chances for permanence. But then she wondered if the gemlike “clues” were only some kind of compensation. To make up for her having lost the direct, epileptic Word, the cry that might abolish the night. (118)

In comparing the language here with that of Bleeding Edge, one sees the extent to which Pynchon has come to privilege void over Verbum. In the later novel, one encounters nothing so sanguine, so numinous, as a redemptive Logos. Far from the Miltonic numen that confounds Chaos and old Night, the Word referred to by Maxine’s fellow wanderer in DeepArcher annunciates only the secular boundary between digital order and disorder. Momentarily imagining the dark side of this binary, the author contemplates, with Maxine, a cybernetic event horizon, the ineffable origin of origins. Pynchon in effect “digitizes” the poignant passage in which Nabokov, in Pnin, evokes exile: “the accumulation of consecutive rooms in his memory now resembled those displays of grouped elbow chairs on show, and beds, and lamps, and inglenooks which, ignoring all space-time distinctions, commingle in the soft light of a furniture store beyond which it snows, and the dusk deepens, and nobody really loves anybody” (62).
 
Pynchon also contemplates what, borrowing a term from Derrida, one might call the “archontic” function of cyberspace. Pynchon views the Internet as a great archive made in the image of the human mind. Consciousness finds its “analog” in the surface Web; the Deep Web models the unconscious, in which fearsome abreactive energies may lurk. Like Derrida, moreover, Pynchon conceptualizes the archive as troubled by the originary material it houses. An archive, according to Derrida, always represents more than a simple repository. Originating as a place distinguished (often dubiously) as the special charge of an archon, the archive is inescapably political—as is the narrative of origins to be read there. Derrida emphasizes the “politics of the archive” and argues that “[t]here is no political power without control of the archive, if not of memory. Effective democratization can always be measured by this essential criterion: the participation in and the access to the archive, its constitution, and its interpretation” (4n1). Politically susceptible to suppression, the archive is, insofar as it models the psyche, susceptible also to the pathologies of repression. The archive fosters the “compulsive, repetitive, and nostalgic desire to return to the origin, a homesickness, a nostalgia for the return to the most archaic place of absolute commencement” (91). Deconstructing archival desire (the custodial imperative), Derrida discovers something very much like the repetition-compulsion that prompted Freud to hypothesize a Todestrieb or death instinct, Janus-face to the Lustprinzip or pleasure principle. Derrida’s “archive fever,” by the same token, twins the desire to conserve with a paradoxical, self-canceling “destruction drive” (19).
 
Thus Ernie Tarnow says more than he realizes when he declares that the Internet “never stopped carrying in its heart a bitter-cold death wish for the planet” (420). Ernie’s paranoia is ironically mirrored in the very medium he despises. As Michael Chabon notes in a perspicacious review of the novel in The New York Review of Books, the “infinite interlinks” of the Internet make it “a perfect metaphor for paranoia” (68). Chabon persuasively reads Bleeding Edge “not as the account of a master of ironized paranoia coming to grips with the cultural paradigm he helped to define but as something much braver and riskier: an attempt to acknowledge . . . that paradigm’s most painful limitation” (69). He sums up the many teasing invitations to embrace full-blown paranoia:
 

Pynchon clicks, clicks, and clicks on the hyperlinks coded into the page source of 9/11—advance warnings given to Jewish brokers or Muslim cabbies by Mossad or al-Qaeda, suspicious groups of men seen on rooftops before or after the attack, the purported destruction of TWA Flight 800 in 1996 by a shoulder-mounted Stinger missile, unusual trading in the stock of American and United Airlines in the days leading up to September 11. His scorn for all this weak sauce is most sharply evident when it dribbles from the lips of [March Kelleher,] an otherwise affectionately rendered old-lefty liberal New Yorker. (68)

The reader, in other words, must not mistake the “weak sauce” for heavy hermeneutic gravy—must resist indiscriminate linking of, say, Kugelblitz the psychotherapist, Kugelblitz the school, Kugelblitz the atmospheric phenomenon, and Kugelblitz the anti-aircraft weapon. More seriously, the reader would err to take the emergent catalogue of paranoia’s hyperlinks as adding up to a coherent theory of 9/11’s grassy knoll. Although the novel “unnervingly plays footsie with 9/11 trutherism,” as Jonathan Lethem observes, “the discomfort this arouses is intentional. Like DeLillo in Libra, Pynchon is interested in the mystery of wide and abiding complicity, not some abruptly punctured innocence.” Even as he assembles the ingredients of conspiracy, then, the author resists its powerful undertow. Fox News, after all, has given paranoia a bad name.
 
Part of history is its reception—not what happened but what it was thought to mean. The author of Bleeding Edge reminds readers that many saw the terrible events of 9/11 as being likely to put an end to the irony with which the American intelligentsia couched its critiques of the nation’s political and cultural folly. But Pynchon has little patience with the pundits who faulted irony as a failure of moral discrimination. “One good thing could come from this horror,” declared Roger Rosenblatt shortly after 9/11:
 

it could spell the end of the age of irony. For some 30 years—roughly as long as the Twin Towers were upright—the good folks in charge of America’s intellectual life have insisted that nothing was to be believed in or taken seriously. Nothing was real. With a giggle and a smirk, our chattering classes—our columnists and pop culture makers—declared that detachment and personal whimsy were the necessary tools for an oh-so-cool life.

No. In the toolkit of truth, irony is at once saw, hammer, and screwdriver. Without irony, a writer is a surgeon without a scalpel. Storytelling without irony eventuates in little more than the meretriciousness of “reality” TV— “suddenly all over the cable,” as Maxine’s friend Heidi Czornak says, “like dog shit” (335). Heidi subjects the reasoning of Rosenblatt and his ilk to Aristophanic scorn. Not for her the argument
 

that irony, assumed to be a key element of urban gay humor and popular through the nineties, has now become another collateral casualty of 11 September because somehow it did not keep the tragedy from happening. ‘As if somehow irony,’ she recaps for Maxine, ‘as practiced by a giggling mincing fifth column, actually brought on the events of 11 September, by keeping the country insufficiently serious—weakening its grip on “reality.” So all kinds of make-believe—forget the delusional state the country’s in already—must suffer as well. Everything has to be literal now.’ (335)

Maxine knows what her friend means. At the Kugelblitz School, she has noticed an especially worrisome development: fiction will no longer figure in the curriculum. The repudiation of “make-believe,” addressed in a small way by the hearty endorsement of Santa Claus by Ziggy and Otis’s father (397-98), threatens some final diminution of the creative engagement with the world—some askesis of the imagination that resists and subverts official versions of reality. (Pynchon historicizes this agon in Mason & Dixon, in which the Juggernaut rationalism of the eighteenth century drives before it the last vestiges of magical and spiritual thinking.)
 
In his one concession to those who would dispense with irony, Pynchon always refers to the destruction of the Twin Towers—synecdoche for all of the terrorist acts that day—as “the atrocity” (321, 328, 376). But he repudiates any and all naïve yearning for a post-ironic episteme. Even a brief suspension of irony will allow supremely unimaginative entities (journalism, government, religion, media) to back a bewildered country into puzzled patriotism—that blunt instrument of national purpose. Thus Pynchon subjects history, notably the horrific events of 9/11, to scrutiny that resists the call to embrace and echo the un-ironic discourse of those who would presently lead the nation into wars in Afghanistan and Iraq. Irony contests what Don DeLillo calls the “flat, thin, tight, and relentless designs” of official history, written in “a single uninflected voice, the monotone of the state, the corporate entity, the product, the assembly line” (63). In his insistence that, confronted with “the reeking hole with the Cold War name at the lower edge of the island” (373), irony becomes all the more indispensable, the last thing thoughtful people ought to relinquish, Pynchon affirms this ancient figure as truth’s box-cutter, an edged tool that sharpens perception. In his honesty, he also affirms that every such “cutting edge” twins itself as “bleeding edge.”
 
I have argued here that Pynchon’s ironic engagement with history, along with his probing of the archive (both psychic and cyberspatial), places Bleeding Edge on the shelf of truly distinguished fictions on the national trauma that was 9/11. As trauma embeds itself in the psyche, it becomes a wound that cannot heal, a bleeding edge never stanched. As a work of art, Pynchon’s novel restores perspective, effects the “working through” that alone can neutralize trauma, picks its readers up off the barroom floor of history, perhaps even affords them a little of the grace invoked—ironically—in the title of that Joyce story. Another ironist resisting the infantilization of public discourse, Thomas Pynchon situates himself at the bleeding edge of epistemic perception; like Joyce, withal, he takes up a position at the bleeding edge of the art that defines his moment in literary history.

In January 1995 Martin Amis signed on with American agent Andrew Wylie to publish The Information with Harper Collins, and initiated the media scandal that one paper referred to as his “greed storm” (Amis, Experience 247). The scandal resonated across multiple levels. Having broken his long-term publishing relationship with English agent Pat Kavanagh and Jonathan Cape, an imprint of Random House UK, Amis was seen as having turned his back on the English publishing industry and, indeed, on England itself.[1] Personally, the switch put an end to the friendship with Julian Barnes, Kavanagh’s husband and Amis’s celebrated contemporary in British fiction. And perhaps most importantly, the deal with Wylie, to the tune of a £500,000 advance on The Information, signaled for readers of literary fiction a betrayal of a lofty ideal of authorship in favor of capitalist greed and glamor, a celebrity sell-out.[2]
 
That Amis’s change in agents ignited such an uproar, whether or not the move indicates a greedy complicity with the commercialization of literature, is in itself quite telling. First, the scandal and Amis’s role in it provide a bitter reflection of the way the novel publishing industry works today. As Paul Delany has shown, the 1980s and 90s witnessed a shift “to what may be called a postmodern literary system” (Delaney 180). While literary publishing has always been a business, at least since the emergence of the novel form itself, prior to the 1980s it could be viewed as a trade based on loyalty between a publishing house and its authors. Now, however, most of the fiction industry is controlled by multinational conglomerates—including Bertelsmann and Time Warner at the top—so that relationships between authors and publishers have become more tenuous.[3] Further, this shift has meant a reconfiguration of the players in the marketing of manuscripts, published novels, and future work. Richard Todd shows that since the abolition of resale price maintenance following the end of the Net Book Agreement in 1995, publishing functions within a triangle of forces: the author and agent, the publisher, and retail, with the latter holding the most power (20).[4] Publishers acting within the multinational conglomerate system, for their part, seek out top-selling authors as brand names, “buying a literary property rather than taking on an author” (Delany 182) and investing large advances as a form of speculation, effectively “[gambling] with the company’s money” (Todd 26) on both the sales of a novel and that celebrity author’s future work.[5] Amis’s “greed storm,” in this light, gives the lie to any lingering fantasy of producing literary fiction in a way that’s autonomous from global corporate capitalism. He played the game.[6] “Martin Amis” is a brand name, a celebrity and, as one acting in seemingly obvious self-interest, was temporarily placed in the press’s “shithead factfile” of sensational public outrage (Amis, Experience 248).
 
And yet, while I am interested in the contemporary marketing of literary fiction, I focus here on Amis’s role in forming his own celebrity status, and specifically on how his fiction reflects the ethos of corporate capitalism, often satirizing and participating in its logics simultaneously. That is, how do we make sense of the scathingly satirical depiction of Reagan-Thatcher economic policy in Money, for example, in light of his apparent embrace of the corporate capitalism that helped give rise to the Amis brand? In the simplest sense, Amis’s novels that self-reflexively center on authorial production and the publishing industry employ a cartoonish and self-conscious style to mock the commodification of literature and the vicissitudes of success in an increasingly volatile and polarized literary marketplace.  But what are the effects of this satire when read together with Amis’s public image and the apparent greed that has come to define it? If Amis critiques the corporate publishing model and its place within the global conglomeration of capital and distribution, does he simply wind up critiquing his own authorial brand-name? Certainly. As Delany has suggested regarding Amis’s satire of authorial celebrity in The Information, his “satire cannot escape complicity with its own target” (184).[7]
 
While Delany is right about the limits of Amis’s satire (and the same could be said about much twentieth-century satire, such as that of Wyndham Lewis or Evelyn Waugh), I want to complicate that reading by showing how Amis’s fiction negotiates the economic production of Amis the authorial brand and the symbolic capital that it has accrued. In tracing his satirical treatment of authorial control and corporate publishing across Success (1978), Money (1984), and The Information (1995), we see that these metafictional novels participate in the production of the authorial brand precisely by folding the increasingly dominant corporate model of publishing and marketing fiction into their satire. His depictions of the commercialization of literature and the production of the author-as-celebrity in these novels are more than simply cartoonish caricatures.[8] Rather, these novels satirically reflect the corporatist economic policy that emerged during the Reagan-Thatcher era, while at the same time allegorizing Amis’s own relationship with big corporate publishing, including the way his celebrity status—and the status of “literary fiction”—depends on the contingencies and volatility of a highly speculative market.  In doing so, these novels tell something of an allegorical backstory to the media scandal over Amis’s advance from Harper Collins and reflect the ways in which literary value came to be produced in the 1980s and ‘90s, including the value of the celebrity author as a cultural commodity.
 
While this essay thus focuses on Amis’s position within these recent changes to large-scale corporate publishing and their impact on the social production of literary value, I also show how Amis’s case in particular constitutes both a continuation of and a rupture with literary modernist modes of celebrity production, placing him within a larger historical narrative of literary circulation and authorial celebrity. Literary celebrity, in this view, isn’t new, but the modes of its production, circulation, and economic returns have changed dramatically since the period of high modernism and its sense of relative autonomy from bourgeois and corporate marketing practices. As Lawrence Rainey and Aaron Jaffe have shown, modernists like Joyce and Eliot participated in networks of limited commodity production. Focusing on modernism’s “tripartite production program [of] journal, limited edition and public or commercial edition,” Rainey demonstrates how the limited production and careful marketing of modernist texts like Ulysses reveal a “strategy whereby the work of art invites and solicits its commodification, but does so in such a way that it becomes a commodity of a special sort, one that is temporarily exempted from the exigencies of immediate consumption prevalent within the larger cultural economy” (Rainey 100, 3). For Jaffe, building on Rainey and reframing Bourdieu’s model of cultural capital, this specialized marketing style is ultimately more important than the style or meaning of such avant-garde texts; very few could actually get a complete copy of Ulysses for several years after its appearance, and it’s this inaccessibility that largely shapes the modernist’s name as a cultural signifier of value, or “imprimatur” in Jaffe’s terms. “These luxury commodities,” Jaffe writes, “were designed to be scarce, to be more heard of than come across, and to redound their excess aura to the authorial name” (Jaffe 74).
 
Building on the model of modernist authorial imprimatur, Jonathan Goldman has shown how Joyce and others forged uniquely recognizable styles to solidify a celebrity authorial identity. The text, on this reading, produces the author as celebrity, a figure distinct from a writer’s material existence. Perhaps most important for my argument on Amis, Goldman shows how self-reflexive references to authorial production contributed to a stylistic branding of authorial identity. Joyce’s Ulysses is exemplary. Borrowing from Foucault’s theory of the author-function, Goldman reveals how Joyce the celebrity figure is a product of his own textual strategies. In a nuanced reading of “Scylla and Charybdis,” the episode most explicitly concerned with authorship, Goldman argues that Stephen’s internal asides during his lecture on Hamlet function simultaneously on diegetic and extradiegetic levels, both grounded in the narrative events of the novel and referring outside the text to an orchestrating authorial voice (Goldman, 66-70). The self-reflexive stylistic virtuoso of Ulysses produces the idealized author whose name continues to circulate as the exceptional referent of modernism. The trademark styles of modernists like Wilde, Joyce, or Chaplin produce, in Goldman’s words, “the idea of the author, and therefore the celebrity, as a paradigmatic subjectivity, all the while replicating the process by which one turns the self into an object” (11-12).
 
Amis’s fictions that indulge in the processes of authorial branding reveal self-reflexive affinities with this modernist mode of celebrity production. But, again, the corporate production of top authors works differently and has dramatically altered the relationship between writers and the means of marketing their work. While Amis’s self-reflexive style reproduces Joyce’s production of a split authorial identity—writer and celebrity—it does so within a vastly different market for literature and the circulation of economic and cultural values. Thus, Joyce’s (and others’) dependence on patrons or intentional scarcity has been replaced by a system in which “shrewd authors realize that it is better to get the biggest possible advance, because then the publisher will have a strong incentive to promote the book, having put a substantial sum at risk” (Delany 182), a system concomitant with the “historical shift over the last century from a model of authorship dominated by the signature to one dominated by the brand name” (English and Frow 48). As Amis’s celebrity status accrues across approximately the first half of his career, we see his fiction increasingly taking for its subject the idiosyncratic and increasingly corporate means of producing the authorial brand in particular and literary values more generally. In short, Amis redeploys a modernist mode of reflexive authorial self-fashioning, capitalizing on it in the process of negotiating the postmodern market for literary fiction.
 

Finding Success

Readers often single out Money or The Information to discuss Amis’s problematic postmodern satires on social class, obligatory consumerism, and authorial complicity with the apparent totality of global market logics in the eighties and nineties.[9] And as many critics acknowledge, each of those novels employs complex pairings of characters, unwilling doubles that often bleed into sexual triangles, to create fictional tensions that comically reflect ideological contradictions and polarized class relations that became increasingly transparent in the seventies and eighties.[10] More specifically, the dialogic and frictional relations between Amis’s doubles raise questions about the viability of authorial control, social critique, and complicity with hyper-commercialized cultural production, exemplified by the role of Amis’s fictional surrogate character (named “Martin Amis”) in Money and by the contrast between two writers, the obscure Richard Tull and the revoltingly successful Gwyn Barry, in The Information. But to gauge fully the significance of Amis’s doubles to his ongoing fictional engagement with the commercial production of authorial celebrity, we can begin with Success (1978) and its depiction of the contradictions of social class under the new money economy that led to Thatcher’s election. Success, his third novel, isn’t about writers or the literary marketplace in any diegetic sense, but it initiates Amis’s continuing subjection of Britain’s changing political economy to a fantasy of authorial control and his signature style. The novel’s comic rendition of shifting class identities and anxieties played out by its discursive doubling of “yob” Terence and posh Gregory offers a starting point from which to trace Amis’s allegorical engagement with the cultural production of the Amis brand.
 
The novel is made up of alternating first-person accounts, addressed to the reader, of the unfolding daily events of foster brothers Terence Service and Gregory Riding. Throughout the first half of the novel, Greg regales readers with his lofty old-money exploits of sex, fashion, and narcissistic charm, showering Terry’s name and lower-middle-class identity with smug derision and snobbish dismissal. Terry, having been adopted by the Riders as a child after his father killed his mother and sister, limps through his narratives in abject shame and self-loathing, ever-subservient to Greg’s easy affectations of confident wealth and sneering class insularity. Excessive comic styling reduces each to categorical social types, opposites on the class spectrum, exemplified by their own self-descriptions. Terence’s passages cringe in passive abjection and the bare survival of an unrecognizable “Service” class employed in pointless sales. As he says of his appearance: “I look ordinary, I look like educated lower-class middle-management, the sort of person you walk past in the street every day and never glance at or notice or recognize again” (11); or of his job and social standing: “I do a job. That’s what I do. . . . I was pleased when they gave it to me—I certainly didn’t ever want to give it back. I am still pleased, more or less. At least I won’t be a tramp, now that I’ve got it” (33). Greg, on the other hand, dashingly dandy and redolent of old money and new fashion, begins his days planning his outfits and recounting his elaborate exploits of the night before in cartoonish delight—“We always go to the grandest restaurants. We’re always in those plush, undersea cocktail bars (we can’t bear pubs). We always love spending lots of money”—before breakfasting on fresh orange juice and croissants, “[tolerating] the obsequious banter of liftman, doorman and porter,” and swishing off to his posh job at an art gallery (41).
 
In its caricatures of social class, this is pretty simple satire, a kind of comic book Gulliver’s Travels for 1970s London. But the typological obviousness, while done for comic effect, also serves Amis’s larger ironic designs on the changing conditions of economic class, changes that will inform his later self-reflexive narratives of authorial celebrity and the marketing of literary value. The novel’s narrative arc traces a process of role reversal and a discursive intersection of the identities of Greg and Terry that reflects the lingering anxieties of the economic recession of the early seventies and the “dissolution of the postwar Fair Shares consensus” that followed (Delany 175). Briefly, Gregory gradually surfaces from his denial to reveal to readers that he’s going broke: his job doesn’t pay enough to live on, he can no longer afford his lavish nights out and, most importantly, his father has lost all the value of the family estate through quirky investments and charity. Wallowing in debts induced by total liquidation and the outmoded ease of property owners, Greg succumbs to the paranoid recognition of money’s totality: “My overdraft grows in lines of figures and print, spawning bank charges, interest payments. I can no longer read a book or even watch television without this other drama rearing up inside my mind, mangling page and screen. I cannot do anything without money leering over my shoulder” (182). At the same time, following the failure of unionization coupled with rationalization (or downsizing) at the sales firm where he works, Terry gets promoted and earns increasingly higher commissions for buying and selling products that remain unknown even to him, resulting in inflated confidence and an awareness of a seismic shift in his class relations with Greg. Puffed up on disposable income, Terry “won’t be scared of them [upper-class property owners] any more. … They don’t belong any more. What they belonged to has already disappeared; it is used up, leftovers, junk” (193). 
 
This comic drama of the shifting parameters of social class provides a neat satirical reflection of the increasing corporatization and financial deregulation of British society leading into the 1980s. The Riders’ financial decline is in itself rather typical of a pattern of dwindling estate values in England since the late nineteenth century. But Terence’s “success” reflects the reactions following the oil crisis and recessionary cycles that defined British economics in the seventies and that led to the embrace of a global finance system of floating exchange-rates, dramatic cuts to public spending, and radical deregulation of British banking and stock markets coupled with an increasing rise in unemployment.[11] Only obliquely and subjectively represented by the limited Terry, Amis nevertheless suggests that Terry’s increased earnings result from the contradictions and failure of leftist unionization and the short-term shoring up of virtual capital in a free floating exchange market. Before his good luck strikes, Terry listens to a regional union secretary at his firm who appeals to collective organization “because you want to not get fuckin’ sacked,” and to his boss’s reply that unionization would result in several firings because they would have to pay sellers union rates (100). As Amis’s comic dialogue suggests, unionization ironically favors corporate power and individual entrepreneurship. Later, following unionization and Terry’s commitment to his boss Veale’s vague instructions to buy and sell, he’s raking in the cash because “Veale has already gimmicked it that I get tax relief and supplementary benefits for doing things about being Clerk (i.e., for doing things for him. . .)” (158). In his own thick way, Terry recognizes that he benefits from the deregulation and privatization that began to emerge in the mid-seventies and found their most notorious advocate in Margaret Thatcher. Terry’s in the money while his colleagues face a rapid series of terminations.
 
But beyond this condensed fictional reflection of economic contradiction and change facing Britain in the 1970s, I’ve traced Success’s class narrative here because it also underpins and initiates Amis’s ongoing experimental negotiations of authorial identity under the increasingly ubiquitous control that transnational corporate marketing has come to exercise over literary production. Specifically, the novel’s subtle self-reflexive hints at Amis’s orchestration of fictional events engage with the production of authorial identity in the face of corporate publishing. Self-reflexive authorial references in the novel operate on two distinct, ultimately conflicting, levels. First, the voices of Terry and Greg alternately point to Amis and his imaginative control over the fictional representation of shifting economic and class relations. As Terry begins to reflect on his changing financial situation, his comments on his own position have a fatalistic ring  and displace the power of economic forces onto authorial control. Specifically referring to his relationship with Greg and his sister Ursula, both beginning to go mad, he says “Things have progressed with steady certainty, with the slow cohering logic of a genre novel, or a chess combination, or a family game. Already I know how it will end—things will suddenly get much worse for two of us and never get better again—but I cannot break out” (170). Of course he doesn’t “break out,” and Ursula commits suicide and Greg slips into poverty and madness. More importantly, this “family game” is part of what could be called a “genre novel”: Success as a nasty “condition of England” novel of the late-seventies organized by Amis’s sadistically “cohering logic.”
 
Greg’s voice also speaks for Amis, but in terms of style. Through Greg, we hear sly references to Amis’s stylistic affectations, his rapid-fire caricatural excess of urbane postmodernist irony. In the first half of the novel, Greg’s stylistic excesses express his big-spending confidence and smugness. Nearing the end of his decline, though, that stylistic panache only gives the lie to the protective sham of wealth. And it’s during this transition that his address to readers takes on a double-voice, simultaneously announcing his demise to readers and referring to Amis’s stylistic orchestration of the whole thing. Disablingly claustrophobic about riding the Tube, he indulges in a triumphant fantasy of overcoming his fear in his usual style of comic book daring: “I was looking in superb form, with my cape fanned out behind me like Superman’s, wearing some crackly new snakeskin boots, my hair spruced high by an expensive haircut,” to conclude the passage with his heroic emergence from “the pit of harm” to the optimistic daylight. Then comes the abrupt shift. “Recognize the style,” he asks us, “(I suppose I’d better change that too now)? If you believed it, you’ll believe anything” (180-1). What follows is a lengthy catalogue of Greg’s lies up to this point in the novel, completely undermining the rhetorical and consumer excesses that have defined him. On a basic diegetic level, Greg’s style is an expression of pompous affectation. But at the moment of this shift, hinging on attention to style, Greg’s voice is less a means of expressing a character’s psychological depth, calling attention instead to Amis’s intense stylistic artifice (“Recognize the style?”) and suggesting a fictional control—where authorial style trumps narrative realism—vying with the vastly indeterminate and unpredictable economic changes that the novel comically reflects.
 
Second, Amis echoes modernist literary precursors in a way that self-reflexively refers to the narrative voice masterminding the fictional reflection of real material processes in England’s political economy. Also through Gregory’s stylistic pomp—and Greg confesses to having never read much—Amis appropriates well-worn fragments from celebrity modernists like T.S. Eliot and Evelyn Waugh. In doing so, he suggests a fantasy of autonomy from market functions—one in which ironic references to highbrow literacy might offer an alternative space from which to critique the sweep of commercialized culture—but one that the novel’s form ultimately undermines. For instance, one of Greg’s more flamboyant rhetorical performances of the posh consumer opens with “April is the coolest month/for people like myself” (89). A cheap ploy, no doubt, but the twist on Eliot and what is perhaps the most clichéd line from all of modern poetry points in two directions at once. On the one hand, “April is the coolest month” translates Eliot’s bleak modernist social vision composed of the fragments of the Western literary tradition into Greg’s cultural and consumerist currency and narcissistic high style. Its irony, on the other hand, obliquely points to Amis’s reading of modernism and his own participation in Eliot’s elitist theory of inserting one’s “individual talent” into the “tradition,” or literary canon. And in this modernist vein, finally, the ironically Eliotic line hints at both formalism’s fantasy of modernist literature’s autonomy from market functions and our more recent understanding of modernist celebrity. Recall that, as Aaron Jaffe has shown, the scarcity built into much of modernist production helped shape the modernist’s name as a cultural signifier of value, or “imprimatur,” so that the scarcity itself acted “to redound [an] excess aura to the authorial name” (Jaffe 74). In this light, Amis’s self-referential borrowing from Eliot is also a borrowing from his cultural capital, suggesting that he, too, can wax ironic on the perversities of contemporary society, benefit from its market logics, and yet do so from an imagined space of relative cultural autonomy.
 
Of course the point is that like Eliot, despite the vastly different means of marketing their work, Amis’s satirically disdainful reflections on market society ultimately depend on its ongoing commercialization of fiction. Success’s self-reflexive characteristics—its references to a controlling authorial figure and its appropriation of modernist literary celebrity—imagine a limited form of literary autonomy, producing an author figure who orders the fictional reflection of otherwise unpredictable economic mechanisms. But the novel’s form reflects a reified economic society, in which characters’ fates are determined by finance and fluctuating market values, making authorial control itself a fiction (operating only within the enclosed diegetic space of the novel), inextricably bound up with the market conditions it satirizes. Success thus introduces an important disjunction in Amis’s work: the fiction points to an author figure in control of its representation of deregulated finance and economic volatility, but the novels themselves are marketed as cultural commodities in a corporate system of profits over which Amis the author has little control. I pursue this disjunction further in what follows and, in a move similar to other critics who have noted Amis’s ironic complicity with the market for literary value and prestige, I show the ways that his fiction reveals an unfolding attempt to negotiate the terms by which the author as celebrity is produced within the global corporate marketing of literature. If Amis the brand is produced by global networks of production, marketing, and circulation, then Amis the author recapitalizes on that mode of commercialized cultural production. This fictional engagement with the production of the Amis brand, and what its curious blend of complicity and critique can teach us about the production of literary value, comes to a head in Money.
 

Show Me the Money

As several readers have noted, Money (1984) is an inflated satire on the financial deregulation, economic globalization, and consumerist individualism that became increasingly prominent during the early years of the Thatcher-Reagan era.[12] John Self, whose name is appropriately generic and solipsistic, narrates the novel in a continuous present of excessive and self-destructive consumption often fractured by alcoholic black-outs. For Self, an English adman working in New York on a film to be called either Good Money or Bad Money, money is everything. Literally. Not only does he follow a path of insatiable commodified desire, whose appetite ranges from booze and fast food to pornography and prostitutes; he also conflates money as a medium of exchange with the object of desire itself.[13] His desire is completely reified, a symptom of a totally commodified society whose “shady, petty dealings in high finance mirror the supposedly legitimate, grand-scale monetary dealings of Thatcherite Britain,” as Patrick Brantlinger puts it (259). As a figure for such an absolutely commodified desire, Self is also the perfect dupe for the enormous financial swindle that by the end we find has been taking place throughout the novel. Lavishly living it up on credit, Self winds up criminally bankrupt and living in a London slum after a failed suicide bid.
 
My reading of Money advances two claims in light of its story of excessive individual consumerism. First, I show that the novel yokes the imperative to endless and excessive consumption to a corporatist ethos of fast money—speculation and quick-selling—within an allegorical structure. Following Tamás Bényei’s argument that the novel reflects the multiply allegorical nature of money itself—as both “the naming of something abstract” and a representation of empty serial interaction—I show that Amis’s satirical allegory consciously and self-reflexively eschews the claims of literary realism in order to stress the fictive nature of speculation and virtual capital and the real material agency they exercise in global markets.[14] Second, building on this allegorical reading, I argue that Amis—who figures as a fictional version of himself in the novel—tests the limits of his own authorial celebrity against this vision of the omnipresent power of global finance and virtual market values. As such, I build on Jon Begley’s observation of the novel’s “precarious balance between satiric authority and a self-reflexive recognition of authorial and cultural complicity” (84), and argue that that “balance” and “complicity” are means by which Amis stages his ongoing fictional negotiation with the global publishing industry and its production of the celebrity author-figure as distinct from authorial agency.
 
Readers simply cannot ignore Money’s John Self as an extreme caricature of unbridled individual consumption, one that can lead to individual and national self-destruction (indeed, the subtitle of the novel is A Suicide Note). During the first week of his visit to New York to work on the film project, Good Money, Self’s typical day begins with a hangover followed by a gluttonous feed on the quick-fix junk of American industry: “I didn’t feel too great this morning, true. A ninety-minute visit to Pepper’s Burger World, on the other hand, soon sorted that lot out. I had four Wallies, three Blastfurters, and an American Way, plus a nine-pack of beer. I’m a bit full and sleepy, perhaps, but apart from that I’m ready for anything” (32). As his almost pornographic indulgence in fast food suggests, Self is something of a class outsider (having grown up the son of a pub owner), but also a willing apprentice to the new order of fast money. Self is guided in this role in part by his alleged partner, Fielding Goodney, who encourages big credit spending with a nearly religious devotion. In response to Self’s admission that he flew coach on his transatlantic trip to New York, Goodney chastises him to “pay more money, Slick. Fly in the sharp end, or supersonic. Coach kills. It’s a false economy” (24). Fielding’s real economy is the world of high finance, free-floating exchange rates, and speculation, as he tells John in a “voice full of passionate connoisseurship” of “Italian banking, liquidity preference, composition fallacy, hyperinflation, business confidence syndrome, booms and panics, US corporations,” and so on (27).
 
What I want to stress here, though, is Amis’s emphasis that Self’s insatiability is a symptom of a quick-sell economic ethos and of free market deregulation, both conservative “solutions” to economic crises of the seventies and early eighties. Set in 1981, the novel reflects the lingering effects of the 1973 oil crisis and the failure of the Bretton Woods agreement on fixed exchange rates and the ensuing corporatist politics of deregulation and privatization that followed throughout the decade.[15] Through Self, we get a caricatured but oddly accurate sense of those complex international processes, partly because, as Amis’s allegorical siphon for a booming credit economy, he rides the tide of artificially stimulated markets. Observing a “big blonde screamer” on Broadway who repeatedly shouts “‘It’s my money and I want it,’” Self is vaguely aware of the global links between the oil recession and reductions in public spending that came to characterize Thatcher’s England and Reagan’s U.S.:
 

The city is full of these guys . . . . I read in a magazine somewhere that they’re chronics from the municipal madhouses. They got let out when money went wrong ten years ago . . . Now there’s a good joke, a global one, cracked by money. An Arab hikes his zipper in the sheep-pen, gazes contentedly across the stall and says, “Hey, Basim. Let’s hike oil.” Ten years later a big whiteman windmills his arms on Broadway, for all to see. (12)

 
Self’s joke about reduced public spending (slashed funds for “municipal madhouses”) is itself reductive, but indicates a certain awareness of the local impact of deregulated global markets. Indeed, in England he’s both a pawn and player in the new economy of corporate tax deferrals and reduced labor costs. Partner in the London ad agency Carburton, Linex & Self, he’s privy to the benefits and anxieties of privatized money and floating corporate expenses, telling readers, “We all seem to make lots of money. . . . The car is free. The car is on the house. The house is on the mortgage. The mortgage is on the firm—without interest. The interesting thing is: how long can this last? For me, that question carries an awful lot of anxiety—compound interest. It can’t be legal, surely” (78). Benefitting from corporate tax reductions and deferred interest payments, Self’s reality is measured by volatile abstract values and the threat of compound interest, precisely the free market policies that allow Fielding to swindle him with little more than a rally of confidence for the future market for their film and a few quick contract-signing sessions supposedly backed by a troop of domestic and foreign investors.
 
Again, Self’s jokes about the market, as an only partially aware insider, are caricatures, typical of Amis’s rapid-fire cartoonish style of satire. But Amis’s caricatures—of John’s insatiable appetite and of money’s mad liquidity—also support the novel’s allegorical representation of hegemonic corporate capitalism. Amis incorporates several self-reflexive hints that we’re to read the novel as an allegory, and we can briefly chart those clues before returning to the novel’s concern with corporate capital and floating market values—and to the ways they shape Amis’s fictional negotiations of literary celebrity.
 
For one, John’s very appetite, as we saw with his gut-walloping fast food hangover cure, is clearly comic excess: his eating and drinking would kill most anyone within weeks. As an additional comic device, and as in much traditional allegory, characters’ names in Money align them with social functions or moral categories, but usually with an added layer of irony. So John’s London-based girlfriend who openly exchanges sexual favors for High Street fashion and expensive dinners is called Selina Street—“street seller.” Always encouraging John to enjoy the high life and pornographic pleasure industries, Fielding Goodney suggests “feeling good.” Lorne Guyland is a washed-up, insecure, hyper-macho actor with whom John is forced to work and who puts his “guyness” on display whenever possible. And Martina Twain, educated high society woman and temporary love interest for John, doubles with the fictionalized “Martin Amis” as one of the novel’s voices of reason, hence, “Mart-in-twain.” Finally, as a fictional surrogate for Amis, Martina Twain lends John a copy of Animal Farm, perhaps the most famous twentieth-century allegory in English, in her attempt to educate him in high culture. John not only struggles to read Orwell’s short novel, but thinks it’s a children’s book and fails to recognize it’s an allegory, even trying to identify with the various animal figures (190, 193)—a comic blindness to allegory that mirrors his swindling by Fielding (which in turn gets narrated through an extended metaphor, as we’ll see). So John’s misunderstanding of allegorical representation, combined with Amis’s typological naming of characters, all point to Money’s comic allegory of high finance’s virtual—or fictive—reality.
 
That allegory of spiraling finance in the eighties forms the economic context in which the novel engages with the production of authorial celebrity and its symbolic capital, as a cultural figure produced by those market forces yet distinct from the material existence of the writer. Money is a novel that is about novel writing and the commodification of the author figure, which Amis dramatizes through his own authorial presence in the novel, “lurking in the text like some pantomime monster,” as Philip Tew puts it, a fictional version of himself that plays on the split between writer and authorial brand (Tew 78). Amis is simultaneously a fictional character in the novel and an author-surrogate that expresses his limited control over his own circulating brand name. Martin Amis the fictional author plays the role of the high-minded artist and voice of reason, parodying the image of the writer who eschews the world of commerce, “the money conspiracy,” in devotion to literature. When Johns asks him about his writing schedule, his reply is an arrogant description of an ascetic devotion to high culture and literary autonomy from the market:
 

“I get up at seven and write straight through till twelve. Twelve to one I read Russian poetry—in translation, alas. A quick lunch, then art history until three. After that it’s philosophy for an hour . . . Four to five, European history, 1848 and all that. Five to six: I improve my German. And from then until dinner, well, I just relax and read whatever the hell I like. Usually Shakespeare.” (220)

 
Speaking with “a tone of pompous superiority rather than detached wisdom” (Begley 99), this Amis figure seems a self-consciously constructed parody, his seriousness giving the lie to any latent fantasy of gentrified authorial detachment. Or, as James Diedrick suggests with regard to the Amis figure’s ascetic literariness, the novel exposes a kind of “false consciousness,” the depiction of “a naïve literary modernist clinging to the fiction that he can protect his art from the influence of the marketplace” (Diedrick 98). And since, as we’ve seen, literary modernism produced its own forms of authorial celebrity, the point to stress here is that Diedrick’s sense of a “naïve” modernist autonomy is a myth concealing a highly self-conscious fiction of the author’s identity as it circulates in the market.
 
At the same time, and distinct from this parodied author figure, Martin Amis’s presence also refers to the author of Money, suggested when John thinks, “For some ambiguous reason (and I think it’s to do with his name, so close to that of my pale minder), I feel strangely protective of little Martin here” (222). Following this coy reminder to readers of the character’s real-life “pale minder,” the fictional author-figure begins to speak more frequently for the author of the novel we’re reading. So when Amis’s surrogate begins rewriting the film script for John’s Money, he gives him a lecture on contemporary literature that clearly calls attention to Martin Amis’s allegorical aims in the novel. First, Amis addresses the conventional relationship between author and fictional narrator, telling a distracted John Self that, “‘The distance between author and narrator corresponds to the degree to which the author finds the narrator wicked, deluded, pitiful or ridiculous. . . . This distance is partly determined by convention. In the epic or heroic frame, the author gives the protagonist everything he has, and more. The hero is a god or has godlike powers or virtues’” (229). On the other hand, when dealing with a narrator either lower on the scale of social class or simply despicable (like John Self), “the more liberties you can take with him. You can do what the hell you like to him, really. This creates an appetite for punishment. The author is not free of sadistic impulses” (229). Note that the “heroic” treatment of the narrator echoes a long interpretive tradition of reading Joyce’s Portrait, one that stressed as Joyce’s own Stephen’s aesthetic theory of the artist as a godlike creator hovering behind the work, “paring his fingernails”; while the notion of a sadistic author, clearly alluding to Amis’s treatment of Self, allows for a self-consciously ironic treatment of fictional narrator or alter ego. The novel supports this when Amis’s fictional author continues his lecture, still in the self-reflexive mode, on the demise of literary realism: “‘we’re pretty much agreed that the twentieth century is an ironic age—downward-looking. Even realism, rockbottom realism, is considered a bit grand for the twentieth century’” (231). So why not try metafictional allegory instead?
 
His lecture on the ironic age of postmodernity and the obsolescence of realism positions Amis’s surrogate author as a literary authority: his advice to John speaks to readers on behalf of Amis, the author of Money. But that authority only functions within the self-reflexive fictional space of the novel; enclosed in self-conscious fiction, the idea of the author’s sadistic control becomes itself a fiction produced by the “money conspiracy” (316) of the publishing industry and its speculation on authorial celebrity, as will become clearer when we turn to The Information. Money dramatizes this point in its climactic chess match between Amis’s fictional surrogate and John Self. Having lost everything to Fielding’s financial schemes and barely having escaped from the U.S. authorities back to London where he plans to commit suicide, John calls Amis over to his flat for a final chat. Amis of course has figured out how Fielding duped John (again in reference to the author’s control of his fiction), and he tries to explain the swindle over a game of chess. The chess match serves as synecdoche for the way Fielding locked John into signing away enormous sums of money. Throughout the game, Amis explains Fielding’s moves or money art, a combination of paid-off actors, insurance deals, and computer hacking that left John criminally in debt. At the same time, he plays what appear to John to be oddly defensive or counter-logical moves on the board. John, totally focused on the game, “searching for blueprints, for forms and patterns” (344), fails to follow Amis’s money narrative. Then, as the absolute victim of authorial sadism, John finds himself locked in the loser’s position of a zugzwang endgame: the player whose turn it is is forced into a suicide move. John loses the match precisely as Amis wraps up his narrative of the financial zugzwang that Fielding had played.[16]
 
As synecdoche for the larger narrative of Money, the chess match brings into focus the arguments I’ve been making about Amis and the literary marketplace, and does so around an apparent contradiction. One the one hand, as spokesperson for Amis’s metafictions of the literary market, his allegorical stand-in only retrospectively grasps the abstract functions of high finance and its very real material effects. The novel thus plays with the distinction between Amis the author and his fictional surrogate, figure for the circulating authorial name. In doing so, it contrasts Amis’s strict narrative control over Money and his celebrity double’s limited agency over the literary marketplace in which he circulates. But on the other hand, and following the fictional Amis’s victory in the metaphorical chess match, his narrative conflates authorial control over a self-enclosed, self-referential fiction with control over market values, as he wonders aloud to John why Fielding didn’t quit earlier and cut his risks, and speculates:
 

“Probably he was too deep into his themes and forms, his own artwork. The illusionist, the lie artist, the storyboarder—they have a helplessness. . . . Why didn’t he just let you walk [away from it all]? Because he was hooked. On the fiction, the art. He wanted to get to the end. We all do.” (346-7)

 
Amis insinuates that, like the fictional money man, he treats John Self sadistically out of devotion to “the fiction,” which here means both novels and high finance. Amis’s metafictional trick here thus suggests Jon Begley’s sense that the novel’s dialogical pairing works to “undermine the status of the authorial presence and his narrative designs, thereby reaffirming the premise of his cultural critique by implicating both figures within an economic system that resists the imposition of any encompassing ‘Answers’” (Begley 98). More importantly, though, as the allegorical double of Amis the author, his celebrity surrogate is self-consciously a product of the fictions, novelistic and financial, that produce the Amis brand as it circulates in the market for literary celebrity.
 

The Information on Celebrities

In his 2000 memoir Experience, Amis quotes Ian McEwan in describing the split subject of the celebrity author. Amis had the experience on his spring 1995 North American book tour for The Information and writes, “On such tours, Ian McEwan once said, you feel like ‘the employee of a former self’, because the book is now out there to be championed and squired, while you have moved on” (Experience 275). “Once an outrageous novelty” (like Oscar Wilde’s celebrity U.S. tour),[17] he continues, “the book tour is now accepted as a fact of life and a matter of professional routine. You arrive in each city and present yourself to its media; after that, in the evening, a mediated individual, you appear at the bookshop and perform” (275). This personal reflection on his public tour, in fact, provides a partial summary of The Information and its satirical reflection on the literary star system. As in Success and Money, The Information is composed of antithetical doubles coyly orchestrated by authorial intrusions. But here Amis uses that satirical structure to expose, simultaneously, the lingering fantasy of modernist modes of celebrity-production that have been outmoded by large publishing conglomerates, the contingencies of authorial celebrity under that now fully formed star system, and Amis’s ongoing and uneasy negotiation of the terms of his own celebrity brand.
 
The novel, set in the 1990s, centers on two forty-year-old writers: the increasingly smug Gwyn Barry who writes highly successful drivel, and the quaveringly abject Richard Tull, a failing novelist trying to hold onto some literary dignity by churning out reviews of obscure biographies. While Gwyn’s success on the literary market forms the focus of much of the novel’s satire, it’s important to note that that celebrity status is defined against Richard’s pathetic grip on an obsolete ideal of modernist exceptionalism and difficulty. If in Money, as I argued above, Amis alludes to celebrity modernists like Joyce and Eliot to invest their cultural capital in his own authorial brand within the increasingly corporatized production of fiction, then in The Information he thoroughly and self-consciously exploits and explodes the myth of modernist exceptionalism with the figure of Richard Tull.
 
When not cranking out tedious book reviews, Richard divides his working time between two crumbling bastions of highbrow modernist literary production: private publishing and little magazines. He works as poetry and fiction editor at the Tantalus Press, a private vanity publishing house whose authors, mostly barely literate, pay their own printing costs. But whereas the reputations and cultural capital enjoyed by Joyce and other modernists depended in part on the successful niche marketing of private publishers, the Tantalus exists to mock the contemporary irrelevance of such ventures, denying writers the tempting fruit of publication as cultural capital. Amis bitingly asserts the devolution of private publishing and its modernist associations with authorial exceptionalism when the chief editor at the Tantalus, Balfour, encourages Richard to publish his work under their imprint by holding out the Joycean appeal: “‘One should remind oneself,’” he tells Richard, “‘that James Joyce initially favored private publication.’ Then he added: ‘Proust, too, by the way’” (Information 52). Richard recognizes, however, that private publishing, with its myth of being “a springboard to literary eminence” fully undermined by commercial distribution in the global age, “was not organized crime exactly, but it had close links with prostitution” (53). As a fatalistic hold-out against the prostitution of postmodern private publishing, Richard is also Literary Editor at a little magazine called, yes, The Little Magazine. As if Balfour’s Joycean appeals to private publishing weren’t enough to nail the coffin on the modernist heyday of niche literary marketing, Amis gougingly traces the decline of the little magazine as a final resistance to the pressures of advertising and commercial publicity. The fictional Little Magazine emerged on the tails of high modernism, “born and raised in a five-story Georgian town house next to the Sloane Museum in Lincoln’s Inn Fields (1935-1961),” and housed all the Bohemian trappings of modernist culture—“dusty decanters” and “tables strewn with books and learned journals” (116)—before its gradually declining public presence. “Increasingly nomadic and downwardly mobile,” by the 1990s the magazine’s existence is like a metaphorical vagabond from the modernist period begging money from failed writers and critics. “On the other hand,” Amis writes with a satirical sneer, “The Little Magazine really stood for something. It really did stand for something, in this briskly materialistic age. It stood for not paying people” (117).
 
With Richard a figure for such dying modernist institutions, his writing, always alluded to as tortuously dense and self-consciously learned, fares no better. He is, as Amis’s narrator puts it, “a marooned modernist” (125). Speaking in the guise of his narrator, Amis invites readers to “take a quick look at Richard’s stuff” before waxing ironic on modernism’s flickering historical moment and Richard as abject figure for its cultural demise from the vantage point of postmodern high publicity. “Modernism was a brief divagation into difficulty,” he writes, and Richard, its latent cross-bearer, “didn’t want to please readers.” His prose uses endless layers of “unreliable narrators and author surrogates” in what read as “indistinguishable monologues interieurs.” In other words, Amis tells us, Richard’s problem is that “he was trying to write genius novels, like Joyce. Joyce was the best yet at genius novels, and even he was a drag about half the time. Richard, arguably, was a drag all the time” (125). Amis summarily mocks Richard for trying to redo a modernist myth of exceptionalism, an effort doomed to failure either way. At best, he is a wicked and unknowing parody of Beckett’s The Unnamable and other narratives of undoing: Richard’s collected works can only go by names like “unreadable,” or, as the title of his current manuscript has it, Untitled (“deliberately but provisionally” given that title in imitation of Joyce’s Work in Progress) (125, 5).[18] Passed from one agent to the next in a downward spiral through the literary publicity machine, Richard’s manuscript gives readers migraines or sends them unexplainably to the hospital, usually before they get past page seven.
 
Much of the novel’s satire is leveled, however, at the counter to Richard’s outmoded modernism, Gwyn Barry, a talentless scribbler and temporary success story of global literary marketing. “Gwyn Barry” is a product of media hype, “all fax and Xerox and preselect” (10), and Amis doesn’t even represent his writing within the novel, its absence silently supporting Amis’s insistence, voiced by fictional agent Gal Aplanalp, that the public is “more interested in the writers than in the writing” (94). As Amis’s own publicity scandal over switching agents demonstrated, the role of the literary agent has become increasingly central to the publication and marketing of novels and the circulation of authors as brand names. Sarah Brouillette has shown how this process works in the global marketing of postcolonial writers in a way that is also useful in considering Amis’s case and his satirical representation of the authorial star system in The Information. In a revision of Pierre Bourdieu’s thesis in The Rules of Art, that “the idea of the artist as autonomous from the economic sphere is inseparably linked to the rise of a commercial culture that allowed artists to make a living producing art,” Brouillette argues that, since the rise of multinational publishing organizations, any “claims to an authenticity defined by separation from the market” has become “a near impossibility” (62-3). This corporatization has altered the respective roles of the players involved—authors, agents, and publishers—so that “a dwindling number of ‘star’ authors receive an increasing percentage of a given firm’s available dollars in the form of lucrative advances and royalties,” and agents now play a more central role in auctioning a star’s work to the highest bidder (65).[19] Central to this network, celebrity authors are marketed as unique personae with very little realistic agency in the market for their books in such a way that the author figure becomes a “marker of differentiation” that “[conceals] mass production in individuation” (66).
 
Obviously familiar with this corporate organization and marketing of books and authors, Amis scathingly depicts it through the smug Gwyn Barry and his interactions with agents and his own media image, in part to distance himself from it, as we’ll see. Gwyn’s success is, of course, a result of a complex network of finance, agents, marketing and distribution; or, as Richard Menke puts it, “novels [in The Information] feature as the excuses for radio and television appearances, newspaper profiles and gossip columns, movie deals” (149). In a publicity event combining interviews, photo sessions, and financial arrangements with Gwyn, Amis shows how such publicity maneuvers serve to package the image of writers whose “personae as authors are crucial to the promotional circuit necessary to a book’s success within the market” (Brouillette 67), and how this mode of production still harbors within it and cultivates a lingering fantasy of the redeeming powers of “literature” for its own sake. After a photo session with a financier, Gwyn’s publisher, “the captain of industry” (sly nod to Carlyle’s rantings?), and “the Shadow Minister of the Arts,” the financier gives a speech—“trying to get something back for his money”—about which literary magazines he would like to be associated with. All agree: one with “high standards,” and the discussion moves on to market research and questions of “targeting” the book (17-18). Gwyn also gloats to Richard about his new agent, the American Gal Aplanalp (having “controversially” switched agents in a possible allusion to Amis’s own immanent controversy), brags about the huge advance he’s getting for his incomplete manuscript, and assures Richard that Gal’s list is moving “upmarket” and becoming “more literary,” a nod to the lingering fantasy of literary exceptionalism (40-1). ^[20] That fantasy is partly upheld by the paradoxical process of authorial “differentiation” concealing mass production that Brouillette outlines, a process in which Gal plays a significant role in the novel and in Amis’s comic deflation. “‘Writers need definition,’” Gal tells Richard at one point, because “the public can only keep in mind one thing per writer. Like a signature. Drunk, young, mad, fat, sick: you know. . . . Ever thought about the young-fogey thing? The young fart. You wear a bowtie and a waistcoat. Would you smoke a pipe?” (94). Richard, being the naïve modernist, suggests that he get published first, and Gal quickly shifts the conversation back to publicity, suggesting that Richard begin with a journalistic piece on “very successful novelist” Gwyn Barry and initiating the plan that Richard tag along on that all-important publicity stunt to generate celebrity hype, the American book tour.
 
In terms of the novel’s structure, the book tour across major U.S. cities serves to further polarize Richard’s failure and Gwyn’s success in the star system. Richard meets with the alleged publisher of his novel, Untitled, only to learn that the firm is a shaky start-up relying on a form of print-on-demand publication. Gwyn, on the other hand, is shepherded around by a publicity crew from photo session to book-signing events to radio interviews, all the while following rumors of his candidacy for the “Profundity Requital” literary prize. As a publicity stunt, the book tour crystallizes, in the figure of Gwyn, the mass commodification of the writer’s “uniqueness” or “signature” and the symptomatic narcissism that emerges from this tension. Following Gwyn’s return to London as a thoroughly “mediated individual,” Amis shows how the material existence of the writer becomes secondary to the author as celebrity, as circulating brand name. Perusing reviews of his work, Gwyn notices a tepid critical dismissal of his recent novel that suggests, “‘It would seem that Barry has somehow tapped a deep collective yearning. This explains the book’s success. Nothing on the page explains it’” (297). As if in response to that “deep collective yearning,” Gwyn starts reading everything that might contain some obscure reference to him or his novels, branching out from fiction reviews to agricultural and real estate reports (299-301). He further feeds this mediated celebrity ego by imagining a glowing Gwyn Barry biography, a projected crystallization of his authorial public persona, a carefully packaged mass product that shapes the image of the author’s unique subjectivity for a consuming public.
 
The novel’s polarization of success and failure, Gwyn’s celebrity and Richard’s abject obscurity, forecloses any alternative mode of literary production. Despite Richard’s increasingly desperate attempts to sabotage Gwyn’s public image, and thus his literary authority, Gwyn remains a media darling through the novel’s end, while Richard, having accepted his inability to write something the public might want to read, gives up writing entirely and dotes on his young sons. If Amis’s presence as author-figure in Money suggests that while the writer may control the fiction, his celebrity status is subject to the contingencies of marketing, then The Information makes that point even more transparently. While the novel frequently insists that the market for fiction and authorial celebrity is arbitrary and vastly in excess of any writer’s immediate control, it also withholds any alternatives to its dictates. This reified view of market culture, where the overarching reach of market forces shapes every character’s desires and fate, is of course not new for Amis. And when the fiction is precisely about the commercial production of fiction, such a restricted vision of writing for the market—either to succeed or to fail—perhaps serves in its simplicity to heighten the satirical impact of the novel that never lets readers forget that Barry’s celebrity status has nothing to do with talent or originality. Were this the only achievement of The Information, however, we might simply dismiss Amis for his cynical complicity with the market, as Delany does, or for an implied authorial smugness as a celebrity author but one distanced from the obviously uninteresting work of his fictional creation, another instance of postmodern irony that has, for most critics, long since run its course.
 
But it is precisely this limit, this foreclosure of alternatives in an apparently hegemonic market for fiction that I want to complicate, by asking how that fictional foreclosure implicates Amis and his ongoing negotiation of the production of authorial celebrity. My reasoning here thus diverges from Catherine Bernard’s argument that Amis’s “disembodied” authorial presence “may be a mere posture to mask his lack of control and self-identity,” but that the whole contributes to a Frankfurt School immanent critique of society by reflecting its contradictions (132). The critique is there, but exists uneasily alongside Amis’s satirical embrace of celebrity production. In a sense, especially if we take Amis at his word, “the two writers, Richard and Gwyn, are [him],” as he stated in an interview with Graham Fuller shortly after the publication of The Information, and Gwyn’s mediated ego certainly reflects Amis’s own experiences of a celebrity alter-ego during publicity events (Fuller 124). The novel also shows Amis using Richard and Gwyn to play with his own public persona. For example, Richard’s Joycean aspirations, while part of his failure in a postmodern literary market, also point to Amis’s admiration for Joyce as a model stylist; introducing Richard and his internal struggles with writing, Amis’s narrator toys with different ways of representing that interiority, revising Richard’s thoughts several times before deciding to drop the “I”: “For the interior monologue now waives the initial personal pronoun in deference to Joyce” (5). Further, Richard’s attempts to slander Gwyn’s image include spreading rumors among the judges for the Profundity prize of Gwyn’s womanizing and misogyny, accusations commonly leveled against Amis. But Amis’s sadistic treatment of both figures, even if they reflect aspects of himself, problematizes such a neat picture, even beyond a widely discredited biographical criticism. Amis makes frequent authorial intrusions throughout the novel (by now one of his signature moves), distancing his own public persona as writer from his fictional author-figures. Amis’s authorial presence in the novel, that is, contributes to its satirical representation of his dubious alter ego, Gwyn.
 
Amis’s authorial presence in the novel, while associated with Gwyn, also serves to contradict Gwyn’s success, emphasizing the contingent and ephemeral nature of celebrity, particularly Amis’s own. Consider two examples. First, in a clear authorial intrusion early in the novel, Amis briefly interjects with what sounds like a self-conscious undoing of the controlling Joycean creator, “behind or beyond or above his handiwork . . . paring his fingernails.” The intrusion tells a story about trying to sign with a child in the park whom he thinks is deaf. Self-consciously failing to communicate with the child, he finally attempts to make the signs—“the M, the A”—and thinks to himself, “how can I ever play the omniscient, the all-knowing, when I don’t know anything?” (43). If modernist celebrity depends in part on the myth of relative autonomy from bourgeois systems of production and exchange, Amis’s self-effacing authorial presence points to the postmodern and highly speculative literary market in which he is only “one small part of a vast and complex machine” (Brouillette 67).
 
Second, Amis pits the arbitrary and ephemeral time of authorial fame against the nature of universal time, a trope through which he refers to his own contingent celebrity status. In an interior monologue during a conversation with Gwyn, Richard reflects that “Gwyn’s success was rather amusingly—no, in fact completely hilariously—accidental. And transitory. Above all transitory. If not in real time then, failing that, certainly in literary time. . . . Or else the universe was a joke” (80). After they part ways, Amis intrudes to reflect on the speed of light and the inconceivable and growing distance between points in space. On par with Joyce’s interest in the universal and the particular, the timeless and the trivial, that we see in the “Ithaca” episode of Ulysses, Amis’s interjection on astronomical time answers Richard’s speculation about Gwyn with a comically hyperbolic reflection on his own “literary time” of transitory celebrity in the face of universal time:
 

In a million millennia, the sun will be bigger. It will feel nearer. In a million millennia, if you are still reading me, you can check these words against personal experience, because the polar ice caps have melted away and Norway enjoys the climate of North Africa.
 
Later still, the oceans will be boiling. The human story, or at any rate the terrestrial story, will be coming to an end. I don’t honestly expect you to be reading me then. (81)

 
As Amis jokingly projects his own literary longevity into this grand narrative of apocalypse, he implicitly mocks his fictional author’s desire for an immortality born out of the polish of corporate branding.
 
So through the novel’s foreclosure of any alternatives to success or failure in the global corporate production of literature, Amis’s identification with his author figures, and his authorial reflections on the ephemeral and contingent nature of his own celebrity status, The Information, as several critics have suggested, certainly implicates Amis with the star system and its arbitrary commodification of literature that the novel supposedly indicts.[21] The marketing of the novel, Amis’s self-reflexive complicity, and the novel’s picture of winners-take-all publishing, all point to a totalizing market for literature that is fully and inescapably reified. But that’s precisely the point on which I want to conclude my reading of the novel.
 
In his recent essay on Amis and the marketing of genre, Will Norman argues that Amis’s
 

“Night Train reveals a disjunction between the marketing, design and institutional reception of Amis’s work as literary fiction on one hand, and the author’s own strategies of composition on the other. In the light of this analysis, Amis’s work yields a negative critique of the category of literary fiction from within its own domain, in rendering visible the tensions and compromises necessary to its desire for legitimacy.” (38)

 
I fully agree with Norman’s thesis and its general relevance to Amis’s larger aims across his fiction, especially insofar as it calls attention to a negative critique operative within the very domain of literary production today. I would, however, like to push that argument towards a different conclusion. In exposing the “compromises” associated with the corporate market for fiction, The Information fully undermines any highbrow legitimacy for literature, leaving only an empty desire in its place. The celebrity author, as representative of literary fiction, is an absolute product of successful packaging and marketing, and thus serves for Amis to sweep away any residual claims literature makes to an art that is not bound by capricious and speculative corporate values. Following on this, and building on Success and Money, Amis implicates his own authorial celebrity with the systems of speculation and greed that he so strongly satirizes. But rather than seeing this simply as a problem of complicity with its satirical target, as Delany does, or as a balance between “satiric authority” and complicity with commodification, as Begley argues of Money (84), the strength of The Information is that it collapses any distinction between fictional representation and its mode of production under the new star system of multinational marketing. As such, it culminates Amis’s ongoing fictional drama of the market for literature. The novel concludes by insisting that “the information” is nothing, a kind of existential abyss of a contemporary culture lacking any ontological or moral ground. But it also suggests that the novel is about, is the information on, the process whereby the category of literature has become completely reified, and the contingent status of the celebrity author figure it produces along with it. More specifically, The Information is about the production, and contingency, of Martin Amis’s celebrity.
 

Conclusion

I began this discussion with the story of the media scandal over what some in the British publishing establishment saw as a mercenary move to secure an enormous advance, an outcry based partly on the sense that Amis had sold out the category of literary fiction to the strictly commercial dictates of the mass market. As I’ve suggested throughout the essay, this distinction is something of a fantasy, a holdout on a modernist myth of literary exceptionalism from the homogenizing forces of the conglomerate system that has come to dominate the market for literary fiction. In this sense, Amis’s rising financial success as an author and his transparently commercial move served to expose that fantasy. Further, we might think of the media outrage as participating in the game that Amis’s fiction had been playing all along. From the self-reflexive stylistic experiments with modernist authorial control in Success to the metafictional play with a split authorial identity under the global “money conspiracy” of Money to The Information’s culminating reflection on the total reification of contingent celebrity, Amis has constructed a loosely allegorical trilogy that dramatizes the way in which modernist modes of celebrity—based in carefully cultivated niche markets and a myth of exceptionalism—have been fully absorbed by the global market for literary production and the commerce of cultural values. The scandal of Amis’s commercial greed played its part within a system of commercialized cultural values that, like that of literary prizes, serves to protect the collective belief in artistic autonomy, a form of cultural capital that can translate into other symbolic and economic forms, as James English has shown (189-90). If the outrage over Amis’s alleged sell-out stems from a faith in the independence of cultural capital from economic structures, a faith that at least since Bourdieu has been shown to be naïve of the way those structures prop up cultural production, then the establishment’s ire was already bound up with the commercial game Amis was playing.
 
But beyond this picture of a totalizing market that both rewards and chastises complicity, Amis’s unfolding story about the corporate production of celebrity was a new and perverse means of generating cultural capital. Across these novels, we see Amis increasingly collapsing the distinction between fictions about the market and the market for fiction, such that even the most apparently anti-commercial satirical stance cannot deny its dependence on the systemic commodification that gives it its voice. This is by no means to redeem Amis’s choices or the politics of his fiction, much less the ways in which the market shapes the conditions of visibility for literary fiction. Rather, Amis’s self-reflexive metafictional project on the market for fiction shows that the identity of the celebrity author is itself a fiction produced by “the accumulation of literary capital (or power), and its convertibility into or out of other kinds of capital” as it continues to circulate (English and Frow 55). As Amis’s novels come to engage ever more directly with the commodification of literature and the contingent processes by which literary celebrity is conferred, and does so from the position of a self-conscious insider, he in a sense renounces any claims to cultural values distinct from their economic machinations. But in that renunciation and his full, if ironic, embrace of the corporatization of literary production, he signals a form of cultural capital whose authority is based in dramatizing the production of his own ephemeral celebrity status. Amis’s fictions about the market, read in light of the marketing of fiction, reveal a perverse and limited means of producing cultural capital out of the symbolic and economic structures that it has traditionally disavowed.

According to the OED, the word etiquette derives from the French étiquette, meaning ticket or label. Of course, etiquette also refers to the “manners and rules of polite society,” the learning of which is tied to sociability rather than to the moral virtues. At the heart of the semiology of manners is thus the question of whether a moral system can be produced from a merely conventional form of politeness. Or, conversely, can a code of etiquette be grounded in moral and aesthetic judgment (as opposed to a more instrumental notion of civitas)? Kant suggests not, when he  suggests that our moral conscience impels us to act purely for the sake of duty. In other words, fine manners and self-cultivation signify mere civility and should never be confused with the demands of virtue. Nor are philosophers the only ones to have expressed suspicion regarding the universal pretension of social norms à la mode; artists and writers too have recognized norms as the mere grammar of a culture in the name of a certain ethnological prejudice: the refusal of xenia, which is to say, the refusal of hospitality towards the other or stranger. As we know, the modern racial or class connotation of xenia has long been reputed antithetic to universal and/or cosmopolitan culture. Thus two sides consider etiquette to be weak with respect to universal ethics: there are those who (nevertheless) think that etiquette offers the only way out of incivility in comparison with a more cosmopolitan ideal, and those who think that civility cannot pretend to xenia without formal rules of inclusion-exclusion. Now even – and above all if – etiquette in a certain manner delegates public morals, it also permits the consideration of a veritable ontology of civility as a process of interaction. How does a rule of etiquette produce xenia rather than its mere label or semblance? Where does one locate courtesy in relation to sincerity or honesty? And if politeness is practiced sincerely, should an elegantly expressed xenophobia be judged solely as a form of politeness? Such are the questions I wish to raise by analyzing the racial messages that may or may not be conveyed in rules of etiquette. I start by considering the tie of ritualized racism to codes of decorum: I examine a contemporary black philosophical-artistic response to racist incivility, in the art and writing of Adrian Piper, before turning briefly to an eighteenth-century white philosophical-aesthetic response to blackness as a kind of faux pas. Why Piper? Because in advertising her allegiance to Kant and to etiquette, she undoubtedly addresses the question of interracial intimacy as a question of xenia and/or xenophobia; if our moral lives are formed a priori by certain categorical attitudes and these attitudes have to be transmitted via norms in order to be effective as customs or mores, these attitudes will take on a certain guise in an avowedly racist culture.[1] If these categories contain social mores, we can be sure that in representing racism’s social “virtues,” Piper’s art addresses their etiquette or grammar with a view to changing their normative power: the cultivation of racist incivility continues to define American attitudes towards blacks, or at least the language of polite sociability.

I. Faux Pas

And yet, being a problem is a strange experience,—peculiar even for one who has never been anything else, save perhaps in babyhood and in Europe. It is in the early days of rollicking boyhood that the revelation first bursts upon one, all in a day, as it were. I remember well when the shadow swept across me. I was a little thing, away up in the hills of New England, where the dark Housatonic winds between Hoosac and Taghkanic to the sea. In a wee wooden schoolhouse, something put it into the boys’ and girls’ heads to buy gorgeous visiting-cards—ten cents a package—and exchange. The exchange was merry, till one girl, a tall newcomer, refused my card,—refused it peremptorily, with a glance. Then it dawned upon me with a certain suddenness that I was different from the others; or like, mayhap, in heart and life and longing, but shut out from their world by a vast veil. I had thereafter no desire to tear down that veil, to creep through; I held all beyond it in common contempt, and lived above it in a region of blue sky and great wandering shadows. (Du Bois 1-2)[2]

 
Here is a famous moment from W. E. B. Du Bois’s The Souls of Black Folk: from shared etiquette to peremptory refusal, there is something about the racial dimensions of sociability (a visiting card, a childish exchange) that introduces a limit. We can distinguish three levels of meaning in the tall newcomer’s “glance”:
 

1. Her peremptoriness brings an end to a story of playful formality and leads to another story of revelation, exclusion, and displacement—a story of being shut out from the world’s social spaces “by a vast veil.” In reading a story about black experience that begins with its social exclusion, we, too, seem to have exchanged a story of innocence for that of fall and revelation, and to have exchanged polite society for a life lived “in a region of blue sky and great wandering shadows.”
2. On another level, the visiting card also has a certain referential symbolism: through its embassy one recognizes both one’s difference and its veiled meaning. There is also the suddenness of the card’s revelation of social law and the way that the latter turns merriment into abjection and acceptance into antipathy and reversal. This symbolic exchange, which seems irrevocable, brings an end to childish playing, and its scenography of refusal can be located both psychoanalytically and allegorically. The story of the card’s refusal, that is, presents a primal scene as political as it is personal.
3. Then again, what is Du Bois’s story about if not what it means to learn the difference between innocent entitlement and an entitlement that is innocently hateful? This lesson in status and manners is also at the heart of the African-American artist Adrian Piper’s notorious series My Calling (Cards) #1 and #2 (1986-90), a series of cards that read: “I regret any discomfort my presence is causing you, just as I am sure you regret the discomfort your racism is causing me” (Series #1) (see Fig. 1).

Fig. 1. Adrian Piper, My Calling (Card) #1 (for Dinners and Cocktail Parties), 1986-1990. Performance prop: business card with printed text on cardboard. 3,5″ x 2″ (9,0 cm x 5,1 cm). Collection Davis Museum of Wellesley College. © Adrian Piper Research Archive Foundation Berlin. Used by permission.

I regret what you will also regret and (probably even first and foremost) what these cards signify: acts of negation and denial, the incipient hypocrisy when white people – innocently or not, unwittingly or not – imagining themselves unobserved by blacks, give vent to barely repressed forms of conscious and unconscious hatred. These calling cards all too literally signify missed encounters, the accidental nature of which seems to call forth hatred, regret, discomfort, peremptoriness, and an all too familiar contempt. I am not sure if this reading is entirely justified, but already it seems to me that if Du Bois’s calling card tells of an innocence disenchanted by unspoken racism, a scene as painful as it is fundamental, then Piper’s cards attempt to bring the affect of those veiled scenes to social consciousness, and to show how racism in American social life can itself be exchanged again and again, and especially when the targets of such violence are denied any symbolic equivalence as presences. On the one hand, as allegorical motifs these calling cards clearly have everything to do with the limits of sociable exchange; they compel recognition through regret and discomfort. On the other hand, the dramatic meaning of the two episodes in My Calling (Cards) and Souls refers to the largest possible questions by way of small printed bits of paper, whose interrogative reading already encodes a politics of racial impropriety. These encounters, that is, evoke exchange, etiquette, inclusion, and social law without, however, responding to blackness as anything more than a faux pas. In contrast to Du Bois, Piper wants to pursue the significance of having the card refused or accepted, and this is why she introduces a written message, hoping to cause those who receive them to “reflect on their own deep impulses and responses to racism and xenophobia,” the latter defined as the “fear of the other’s singularity through the imposition of inadequate, stereotyped categories of classification” (Out of Order I 234, 248). My concern here is not with whether there is any inherent connection between the acceptance/refusal of the cards and questions of equality and difference, but with their affective significance for both giver and receiver. I am interested in their mode of interrogation, in contrast to their communication or signification, via the path opened up by the various faux pas committed in the presence of black persons.
 
As a way of approaching this problem, I begin by discussing the trope that has come to seem almost synonymous with Piper (and also with Souls): the figure of veiled sight, or cognitive blindness. In an essay in Reimaging America (1990), Piper refers to a way of seeing (racial-sexual others) that is itself blind and blinding, one that takes the form of self-serving “defensive rationalizations,” emblematizes procedures usually repressed or hidden in social interaction, remains closed to difference, and is mired in its own precarious rationality (Piper, Out of Order I 234). She calls this seeing xenophobic rationality. Such rationality involves the direct negation of others by fear, mistrust, error, antipathy, etc. “The fear I target,” she writes in “Ways of Averting One’s Gaze,”
 

is the more pervasive fear of the dissolution of the boundaries of the self in intimacy with an Other, through the seduction that coaxes your deep, unsubdued drives into the open…. My lifeline to integrity is the willingness to name and represent these forces, both in others and in myself. (Out of Order II 132)

 
Xenophobia here means both defense and aggression: turning aside and fleeing intimacy, the xenophobe refers to people who are different in a delusory, fictionalized, abstract, self-serving way. X-rationality cannot succeed in knowing the world, for it is at once a form of disavowal and negation, stereotype and fixation, and all too literally instantiates the unseeing, intransitive glance we saw in Du Bois’s Souls. For this intransitive vision, racial difference stands for a disturbing limit to the symbolic delegations of desire, a boundary beyond which “polite” white society does not normally go. This sort of limit, which stands for antipathy or refusal, seems based on the belief that blackness already has the inherent meaning of a faux pas that is by definition unwelcome. Indifferent to moral or aesthetic categories (of good manners, refinement, or breeding), such intransitive vision is by definition always on the side of refusal.

II. The Infirm Ground of Prejudice

“To feel the firm ground of prejudice slipping away is exhilarating, but brings its revenges” (Austin 61).

Piper’s 1989 essay, “Xenophobia and the Indexical Present I: Essay,” addresses her political-artistic response to racism and sexism in the following terms:
 

My work springs from a belief that we are transformed—and occasionally reformed—by immediate experience, independently of our abstract evaluations of it and despite our attempts to resist it. Because my creative commitment is inherently political, I am primarily motivated to do the work I do by a desire to effect concrete, positive, internal political change in the viewer, independently of—or in spite of—the viewer’s abstract aesthetic evaluation of my work…. Artwork that draws one into a relationship with the other in the indexical present [a self-critical standpoint encouraging reflection on one’s responses to the work] trades easy classification—and hence xenophobia—for a direct and immediate experience of the complexity of the other, and of one’s own responses to her. Experiencing the other in the indexical present teaches one how to see. (Out of Order I 247-48)

 
Artwork that teaches one to see does not limit itself to anger or accusation. It does not suffice to be didactic or confrontational; such work also must transform: “My purpose is to transform the viewer psychologically, by presenting him or her with an unavoidable concrete reality that cuts through the defensive rationalizations by which we insulate ourselves against the facts of our political responsibility” (Piper, Out of Order I 234). This transformation in the name of political responsibility and social politeness, it should be noted, begins (always violently, moreover, as the word cutting suggests) with immediate experience. As the phrase “indexical present” implies, Piper’s political art wants to be constitutive for the viewer in the here and now: it is hoped that in performing-viewing this art, we can sidestep the power of convention so as to experience the uniqueness of others, and thereby undergo a process toward some other telos or possibility. Curiously enough, we find that the possibility of transformation in the here and now itself relies on convention, but these “norms of etiquette” are irreducible to individual purposes and intentions (Piper, Out of Order 1 246). Etiquette, the way we interact with each other, is for Piper a political question, or rather, it is already the question of the political in the form of our acceptance of cultural or ethnic others. “I am interested,” she writes, “in acceptance of cultural and ethnic others as a social norm of etiquette, not just a moral or political norm” (Out of Order I 246).
 
At this point in the reading suggested by Piper, the political meaning of My Calling (Cards) becomes clear enough: the cards (1) stand for our submission to racist conventions or, what amounts to the same thing, our conformity to racist concepts in social situations, and (2) they also reveal the meaning of norms whose function is to produce effects beyond racist convention when what is communicated cannot be explained fully by conscious intentions or purposes. Or, rather, the cards unveil the meaning of a refusal of xenia that cannot be reduced to individual impropriety, a refusal that, as we know from Souls, is the very condition of a life veiled by racism. Precisely because we fear the shame and embarrassment caused by such norms of conduct, we “might conceivably work to discourage future racist and sexist gaffes,” thus making etiquette (and honor, respect, humility, and courtesy) the ideal for art, self, and society. Central to Piper’s ethics and aesthetics, etiquette, insofar as it is a norm above and beyond any singular utterance, is meaningful only if it can exceed the context of racist convention. The possibility of etiquette – and what allows us to recognize the difference between good behavior and social gaffes – makes the immediate present of our racialized experience transformable and thus reformable. If etiquette works through shared contexts, then its meaning is already other to any individual utterance or act and is therefore beyond any supposedly original or governing context. Etiquette may have unintended or passive political effects precisely because it cannot be contained within individual (or parochial) acts of intention or decision. This is why My Calling (Cards) makes use of the calling card as another form of delegated or non-enunciated communication. Only when freed from intent, when the subject can no longer determine or decide itself, does speech manifest another politics. Interestingly enough, Piper herself both invites this reading and subverts the very terms of its consistency when she invokes the indexical present as the defining context of her art. Because etiquette governs what we say and do, and not what we mean or think, she argues that it can produce a situation where selfhood, defined as a set of ideological practices, becomes critically aware of itself. Indeed, Piper locates the pedagogical function of her art in the effects of such self-transformation. By establishing a distance from racism, her art further serves a critical function by making the defensive rationalizations of racism visible. The idea of a secure or simple presence is thus shown to be an effect of ideology. The presentation of xenophobic rationality, then, essentially estranges that rationality from itself by establishing a distance to the ideology presented, and this estrangement, in turn, produces knowledge of the ideological illusion of race. In other words, precisely by making the effect of racial ideology visible at the level of identification and performance, Piper’s art produces knowledge that the viewer can then use to transform the ways in which racist ideology “insulates” us from the experience of “concrete reality.” This transformation arises from xenia itself, or, more precisely, from a notion of universal politeness directly expressed and experienced. The attempt to present political “facts” to the viewer, directly and immediately, nonetheless implies that the “aesthetic” is itself merely a veil or ornament that hinders access to the unique experience of those facts. More pertinently, the attempt implicitly denies, through various media, that experience is always transforming and so has no uniquely immanent meaning. At those moments of encounter, Piper ostensibly asks for a form of critical reflection and judgment that will in turn reveal gaps in imagination and understanding in interpersonal situations. But as Piper herself describes perfectly, the cards also reveal precisely that gap between private cognition and public performance whose avoidance enables the hateful innocence of racist speech to be maintained in the absence of any moral or civic responsibility toward others.
 
To put it another way: as signifiers rather than indexes, the cards are devoid of meaning and function until put into circulation, when they act as delegates for a meaning they manifest only in the act of their exchange. In circulation, moreover, their proxy meaning vanishes as soon as they are received, leaving only their decorative or referential symbolism. In brief, these cards should be understood as supplements rather than as visitations attendant upon “direct and immediate experience”: they offer no guarantee of intentionality or authenticity, for they are not in themselves about truth or experience. If the logic of rectification and correction itself presupposes an immediacy that puts immediacy into question, that is because, in contrast to the obvious meaning, it does not have an immediate effect – how do you have an experience “independently of an abstract experience of it”? The immediate rendering of experience is impossible here, with the consequence that if, when confronted with these cards, we remain, “you” and “I,” at the level of immediacy – at the level, that is, of immanence – the immediate meaning will not succeed in entering the other’s experience. This means that, when presented with the articulate language of My Calling (Cards), the meaning of blackness (to the “you” or “I”) remains outside the encounter while nevertheless within the situation. This supplementarity – at least in Piper’s worded message – thus blurs the line between politeness and recognition, regret and discomfort, while allowing that oscillation succinct demonstration – a visitation, if one can put it like that, that is both abstract and anonymous. A question then arises: what kind of aesthetic is implied by Piper’s statement that her “main conscious interest is in truth rather than beauty” (Out of Order I 249)? How does one distinguish truth from beauty, without, as Piper herself seems to imply here, regarding the latter as somehow falsely immediate, and so something to be resisted as lesser than truth? Piper’s aesthetic clearly has a pedagogical function: the emphatic truth of immediacy is inscribed in an indexical truth and in the way we supposedly experience transformation; but if one examines what etiquette implies about the politicization of her calling cards, then things are not so obvious or immediate.
 
But even if we don’t follow Piper regarding the status of immediacy, her argument regarding racism and etiquette radically extends the relation between art and responsibility. If racism works through shared interpersonal contexts, it would seem that to question the meaning of those exchanges as ever contractually given is to open up racism to further questions regarding institutional precarity and politics. My Calling (Cards) makes explicit the relation between direct address and a future desire for a nonracial ethical-political formality. “In the society I want to live in,” Piper writes, “no one needs to be warned about my racial affiliation at dinners or cocktail parties because no one is inclined to insult it” (Out of Order I 246). But something strange soon happens to the face-to-face humanness of this longing. Being publicly – and psychologically – responsible for what we say is supposed to be the condicio sine qua non of an acceptance that has something to do with democratic openness: “To accept something is to be receptive and vulnerable to its effects on us, to discern its value for us, and indeed to rejoice in its intrinsic character and extrinsic ramifications for us” (Piper “Xenophobia” 286). To accept others is to overcome the fear of being invaded in the name of “new experiences” in which values of hatred and fear are superseded by values of “personal catalysis and growth.” One implication is that “an eye widened in terror, unable to blink for fear of being blinded by the ineffable” can no longer see primarily because they are “corrupted by deep-seated angers against blacks and women” (Out of Order I 246). By seeing people as they are, in their uniqueness, vision is supposedly restored and redemption can start in the “flexible adaptation” of a psyche that does not barricade itself against difference (Piper, “Xenophobia” 286).
 
If this state of affairs sounds all too liberal (and Piper repeatedly refers to herself as a Kantian), if one examines what etiquette implies about the politics of Piper’s aesthetics, then things become less rather than more clear cut. (The aesthetic-political status of Kant in Piper’s work is examined later in this study, but first let us pursue this notion of etiquette.) Even within those works “target[ing] interpersonal manifestations of racism,” Piper cannot limit herself to good manners, because she is driven to name and represent those hatreds whose intolerance we are never supposed to suspect (Out of Order I 246). If “blacks learn from whites that they are unwelcome,” this also happens, it should be noted, because racial hatred is conventionally acceptable, and, in terms of personal catalysis and growth, can in fact seem more respectful of otherness than the merely tolerant (Out of Order I 246). Since acceptance is meant to have more value in social life than hatred does, how are we to know when we are dealing with a true hatred rather than a merely conventional one? Moreover, if the cards are not in themselves a reparation in either a moral or political sense but exist only negatively, so to speak, as an invitation (to critical reflection), how are we to know that acceptance of the cards indicates a true commitment? The recognition of a racist faux pas, after all, implies its exoneration in the name of the same transcendental principle of etiquette that allowed for the certitude of having committed a faux pas in the first place. The etiquette in whose name the faux pas has to be denounced, even in Piper’s assumed continuity of acceptance and transformation, is not governed by the same integrity that governs the handing out of the cards as art or critical reflection. Interestingly, in Piper’s case, the indexical present leads to an artwork that is neither hateful nor seductive, but a set of self-critical practices different in kind from that of formalist aesthetics. This is why she states: “my main conscious interest is in truth rather than beauty” (Out of Order I 249). But the etiquette in whose name truth has to be stated, even at the “most elemental, personal level,” must remain impersonal, or merely conventional. Etiquette may well be the opposite of the racist peremptoriness that obscures difference but performs conventionalized forms of racist authority, but it can no more distinguish inner sincerity from outward conformity than it can distinguish insincere but polite tolerance from deep-seated racist conviction. Piper is not always clear on this point. In accordance with her Kantianism, she argues that etiquette provides a moral limit for all of us, but also that it cannot guarantee what we say or the way that we say it. This is a major premise of her understanding racism as a kind of illocutionary force, rather than a referential belief to be verified by subjective truthfulness or sincerity. But if it is a force, how can racism be reined in by etiquette or convention? This will be our question.
 
To return to My Calling (Cards): devoid of moralism and prescription, the cards can circulate between giver and receiver, who are both called upon to attend to racism’s effects independently of the “easy trades” (or conventions) of abstraction, aesthetic evaluation, and xenophobia. To hand out a card is not, then, a demand for further clarification or exoneration, for the cards themselves are not about psychological expression or content. We would therefore expect that My Calling (Cards) itself would somehow escape the simple dichotomy that it evokes between (black) acceptance and (white) refusal. Piper in fact implies this, when she speaks of regret and a certain discomfort that is somehow (and exactly how remains unclear) connected with “forces, both in others and in [her]self.” Even the work’s title poses questions of artistic labor or vocation – my calling – as somehow separable from the actual product—the “cards” left in brackets: Piper’s resuscitation here of the artwork as an act of drawing attention to the incivility of racism prefigures the cards’ attempt to produce self-critical reflection in the person who receives/understands them. The language of reflection is, in fact, far from simple here and seems traversed by several stand-ins and delegates. For if the cards stand in for the despair of being made to feel different, and Piper herself only introduces them at dinner parties in response to racist remarks, then the cards not only stand in for her as an exposé of racism, they also are supposed to cause people to reflect on the feelings they themselves provoke, with no hope of escape from regret or discomfort; that is, by assuming that both the racism the cards seek to correct and the self-critical capacity are somehow equivalent, Piper implies that the cards can be politically formative only if they have been unequivocally, unambiguously understood.
 
But this type of belief cannot account for the possibility that the recipient, rather than using the cards to transgress illusion, may well end up using them to confirm the delusion of a new self-critical racial lucidity—the possibility that the cards only have a meaning for a racist reader and/or reader of racism. No such possibility of verification exists for sincerely held racist belief, which is seen as defense or unconscious phantasy, nor can we be sure that the meaning of racist faux pas can ever be an example of simple acceptance or refusal by white unseeing, itself an allegory of intolerance to which only a life lived behind the veil can bear witness. Piper acknowledges this when she writes that black and white viewers often “deflect recognition of the meaning of their response to” her work (“Xenophobia” 293), and when she explains: “I try and promote viewer self-reflection in my work, but I don’t always succeed” (“Xenophobia” 293). But what if the cards were precisely what put the political reading into question? What if, as in the case of etiquette, these calling cards can only refer to black veiled life through the conventionalizing fictions of race?  Or, more particularly, what if handing them out does not constitute, in Piper’s words, “[e]xperiencing the other in the indexical present,” but instead designates a necessary complicity between victim and abuser, bearer and addressee? (Out of Order I 248) If so, handing out a card declares its own artifice the moment it simultaneously realizes itself as civility and self-insight, since it must fissure (falsehood) and suture (transformation) and thus rejoin what is disjointed, rather than what is immediate or present.
 
In this way Piper’s art might seem to be just another conventional way of coming to terms with the conventions of racism.  Her notion of “a direct relationship to the work,” however, challenges such a reading. She has said that handing out the cards “ruin[s]” her evening (Out of Order I 271). (In another essay, from 1990, she writes that “the only evenings that are ruined are mine and the offender’s” [Out of Order I 220].) The word “ruin” recalls Du Bois, and at such moments the cards stand in for the awareness of a gap or veil between blackness and a community of feeling, or at least the promise of it. This crisis in understanding is precisely what Piper asks us to understand. To consider such ruination, however, one must recognize that the experience of hurt is also meant to inspire transformation (in the reader-recipient-offender). By substituting etiquette for racist speech, Piper’s calling card dramatizes precisely their radical incompatibility – she is ruined by both racist language and the need to perform the act. But ruined, too, in so far as the exchange of cards reveals her to be black, a revelation that means that Piper too, as a light-skinned person, now stands in for something indeterminable, or that her inner race feeling is also a kind of rebus or riddle for perception (unseen, it is true; she is a spectator to her own absence). Clearly people aren’t what they seem: a person who appears white can really be black, and an avowed liberal can be a closet racist. The norms of etiquette confirm the duplicity of identity and, in the process, reveal the racial viciousness at the heart of civility and the exclusionary, rule-governed performance that is the very origin of integrity and self-insight. “The general character of the statement and the rule-governed policy that governs its presentation,” Piper writes, commenting on the cards’ meaning, “convey the message that the offending individual is behaving in typical and predictably racist ways. It fights a stereotype by giving the offender a concrete experience of what it is like to be the object of one” (Out of Order I 220). The acceptance of the card can thus readily be seen as an acceptance of racist hypocrisy.
 
When she hands out the cards, then, it is no longer possible to undo our complicity with racist faux pas, for the cards themselves perform the ruination that such language triggers in its glaring infelicity. Unable to communicate directly with her offenders, her cards take the place of voice and word at once. Indeed, Piper is at least as ruined by these semantic as by these rhetorical improprieties. In such infelicitous speech, the violation of etiquette introduces a foreign element that disrupts the sense of self, disturbs the readability of polite discourse, and reopens what propriety seems to have closed off. The cards refer to both obliquity and falsity, and yet they also testify, paradoxically enough, to Piper’s ruination as a Kantian artist whose purpose is to confirm the ruination (of herself as a victim of racism). Neither does their exchange allow for a recuperation of this catastrophe, despite Piper’s plea that they should convince rather than indict, because their appeal to “concrete experience” is itself an inner ruination of delusory rationalization. Piper recognizes, as Du Bois did in 1903, a certain double bind: the norms of etiquette erase all traces and referents of oneself as uniquely singular, because etiquette sees only convention and never presence. Indeed, etiquette can appear as arbitrary and unmotivated as the peremptory “glance” for which black being remains mere appearance. Piper can convey her hurt only if we take, as we say, her word for it, whereas the evidence for the receiver’s shame or insensitivity is, at least in theory, literally normative. Whether we believe her or not is not the point: the formal nature of the exchange makes the difference, not the sincerity of the receiver or the sensitivity of the giver.
 
The process that necessarily includes a moment of self-understanding cannot be equated with mere fear of social embarrassment, and the social duty (etiquette) that governs this moment of self-insight is not the same as that which governs regret or discomfort. The racism that makes the cards meaningful is itself normative, given from elsewhere and imbricated in a historicity that is irreducible to meaning or intention. To return to Du Bois’s formulation: racism speaks to us from elsewhere and is given to us veiled, just as much as it veils its given emergence as a form of natural “innocence” rather than arbitrary authority. When Du Bois insists on racism as a veiling of the world, he means that it be considered under a double epistemological perspective: it functions as a verifiable index of social incivility, but also as a norm whose applicability cannot be reduced to moral or political pathologies. The convergence of the two modes is not a priori given, and their discrepancy makes the racist faux pas possible. The faux pas articulates the discrepancy between the already given conventions of etiquette and racist lived experience and, in so doing, asserts racism as norm (when it is only ideology). It indicates the belief or pretense that giving voice to racism is both norm as social fact and a certain inner feeling peculiar to the arrogant presumptiveness of whiteness. Moreover, the faux pas indicates the belief that the norm and the feeling are the same. To complicate whiteness as a norm is thus to complicate it as a feeling: of being entitled, or always entitled to being. The difference between the verbal faux pas and the norms of etiquette is not a simple opposition between feeling and being, or truth and falsehood. A faux pas is a discursive error, but one governed by norms or principles of verification that include nonracial forms of being: even if we believe that certain races lack modesty, humility, respect, tact, sensitivity, etcetera, the verification of such improprieties, the decision about their truth or falsehood, is not racial but formal, informed by the knowledge that these norms apply to everyone irrespective of their difference. No such verification exists for the racist, who is impolite in his effect and his authority: his purpose is not to be polite, itself neither an inner process nor simply a social performance, but to abuse.
 
The interest of Piper’s calling cards is that they explicitly function as both politesse and politically, and thus indicate why racism is so offensive to those it offends. But in the actual worded message of My Calling (Cards) #1, the reference is neither straightforwardly polite, nor straightforwardly political, for it describes a chiasmus, a kind of mutual inclusion-exclusion: “I regret any discomfort my presence is causing you, just as I am sure you regret the discomfort your racism is causing me.” And in fact, the more one works with Piper’s notion of the indexical, the more convinced one becomes that although the critique of what she calls “pseudorationality” is entirely justified, it does not quite apply to what the cards may or may not be saying or doing as politics. Though it is epistemologically inadequate to say that the cards enable the white subject to see blindly, or blindly see, the repercussions in themselves are significant: whatever the meaning of the girl’s glance may have been, the card presented in Souls could not prevent the force of the very separation of blackness from the world of companionship. Is it inevitable that the same split that divides blacks from a community of feeling should divide whites from life lived behind the veil in the same way? And can the addressee of the card, understood as everyone and no one, refer to anything other than that very split? If Piper’s unstated question is “What are we doing when we speak racially?” it becomes clear that, whatever else we may be doing, we are not seeing beyond the veil but testifying to its further extension. And it is precisely the unknowable extent to which we differ from its phantasy that veils us in our denials and antipathies. Returning to the present indicative presence of the other and substituting etiquette for phantasy is not as simple as it sounds. For what is indicated, say, by a glance, is not necessarily what is being performed; and what the veil signifies, by way of metaphor, does not correspond to the experience (of difference) that it exposes-obscures. The exchange of cards may signify a desire (for changed experience) that can be performed, but that performance does not necessarily indicate social civility or unveil a desire for greater self-examination and scrutiny.
 
More important than any of these substitutions is Du Bois’s metaphor of the veil, which is itself allegorically veiled, and which exposes both desire and dispossession, exposure and revelation, and the belated recognition, in this narrative of a fall (into racist incivility), of the inability to unveil the burden of being a black person. The very diachrony that substitutes a tall white girl’s refusal for childishexchange is itself a metonym: quite apart from the various veiled scenes of seduction, rejection, and trauma implied in the veil metaphor, so to speak, the illocutionary force of racism has power precisely because of its conventional substitution of racism for who one is, for one’s social being, a substitution much harder to accept than the refusal of one’s card. Du Bois’s notion of a veiled world names the performative burden of this substitutability: the substitution of one’s ruination for one’s unwantedness, the substitution of a veiled life that must simultaneously hover and be irreducible to brute givenness or evasive transcendence for a life lived before any full awareness of, or any responsibility for, being shut out of the world.
 

III. Regretfully Yours

The question of the cards’ nature brings us back to the complexities of their exchange. We know they are meant to effect change by addressing racist incivility as a problem of social performance—change effected, moreover, not by grace but by a new insight into the objectified, fetishized life of racism. Further, both the giver and the receiver enter into a kind of symbolic exchange or contract, as the initial donation of offense turns into a reflection on xenia, its role and absence. The full text of Card #1 makes this clearer:
 

Dear friend,
 
I am black.
 
I am sure that you did not realize this when you made/laughed at/agreed with that racist remark. In the past, I have attempted to alert people to my racial identity in advance. Unfortunately, this invariably causes them to react to me as pushy, manipulative, or socially inappropriate. Therefore my policy is to assume that white people do not make these remarks, even when they believe that there are no black people present, and to distribute this card when they do. I regret any discomfort my presence is causing you, just as I am sure you regret the discomfort your racism is causing me.
 
Sincerely yours,
 
Adrian Margaret Smith Piper

 
The questions raised by this text are multiple. What (if anything) is exposed by this desire for exposure and in what way does it relate to art? What is the relation between exposure and regret, on the one hand, and between faux pas and discomfiture, on the other? If racism permits the gift of the card, as it does in this text, is regret merely a ruse that permits discomfort in the name of its unveiling? In other words, when, according to this text, is it socially appropriate to expose racism?
 
The calling card makes explicit the relation between discomfort and the desire for exposure: the card’s meaning is located not in the regret for having caused social discomfort, but in the context by which racist speech can be both expressible and repeatable, legible and meant. Since this speech, at the moment of its utterance, reveals a kind of systemic complicity, Piper goes out of her way to assume that not all white people are inherently racist. The gift of the card (just like the offense) must itself be returned to the subject for whom racist language is a conventionally appropriate way of speaking, in a given situation, about blacks. As the card changes hands it traces a circuit leading to the exposure of a hidden, barely censored racism that (she argues) is as conventional as it is deep-seated: “My work,” Piper writes, “intentionally holds up for scrutiny deep-seated racist attitudes that no individual socialized into a racist society can escape, no matter how politically correct or seasoned such an individual may be” (“Xenophobia” 293). If it thus becomes impossible to determine who is and is not racist (or even whether such knowledge is possible), it is also impossible, it seems, to know whether racism is the outward expression of deep-seated conventions, or whether the outer convention creates deep-seated racist attitudes. Perhaps racism is not hidden away and then expressed, outed, but is the expression itself. Then again, against conventionalism, perhaps it is more accurate to say that we receive racism like a law. We relate to it through subjection rather than contractual agreement, which is presumably why it is inescapable, and why we follow its rules blindly. How do we explain, then, why the law never seems absolutely binding, its enunciation having something to do with a kind of furtive bad faith staked on the absolute refusal of xenia, a refusal that is nevertheless never absolute nor conscious? The answer clearly has something to do with borders: the unease and perhaps sadism produced by the excessive proximity of a certain touching or presence within civil society, the envy and eroticism indicated by the other’s difference that is a matter neither of consent nor indifference but of deep-seated and unconscious implications. But if racism is conventionally given both in the sense of being socially received and in the sense of being bestowed, but given neither from without nor by the subject, then is the meaning of the cards not, paradoxically enough, already given in the sense that these deep-seated racist attitudes already precede any subjective decision? This oscillation between racism and convention takes the form of an irresistible but wholly inescapable sense of force or obligation, which is why Piper bases her appeal on the impersonal norms of etiquette rather than on moral intent or responsibility. This notion of etiquette as a social duty, however, culminates strangely in a purely formal image of anti-racism. Piper shows, inadvertently, that the mere identification of oneself as racist or non-racist cannot ensure either since, from the moment one becomes aware of one’s racism, one cannot dissociate it from the otherness that is the true limit of either position. How do we know when inner transformation amounts to interpersonal respect? Can one return racist speech to its utterer by merely pointing out its faux pas? This last question – and its implication that racism and race are both faux pas – perfectly describes ideology itself: a trope that, by means of not revealing itself, has become efficacious in both speech acts and other signs. In other words, the cards do not simply show that we are as blinded in our apperception of people as we are in our perception of social laws or norms; instead, they ask whether we can attain any direct and certain knowledge of either when we gaze as through a veil out onto a world of “great wandering shadows” that we can never penetrate, of which there can be no such thing as direct knowledge, and with respect to which we form countless beliefs – a veil behind which we can alternately imagine, with equal justification, that there shines a world of courtesy, respect, and love, and aworld that is essentially one of derision, hatred, and contempt.  The final question then becomes, not can etiquette alone rend this veil or unveil the other, but against what does this veil defend us?
 
A work about mutual interdependency and getting away from defensive rationality, My Calling (Cards) interestingly enough acts out a return to rather than a departure from its starting point, repeating a primal scene of refusal. The work’s structure contradicts its theme. For the aim of the cards is not to excuse but to perform inappropriateness—to make socially inappropriate such “interpersonal manifestations of racism” as “the off-color remark, the anxiety at the mere presence of an ethnic or cultural other, the failure of empathy with an other that causes insensitivity,” and “the failure of imagination and self-awareness that elicits the imposition of inappropriate stereotypes” (Piper,Out of Order I 246). If, according to J.L. Austin, “it is always necessary that the circumstances in which” the uttering of performatives “should be in some way, or ways, appropriate,” then whenever a card is handed out, it must trouble racist utterance as an appropriate speech act (Austin 8). The card’s structure of address substitutes, too, most explicitly for the social gaffe that causes it. To adopt Piper’s lexicon, My Calling (Cards) asks the receiver to take responsibility for racist utterance in the immediate present. The “you,” too, must directly address the “I,” in the grammar of the sentence “I regret any discomfort my presence is causing you, just as I am sure you regret the discomfort your racism is causing me.” The card seems to empty itself of all other reference aside from these two pronouns, acting out a concretization that is in fact its subject: the failure of empathy and imagination brought about by institutional abstractions that are existentially empty and methodologically false. The card thus enacts in its own writing the recognition of difference that it situates in the self’s intimacy with others. Simultaneously asserting both the necessity and undesirability of its existence, the card refers to its own referring, and indirectly to its referent. If performative utterances rely on convention, and thus find their support in the conventionalized forms of authority that compose racist society, the cards can only perform their own fictionalization as representatives of that authority.
 
But whatever may be said about My Calling (Cards) as politics, it is neither racism nor any of its deep-seated attitudes that finally cause discomfort or regret, but rather Piper’s desire to be excused for being pushy, manipulative, or inappropriate (her words), even though the truth in whose name the excuse has to be stated, and the cards justified, makes the conflict between the need to expose racism and her regret at having to do so into a kind of inescapable guilt. Racism, if it is indeed the subject of My Calling (Cards), becomes here not some referential faux pas. Instead it is a function of a specific interlocutionary situation, a way of speaking that exposes its own deep-seated conventionality, its own simultaneous act of concealing and exhibiting that, as we know from Souls, is the very condition of racism’s ideological effect: the substitutability of difference for stereotype and stereotype for experience. To interrupt this fantasy experienced as an interdict, Piper introduces the cards and, by so doing, has to be willing to be substituted – as an unwelcome agent of transgression – in performing this act. We have at least two levels of substitution (or displacement) taking place: the cards substituting for a regret that is itself a desire for substitution. Both are governed by the same desire for exposure, which makes the cards’ symbolic effect uncanny and ambivalent.
 
The doubling begins with Piper herself. By this, I do not mean that her outward appearance and inner feeling are simply opposed, but that any reading of My Calling (Cards) effectively reveals that all racial identity, insofar as its referential meaning has to be performed, ceases to have any simple cognitive meaning or index. For example, simultaneously asserting the inescapability of racist attitudes and their transformation, My Calling (Cards) presents race as a referential illusion, but one whose efficacy may be contested and undone only insofar as it is affirmed and prolonged as an illusion. But, it may be objected, isn’t this because all racial identity is an uneasy mix of fixation and denial, as Piper herself testifies? Perhaps. Piper excuses herself not, however, because her racial identity is denied, but because it cannot at first be realized. “I am black./ I am sure that you did not realize this when you made/laughed at/agreed with that racist remark.” We can see her as the referent of these remarks only at the moment that her card is read retrospectively, as it were. The statement “I am black,” far from a referential or constative statement of fact, is a performative speech act that sounds almost ironic since the blackness to which it refers is only a text or signifier that cannot be easily read except as a figure of unveiling, following its disclosure as perceptually indeterminate. One suspects that, in the relation between its ambiguous reference, say, and signification, Piper’s confession is itself an infelicity or faux pas, or a faux pas of a faux pas insofar as it can only perform the blackness it names as an erroneous text, even to the point of serving as a metaphor for something totally unrelated to its own literal display (or lack of) self-presence.
 
But before pursuing this further let us examine the context of Piper’s remark. The racist is told that Piper is black. He or she has to be told this, it should be noted, in the name of truth and, at first sight, to verify the later expressions of discomfort and regret whose complicity the cards insist both racist and victim share. The text conveys this in a way that is direct, intimate, and formally impersonal. “Regret” and “discomfort” are Piper’s words for demonstrating her “policy” regarding white racism. Regret and discomfort are co-implicated in a sentence that is unable to separate them totally or fuse them completely. But it is difficult to determine where the discomfort begins and where it ends. It is as if Piper still had to regret the guilt that there is, and that remains, in having to feel regret. Or better yet, in saying she is regretful and expressing her discomfort in the very place where her suspicions of white people are confirmed, she shows that racism is inescapable. Piper regrets without having had the intention to regret; she becomes pushy, manipulative, and socially inappropriate without meaning to, and (this is another regret) without being able to confirm her identity before its exposure. The signifier “regret” can only represent that regret regretfully as if its meaning were already understood, or as if racism could always be excused because it is unavoidable, outside of all differential contexts, an “origin” where the norms of society, or the giving of cards, makes sense precisely because everyone knows the rightful racist place from which to read them. The more one regrets, the more one admits that one is regretful and the more one feels discomfort—the discomfort of regretting something that was not quite believable but that has now proven to be the case. But the regret has been displaced from the racist remark to the writing and gift (to the writing as gift) of the calling card, from the referent of the narrative – the failure to make people realize her identity – to the act of exchanging the card, from the spoken remark to the inscription of a confession that thus realizes that failure. The second time it is no longer what is heard or being pushy that causes discomfort; the discomfort is caused instead by giving the card, confessing to one’s difference, and setting it down on paper, in lieu of the ruination to come. The discomfort of this regret cannot be effaced because it has been reprinted and exchanged as text on a body of paper. As if that were not enough, the racism that excludes Piper is also the reason she cannot be comforted: the etiquette that causes her to act is the same reason the cards cannot be taken back, and the same reason why, in her discomfort, she is not in possession of her own guilt since, in white racist language, blackness remains the referent of shame and interruption, a literal faux pas within the norms of polite white society.
 
In rectifying racist speech in order to fit it into a process of transformation, Piper adds no content to this symbolic structure or to its repetition; instead she effects, regretfully, its denouement by locating the speaker in a shared act of interpretive infelicity. Her calling cards are not ciphers for this infelicity but a comparable act. Tear a card into pieces, and the message remains what it is; but how does one know when the message has arrived at its “proper,” non-racial destination? Holding the card in one’s hand is not the same as knowing its politics. Indeed, the card cannot be known in itself; it simply identifies a referential faux pas that cannot be bypassed, which is why, presumably, a white subject handing them out would introduce a different demand and desire. As such, Piper’s calling card may well end up preserving the discomfort in the very act of negating it. But if pseudorationality is a form of blindness, or a seeing that is unable to see itself as blind, and so can only blindly see (itself or others), it would seem that, by offering recognition of a shared discomfort, Piper loses the opportunity to read beyond or behind it, and thereby to coax those deep, unsubdued drives into the open, no matter how innocent or guilty they may be. So instead of conferring a dignity on the “you” as other, the peremptoriness of the message starts to undo that possibility. Then, too, why begin that conversation with a card? Because it is a signifier (of etiquette) whose effect is predicated on the receiver not expecting to receive it, and whose writing exposes an already open secret, namely, the ellipsis of blacks by the signifieds of racism. If the relation between regret and discomfort follows a general pattern of substitution, then the exchange of these signifiers is made possible by (or makes possible?) a proximity or analogy so close and intimate that it allows one to substitute for the other without revealing the difference necessarily introduced by the substitution. The relational link between the two sentiments is strong enough to be necessary: no regret without discomfort, and no discomfort without regret. Is this substitution really an exchange? Does the contingency of the exchange, based only on a chance encounter between two people at a dinner party, express anything more than physical contiguity? For if you look at Piper’s image, you can see how she might act as the figural referent of the literal representation of the blackness referred to (by the racist faux pas); but, because her identity is not stapled, as it were, to her image, it serves as a virtual reference of itself.
 
In short, the racist remark disturbs or reveals as discontinuous the gap between image and identity. This dissociation has an alienating effect regarding the offense to which the calling card refers. Piper’s message acknowledges this discontinuous gap, but also wants her interlocutor to be comprehended and discomforted by its statement: indeed, there is no place from which s/he can stand back and observe it abstractly and theoretically, outside of the interlocution. Finally, the dissociative meaning of the statement – the simultaneously emphatic and elliptic reference to Piper’s blackness – can only leave its mark if read literally, immediately, and without abstraction, exchange, or, dare I say it, politeness.
 
Piper’s theory of the indexical present, of course, contains no provision for this kind of ambiguity. The elimination of ambiguity, in fact, is one of the main motives behind the insistence on the indexical, since the vividness and uniqueness of the other (beyond the veil) are meant to rule out equivocation and disrupt racism’s “easy trades.” And yet, despite this accentuation, the implications of ambiguity for My Calling (Cards), and for Piper’s entire aesthetic, are significant. Piper scholars have been unable to study those who received the card, or to identify their catharsis, but they always presume a reaction to the cards and one that is politically legible. These readings take their cue from Piper’s own “metaperformances,” which engage with audience reactions to her work. In “Styles of Radical Will: Adrian Piper and the Indexical Present,” Maurice Berger describes white audiences’ initial response to My Calling (Cards) as defensive, agitated, nervous, offended, and angry: only in the final minutes of the performance, when Piper refers to the pain caused her by having to hand out the cards, does “the audience drop its guard.” “It is at this moment,” Berger argues, “that Piper has achieved a true and profound indexical present – an instant when each person in the room is caught off-guard, compelled to jettison preconceptions and ask difficult, even painful questions about themselves” (31). This indicates that it is neither concept nor representation, but the expression of Piper’s own ruination that permits communication and thereby allows the audience to situate with new awareness the historical, political, and theoretical task accomplished by My Calling (Cards). In other words, the moment it becomes possible to return the card symbolically to its bearer, the more the audience can read the constitutive negativity of its implication; or, again, the moment racist speech becomes emotionally locatable if not theoretically describable as black suffering, the more the meaning of the cards can be seen in the passage from offense to sensitivity and to the complexity of difference itself. Racial sensitivity (to black hurt) begins only where (white) aggression and defensiveness end. But this profound indexicality forgets that Piper’s ruination is not freely chosen: she does not invite her own abjection even when she knows that abjection (from racists) cannot be refused. Indeed therein lies the forced choice that is the source of the regret and discomfort of My Calling (Cards) and that is the work’s artistic vocation; the black can only recognize herself as always that referent or faux pas, as the anonymous interlocutor within that grammar of texts, and precisely in places where intimacy and respect are ordinarily in close affiliation. To say that in handing out the cards she freely assumes her ruination because she is already ruined as black, in other words, to identify with her freely choosing hurt or injury as a moment of indexical resolution is, in my view, a blind interpretation of the work and its meaning. It is not that she is free to be ruined only on the condition that she freely chooses to be identified as black that anchors the work; the work is anchored, rather, in its asking why blackness has become the political sign, in US culture, of an exclusion, an exclusion always precisely veiled as such. As for immediacy, there is no index of civility that isn’t always already constituted by the delimiting of certain kinds of difference as unacceptable, and whose faux pas is always retroactively posited as the reason they have to be excluded in the first place.
 
Everything that can be said of My Calling (Cards) can be said here, where strategies of displacement are no longer appropriate and where another language begins (one whose significance is not yet determinable or representable). Nor is it surprising that this moment can be located only after having – analytically – gone beyond the defensive rationalizations of whiteness: all those honorific stereotypes that merely devalue others and constitute black difference as socially valueless and read it as such. White lack of self-awareness is not the same as black pain, however; it is as far removed from a black conception of self as the tain is from the mirror (I can see myself in a mirror without ever seeing the tain). Even though one is unthinkable without the other, only one is the sustaining void of the gaze. In the following two sections I explore this ambiguity – in the form of a gaze that can never be part of any seen reality, and a void that masquerades as a sublimely black aesthetic. A key consideration here is the connection between racial etiquette and aesthetic judgment in terms of a scene of unveiling and a transformation in (white) seeing.
 

IV. Kant as Medium

Given that My Calling (Cards), or what I’m calling its exploration of racial etiquette, is meant to give an insight into black, objectified life, what of those other artworks in which Piper represents herself as a racially-sexually coded subject (by norms or media that she then attempts to translate into universal, nonracial-asexual terms)? These works modify the historical dialectic of racial incivility according to a more primal dialectic that consists of an escape from the raced-sexed body (its voice or rhythm) while simultaneously exploring, at least by propensity, the fantasmatic limits of that renunciation. The remainder of this essay takes up this reading, not so much in terms of etiquette, as in terms of xenia with respect to ethics and the (always cultural) limits of fantasy. A key preoccupation is the way that fantasy resists radical divestiture (of the subject) by the raced Other, and the cultural nature of those imaginary resistances. But I also ask about the way that an appeal to xenia and its openness to difference represents, for Piper, a politically revised notion of etiquette opposed to particularist class and social values.
 
A few words regarding Kant, even though he is not the object of this study. All of Piper’s papers on Kant are slightly delirious. Ever since Food for the Spirit (1971), a visual and textual record of Piper’s first exposure to Kantian critical philosophy, “Kant” serves as a metaphor for the radical annihilation of selfhood and of the will—or at least for the threat of such annihilation. In an essay from 1981, Piper writes:
 

The Critique is the most profound book I have ever read, and my involvement in it was so great that I thought I was losing my mind, in fact losing my sense of self completely. Often, the effects of Kant’s ideas were so strong that I couldn’t take it anymore. I would have to stop reading in the middle of a sentence, on the verge of hysterics, and go to my mirror to peer at myself to make sure I was still there. (Out of Order I 55)

 
A first question: what is it about the Critique that poses the threat of madness and nonexistence? Physically weak due to fasting, Piper convinces herself that it was neither her social isolation nor her lack of food (“I didn’t see other people at all”; “I was on a two-month juice-and-water diet”): such things belong to the everyday meaning of existence, to “the sight and sound of me, the physically embodied Adrian Piper,” to the “boundaries of my individual self” and “the material conditions of my mental state” (Piper, Out of Order I 55). By contrast, reading the Critique is “so intensely affecting” – disturbing her mental and physical states and boundaries – that Piper can no longer situate herself as real or embodied: feeling herself vanishing, and leaving behind a physical slough of herself at this “entrance into a transcendent reality of disembodied self-consciousness” (Piper, Out of Order I 55), she uses a mirror, a camera, and a tape recorder to anchor herself in the physical world, thereby imposing a “ritualized” contact with the “physical appearance of [her]self in the mirror” onto her reading of Kant.  From the withdrawal into the noumenal dimension of a transcendental quintessence, where the self’s disguises give way to an intense awareness of one’s own absence, or, as Piper puts it, where the self’s coherence is reduced to babbling incoherence, she resorts to the “reality check” of the mirror that records her appearance to an objectivized gaze. This gaze observes her as a series of partial objects left in a heap, metaphorically speaking, by the too intensive effects of a fear or anxiety that signals something both more intimate and more penetrating than the mere observation that the Critique was “a book with good ideas in it that I had chosen to study” (Piper, Out of Order I 55). All these traits suggest “Kant” is a metaphor for a disturbance whose vague reference is a noumenal collapse of reality, if one can put it that way, a dreadful and extremely intensive subtraction that Piper describes perfectly as a mirroring detached from any body, and in which one can see one’s own absence and/or threatened annihilation.
 
The photographs in Food for the Spirit do not alter the scenario: the fourteen black-and-white images are used essentially as orthopedic props and, as such, they reference a form of self-quotation. They neither embody the absence felt beneath experience, nor show the restoration of the vividness and contact that Piper desires: their vividness is instead a kind of inverse echo of the loss that is the source of the distance and inadequacy of any self-image (see Fig. 2).
 

Fig. 2 Adrian Piper, Food for the Spirit, 1971 (photographic reprints 1997). 14 silver gelatin prints and original book pages of a paperback edition of Immanuel Kant’s Critique of Pure Reason, torn out and annotated by Adrian Piper. 15” x 14,5”. Detail: photograph #6 of 14. Collection Thomas Erben. © Adrian Piper Research Archive Foundation Berlin. Used by permission.

In a sequence from the clearest to the darkest underexposed image, in which the unveiled body gradually disappears, the image comes to serve as a perishable signature and as the flickering eclipse of a desire in whose limits or remainder the subject finds herself almost unrepresentable, which is to say, as an ejected or dejected object, the effect of a blackout. What threatens the black autobiographical subject is not the loss of something that once was present and that it once possessed, but the radical estrangement between any representation and animaginary fullnessof being. If we look into Piper’s “glance” in these photographs, we realize it has nothing to do with the phenomenal form in which the photographs make her appear, but with the transcendental illusion that is the source of any noumenal self-image – a dialectic that Kant would have liked. On the back of Kant’s Kritizismus, as it were, these photographs reveal not the indexical proof of Piper’s existence as a black woman (a common misreading),[3] but rather the de-naturing, distancing effect of a certain formalization of her mirror image as the trace of a residual loss, a tracing that can be portrayed photographically only as a fall into gradual darkness. The mirror image, then, has something to do with the repossession of the lost self, but this is a self that is alienated, distracted, and already possessed by a deeply invasive presence that has no phenomenal existence. Food for the Spirit attempts to capture that which is always concealed from representation: the withdrawal or remainder produced by the desire for universalization itself, which is to say, the desire to coincide with oneself as a subject. The pictorial rendering of an objective correlate is impossible here, and Piper remains suspended in front of these images (neither present nor absent) because, in contrast to the audio cassettes, the photographs do not copy anything – how do you capture something that does not have a place in representation? The crux of Food for the Spirit is not an opposition between particularity (of black feminine experience) and universality (reductively read as a sign of Kant’s ethnocentrism),[4] but rather the vanishing that is their ghostly simulacrum. In this sense, the universal is not experienced as such until it singularizes itself in the lacking or fasting subject; when its excess is transferred inside the subject as a subtraction, as a minus sign of all that the subject is not, the subject disappears into this pure vanishing point of universality. Contrary to the prevalent cultural studies readings of Piper, then, the problem isn’t simply that black femininity is not theoretically or existentially locatable as a universal subject for Kant, but rather that blackness has no material or phenomenal meaning outside of its relation to racist representation; it is only a stock of signs through which the subject cannot digest itself (as a presence or signifier) without slipping away from itself in a glissando of aberrant remainders. (Does this mean that the desire to expose oneself as a disappearing object is more originary than the desire to possess oneself as [an image of] a self? If so, then in the guise of exposure the photos reveal an originary concealment, and the reading of Kant reveals the ruse by which the raced-sexed self makes self-desire and self-annihilation interchangeable.) For the photographs in question already allegorize a pre-originary disjointure without which there would be neither experience of the body nor its disappearance, neither loss nor its inscription. They refer to an equivocation, on the one hand, between the desire to be immediately, uniquely known, to be exposed and revealed as a subject—the truth that, according to Piper, concerns the uniqueness of transcendental personhood—and, on the other hand, the sense that there is something lacking or veiled, a no-thing at the core of the self that can only be illusorily eaten or represented, a “food” for spirit. By reason of this equivocation, which invades the mind as the source, we are always already in the process of disappearing ourselves, or even asking for annihilation, precisely in this exhibitionist and subtractive mode. This loss, paradoxically, allows the subject to conceive itself as a lack, causing the subject to lose itself as a subject.
 
This is why reading Kant, paradoxically, pertains to the illusory surplus of a lack that is not a néant or absence, but a surfeit upon which the self starves itself in its desire to be fed. As she starves herself, so Piper darkens her photographic exposure, forfeiting visibility in the name of an artistic hunger that can only secure voice, word, sexuality, and image through renunciation and disembodiment. In the same way, the attempt to feed the transcendental imagination as a recompense for the loss of objective reality can only lead to a withdrawal of the self from the world, to its vanishing; and in this surfeit of illusion, even if the self were able to see itself transcendentally (as black), it can only negate itself, for what constitutes the transcendental unity of apperception can never be seen in representation, and so can only be consumed as if it were an object in the realm of what is (which is furthermore the “illusory” effect of its racialsemblance). That said, one must avoid the tendency to view the torn out, mutilated pages of the Critique as separate from the photographs they accompany. It is not a question of seeing these membra disjecta as two halves of an imaginary whole: both are fragments of a split that appears to the subject in its semblance, which is itself split between the inner and outer intuition of itself as the desire for transcendence and/or the desire to see itself viewed transcendentally; or again, the Critique is experienced as a work of pure imagination, but this is the imagination at its most violent and inaccessible, already constitutively marked by a kind of madness or a withdrawal from the world that is equivalent to a slow starvation.
 
For a long time, I have been intrigued by the title of this work and even fascinated by this vision in which the black feminine self satiates itself on its own lack or emptiness, engorged by its inability to be ever adequately represented in the real, cast out from its own edible feast: at once force fed (by Kant) and starved almost to disappearance (by transcendental madness). This emphasis – the simultaneously emphatic and elliptic character of which has already been mentioned – is not directed toward the body (as in hysteria), does not achieve agency (according to which Piper “seeks the comfort of recognizing herself [as an object] in the index” [Bowles 214]), and does not even indicate an elsewhere of meaning (the transcendental location of the gaze). Food for the Spirit is a study of failed ingestion, of the space where racial-sexual fictions (of the self) are exposed, ghostly, and only semi-digested; it studies the way the act of eating literally no-thing makes black flesh disappear within a devouring self-image, but also brings to surfeit a transcendence that the famished flesh (in its darkening) is presumed to lack. This is why “Kant” remains a complex metaphor for the sacrifice of a desire to be seen or known irrevocably (in the excessive purity of an unnameable ascesis), a metaphor that Piper ritualistically reads as a narrative entailing both fantasy and theater. To put this in Kantian terms: Piper can only engorge herself, as a transcendental unity of apperception, by starving herself of the sensuous unity of experience, for both are destined to be eaten up by the noumenal hole that can never be satiated or nourished by the subject.
 
Piper’s long fascination – even obsession – with Kant’s first Critique is at once an illustration of this crisis (an anxiety about nonexistence) and a theorization of selfhood, since it shows the self’s delusion and its anchor: what can be seen in Food for the Spirit is the join between the two and thus the original disjointure opened up by Kantian critical philosophy. The key reference here is “the conception of the self that Kant develops in the first Critique,” which Piper, in an interview with Maurice Berger, defines as one in which “what is most important to us is a rationally consistent and conceptually coherent theory of the world that enables us to fit every kind of experience we have into a priori categories” (“Critique” 87). Hence the repeated emphasis, in her many readings of Kant, that “if we cannot fit things into those categories [which are a priori], we can’t experience them at all; they can’t be incorporated into the structure of the self” (“Critique” 87). “[I]nformation that violates our conceptual presuppositions threatens our belief system and thereby the rational integrity and unity of the self” (“Critique” 88). The whole of Piper’s Kantianism lies here: in the threat of dissolution that accompanies self-deception, and in the fissure of reason that follows our exposure to the other’s disruptive force. In order to preserve ourselves, it is perhaps not surprising that (despite our best intentions) “we are overridingly motivated to do and to believe what will preserve the coherence of our worldview” (“Critique” 87). This is why x-rationality causes others to disappear as a trace or semblance of the universal; and why Food for the Spirit can be seen as an inversion of x-rationality from the point of view of the disappeared object. From another point of view, Piper can be described as interested in the ways that pseudorational responses to those who are different from us, who don’t fit our conceptions of how people ought to be and look, are often mistaken for transcendental contents of who we are. Insofar as our reason remains dependent on phantasy, xenia cannot be received or known, and it is not surprising that these responses include dissociation, anxiety, denial, and the attempt to “impose our categories”—strategies by which human rationality, paradoxically, is “invariably inadequate and insensitive to the uniqueness of an individual” (“Critique” 88). Her art attempts to make people aware of these pseudorational responses, and consequently to become more sensitive to their cognitive failure or error – these words, illocutionary words if ever there were, with little that is revolutionary or radical about them, must nevertheless be assumed to be deeply political in their implications. Piper describes her aesthetics as enabling the viewer “simply [to] stand silently, perceiving and experiencing at the deepest level the singularity of the object or person, knowing in advance that any attempt at intellectualization is going to be invalid, and so allowing their concrete experience to quiet the intellect before it starts poisoning that experience” (“Critique” 90). Taking the word “poison” literally, we can describe transcendental illusion as a pharmakon: either it remedies the ways we falsely appear to ourselves as experiencing subjects, or it is the charm or drug that allows us to enjoy the illusion of experiencing otherness, when in fact what we experience is our own chimerical investiture and deferment, with our judgment remaining cognitively and morally blind.[5] In the important essay “Two Kinds of Discrimination,” first published in 1992, such poisoning is never purely intellectual; it is a moral-existential response that registers the threat to the self’s “internal coherence” (Piper, Out of Order II 220). Piper’s xenophobic self is constantly exposed to the fear of being “exceedingly fallible and regularly discomforted,” a fear that affirms its own vision of the world as a place where the self is “inhabited by enigmatic and unpredictable disruptions to its stability,” and so is forced to “conjure chimeras of perpetual unease and anxiety into social existence” in order to preserve its rationality (Out of Order II 227-28).
 
This is why, to a certain extent (namely that of our moral or epistemic insecurity), the “malevolent intentionality” we ascribe to others need not be based on firsthand experience or evidence, but only needs to be become habitual, or intimately familiar, “to seem necessary prerequisites of personhood” (Out of Order II 228). Doubtless these illusions are not merely subjective but are also transcendental; this is the case in Kant’s Critique, where the conceptual unity of the subject is the necessary anchor for any kind of experience (and without which the mind is “nothing but a blind play of representations, that is, less even than a dream” [Kant qtd. in Piper, Out of Order II 219]). But the pseudorational crises included in the list of defenses (or rather, the lack of any consistent, coherent sense of the self) are not purely transcendental, either: Piper believes that Kant’s “categories are mutable,” and “the more we learn to guide them consciously, with an eye to achieving certain goals like overcoming racism, … the more we can evolve cognitively” (“Critique” 90). The obscure meaning of such evolution, which includes a certain utopian gesture, implies not only an idea of art as exceeding the “divisive illusion of otherness, the illusion that each of us is defined not just by our individual uniqueness but by our racial uniqueness,” but also the idea that art falls outside pseudorationality and its limits – that is, a concept of art as more than a blind play of representations, and whose illocutionary force is more than a dream (“Critique” 77). “Art can highlight pseudorational failures of cognitive discrimination as themselves objects of aesthetic examination,” she writes in “Two Kinds of Discrimination,” “and it can heighten a viewer’s level of cognitive sensitivity to a wide range of complex situations, of which political discrimination is only one” (Out of Order II 253). How does it do this? By being an “antidote to provincial and conventional habits of thought,” which Piper seems to equate with the fact that the aesthetic interest of the art object lies in its being an “anomalous entity in its own right” relative to “the conceptual scheme in which it was conceptually embedded”; her art breaks through the illusion of x-rationality by showing the pseudorationalizations to be attenuated and irrational (Out of Order II 254, 255). If art is an antidote to the fear of going mad driven by the desire to inhabit the space of the rule, to be the form that forms (fanaticism in Kant’s sense, self-transcendence in Piper’s), that is because art bridges the gap between cognition and experience, ideas and reality. As we have already seen, the task of teaching the viewer to see his/her own racist-sexist blindness has always involved, for Piper, the task of seeing the unseen, the nonvisible frame or media that produces the seen. As a media that gives form to her politics, Kantian critical philosophy is not only a body of ideas but also a vehicle and object – literally a lens, frame, or window – capable of giving form to this strategy. For she goes on to say: “My philosophy work, in fact, provides the broad theoretical underpinnings of my art. There is a very deep connection” (“Critique” 85).[6]
 
Piper insists that our categories of experience are both necessary (a priori) and mutable (even evolving). Take away anomalies, and rational consistency and coherence still remain, are still necessary, still inherent to the integrity and unity of the self: without these categories, “we are struck with confusion and panic,” and the world pressing in on us would be “just too much,” “all too unfamiliar” (“Critique” 88). What happens, however, when the “complexity of the world has outstripped our conceptual resources for dealing with it” (“Critique” 88)? We may experience terror when confronted by anomalous objects, but anomaly is already more than a threat, more than an “unmanageable conceptual input,” with the threat being provisional (i.e., decided by whether we resort to pseudorationality or whether, via philosophy or art, we seek out new kinds of cognitive discrimination) (“Critique” 88). In fact, Food for the Spirit dramatizes this encounter intensely, while showing why rules of etiquette remain powerless in the face of the powerful immediacy of the real. And yet. If one part of the mind suffers anomaly as breakdown and terror, another seems to actively seek a fusion between categorial unease and the understanding, and to find a way out of the impasse: in a certain manner, then, art allows us to experience the anomalous without succumbing to its lethal affects. What must be resisted, in any case, is the temptation to reimpose our categories when they are “completely inadequate to the complexity and uniqueness of what one is experiencing” (“Critique” 90). It would seem then that xenophobia can be approached and experienced in reaction to the anomalous affect of art; or again, the art object is experienced as a negative, disruptive power within both the categories of the understanding and the conserving habits of mind. This point is underlined by her belief that “it is not possible to apprehend the singularity of that person through any simple act of categorization” (“Critique” 96). The aesthetic could be said to be privileged in Piper for the same reasons it is in Kant: because the problem of judgment is most radically articulated in terms of it, because it demands a form of judgment that judges without knowing or presuming to know its object and in the absence of determined customs or rules. It is a perspective on or a way back into the political that is not totally determined by history and politics, and that demands more than conformity to conventional laws or systems and categories of thought. For Piper (and for Kant), the aesthetic is not, however, a privileged domain or territory unto itself that has no relation to political or ethical questions, as it seems to be for many neo-Kantians; it is, rather, an uncharted, open horizon that demands a particular kind of critical judgment, given that beauty does not reside in the object itself and therefore cannot be determined. The aesthetic object is not an object of experience; its form is perceivable, but the beauty of its form is not. In fact, this necessity to judge in the absence of determinable laws could be considered to characterize the ethical and political realms as well, areas where one is called upon to judge, but where the authorization to judge is finally indeterminable.
 
Following Kant, Piper insists that the “more we examine our defensive rationalizations and acknowledge that our stereotypical categories don’t fit, the more we will be able to sensitively expand those categories in order to encompass the singular reality of the ‘other’” (“Critique” 90). And yet “such flexibility,” she adds, “was something that Kant didn’t envision – his idea was that we were just stuck with certain categories. I believe that these categories are constantly being redefined and that they are evolving in response to the complexity of information and experiences that confront and overwhelm us” (“Critique” 90). If, however, the way we experience the world lies not in predetermined categorical rules, but in the expanding gap or disjointure between the techno-scientific rationalization of the world and our ability to make sense of it, then the politics of art lies not in mimesis or representation. It lies instead in the world always being out of step with our intuitions and understanding, since all experience involves conventions that maintain hegemonic ways of viewing the world. In the same way, understanding and experience are not simply opposed: the encounter with the anomalous results in an experience of groundlessness, since the anomalous can never be contained from the position of societal reason, but always remains a kind of uncanny object. Epistemic security, then, is constituted by an ultimately contingent precariousness and, as such, is always under threat; it can always be undermined by a sudden encounter with anomaly, a subversive force in respect of the understanding. In the essay collection Out of Sight, Out of Order, conceptual art is defined furthermore as what allows more flexible insight into this techno-scientific crisis of experience. “First, I define conceptual art as art that subordinates medium to idea…. Second, the resulting flexibility in available media is strategically important, given the political targets of my work” (Out of Order I 248-49). In other words, whereas for Kant illusion or Blendwerk is inevitable and irrefutable and “does not cease even after it has been detected and its invalidity clearly revealed,” for Piper the question is not whether reason is deluded or not but how we respond to reason’s deceptiveness (Kant 209). This is why, in “Two Kinds of Discrimination,” Piper defines her aesthetic as one that tries “to enable the viewer to discriminate cognitively between what he sees and what he is” (Out of Order II 258). Moreover, she employs various strategies for situating this politics, notably, mimesis, confrontation, and naming. By echoing back to the spectator – ironically, mimetically – stereotypical phrases or habits of reasoning; or by naming, simply and plainly, what such euphemisms conceal; or by confronting the spectator with the harmful consequences of discrimination, Piper hopes to draw “the viewer’s attention to these realities” in ways that are “assaultive and disturbing,” so as to reflexively apprehend the more general assaults of social experience (Out of Order II 257). By making the viewer see what ordinarily remains suspended between pseudorationality and experience, she hopes that the unarticulated will not remain at that level, that is, as habit, but will enter self-conscious awareness free from predetermined conventions or rules. This means that the experience of being assaulted by the art object occurs outside pseudorational categories while nevertheless within their interlocution. For if you look at Piper’s artworks, you can see this mirroring, even when Piper performs herself as the anomalous object in social spaces. Thanks to these performances (assaultive, it is true, but also creative), or rather thanks to what, in the work, is violently unrepresentable (which is in fact very little), we are forced to encounter data that cannot be apprehended familiarly, and yet never ceases to question the role of x-rationality.
 
Here the problem of judgment and thus Kant’s notion of the sublime come to the fore in Piper’s analysis, even though she passes over the sublime in her philosophical readings of Kant and, consequently, has devoted least attention to the third Critique in her published writings. Still, it could be argued that Food for the Spirit is Piper’s most sublime performance insofar as it brings together, violently and dialectically, the affectivity of immediacy as the cure or antidote for what remains of reality once it has been deprived of its fantasmatic support in transcendental illusionism. The sublime should not, however, be overestimated here: it is more an unresolved tension between immediacy and the abyssal disintegration of any categorical framework (Piper’s version of encountering an absolute anomaly) that leads to Piper’s ongoing fascination with the way our everyday life is grounded on precarious cognitive decisions. Those decisions, as is frequently stressed, are seen to be impotent vis-à-vis the abyssal excess of the real. While for Kant the imagination tries but fails to furnish a direct, sensual presentation of an Idea of reason, thus experiencing its impotence, for Piper the understanding itself is put in crisis by the failure of reason to find an appropriate presentation for the anomalous. According to the traditional interpretation of the sublime, for long (and still) conceived as a tension between the experience of an object and a feeling for the Idea of “humanity in us” as subjects, this tension is overcome by reason’s ability to present an object equal to the Idea of that totality (Kant Metaphysics 187). Piper’s work, by contrast, suggests that the Idea of humanity is itself beset with self-deception and fantasy, a suggestion that cannot be made via the categories of the understanding, since they are what actively produce that Idea. The encounter in Food for the Spirit with the negative power of the imagination as a disappearing subtraction, so to speak, should be understood as the result of what happens when the world is wholly given over to a (disembodied, delusory) presentation of Ideas. To imagine means to imagine what we already know, an imaginary that can only feed itself by withdrawing until it disappears into the phantasms of its own creation. Madness would be a sign of this contraction of what can no longer be computed, this surfeit that is also a radical evacuation or emptying out – this withdrawal that underlies the photographic or techno-scientific attempts to stand in for the disintegration of thought and being. The sublime emerges in Food for the Spirit insofar as the work is a fragment, or series of fragments, occupying the place of a veil covering (our phantasies of) a noumenal beyond; but only in a representation can we perceive (and endure) this unimaginable, all-engulfing anomaly. The impasse may recall (without entirely reproducing) Piper’s distinction between the violence done to the imagination by reason and the violence that art, in turn, does to reason: likewise, her work can be seen (across a variety of media) as an attempt to cut through the regulative rules of racist-sexist social life.
 
Arguably more theoretically modest than this language of sublimity suggests, Piper evokes universality by using terms such as “etiquette,” “openness,” and “acceptance” (to name just a few) always in dialogue with terms of particularity such as “uniqueness,” “immediacy,” “singularity,” etc. This is not to say that the sublime has no relevance to her work, but that it accomplishes something very exact: her work does not so much bridge the gap (without denying it) between the aesthetic and the historico-political, as it opens up an irreducible abyss within reason itself. The sublime functions then not so much a bridge as a passage here; thus it answers not to an aesthetic, political, or even a universal idea of formlessness, but to a disruption or dissolution with neither closure nor center. The sublimity of the work depends, that is, not on a demand for universality and community, but on what might be called an ethics of anomaly (as what is owed to the different and the unfamiliar), as a way of bearing witness to the groundlessness of each decision vis-à-vis the Other. Etiquette is Piper’s figure for this decision, and the anomalous her trope for the abyssal nature of reason’s illusory rendering of xenia (a rendering woven entirely out of stereotypes, abstractions, fetishisms, cultural languages, hateful passions, and desires). If etiquette designates a demand that is universal and not determined by the form such a community (of difference) should take, etiquette and the rules determining it also reveal, paradoxically, the limitations of all rules or conventions, and thus the necessity to go beyond them and beyond experience, where the anomalous cannot be presented without reversion to fiction or stereotype.
 
In brief, the anomalous artwork teaches us to dissociate the formal constraint of the work from the direct and personal affect that is the indescribable meaning of each individual reaction. Perhaps it was the reading of these reactions (discovered in metaperformances) that Piper called for when she said that an art object is not simply to be seen and heard aesthetically but should be scrutinized and listened to for its truth. The contemporary challenge of art is not to destroy xenophobic thinking but to subvert it, and thus to dissociate subversion from destruction. It seems to me that My Calling (Cards) operates such a distinction, but the distinction becomes problematic in relation to racism. The work is trying to include what its own rhetoric excludes – the realization that blackness must be literally recognized apart from racist language. And yet the work makes another claim: it attempts the impossible task of humanizing offense while presenting the inadequacy of any identity to resolve racism without conventionalism. Blackness becomes, as it were, the anomaly to the false or distorted representation of the anomalous. It is no longer the faux pas that consists of something appearing in the wrong place, as it were, since being out of place is precisely its legacy and its guarantee. At the same time, the enunciation of anti-blackness does not involve insincerity or deception, for everyone authorizes it unwittingly via racist norms; there is a reversion to anti-blackness by the simple fact that it is. Blackness disturbs and offends at the very level of its being, and this is why it is both a pharmakon and an idol of sublimity.
 
The question asked by her work, then, is what happens when we are forced to see our own nothingness or vacuity – a nothing that captivates us and that arises out of and is addressed to the (black) object that is transcendentally lacking or empty? Now, in Piper’s Kantian aesthetics the art object is the occasion for conceptual negation and an anchor for a more universal, reflexive sentiment of self that is negatively affirmed. In My Calling (Cards), affectivity (of regret and discomfort) is both given and gives itself as the occasion for an immediate response that Piper insists is prereflexive, that is, prior to any kind of abstraction and without any standard of judgment, but one that simultaneously opens up the possibility of another kind of imagining, another kind of impersonal intimacy. In the absence of this transformation, we are left with failures of cognition, imagination, and communicability, and so can only repeat the violation of word and sense that is racist conventionality. As my earlier comments on etiquette suggested, for there to be etiquette already presupposes what Kant calls a Gemeinsinn or sensus communis, an ideal community of feeling. The relation between communicability and the sensus communis that abstracts from the content of a judgment attends only to its formal communicability. This is grounded upon, but also grounds, the relation of imagination and understanding “without the mediation of a concept” that is peculiar to the aesthetic judgment of taste (Kant 176). Kant also suggests that the interest in communicability may explain why a judgment of taste is felt “as if it were a duty”—one that is not, however, based on moral law (Kant 176). Etiquette does imply a sort of duty, a kind of transcendental pragmatics that comes down to acting in concert and in terms of a universal as-if (a form of judging and reflecting that takes into account everyone else’s feelings and sensitivities). Putting oneself in the position of everyone else: this could easily be read as Piper’s ultimate pragmatic response to xenophobic satisfactions. What prevents us from reading My Calling (Cards) and Piper’s work more generally in this way is the ambiguous pleasure she takes in unpleasure without ever articulating it as such, a pleasure that allows for the circulation of the cards in the first place. Whether conscious or not, the pleasure taken in white racist discomfort is not itself visible, and whites do not see it; but it lets me see, it constitutes me as a seeing subject within the field of the veil. Making white racists suffer allows me to see myself better, for it is through their discomfort that I discover that I am visible as black person only when I am able to see myself from elsewhere – from outside the mirror, as it were, from the side of the gaze. Black visibility already knows this, containing as it does a veil that is neither conceptual nor immanent, and that remains invisible as such to every viewpoint, despite persisting within it interminably. If for Piper (and Du Bois) “racism is a visual pathology,” it manifests itself as an invisible gaze, albeit one that is always veiled (Piper “Critique” 93-94).
 
The calling card leaves me with this question, among others: what is the feeling of being shut out from the world, from a community of feeling, and can that feeling ever be communicated? This question is linked to another concern that has been more or less implicit throughout this essay: namely, why should the pleasure in one’s ruination be bound to self-deception rather than coincide with the form of an unconditional “must”? One could dismiss such pleasure as perverse, but is it necessarily a cognitive failure of the understanding? Why should we be called upon to judge who we are via a proxy form of objection and cultivation (etiquette), if not for the sheer pleasure of cynical disenchantment?  For if one is to be equal to the task (or duty) of one’s speech, why can one not formally enjoy it in its endless imperfection? And who is to say such pleasure is merely the pleasure of unrefined hatefulness, rather than the essence of the very highest, most refined enunciation? Can I, as a black person, be anything more than passive – or resistant – to the hatefulness of such speech? I think it will be useful, in conclusion, even if it means a distinct change of tone, to turn to a text in which blackness acquires its authority over thought precisely because it is experienced as a form of ontological assault and, mutatis mutandis, an unerasable terror to the eye that beholds it. But this terror’s excess is hard to differentiate from a pleasurable breach.

V. Cognitive Terror

Mr. Cheselden has given us a very curious story of a boy, who had been born blind, and continued so until he was thirteen or fourteen years old; he was then couched for a cataract, by which operation he received his first sight. Among many remarkable particulars that attended his first perceptions, and judgements on visual objects, Cheselden tells us, that the first time the boy saw a black object, it gave him great uneasiness; and that some time after, upon accidentally seeing a negro woman, he was struck with great horror at the sight. (Burke 131)

I choose this example from Edmund Burke’s Enquiry into the Origin of Our Ideas of the Sublime and Beautiful (1757) because it offers a look from inside an encounter with the racially anomalous, an envisioning in which the (white) subject finds itself suspended amid great uneasiness. This shock turns on a certain accentuation within the field of the visible, namely, a sight, not so much of blackness as color, as of a black object (a “negro woman”). And what disturbs is not the reminder of the eye’s former blindness, but rather what seems to accrue with the horrendous sight of a black person, a horror that limits the very act of seeing in the renewed experience of the visible (Burke 131). In this theater of the eye, then, we see a racial allegory of veiling/unveiling; in this spectacle of a first sight formerly lost, now restored, seeing and imagining find themselves in an anomalous relationship without it being possible to say that one takes precedence over the other or that one is extracted from the other. Finally, in this scenario of restored vision, it seems that blackness can only be reproduced as a faux pas, as a dispossession (because aggressing) of white sensibility and custom, insofar as it continues to form an obstacle to what might be called the birth of a certain epistemological, politico-aesthetic knowledge of the self (which is born theoretically, allegorically, out of darkness). This is why Burke begins the section of his Enquiry titled “On the effects of blackness” with various tropes of blindness: with the feeling that, in utter darkness “it is impossible to know in what degree of safety we stand; we are ignorant of the objects that surround us”; “we may fall down a precipice the first step we take”; and in such darkness “wisdom” cannot avail itself of any certainty, it “can only act by guess.” For in this phantasy of being seen while unseeing, of being struck unawares, of falling down while groping along, the terrible fear is that darkness sees me precisely where I can no longer see myself (130). Thus the great uneasiness is founded – despite sight’s restoration – on the threat that the world has lost its “belong to me aspect,” and that seeingness is no longer reachable as a first sovereign impression, but is vulnerable and bereft (Lacan 81).
 
In fact, such terror is neither merely conventional nor a result of the constitutive frailties of reason (as we saw in Piper). For Burke, “the ill effects” of blackness are felt as a physical assault on the eye. But even if the “natural operation” of that blow is painful, the scenario nonetheless shows a subject caught up or exposed in its own labyrinthine imagining (of the eye as a kind of sadomasochistic theater or boudoir) (Burke 145, 144). When darkness appears and conquers the field of vision (and consequently blinds us), Burke says the fibers of the iris are painfully contracted or “forcibly drawn back,” which produces “spasms” in the eye’s efforts to see the object. In this sensation there is a dual experience (whose ramification again touches on seeing as a question of mastery and immediacy before habit or representation): “the bodily organs suffer first, and the mind through these organs” (Burke 131, 133). Not only does Burke tell us that he himself has experienced such pain, but he also recounts: “I have heard some ladies remark, that after having worked a long time upon a ground of black, their eyes were so pained and weakened they could hardly see” (133). The threads of these various painful stories therefore link blackness not to a reproducible image, but to a natural immediacy whose effects are constitutive rather than habitual. Blackness is consequently painful to the eye because it signifies a vertiginous ground whose optical geometry is so “many vacant spaces dispersed among the objects we view” (Burke 133). Threaded through this example of pained needlework (since it arises from a process of muscular and visceral contraction, of the hand faltering because the eye is no longer a guide), is a notion of perception as itself a kind of labor in vacuity, and of the visible as composed of vacuities that thus weary the eye.
 
Despite Burke’s appeal to nature, it is difficult to locate the threat of the negro woman’s blackness because its effects concern neither the woman’s race nor her gender (though Burke’s interpretation implicitly relies on both). The threat derives instead from a kind of subtraction or vacuity that cannot, however, be grounded in cultural discourse, since it constitutes a kind of material absence within culture. According to Burke, black bodies
 

are but so many vacant spaces dispersed among the objective view. When the eye lights on one of these vacuities, after having been kept in some degree of tension by the play of the adjacent colours upon it, it suddenly falls into a relaxation; out of which it as suddenly recovers by a convulsive spring. (133)

 
To look on black bodies is thus to look on a disjunctive space within being and/or nature; it is, in other words, to witness a break or rupture within culture, a vacuity or subtraction that is at the same time compared to a dream or hallucination. More precisely, blackness terrifies because it has no ground in nature, and because it denotes the blind unrepresentability of our own natures, so that to see it is to know that we no longer see and are at risk of a fall. By choosing the word “vacant,” Burke renders it unclear whether blackness is the manifestation of an emptiness that grounds the image, or whether it is a vacuity that allows that emptiness to manifest itself within culture. It is clear, however, that this gap or dispersion results from a “relaxation” that is both mental and corporeal and from which the mind recovers and forms itself as by a “convulsive spring.” Furthermore, it is always white subjectivity that conceives of this vacuity cast by metaphysical blackness, and that conceives itself in the process. Once again, the terror of representation is not due to the eye being so weakened or fatigued by its own deceptions. For as Burke discovers when he tries to see himself through the eyes of the couched boy or by pursuing the same threads as the needlework ladies, the terror lies not so much in blackness as in the very vision of a vacuity that it discloses or makes seeable, as the mind falls victim to the sublime blindness of reason, and precisely when its (racial) staging cannot be pictured or conceived as a theater of representations: “and by no art, can we cause such a shock by the same means, when we expect and prepare for it” (Burke 133, my emphasis). Furthermore, Burke concludes, even though “custom reconciles us to everything,” including our night terrors, “the nature of the original impression [of blackness] still continues”; or, more problematically perhaps, the restitution of sight (via the sublime) is always in fact a repetition of a primal vacuity within the sighted subject (Burke 135). In these stories of restored sight and sight endangered, one thereby glimpses the way that the aestheticization of the natural sentiments of civil society is instituted and constituted on an account of a racial horror that overwhelms the mind absolutely, irrevocably, and regardless of custom, sentiment, or reason. For white custom or culture, in brief, blackness is indeed the Other, and to say that blackness is a faux pas is inherently tautological.
 
Thus is the body of a black woman introduced into the dream of a blind (and blinding) envisioning, but in this dream the body and mind are both hallucinated as under threat. Here the corporeal body and representation are both subjected and held in abeyance by a gaze that becomes the sublime substitute of both nature and meaning: this gaze blackens the world. (This picturing of blackness as an anomaly within the visible is permitted by nothing other than the conventional association of blackness with malevolent threat, one that renders it subservient to the drama of an exposed, ever fragile whiteness; nothing permits this classical racial optics more than the sense that whiteness needs protecting from the racial “convulsions” that its own relaxation solicits.)
 
Burke’s example thus poses this problem: how can the mind free itself from blackness, when it is not so much the mind that is deceived into relaxation (by blackness, or femininity) as it is the “relaxation” itself that causes the eye to fall (inside a dream that is, in truth, the blindness of its own envisioning), and when it is this “accident” of the gaze that “induces this [black, sublime] image in the mind” (Burke 134)? In the case of the sublime, the image of falling is derived immanently and essentially (that is to say, aesthetically) from the threat of a relaxation induced from without that is simultaneously the nightmare or fantasy of the reposing mind. This fear, as Piper argues in Out of Order, Out of Sight, is itself problematic, since by protecting civility, masculinity, and the gaze over the eye, this imagining of blackness also protects the injustices of patriarchal sexual-racial conventions from being connected to their delusional origins in the imaginings of whites.
 
When the issue is a black woman as a visual faux pas, or as the point at which the categorial framework collapses, some sort of boundary has already been invaded, in a sense. Since it is as a veil that blackness, allegorically, remains suspended between being and appearance, it is viewed by Burke simultaneously as both sublime and pharmakon, impressive and debased, moving the body to contract painfully, to open the eye wide, so as to induce the mind’s precipitous relaxation. In order for sensibility to avoid being reduced once again to blindness, sublimity, like judgment, needs to be rethought in terms of the kinds of sexual-racial politics on display here in the Enquiry. The distrust of the aesthetic in Piper, her critique of fetishistic pseudology are so many attempts at this rethinking; they are attempts to lay down (in the sense in which Lacan says the gaze is laid down as a kind of mimicry or camouflage) the visual and categorial limits of racist self-delusion. Yet even the attempt (in Piper) to re-encounter the anomalous is not simply political – one gets the impression that she is trying to imagine another kind of political aesthetics. As Piper convincingly demonstrates, that imagining challenges not only the claims of aesthetic sensibility, civility, or etiquette, but also the racial conventions of aesthetic taste and culture.
 
One often hears in artistic circles that to focus on sensibility is to be apolitical. Burke’s interest in the eyes of the blind as an untrained or innocent way of seeing, one not yet dulled or habituated by custom or reason, argues, on the contrary, for an absolute sovereignty of seeing. The innocent eye is a metaphor not only for a highly cultivated aesthetics of vision or Bildung, but also for a purity of political envisioning. There is politics precisely because the purest (most sovereign) vision is the most unseeing, i.e., free from the restrictions of convention and taste.
 
And there is also judgment. There are striking and suggestive parallels between the blind boy invoked in the Enquiry and the shifting address-structures of works like Piper’s My Calling (Cards). A glance at this and several other works suggests that there tends indeed to be a shared depiction in Burke and Piper of a law beyond sight, a vacuity at the very edge of the visible, a mind ever haunted by its own infirmity and disfiguration; both depict various tableaux of a kind of conventional seeing that produces blindness, and of a ruination that is the moment of first sight, a ruin whose political meaning is that of restored sight. Doubtless there are differences, but the various mises en scène of a mind groping in the darkness of its own delusion, the setting in movement of counter-pseudological tableaux, in short the holding in check of the politics of the sublime, all suggest a concern with the conventional limits of the seeable. At the level of the texts themselves, there is the sense that blackness is uniquely imperious to the mind because in seeing it we become like children, or the blind, unable to measure distances in space or time, unable to tell the difference between the dangerous over-proximity of objects from the very far, distant, or ungraspable. Part of the demonstrative power of blackness is to collapse geometric vision into psychological unseeing. The same is true of Burke’s reading of Cheselden. The original scientific interest of the case was the contiguity of sight and touch; the distance between the mental images we have of objects, their resemblance or likeness, and our actual experience of them; and whether a person born blind could recognize objects in space alone without learning how to associate names and things (the so-called “Molyneux problem”). For Burke, the case is more about the eye as a kind of cinémathèque or theater, where the conventions of judgment themselves become images (of blindness), and where things newly seen are like cutouts or hallucinations that possess insufficient reality and are mere shadows of a more overwhelming darkness. The primary force of race in the Enquiry is due to the direct relation between what we racially see and questions of invisibility; racial seeing is a question not of an illusory reality, but of a phantasy that is unconsciously lived as reality.
 
Naturally, Piper reconceives this delusional fear in transcendental terms. In order to tell the story of the black-woman-as-object (as in, say, Burke), her artwork strives to present her indexical presence as a unique moment or event prior to any defensive rationalization; this moment is one of great unease, since its meaning cannot be assured in advance and involves the suspension of conventional pleasures and associations. Thus, rather than realize a phantasy of innocence transformed into power, here the gaze signals a regression from power to childish innocence. The phantasy of penetrating the world of things is here rendered fallible and precarious when traversed by the gaze of the other in her difference. Necessarily unpredictable, this encounter is what Piper subsequently calls (in Out of Sight) a way of not averting one’s gaze. Burke’s theater of the eye registers a series of aversions, including negrophobia, but by doing so it simultaneously demonstrates the conventional limits of our notions of difference. As a consequence he shows the way that race has always been recruited to perform this pained weariness of the (white) eye, and the way that weariness has become “naturally” blind. The sight of a black woman accordingly denotes not so much an external shock that cannot be expunged from the objective view, as an ideological fantasy that grounds the gendered-raced terms of the Enquiry. It is Burke, then, who cannot look on her, who looks indirectly at her through the eyes of a frightened boy. In the Enquiry her presence is an allegorical vacuity in whose appearance the desire not to see becomes both intelligible and desirable as the phantasized limit of the mind.
 
Yet art needs to see her, finally, because the history of aesthetics does not. In Piper’s justly famous “Self-Portrait Exaggerating My Negroid Features” (1981), the question of racism’s invisibility to art historical discourse is taken up and made explicit (see Fig. 3).
 

Fig. 3 Adrian Piper, Self-Portrait Exaggerating My Negroid Features, 1981. Pencil on paper. 8″ x 10″ (20.3 x 25.4 cm). Collection of Eileen Harris Norton, USA. © Adrian Piper Research Archive Foundation Berlin. Used by permission.

One can’t help feeling that the black woman who appears here is the effect of a figure who disappears, and in whose invisibility the phenomenal form of blackness remains racially indeterminate. Once again, one is struck by the close entanglement of exposure and concealment in this pencil drawing on paper (in fact, one feels the uneasiness and strangeness of this concealment by appearance). This picture looks back at us from the heart of the visible, the record of what it means to be seen when we no longer know who is doing the seeing: we don’t know whether the artifice is one of exposure or concealment, disguise or complicity; whether the “exaggeration” is at once a falsification (pastiche or fetish); or whether it is the expression of an excess, a disruption, a negation pulling the face towards some other model that has no obvious meaning as parody, disguise, or derision, and yet remains embodied as a kind of obtuse referent without designation, neither anchored nor set adrift in the scene of the image. Take away the obvious meaning of “Negroid,” and a “racial” signification still remains, still circulates, still comes through: without it, there would be no exaggeration to be seen or read. But what makes that signification figurable and seeable is used here in opposition, not to the deliberately fictive disguise, but to the imbecility of all racial designation that confuses being with appearance. The question of what appears is thus raised in an interesting way as a kind of non-negating disappearance. But it is hard to know if the exaggeration is part of what appears or what fails to appear; hence the difficulty in locating it. Our vision remains suspended between the image and its designation, between representation and its subtraction. Like the figure of vacuity in the Enquiry, it is difficult to tell whether race is the ground that figures or the figure that grounds. On the one hand, the strokes that mark the surface of the paper are both the frame and what frames aesthetic judgment. Hence, all appearance, for Piper, could be called Negroid insofar as it designates an empty materiality, or a materiality prior to any aesthetic manifestation.
 
Piper has indicated clearly in several texts the burden that her race and sexuality have presented to gallery owners and collectors.[7] “Self-Portrait Exaggerating My Negroid Features” takes up that burden as an allegory of the black female artist always caught between exaggeration and caricature, seemingly present yet disappearing before her own eyes into the abyss of that self-division, desperately trying to recapture herself as an image of referential explicitness, but already knowing that blackness is already, in its very iconicity, the medium that prevents such referentiality from taking shape, from acquiring a singular form or uniqueness. All of Piper’s self-portraits (since that is what we are concerned with) are allegories of an incarnation that subtracts, with blackness as the figure for what lets be seen without ever presenting, and in whose “representation” ruination supervenes on any self-image. In tracing the movement of that figuration, Piper’s self-portraits are powerful accounts of the ways black art has been looked at (that is to say, marked off, ruined, mutilated) by art theory and the white art establishment. One could say that the gaze here sets aside both the portrait and the features – the markers of selfhood – and reaches instead toward a black thing, a black object that belongs in the category of aesthetic formlessness. Piper’s drawing thus attempts the impossible task of addressing the limits of that figuration within a representation – the unrepresentable moment when, in viewing the work, the face first looked at is eclipsed by a memory or stereotype that cannot itself be seen in the portrait. Since any black self-portrait has to include what is by its own form excluded from it, it must present through its own ruination the traces of this limit, not as something known but as something uncomprehended by the aesthetic. Therefore, this portrait, too, in tracing the limit of certain conventions, inscribes an appearing that it itself reveals to be impossible – but necessary (as such, it recalls the photographs of Food for the Spirit). Accordingly, black art historically has been forced to demonstrate – by the unwanted supplement of racism –the fate of being, aesthetically, its own pharmakon; the black artist has to present, to bring out, to render visible, by the very excess that she brings to it, the expression of a disappearance that signifies the ruination of black art as both idea and medium. Piper also makes clear that this obligation is borne and sustained by historical conventions of art historical discourse and enquiry – which is why her conceptual art challenges its own referentiality and representation. Whence her insistence on the ruin of this version of ruination, and by the very anomalous terms that render it tangible as both an aesthetic idea and cultural value. And whence her insistence on the political necessity of etiquette as a moral or dialectical space where black art can form or suspend its own radical anomaly, and where the desire is for an art of xenia.
 
In each of her self-portraits, then, a kind of vacuity is implicitly instated between figure and stereotype. In a way, Piper’s art attempts to return seeing to a certain kind of naivety, to produce a spectator who sees before understanding what it is he or she is seeing. All this is a far cry from Burke. And yet, in the fourth part of the Enquiry, Burke describes a vacuity in visual judgment that has no other meaning than its contribution to a spectacle of excess and ruination (and whose witness is the restored sight of a formerly blind boy). Piper, in “Self-Portrait Exaggerating My Negroid Features,” aims at the recovery of the gaze of the black object from such blindness; the point seems to be that black art cannot be representational without the risk of seeming vacuous, and the price paid is enormous – no less than a sight ruined by having to blindly contemplate itself through stereotypes. Perhaps it was the reading of this other blind text (here in Burke) that Piper called for when she said that an art object should not simply be seen or heard but also scrutinized and listened to attentively as a materially anomalous event. This scrutiny and this listening are obviously not the postulation of some simple need to apply the mind post-racially (that would be banal, a pious wish), but rather a veritable mutation of how we read the black object, text, or image – which remains a crucial problem of our time.

* * *

This still leaves us, and the racist offender, holding the card. If today’s prevailing fantasy is that we are all post-racial, then handing out the card becomes harder than ever. It is no wonder that My Calling (Cards) has been seen as so historically significant. It is also no wonder that its significance remains simply that of asking a subject to become a spectator to his or her own delusion. Whether one has ever received these calling cards or not, everyone participating in the debate has once committed a racist faux pas. Rhetorical, psychoanalytical, philosophical, aesthetic, and political structures are profoundly implicated in these solecistic apparitions. The difficulty in all these encounters would seem to reside in the attempt to achieve a full elaboration of any discursive position other than that of the card not needing to be taken, the receiving of which makes all of us into a terrified child groping blindly in self-deception. What could be more discomforting than that?