Category: Volume 4 – Number 1 – September 1993

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    Every issue of Postmodern Culture will carry notices of events, calls for papers, and other announcments, up to 250 words, free of charge. Advertisements will also be published on an exchange basis. Send anouncements and advertisements to: pmc@jefferson.village.virginia.edu
     


    Journal and Book Announcements:
    
     1) _Essays in Postmodern Culture_
     2) _Black Ice Books_
     3) _Black Sacred Music_
     4) _boundary 2_
     5) _The Centennial Review_
     6) _College Literature_
     7) _Contention_ 
     8) _Differences_
     9) _Discourse_
    10) _Electronic Journal on Virtual Culture_
    11) _GENDERS_
    12) _M/E/A/N/I/N/G_
    13) _Minnesota Review_
    14) _Nomad_ 
    15) _October_
    16) _RIF/T_
    17) _SSCORE_
    18) _Studies in Popular Culture_
    19) _Virus 23_
    20) _ViViD Magazine_
    21) _Zines-L_
    
    Calls for Papers and Participants:
    
    22) _PMC-MOO_
    23) _Call for Papers on Don DeLillo_
    24) _Electronic Journal of Virtual Culture_
    25) _Journal of Criminal Justice and Popular Culture_
    26) _Hypertext Fiction and the Literary Artist_
    27) _Postmodern Culture_
    28) _PSYCHE_
    
    Conferences and Societies:
    
    29) _The Network Services Conference_
    
    Networked Discussion Groups:
    
    30) _FEMISA: Feminism, Gender, International Relations_
    31) _HOLOCAUS: Holocaust List_
    32) _NewJour-L_
    33) _Popcult List_
    
    Grants:
    
    34) _Duke University: Travel-to-Collections Grants_ 
    
    1)--------------------------------------------------------------
    
                      ESSAYS ON POSTMODERN CULTURE
    
    Available in December, 1993:
    
    An anthology of essays from _Postmodern Culture_ is forthcoming
    in print from Oxford University Press.  The works collected here
    constitute practical engagments with the postmodern--from AIDS
    and the body to postmodern politics.
    
                   --"I laughed, I cried.  The feelgood 
                     critical book of the year."  --Jonathan Beasley 
    
                   --"Two thumbs up!"  --Chris Barrett
    
     CONTENTS:
    
     George Yudice, "Feeding the Transcendent Body"
    
     Allison Fraiberg, "Of AIDS, Cyborgs, and other Indiscretions:
         Resurfacing the Body in the Postmodern"
    
     David Porush and Allison Fraiberg, "Commentary: An Exchange"
    
     Stuart Moulthrop, "You Say You Want a Revolution: Hypertext and
         the Laws of Media"
    
     Paul McCarthy, "Postmodern Pleasure and Perversity: Scientism
         and Sadism"
    
     Roberto Maria Dianotto, "The Excremental Sublime: The Postmodern
         Literature of Blockage and Release"
    
     Audrey Ecstavasia, "Fucking (with Theory) for Money: Towards an
         Interrogation of Escort Prostitution"
    
     Elizabeth Wheeler, "Buldozing the Subject"
    
     Bob Perelman, "The Marginalization of Poetry"
    
     Steven Helmling, "Marxist Pleasure: Jameson and Eagleton"
    
     Neil Larsen, "Postmodernism and Imperialism: Theory and Politics
         in Latin America"
    
     David Mikics, "Postmodernism, Ethnicity, and Underground
         Revisionism in Ishmael Reed"
    
     Barrett Watten, "Post-Soviet Subjectivity in Arkadii
         Dragomoshchenko and Ilya Kabakov"
    
                     ISBN: 0-19-508752-6 (hardbound)
                          0-19-508753-4 (paper)
    
                     _Essays in Postmodern Culture_ 
                          will be available at 
                           the MLA in Toronto
                             December, 1993
    
    2)--------------------------------------------------------------
    
                            _BLACK ICE BOOKS_
    
    _Black Ice Books_ is a new alternative trade paperback series
    that will introduce readers to the latest wave of dissident
    American writers.  Breaking out of the bonds of mainstream
    writing, the voices published here are subversive, challenging
    and provocative.  The first four books include:
    
    _Avant-Pop: Fiction for a Daydream Nation_
    
    Edited by Larry McCaffery, this book is an assemblage of
    innovative fiction, comic book art, unique graphics and various
    other unclassifiable texts by writers like Samuel Delany, Mark
    Leyner, William Vollmann, Kathy Acker, Eurdice, Stephen Wright,
    Derek Pell, Harold Jaffe, Tim Ferret, Ricardo Cortez Cruz and
    many others.
    
    "One of the least cautious, nerviest editors going, Larry
    McCaffery is the No-Care Bear of American Letters." 
                                       -- William Gibson.
    
    "A clusterbomb of crazy fiction, from a generation too sane to
    repeat yesterday's lies."
                                       -- Tom Robbins
    
    _New Noir_
    Stories by John Shirley
    
    John Shirley bases his stories on his personal experience of
    extreme people and extreme mental states, and on his struggle
    with the seduction of drugs, crime, prostitution and violence.
    
    "John Shirley is an adventurer, returning from dark and troubled
    regions with visionary tales to tell."
                                       -- Clive Barker
    
    _The Kafka Chronicles_
    a novel by Mark Amerika
    
    The _Kafka Chronicles_ is an adventure into the psyche of an
    ultracontemporary twentysomething guerilla artist who is lost in
    an underworld of drugs and mental terrorism, where he encounters
    an unusual cast of angry yet sensual characters
    
    "Mr Amerika--if indeed that is his name--has achieved a unique
    beauty in his artful marriage of Blake's lyricism and the iron-
    in-the-soul of Celine.  Are we taking a new and hard-hitting
    Antonin Artaud?  Absolutely.  And much more."
                                       --Terry Southern
    
    _Revelation Countdown_
    by Cris Mazza
    
    Stories that project onto the open road not the nirvana of
    personal freedom but rather a type of freedom more resembling
    loss of control.
    
    "Talent jumps off her like an overcharge of electricity."
                                       --LA Times
    
    Discount Mail-Order Information:
    
    You can buy these books directly from the publisher at a
    discount.  Buy one for $7, two for $13, three for $19 or all four
    for $25.  We pay US postage!  (Foreign orders add $2.50 per
    book.)
    
    ___  Avant-Pop
    
    ___  New Noir
    
    ___  The Kafka Chronicles
    
    ___  Revelation Countdown
    
    Please make all checks or money orders payable to:
    
    Fiction Collective Two
    Publications Unit
    Illinois State University
    Normal, IL 61761
    
    3)--------------------------------------------------------------
    
    _Black Sacred Music_
    A Journal of Theomusicology
    
    Presenting the proceedings of an important conference held in
    Blantyre, Malawi in November of 1992, this volume represents a
    significant step for the African Christian church toward
    incorporating indigenous African arts and culture into it
    liturgy.  Recognizing that the African Christian church continues
    to define itself in distinctly Western terms, forty-nine
    participants from various denominations and all parts of Africa--
    Uganda, Kenya, Malawi, Mozambique, Madagascar, Mauritius,
    Zimbabwe, Zambia, Sierra Leone, Cameroon--and the United States
    met to share ideas and experiences and to establish strategies
    for the indigenization of Christianity in African churches.
    
    Other special issues by single copy:
    
    The William Grant Still Reader
    presents the collected writings of this respected American
    composer.  Still offered a perspective on American music and
    society informed by a diversity of experience and associations
    that few others have enjoyed.  His distinguished career spanned
    jazz, traditional African-American idioms, and the European
    avant-garde, and his compositions ranged from chamber music to
    opera.
    
    Sacred Music of the Secular City
    delves into the American religious imagination by examining the
    religious roots and historical circumstances of popular music. 
    Includes essays on musicians Robert Johnson, Duke Ellington,
    Marvin Gaye, Madonna, and 2 Live Crew.
    
    Subscription prices: $30 institutions, $15 individuals.  Single
    issues: $15.  Please add $4 for subscription outside the U.S.
    Canadian residents, add 7% GST.
    
    Duke University Press/Box 90660/Durham NC  27708
    
    4) --------------------------------------------------------------
    
    _boundary 2_
    an international journal of literature and culture
    
    Paul Bove, editor
    
    Forthcoming in 1993:
    
    The Violence of Light in the Land of Desire; or How William Jones
    Discovered India / Jenny Sharp
    
    Veiled Woman and Veiled Narrative in Tahar Ben Jelloun's _The
    Sandchild_ / John. D. Erickson
    
    The Ideologies and Semiotics of Fascism: Analyzing Pound's
    _Cantos 12-15_ / Stephen Hartnett
    
    Lionel Trilling, _The Liberal Imagination_, and the Emergence of
    the Cultural Discourse of Anti-Stalinism / Russell J. Reising
    
    Divine Politics: Virginia Woolf's Journey toward Eleusis in _To
    the Lighthouse_ / Tina Barr
    
    %Saxa loquuntur%: Freud's Archaeology of the Text / Sabine Hake
    
    Deleuze's Nietzsche / Petra Perry
    
    A Tyranny of Justice: The Ethics of Lyotard's Differend / Allen
    Dunn
    
    Thinking\Writing the Postmodern: Representation, End, Ground,
    Sending / Jeffrey T. Nealon
    
    Three issues annually
    Subscription prices: $48 institutions, $24 individuals, $16
    single issues.  Please add $6 for postage outside the U.S..
    
    Duke University Press/ Box 90660 /Durham NC  27708
    
    5) --------------------------------------------------------------
    
    _The Centennial Review_
    
    Edited by R.K. Meiners
    
    _The Centennial Review_ is committed to reflection on
    intellectual work, particularly as set in the University and its
    environment.  We are interested in work that examines models of
    theory and communication in the physical, biological, and human
    sciences; that re-reads major texts and authoritative documents
    in different disciplines or explores interpretive procedures;
    that questions the cultural and social implications of research
    in a variety of disciplines.
    
    **SPECIAL ISSUE**
    
    POLAND: FROM REAL SOCIALISM TO DEMOCRACY
    Winter 1993
    
    Guest Editor: Stephen Esquith
    Essays on events and ideas in recent Polish history, culture, and
    politics.
    
    Adam Michnik:
    _An Interview with Leszek Kolakowski_
    
    Marek Ziolkowski:
    _The Case of the Polish Intelligentsia_
    
    Marian Kempny:
    _On the Relevance of Social Anthropology
    
    to the Study of Post-Communist Culture_
    
    Plus: Lagowski, Narojek, Szszkowska, Buchowski, and others.
    
    Please begin my _CR_ subscription:
    
    ___ $12/year (3 issues)
    
    ___ $18/two years (6 issues)
    
    (Add $4.50 per year for mailing outside the US)
    
    Please send me the special issue:
    
    ___ _Poland: From Real Socialism to Democracy_
    
    Name____________________________________________
    
    Address_________________________________________
    
    City____________________________________________
    
    State/County____________________________________
    
    Zip_____________________________________________
    
    Please make your check payable to _The Centennial Review_.  Mail
    to:
    
    _The Centennial Review_
    312 Linton Hall
    Michigan State University
    East Lansing MI  48824-1044
    
    6) --------------------------------------------------------------
    
    _College Literature_
    A Triannual Literary Journal for the Classroom
    
    Edited by Kostas Myrsiades
    
    A triannual journal of scholarly criticism dedicated to serving
    the needs of College/University teachers by providing them with
    access to innovative ways of studying and teaching new bodies of
    literature and experiencing old literature in new ways.
    
    "_College Literature_ has made itself in a short time one of the
    leading journals in the field, important reading for anyone
    teaching literature to college students."
         J. Hillis Miller
         University of CA, Irvine
    
    "Congratulations on some extremely important work; you certainly
    seem attuned to what is both valuable and relevant."
         Terry Eagleton
         Oxford University
    
    "In one bold stroke you seem to have turned _College Literature_
    into one of the things everyone will want to read."
         Cary Nelson
    
    "My sense is that _College Literature_ will have substantial
    influence in the field of literacy and cultural studies."
         Henry A. Giroux
    
    "A journal one must consult to keep tabs on cultural theory and
    contemporary discourse, particularly in relation to pedagogy."
         Robert Con Davis
    
    Forthcoming issues:
    
         Third World Women's Literature
         African American Writing
         Cross-Cultural Poetics
    
    Subscription Rates:      US                  Foreign
             Individual      $24.00/year         $29.00/year
             Institutional:  $48.00/year         $53.00/year
    
    Send prepaid orders to:
    
    _College Literature_
    Main 544
    West Chester University
    West Chester, PA 19383
    (215)436-2901 / (fax) (215)436-3150
    
    7) --------------------------------------------------------------
    
    _CONTENTION_
    Debates in Society, Culture, and Science
    
    _Contention_ is:
    
    "...simply a triumph from cover to cover."
                                       Fredrick Crews
    
    "...extremely important."
                                       Alberta Arthurs
    
    "...the most exciting new journal 
        that I have ever read."
                                       Lynn Hunt
    
    "...superb."
                                       Janet Abu-Lughod
    
    "...an important, exciting, and 
        very timely project."
                                       Theda Skocpol
    "...an idea whose time has come."
                                       Robert Brenner
    
    "...serious and accessible."
                                       Louise Tilly
    
    Subscriptions (3 issues) are available to individuals at $25.00
    and to institutions at $50.00 (plus $10.00 for foreign surface
    postage) from:
    
    Journals Division
    Indiana University Press
    601 N. Morton
    Bloomington IN  47104
     ph: (812) 855-9449
    fax: (812) 855-7931
    
    8) --------------------------------------------------------------
    
    _Differences_
    A Journal of Feminist Cultural Studies
    
    QUEER THEORY: LESBIAN AND GAY SEXUALITIES
    (Volume 3, Number 2)
    Edited by Teresa de Lauretis
    
    Teresa de Lauretis: _Queer Theory: Lesbian and Gay Sexualities
                         An Introduction_
    Sue Ellen Case:     _Tracking the Vampire_
    Samuel R. Delany:   _Street Talk/Straight Talk_
    Elizabeth A. Grosz: _Lesbian Fetishism?_
    Jeniffer Terry:     _Theorizing Deviant Historiography_
    Thomas Almaguer:    _Chicano Men: A Cartography of Homosexual
                         Identity and Behavior_
    Ekua Omosupe:  _Black/Lesbian/Bulldagger_
    Earl Jackson, Jr.: _Scandalous Subjects: Robert Gluck's
                         Embodied Narratives_
    Julia Creet:        _Daughter of the Movement: The
                         Psychodynamics of Lesbian S/M Fantasy_
    
    THE PHALLUS ISSUE
    (Volume 4, Number 1)
    Edited by Naomi Schor and Elizabeth Weed
    
    Maria Torok:        _The Meaning of "Penis Envy" in Women (1963)_
    Jean-Joseph Goux:   _The Phallus: Masculine Identity and the
                         "Exchange of Women"_
    Parveen Adams:      _Waiving the Phallus_
    Kaja Silverman:     _The Lacanian Phallus_
    Charles Bernheimer: _Penile Reference in Phallic Theory_
    Judith Butler:      _The Lesbian Phallus and the Morphological
                         Imaginary_
    Jonathan Goldberg: _Recalling Totalities: The Mirrored Stages
                         of Arnold Schwarzenegger_
    
    Emily Apter:        _Female Trouble in the Colonial Harem_
    
    Single Issues: $12.95 individuals
                    $25.00 institutions
                    ($1.75 each postage)
    
    Subscriptions (3 issues): $28.00 individuals
                               $48.00 institutions
                               ($10.00 foreign surface postage)
    
    Send orders to:
    
    Journals Division
    Indiana University Press
    601 N Morton
    Bloomington IN  47404
     ph: (812) 855-9449
    fax: (812) 855-7931
    
    9) --------------------------------------------------------------
    
    _DISCOURSE_
    
    Volume 15, Number 1
    
    SPECIAL ISSUE
    
    FLAUNTING IT: LESBIAN AND GAY STUDIES
    
    Kathryn Baker:  Delinquent Desire: Race, Sex, and Ritual in
                    Reform Schools for Girls
    
    Terralee Bensinger: Lesbian Pornography: The Re-Making of (a)
                        Community
    
    Scott Bravmann: Investigating Queer Fictions of the Past:        
           Identities, Differences, and Lesbian and Gay 
           Historical Self-Representations
    
    Sarah Chinn and Kris Franklin: "I am What I Am" (Or Am I?):
          Making and Unmaking of Lesbian and Gay Identity in _High
          Tech Boys
    
    Greg Mullins:  Nudes, Prudes, and Pigmies: The Desirability of
                   Disavowal in _Physical Culture Magazine_
    
    JoAnn Pavletich:  Muscling the Mainstream: Lesbian Murder
                      Mysteries and Fantasies of Justice
    
    David Pendelton:  Obscene Allegories: Narrative Structures in
                      Gay Male Porn
    
    Thomas Piontek:  Applied Metaphors: AIDS and Literature
    
    June L. Reich:  The Traffic in Dildoes: The Phallus as Camp and
                    the Revenge of the Genderfuck
    
    Single Issues: $12.95 individuals
                   $25.00 institutions
                   ($1.75 each postage)
    
    Subscriptions (3 issues): $25.00 individuals
                              $50.00 institutions
                              ($10.00 foreign surface postage)
    
    Send orders to:
    
    Journals Division
    Indiana University Press
    601 N Morton
    Bloomington IN  47404
     ph: (812) 855-9449
    fax: (812) 855-7931
    
    10) ------------------------------------------------------------
    
    _The Electronic Journal on Virtual Culture_
    
    We are very pleased by the great interest in the _Electronic
    Journal on Virtual Culture_.  There are already more than 1,280
    people subscribed.
    
    Our first issue was distributed in March 1993.  The future looks
    very interesting.  Editors are working on Special Issues on
    education, law, qualitative research, and dynamics in virtual
    culture.
    
    The _Electronic Journal on Virtual Culture_  (EJVC) is a refereed
    scholarly journal that fosters, encourages, advances and
    communicates scholarly thought on virtual culture.  Virtual
    culture is computer-mediated experience, behavior, action,
    interaction and thought, including electronic conferences,
    electronic journals, networked information systems, the
    construction and visualization of models of reality, and global
    connectivity.
    
    EJVC is published monthly.  Some parts may be distributed at
    different times during the month or published only occasionally
    (e.g. CyberSpace Monitor).  If you would be interested in writing
    a column on some general topic area in the Virtual Culture (e.g.
    an advice column for questions about etiquette, technology, etc.
    ?) or have an article to submit or would be interested in editing
    a special issue contact Ermel Stepp Editor-in-Chief of Diane
    Kovacs Co-Editor at the e-mail addresses listed below. You can
    retrieve the file EJVC AUTHORS via anonymous ftp to
    byrd.mu.wvnet.edu (pub/ejvc) or via e-mail to listserv@kentvm or
    listserv@kentvm.kent.edu
    
    Cordially,
    
    Ermel Stepp, Marshall University, Editor-in-Chief
    MO34050@Marshall.wvnet.edu
    Diane (Di) Kovacs, Kent State University, Co-Editor
    DKOVACS@Kentvm.Kent.edu
    
    11) -------------------------------------------------------------
    
    _GENDERS_
    
    Ann Kibbey, Editor
    University of Colorado, Boulder
    
    Since 1988, _GENDERS_ has presented innovative theories of gender
    and sexuality in art, literature, history, music, photography,
    TV, and film.  Today, _GENDERS_ continues to publish both new and
    known authors whose work reflects an international movement to
    redefine the boundaries of traditional doctrines and disciplines.
    
                       ------------------------------
    
       _GENDERS_ is published triannually in Spring, Fall, Winter
            Single Copy rates: Individual $9, Institution $14
                      Foreign postage, add $2/copy
           Subscription rates: Individual $24, Institution $40
                 Foreign postage, add $5.50/subscription
    
    Send orders to:
    
    University of Texas
    Box 7819
    Austin TX  78713
    
    12) -------------------------------------------------------------
    
    M/E/A/N/I/N/G
    
    A Journal of Contemporary Art Issues
    
    M/E/A/N/I/N/G, an artist-run journal of contemporary art, is a
    fresh, lively, contentious, and provocative forum for new ideas
    in the arts.
    
    M/E/A/N/I/N/G is published twice a year in the fall and spring.
    It is edited by Susan Bee and Mira Schor.
    
    M/E/A/N/I/N/G #13 is a vivid mix of writings by artists and art
    historians.  Curtis Mitchell's "Working the Park" considers the
    sublime and the abject through the travails of an installation
    artist's efforts at public sculpture; Jordan Crandall's
    "Transactional Space" speaks of new systems of art communication
    and production at the limits of information technology; Jo Anna
    Isaak sheds new light on colonialist discourse in Matisse's "The
    Comfy Chair"; painting illiteracy is considered in Mira Schor's
    "Course Proposal;" Daryl Chin's "Those Little White Lies"
    critiques art history as an instrument of capitalism; an artist's
    spiritual sources are explored in David Reed's "Media Baptisms."
    
    Also in this issue: Definitions of "Art" by Stewart Buettner;
    Book and video reviews by Barry Schwabsky, Susan Bee, Johanna
    Drucker, Stephen O'Leary Harvey, and Robert C. Morgan.
    
    >From issue #13, Spring 1993
    
    "The sublime consists of a major dose of entropy, with the
    picturesque as only a condiment."
                                                 -- Curtis Mitchell
    
    "In all likelihood, what Matisse actually saw of a harem was what
    any tourist would see -- the high outer walls of the compound."
                                                 -- Jo Anna Isaak
    
    "If 'good' painting is suspect and unseen, then it might help to
    look at some bad painting just as closely."
                                                 -- Mira Schor
    
    "The artwork becomes a Marxist Christmas tree on which are hung
    gaudy baubles of 'late capitalism.'"
                                                 -- Daryl Chin
    
    "Rationality or belief don't work well now for painting.
    Suspension--doubt, works best."
                                                 -- David Reed
    
    Subscriptions for
    
    2 ISSUES (1 YEAR):
    $12 for individuals:
    $20 for institutions
    
    4 ISSUES (2 YEARS):
    $24 for individuals;
    $40 for institutions
    
    * Foreign subscribers please add $10 per year for shipping abroad
    and to Canada: $5
    
    * Foreign subscribers please pay by international money order in
    U.S. dollars.
    
    All checks should be made payable to Mira Schor
    
    Send all subscriptions to:
    
    Mira Schor
    60 Lispenard Street
    New York, NY 10013
    
    Limited supply of back issues available at $6 each, contact Mira
    Schor for information.
    
    Distributed with the Segue Foundation and the Solo Foundation
    
    13) -------------------------------------------------------------
    
    _Minnesota Review_
    
    Tell your friends!  Tell your librarians!
    The new _Minnesota Review_'s coming to town!
    
    **now under new management**
    
    Fall 1992 issue (n.s. 39): "PC WARS"
    
    includes essays by:
    
    * Richard Ohmann              "On PC and related matters"
    * Michael Berube              "Exigencies of Value"
    * Barry Sarchett              "Russell Jacoby, Anti-
                                   Professionalism, and the Politics
                                   of Cultural Nostalgia"
    * Michael Sprinkler           "The War Against Theory"
    * Balance Chow                "Liberal Education Left and Right"
    
    Spring 1993 issue (n.s. 40): "THE POLITICS OF AIDS"
    Poetry, Fiction, Interviews, Essays.
    
    topics include: 
    
    * Queer Theory and activism.
    * Public image of AIDS.
    * Politics of medical research.
    * Health care policies.
    
    Subscriptions are $10 a year (two issues), $20
    institutions/overseas.  The new _Minnesota Review_ is published
    biannually and originates from East Carolina University beginning
    with the Fall 1992 special issue.
    
    Send all queries, comments, suggestions, submissions, and
    subscriptions to: 
    
    Jeffrey Williams, Editor 
    _Minnesota Review_ 
    Department of English
    East Carolina University 
    Greenville, NC  27858-4353
    
    14) ------------------------------------------------------------
    
    NOMAD
          An Interdisciplinary Journal of
                           The Humanities,
                                     Arts,
                             And Sciences
    
    **************************************************************
    Manuscript submissions wanted in all interdisciplinary fields!
    
    Nomad is a forum for those texts that explore or examine the
    undefined regions among critical theory, visual arts, and
    writing.  It is a bi-annual, not-for-profit, independent
    publication for provocative cross-disciplinary work of all
    cultural types, such as intermedia artwork, metatheory, and
    experimental writing, as well as literary, theoretical,
    political, and popular writing.  While our editorial staff
    is comprized of artists and academics in a variety of
    disciplines, NOMAD strives to operate in a space outside of
    mainstream academic discourse and without institutional
    funding or controls.
    
    Manuscripts should not exceed fifteen pages (exclusive of
    references); any form is acceptable.  If possible, please
    submit manuscripts on 3.5" Macintosh disks, in either
    MicroSoft Word or MacWrite II format, or by E-mail.  Each
    manuscript submitted on disk must be accompanied by a paper
    copy. Otherwise, please send two copies of each manuscript.
    Artwork submitted must be no larger than 8 1/2" x 11", and
    in black and white.  PICT, TIFF, GIF, and JPEG files on
    3.5" Macintosh disks are acceptable, if accompanied by a
    paper copy (or via E-mail, bin-hexed or uuencoded).  All
    artwork must be camera-ready.  Submissions by regular mail
    should include a SASE with sufficient postage attached if
    return is desired.  Diskettes should be shipped in standard
    diskette mailing packages.
    
      Subscriptions: $9 per year (2 issues)
      Send Manuscripts and Inquiries to:
      NOMAD, c/o
      Mike Smith
      406 Williams Hall
      Florida State University
      Tallahassee, Florida, 32306
      (msmith@garnet.acns.fsu.edu)
    
    *****************************************************************
     "In NOMAD, the rarest combinations of interests are treated with
      respect and exposed to the eyes of those who can most
      appreciate them."
    *****************************************************************
    
    15) -------------------------------------------------------------
    
    _October_
    Art | Theory | Criticism | Politics
    
    The MIT Press
    
    Edited by: Rosalind Kraus
                Annette Michelson
                Yve-Alain Bois
                Benjamin H.D. Buchloh
                Hal Foster
                Denis Hollier
                John Rajchman
    
                                  "OCTOBER, the 15-year old
                                  quarterly of social and cultural
                                  theory, has always seemed special.
                                  Its nonprofit status, its cross-
                                  disciplinary forays into film 
                                  and psychoanalytic thinking, and
                                  its unyielding commitment to 
                                  history set it apart from the
                                  glossy art magazines."
                                            --Village Voice
    
    As the leading edge of arts criticism and theory today, _OCTOBER_
    focuses on the contemporary arts and their various contexts of
    interpretation.  Original, innovative, provocative, each issue
    examines interrelationships between the arts and their critical
    and social contexts.
    
    Come join _OCTOBER_'s exploration of the most important issues in
    contemporary culture.
    Subscribe Today!
    
    Published Quarterly ISSN 0162-2870.  Yearly Rates: Individual
    $32.00; Institution $80.00; Student (copy of current ID required)
    and Retired: $22.00.  Outside USA add $14.00 postage and
    handling.  Canadians add additional 7% GST.  Prepayment is
    required.  Send check payable to _OCTOBER_ drawn against a US
    bank, MasterCard or VISA number to: MIT Press Journal / 55
    Hayward Street / Cambridge, MA 02142-1399 / TEL: (617) 233-2889 /
    FAX: (617) 258-6779 / E-Mail: journals-orders@mit.edu
    
    16) -------------------------------------------------------------
    
    _RIF/T_
    E-Poetry Literary Journal
    
                                  In all arts there is a physical
                                  component . . .  We must expect
                                  great innovations to transform the
                                  entire technique of the arts.
                                                      --Paul Valery
    
    This list was formed to serve as a vehicle for (1) distribution
    of an interactive literary journal: _RIF/T_ and related exchange,
    and (2) collection of any information related to contemporary
    poetics.
    
    _RIF/T provides a forum for poets that are conversant with the
    media to explore the full potential of a true electronic journal.
    
    Dynamic--not static, _RIF/T_ shifts and riffs with the diction of
    "trad" poetry investigating a new, flexible, fluid poetry of
    exchange.
    
    Archives of e-poetry and related files are stored in the e-poetry
    FILELIST.
    
    To receive a list of files send the command 
    
    INDEX e-poetry 
    
    to: LISTSERV@UBVM or LISTSERV@UBVM.CC.BUFFALO.EDU as the first
    line in the body of your mail message (not your Subject: line).
    
    To subscribe to e-poetry, send the command
    
    SUB e-poetry your name
    
    to: LISTSERV@UBVM or LISTSERV@UBVM.CC.BUFFALO.EDU via mail
    message (again, as the first line in the body of the mail, not
    the Subject: line).  For example: SUB e-poetry John Doe
    
    Owner: Ken Sherwood
    v001pxfu@ubvms.cc.buffalo.edu
    
    17) -------------------------------------------------------------
    
    _SSCORE_
    Social Science Computer Review
    
    G. David Garson, Editor
    Ronald Anderson, Co-editor
    
    The official journal of the Social Science Computing Association,
    _SSCORE_ provides a unique forum for social scientists to acquire
    and share information on the research and teaching applications
    of microcomputing.  Now, when you subscribe to _Social Science
    Computer Review_, you automatically become a member of the Social
    Science Computing Association.
    
    Recent articles:
    
    Social Impacts of Computing: Codes of Professional Ethics
    Ronald Anderson
    
    Teledemocracy and Political Science
    William H. Dutton
    
    Trends in the Use of Computers in Economics Teaching in the
    United Kingdom
    Guy Judge and Phil Hobbs
    
    The Essentials of Scientific Visualization: Basic Techniques and
    Common Problems
    Steve E. Follin
    
    Psychology: Keeping up with the State of the Art in Computing
    Charles Huff
    
    Computer Assistance in Qualitative Sociology
    David R. Heise
    
    Automating Analysis, Visualization, and Other Social Science
    Research Tasks
    Edwin H. Carpenter
    
    From Mainframes to Micros: Computer Applications for
    Anthropologists
    Robert V. Kemper, Ronald K. Wetherington, and Michael Adler
    
    Quarterly
    Subscription prices: $48 individual, $80 institutions
    Single Issue: $20
    Please add $8 for postage outside the U.S.
    Canadian residents add 7% GST
    
    Duke University Press/ Journals Division / Box 90660 /Durham NC
    27708
    
    18) -------------------------------------------------------------
    
    _Studies in Popular Culture_
    Dennis Hall, editor.
    
    _Studies in Popular Culture_, the journal of the Popular Culture
    Association in the South and the American Culture Association in
    the South, publishes articles on popular culture and American
    culture however mediated: through film, literature, radio,
    television, music, graphics, print, practices, associations,
    events--any of the material or conceptual conditions of life. 
    The journal enjoys a wide range of contributors from the United
    States, Canada, France, Israel, and Australia, which include
    distinguished anthropologists, sociologists, cultural
    geographers, ethnomusicologists, historians, and scholars in mass
    communications, philosophy, literature, and religion.
    
    Please direct editorial queries to the editor: 
    Dennis Hall 
    Department of English 
    University of Louisville
    Louisville KY  40292
    tel: (502) 588-6896/0509
    Fax: (502) 588-5055
    Bitnet: DRHALL01@ULKYVM
    Internet: drhall01@ulkvm.louisville.edu
    
    All manuscripts should be sent to the editor care of the English
    Department, University of Louisville, Louisville, KY 40292. 
    Please enclose two, double-spaced copies and a self-addressed
    stamped envelope.  Black and White illustrations may accompany
    the text.  Our preference is for essays that total, with notes
    and bibliography, no more than twenty pages.  Documentation may
    take the form appropriate for the discipline of the writer; the
    current MLA stylesheet is a useful model.  Please indicate if the
    work is available on computer disk.  The editor reserves the
    right to make stylistic changes on accepted manuscripts.
    
    _Studies in Popular Culture_, is published semiannually and is
    indexed in the _PMLA Annual Bibliography_.  All members of the
    Association receive _Studies in Popular Culture_.  Yearly
    membership is $15.00 (International: $20.00).  Write to the
    Executive Secretary, Diane Calhoun-French, Academic Dean,
    Jefferson Community College-SW, Louisville, KY 40272, for
    membership, individual issues, back copies, or sets.  Volumes I-
    XV are available for $225.00. 
    
    19) ------------------------------------------------------------
    
    _VIRUS 23_
    
    For those brave souls looking to explore the Secret of Eris, you
    may wish to check out _VIRUS 23_.
    
    2 and 3 are even and odd,
    2 and 3 are 5,
    therefore 5 is even and odd.
    
    _VIRUS 23_ is a codename for all Erisian literature
    
    Don Webb
    6304 Laird Dr.
    Austin TX 78757
    0004200716@mcimail.com
    
    _VIRUS 23_ is the annual harcopy publication of A.D.o.S.A, the
    Alberta Department of Spiritual Affairs.  
    
    All issues are available at $7.00 ppd from:
    
    _VIRUS 23_
    Box 46
    Red Deer, Alberta
    Canada
    T4N 5E7
    
    Various chunks of _VIRUS 23_ can be found at Tim Oerting's
    alt.cyberpunk ftp site (u.washington.edu, in
    /public/alt.cyberpunk.  Check it out).
    
    For more information online contact Darren Wershler-Henry:
    grad3057@writer.yorku.ca
    
    20)------------------------------------------------------------
    
    ViViD Magazine
    
    The first issue of ViViD Magazine is now available. ViViD is a 
    hypertext magazine about experimental writing and creativity
    in cyberspace. We are actively seeking contributions for
    the next issue.
    
    The magazine is presented in the colorful, graphics environment
    of a Windows 3.1 Help File. You will need Windows 3.1 to read the
    magazine.
    
    The magazine will also be available via anonymous FTP at 
    "ftp.gmu.edu", to obtain it:
    
                             ftp ftp.gmu.edu
    username: anonymous
         password: (your email address)
         cd pub/library
         binary
         get VIVID1.ZIP
    
    -----------------------------------------------------------------
    For more information on ViViD, contact the editor, Justin McHale.
    Internet address: jmchale@gmuvax.gmu.edu
    -----------------------------------------------------------------
    
    Issue 1 Features:
    
    Articles:
           What is Cyberspace?
           What is Hypertext?
           Multiple Fiction and Multiple Worlds.
    
    News items:
           "Matrix News," a section featuring news items, notices
            and reviews concerning cyberspace. 
    
           "Treasure of the Internet," a section which details       
    
            interesting sites and services on the Internet.
    
    Experimental writing:
                        Poemtexts
                        Explodedview Texts
    
    21) -------------------------------------------------------------
    
    _Zines-L_
    
    announcing a new list available from: listserv@uriacc
    
    To subscribe to _Zines-L_ send a message to:
    listserv@uriacc.uri.edu
    
    on one line type:
    SUBSCRIBE ZINES-L first name last name
    
    22) -------------------------------------------------------------
    
                 _Postmodern Culture_ announces PMC-MOO
    
    PMC-MOO is a new service offered (free of charge) by _Postmodern
    Culture_.  PMC-MOO is a real-time, text-based, virtual reality
    environment in which you can interact with other subscribers of
    the journal and participate in live conferences.  PMC-MOO will
    also provide access to texts generated by _Postmodern Culture_
    and by PMC-TALK, and it will provide the opportunity to
    experience (or help to design) programs which simulate object-
    lessons in postmodern theory.  PMC-MOO is based on the LambdaMOO
    program, freeware by Pavel Curtis.
    
    To connect to PMC-MOO, you *must* be on the internet.  If you
    have an internet account, you can make a direct connection by
    typing the command
    
    telnet dewey.lib.ncsu.edu 7777
    
    at your command prompt.  Once you've connected to the server, you
    should receive onscreen instructions on how to log in to PMC-MOO.
    
    If you do not receive these onscreen instructions, but instead
    find yourself with a straight login: and password: prompt, it
    means that your telnet program or interface is ignoring the 7777
    at the end of the command given above, and you will need to ask
    your local user-support people how to telnet to a specific port
    number.  If you have the Emacs program on your system and would
    like information about a customized program for PMC-MOO that uses
    Emacs, contact pmc@unity.ncsu.edu by e-mail.
    
    23) -------------------------------------------------------------
    
    ******************************************************
    CALL FOR PAPERS
    for
    
    "RAIDS ON THE CONSCIOUS:
    New Essays on Don DeLillo"
    
    A special cluster for _Postmodern Culture_, Jan. 1994
    ******************************************************
    
       Since the early Seventies, Don DeLillo's work (fiction, 
    drama, and journalism) has played an important role in the 
    literature of what has gradually become known as the 
    "postmodern condition."  DeLillo's novels and plays 
    investigate the problem of subjectivity in an environment 
    increasingly governed by, perhaps even constructed purely of 
    information and its various modes of transmission.  Identity 
    in DeLillo is dominated by a sense of anxiety concerning the 
    formation of "self" from this patchwork of postmodern 
    discourses, and is often further problematized by the 
    lurking suspicion that there is no longer any stable 
    referential framework behind the blizzard of signifiers; a 
    suspicion that ideals, goals, and even individuality are 
    categories as "empty" as poststructuralist theory tells us 
    are the images, words, and digits with which we are 
    surrounded; that identity is as arbitrary, illusory, and 
    transient as the "sign."
    
       The breakdown of various Western master narratives 
    which is often at the heart of DeLillo's novels--a 
    breakdown discussed by, among others, Lyotard--contributes 
    to this "vacuuming out" of substance.  The result is a 
    "postnarrative" world where the acontextual, the enigmatic, 
    the arbitrary and fundamentally anti-rational continually 
    threaten to become the sole reality--as in Jorge Luis 
    Borges' "Tlon, Uqbar, Orbis Tertius."
    
       Furthermore, in DeLillo's works this cultural 
    identity crisis often "bleeds" into the characters' private 
    anxieties; in fact, the boundary between public and private 
    is the barrier which DeLillo seems to believe the postmodern 
    condition threatens to breach.  Some line has been crossed, 
    and in DeLillo's work identity is now formed from the 
    outside in, the product of a ceaseless anti-Cartesian 
    barrage of decontextualized messages and undifferentiated 
    signals from without.  The governance of this situation has 
    devolved from powerful but recognizable individuals onto 
    shadowy larger "bodies": corporations, intelligence 
    agencies, the academy and, perhaps most importantly, 
    terrorist organizations.  Beyond such barely tangible agents 
    DeLillo posits a postmodern sublime, the force described in 
    Libra as the "world inside the world."
    
       Papers are solicited which respond to these issues in 
    DeLillo's work (fiction, drama, and journalism) for possible 
    inclusion in a special issue (January, 1994) of the 
    electronic journal Postmodern Culture, and in a hard cover 
    edition to be published later in 1994 or in early 1995.  
    Papers should address the problems of how literature and 
    other forms of public language support and/or resist the 
    construction of the postmodern relationship of author, text, 
    and reader; how these identities and their relationships are 
    maintained, thwarted, or altered through a concatenation of 
    public spectacle, random violence, and decontextualized 
    language; and how the control of a massively disoriented 
    narrative (or former narrative) of and about these 
    identities increasingly depends upon a variety of ill-
    defined and vaguely sinister "postindividual" agencies.  
    Comparative essays utilizing other authors, films, music and 
    other forms of popular culture are welcomed.
       Abstracts (250-500 words) should arrive no later than 
    Oct. 15th, and the *first* drafts of papers (15-30 pages) 
    will be due no later than December 15th.  Inquiries, 
    abstracts and rough drafts may be sent electronically to: 
    
    Glen Scott Allen at e7e4all@toe.towson.edu, or
    Stephen J. Bernstein at bernstein_s@crob.flint.umich.edu
    
    or by regular mail to
    
    Prof. Glen Scott Allen   or   Prof. Stephen J. Bernstein
    English Dept.                 Dept. of English
    Towson State University       University of Michigan-Flint
    Towson, MD  21204             Flint, MI  48502
    
    24) ------------------------------------------------------------
    
    ^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^
    CALL FOR ARTICLES
    
    EJVC: Electronic Journal of Virtual Culture
    
    ^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^
    
    Special Issue: Gender Issues in Computer Networking
    
    Issue Editor: Leslie Reagan Shade
                   McGill University
                   Graduate Program in Communications
                   czsl@musica.mcgill.ca; shade@well.sf.ca.us
    
    EJVC is a new peer-reviewed electronic journal dedicated to
    scholarly research and discussion of all aspects of computer-
    mediated human experience, behavior, action, and interaction.
    
    This special issue of the EJVC will be devoted to gender issues
    in networking.  Despite the abundance of various private networks
    and the meteoric growth of the Internet, this rapidly expanding
    user base does not include an equal proportion of men and women. 
    How can women become equally represented in the new "electronic
    frontier" of cyberspace?  Issues to be discussed can include, but
    are not limited to, the following: 
    
    * Access issues--to hardware, software, and training.  What
         barriers do women face?  What are some success stories.
    
    * How can women be given the technical expertise to become
         comfortable and versatile with computer networking?
    
    * Interface design: can there be a feminist design?
    
    * How can networking realize its potential as a feminist tool?
    
    * How can women scholars exploit networking's technology?
    
    * What information technology policies could be developed to
         ensure computer networking equity for women, as well as
         minorities?
    
    * How does one define computer pornography and "offensive"
         material on the net?  Should it be allowed?
    
    * How should sexual harassment on the net be treated?
    
    * Are women-only groups necessary?
    
    * How do women interact on MUDS and MOOs?
    
    * What net resources exist for women?
    
    Deadlines:     December 1, 1993 (submission of abstracts)
                   April 1, 1994 (submission of contributions)
    
    Abstracts will be reviewed by the issue editor for
    appropriateness of content and overall balance of the issue as a
    whole.  In turn, authors will then be invited to submit full-
    length contributions, which will be peer-reviewed by the
    journal's normal editorial process before final acceptance for
    publication.  The issue editor encourages correspondence about
    proposed contributions even before submission of an abstract.
    
    Potential contributors may obtain a more detailed statement about
    the focus and range of this special issue by sending email to the
    issue editor with the subject line: EJVC Issue or by anonymous
    ftp to byrd.mu.wvnet.edu, directory/pub/ejvc, get
    ejvc.shade.call.
    
    Further information about EJVC may be obtained by sending e-mail
    to LISTSERV@KENTVM.BITNET or LISTSERV@KENTVM.KENT.EDU with one or
    more of the following lines in the text:
    SUBSCRIBE EJVC-L YourFirstname YourLastName
    GET EJVC WELCOME
    INDEX EJVC-L
    Also, the file is available by anonymous ftp to byrd.mu.wvnet.edu
    in the pub/ejvc directory.
    
    25) ------------------------------------------------------------
    
    *********************
    Call for Submissions
    *********************
    
    _Hypertext Fiction and the Literary Artist_ is a research project
    investigating the use of hypertext technology by creative
    writers.
    
    The project consists of evaluations of software and hardware,
    critiques of traditional and computerized works, and a guide to
    sites of publication.
    
    We would like to request writers to submit their works for
    review.  Publishers are requested to send descriptions of their
    publications with subscription fees and submission formats.  We
    are especially interested to hear from institutions which teach
    creative writing for the hypertext format.
    
    To avoid swamping our e-mail account, please limit messages to a
    page or two in length.  Send works on disk (IBM or Mac) or
    hardcopy to:
    
    _Hypertext Fiction and the Literary Artist_
    3 Westcott Upper
    London, Ontario
    N6C 3G6
    E-mail: KEEPC@QUCD>QUEENSU.CA
    
    26)------------------------------------------------------------
    
              THE JOURNAL OF CRIMINAL JUSTICE AND POPULAR CULTURE
    
                             CALL FOR PAPERS
    
    Scholars are invited to submit manuscripts/reviews that
    meet the following criteria:
    
    ISSUES:  The Journal invites critical reviews of films,
              documentaries, plays, lyrics, and other related visual
              and performing arts.  The Journal also invites original
              manuscripts from all social scientific fields on the
              topic of popular culture and criminal justice.
    
    SUBMISSION PROCEDURES: To submit material for the Journal,
              please subscribe to CJMOVIES through the listserv and a
              detailed guidelines statement will automatically
              follow.
    
    To subscribe, send a message with the following command to
    
                           LISTSERV@ALBNYVM1:
              SUBSCRIBE CJMOVIES YourFirstName YourLastName
    
    Manuscripts and inquiries should be addressed to: 
    The Editors, 
    Journal of Criminal Justice and Popular Culture
    SUNYCRJ@ALBNYVM1.BITNET
    or SUNYCRJ@UACSC2.ALBANY.EDU
    
    MANAGING EDITORS:
    Sean Anderson and Greg Ungar 
    Editors 
    Journal of CriminalJustice and Popular Culture, 
    School of Criminal Justice, SUNYA 135
    Western Avenue Albany, NY 12222 
    
    INTERNET:
    SA1171@ALBNYVM1.BITNET or GU8810@uacsc1.albany.edu
    
    LIST ADMINISTRATOR
    Seth Rosner 
    School of Criminal Justice, SUNYA
    SR2602@uacsc1.albany.edu or SR2602@thor.albany.edu
    
    27) -------------------------------------------------------------
    
    +++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++
    Call for Papers
    _PSYCHE: an interdisciplinary
    journal of research on consciousness_
    +++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++
    
    You are invited to submit papers for publication in the inaugural
    issue of _PSYCHE: an interdisciplinary journal of research on
    consciousness_ (ISSN: 1039-723X).
    
    _PSYCHE_ is a refereed electronic journal dedicated to supporting
    the interdisciplinary exploration of the nature of consciousness
    and its relation to the brain.  _PSYCHE_ publishes material
    relevant to that exploration form the perspectives afforded by
    the disciplines of Cognitive Science, Philosophy, Psychology,
    Neuroscience, Artificial Intelligence, and Anthropology. 
    Interdisciplinary discussions are particularly encouraged. 
    _PSYCHE_ publishes a large variety of articles and reports for a
    diverse academic audience four times per year.  As an electronic
    journal, the usual space limitations of print journals do not
    apply; however, the editors request that potential authors do not
    attempt to abuse the medium.  _PSYCHE_ also publishes a hardcopy
    version simultaneously with the electronic version.  Long
    articles published in the electronic format may be abbreviated,
    synopsized, or eliminated form the hardcopy version.
    
    Types of Articles:
    
    The journal publishes from time to time all of the following
    varieties of articles.  Many of these (as indicated below) are
    peer reviewed; all articles are reviewed by editorial staff.
    
    Research Articles reporting original research by author(s).
    Articles may be either purely theoretical or experimental or some
    combination of the two.  Articles of special interest
    occasionally will be followed by a selection of peer
    commentaries.  Peer Reviewed.
    
    Survey Articles reporting on the state of the art research in
    particular areas.  These may be done in the form of a literature
    review or annotated bibliography.  More ambitious surveys will be
    peer reviewed.  
    
    Discussion Notes critiques of previous research.  Peer Reviewed.
    
    Tutorials introducing a subject area relevant to the study of
    consciousness to non-specialists.
    
    Letters providing and informal forum for expressing opinions on
    editorial policy or upon material previously published in
    _PSYCHE_.  Screened by editorial staff.
    
    Abstracts summarizing the contents of recently published journal
    articles, books, and conference proceedings.
    
    Book Reviews which indicate the contents of recent books and
    evaluate their merits as contributions to research and/or as
    textbooks.
    
    Announcements of forthcoming conferences, paper submission
    deadlines, etc.
    
    Advertisements of immediate interest to our audience will be
    published: available grants; positions; journal contents;
    proposals for joint research; etc.
    
    Notes for Authors
    
    Unsolicited submissions of original works within any of the above
    categories are welcome.  Prospective authors should send articles
    directly to the executive editor.  Submissions should be in a
    single copy if submitted electronically of four (4) copies if
    submitted by mail.
    
    Submitted matter should be preceded by: the author's name;
    address; affiliation; telephone number; electronic mail address. 
    Any submission to be peer reviewed should be preceded by a 100-
    200 word abstract as well.  Note that peer review will be blind,
    meaning that the prefatory material will not be made available to
    the referees.  In the event that an article needs to be shortened
    for publication in the print version of _PSYCHE_, the author will
    be responsible for making any alterations requested by the
    editors.
    
    Any figures required should be designed in screen-readable ASCII.
    
    If that cannot be arranged, figures should be submitted as
    separate postscript files so that they can be printed out by
    readers locally.
    
    Authors of accepted articles assign to _PSYCHE_ the right to
    publish the text both electronically and as printed matter and to
    make it available permanently in an electronic archive.  Authors
    will, however, retain copyright to their articles and may
    republish them in any forum so long as they clearly acknowledge
    _PSYCHE_ as the original source of publication.
    
    Subscriptions
    
    Subscriptions to the electronic version of _PSYCHE_ may be
    initiated by sending the one-line command, SUBSCRIBE PSYCHE-L
    Firstname Lastname, in the body on an electronic mail message to:
    
    LISTSERV@NKI.BITNET
    
    28) -------------------------------------------------------------
    
    *************************************
    Announcement and Call for Submissions
    _Postmodern Culture_
    *************************************
    
    _Postmodern Culture_
    A SUNY Press Series
    
    Series Editor: Joseph Natoli
    Editor:         Carola Sautter
    
    Center for Integrative Studies, Arts and Humanities
    Michigan State University
    
    We invite submissions of short book manuscripts that present a
    postmodern crosscutting of contemporary headlines--green politics
    to Jeffrey Dahmer, Rap Music to Columbus, the Presidential
    campaign to Rodney King--and academic discourses from art and
    literature to politics and history, sociology and science to
    women's studies, form computer studies to cultural studies.
    
    This series is designed to detour us off modernity's yet-to-be-
    completed North-South Superhighway to Truth and onto
    postmodernism's "forking paths" crisscrossing high and low
    culture, texts and life-worlds, selves and sign systems, business
    and academy, page and screen, "our" narrative and "theirs,"
    formula and contingency, present and past, art and discourse,
    analysis and activism, grand narratives and dissident narratives,
    truths and parodies of truths.
    
    By developing a postmodern conversation about a world that has
    overspilled its modernist framing, this series intends to link
    our present ungraspable "balkanization" of all thoughts and
    events with the means to narrate and then re-narrate them. 
    Modernity's "puzzle world" to be "unified" and "solved" becomes
    postmodernism's multiple worlds to be represented within the
    difficult and diverse wholeness that their own multiplicity and
    diversity shapes and then re-shapes.
    
    Accordingly, manuscripts should display a "postmodernist style"
    that moves easily and laterally across public as well as academic
    spheres, "inscribes" within as well as "scribes" against realist
    and modernist modes, and strives to be readable-across-multiple-
    narratives and "culturally relative" rather than "foundational."
    
    Inquiries, proposals, and manuscripts should be addressed to:
    
    Joseph Natoli
    Series Editor
    20676jpn@msu.edu
    
    or 
    
    Carola Sautter
    Editor
    SUNY Press
    SUNY Plaza
    Albany, NY 12246-0001
    
    29) -------------------------------------------------------------
    
                                 NSC'93
    
                  The Network Services Conference 1993
                   Warsaw, Poland, 12-14 October 1993
    
    Invitation
    
    Networking in the academic and research environment has evolved
    into an important tool for researchers in all disciplines.  High
    quality network services and tools are essential parts of the
    research infrastructure.
    
    Building on the success of the first Network Services Conference
    in Pisa, Italy, NSC'93 will focus on the issue of providing
    services  to customers, with special attention paid to the 
    actual usage of the various tools available.  We will address the
    impact of today's global tools on service development and
    support, the changing function of traditional tools and services
    (such as archives), new services (such as multi-media 
    communications), the future role of the library and the
    effects of commercialization of networks and network services.
    Customer support at the institutional and campus level, and the 
    role of support in accessing global services, will also be
    covered.
    
    Talks, tutorials, demonstrations and other conference activities
    will address the needs of the research, academic, educational,
    governmental, industrial, and commercial network communities.
    
    Tutorial sessions on specific network services have been
    integrated into the regular conference program.  Practical issues
    in the use of these services and tools will be covered in detail
    by experts.  Throughout the conference, participants will be able
    
    to get hands-on experience in the well-equipped demonstration
    area.
    
    NSC'93 is being organized by EARN in conjunction with EUnet,
    NORDUnet, RARE, and RIPE.
    
    To get a preliminary program and registration form, send e-mail
    to:
    
       LISTSERV@FRORS12.BITNET     (or LISTSERV@FRORS12.CIRCE.FR)
    
    In the body of the message, write:  GET NSC93 ANN2
    
    David Sitman
    EARN
    
    30) ----------------------------------------------------------   
    
    _FEMISA_
    
    FEMISA@mach1.wlu.ca
    
    _FEMISA_ is conceived as a list where those who work on or think
    about feminism, gender, women and international relations, world
    politics, international political economy, or global politics,
    can communicate.  
    
    Formally, _FEMISA_ was established to help those members of the
    Feminist Theory and Gender Studies Section of the _International
    Studies Association_ keep in touch.  More generally, I hope that
    _FEMISA_ can be a network where we share information in the area
    of feminism or gender and international studies about
    publications or articles, course outlines, questions about
    sources or job opportunities, information about conferences or
    upcoming events, or proposed panels and information related to
    the _International Studies Association_.
    
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    34) -------------------------------------------------------------
    
    ************************************************************
                        John W. Hartman Center
              for Sales, Advertising, and Marketing History
                     Special Collections Library
                           Duke University
    
              TRAVEL-TO-COLLECTIONS GRANTS 1993-94
    
              Three or more grants of up to $1000 are available to
              (1) graduate students in any academic field who wish to
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              The major collection available at the Hartman Center at
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              Walter Thompson Company (JWT), the oldest advertising
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              since the 1920's.  It is anticipated that the
              advertisements (1932+) and a moderate amount of agency
              documentation from D'Arcy, Masius, Benton & Bowles
              (DMB&B) will be available for research by autumn 1993. 
              The Center holds several other smaller collections
              relating to 19th and 20th century advertising and
              marketing.
    
              REQUIREMENTS: Awards may be used between November 15,
              1993 and December 31, 1994.  Graduate student
              applicants (1) must be currently enrolled in a
              postgraduate program in any academic department and (2)
              must enclose a letter of recommendation from the
              student's advisor or project director.  Please address
              questions and requests for application forms to:
    
                   Ms. Ellen Gartrell, Director
                   John W. Hartman Center for Sales, Advertising, and
                   Marketing History
                   Special Collections Library
                   Duke University
                   Box 90185
                   Durham NC  27708-0185
    
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                   Fax: 919-684-2855
                   email: egg@mail.lib.duke.edu
    
              DEADLINES: Applications for 1993-94 awards must be
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              will be announced by the end of October.

     

  • Selected Letters From Readers

    Paul Miers
    Department of English
    Towson State University
    e7e4mie@toe.towson.edu

     

    RE: Kip Canfield’s essay, “ The Microstructure of Logocentricism: Sign Models in Derrida and Smolensky,” in PMC v.3 n.3. A reply by Paul Miers, Department of English, Towson State University.

     

    Connectionism and Its Consequences

     

    Kip Canfield’s article in the last issue of Postmodern Culture is one of the first pieces of critical theory to discuss the implications of the revolutionary paradigm shift now taking place in the cognitive sciences. The movement inspiring that shift, generally called connectionism, offers a powerful and still controversial alternative to the standard model of mental representation which has more or less dominated western philosophy at least since the Enlightenment (Bechtel). As Canfield notes in his comparison of Paul Smolensky, one of the leading connectionists, with Jacques Derrida, the connectionist critique parallels in many ways the deconstruction of traditional semiotics and structuralism. But, as Canfield also notes, connectionist theory does more than deconstruct the old paradigm: it also purports to offer an alternative account of representation, a genuine Copernican revolution which changes our view of mental life from a symbol centered token/type model to a network based vector/matrix account (Churchland).

     

    Since Canfield focuses almost exclusively on Smolensky and Derrida, however, readers of his essay not already familiar with the paradigm wars in cognitive science may not see just how profound the connectionist revolution could be. For that reason, I want to offer here a brief note on the consequences of connectionism which follows up on a point I have made elsewhere regarding the implications of connectionism for critical theory (Miers).

     

    The attraction of connectionism for cognitive science is its potential for providing a “natural” theory of information processing in the brain. All the evidence indicates that the brain itself is organized as a massively distributed parallel processor (Edelman); what the great debate is about is how to reconcile the neural evidence with the standard, classical theory of mental representation. Classical theory claims that mental representations are the product of arbitrary atomic symbols (i.e., signs rather than symbols in the Coleridgean sense) operated on by formal syntactic rules. Connectionist theory, on the other hand, focuses on the fact that neural networks have no one- to-one mappings, and that they respond to input vectors not by invoking rules, but by dynamic transformations of the network (Churchland). The real issue then is not a simplistic opposition between atomic and distributed elements or between arbitrary and motivated symbols; it is, rather, the problem of explaining how the brain produces the apparent formalism of symbolic representation from the non- classical structure of neural networks.

     

    In broad terms, there are two explanations for this puzzle, the first of which I call weak connectionism or neo- symbolism and the other I term strong or pan-connectionism (Miers; see also Bechtel). In the weak version, the logic of neural networks serves simply to implement some version of the traditional token/type symbol processing which the classical cognitivists like Fodor see as essential for mental representation (Fodor, “Connectionism and Cognitive Architecture”). In the weak case, the classical cognitivists can, with some modifications, “save the appearance” of the symbolic paradigm. Even though connectionist processes may infiltrate and shape whole aspects of mental life, there remains a unique domain of rational or propositional thought governed by the formalisms of symbolic structures. As Fodor has consistently argued for years, not all of the messy flux of what passes through our heads needs be structured like a formal language, and Fodor is quite willing to concede much of mental life to Freudian and even Skinnerian accounts (The Language of Thought 200).

     

    Strong connectionism, on the other hand, is much more radical and leads to a rather uncanny picture of the apparent symbol processing capabilities of the mind. Strong connectionism claims that symbolic representation is, in fact, a rather shallow illusion which is being approximated or mimed by a wholly connectionist strategy that evolved in the brains of mammals long before the appearance of humans. In this account, our sense that there are atomic tokens is being created by a series of vector/matrix interactions, and our notion that tokens belong to some double system of message and code or object language/meta-language is a belated allegory. There are only vectors operating within matrices, and the language of thought is in reality the algebra for convolving vectors and matrices (Churchland). Our received notions of deep structure, symbolic orders, even the Unconscious, are therefore historical constructs, reinforced by external contingencies and controls. The language of thought is not structured like a language; indeed language cannot be structured like a language since language itself is fabricated by a non-classical strategy for representation.

     

    I have argued in favor of strong connectionism (Miers), but which, if any, of these two versions turns out to be the case is still an open question. The symbolists argue that connectionist models fail to meet the formal requirement for symbolic representation (requirements, it should be noted, which must be taken seriously) (Fodor “Connectionism”), while the connectionists point to increasingly sophisticated programs which have begun to meet (or more accurately approximate) these requirements (Bechtel). The point I want to make here, however, is that both the strong and the weak version of connectionism have significant consequences for a certain kind of ironic postmodernism most often identified with Lyotard and Baudrillard. It might appear at first glance that this postmodernism would be vindicated by the triumph of strong connectionism since strong connectionism undercuts classical representation. My claim is that ironic postmodernism loses either way, because it is wedded to a particular account of representation still tied to the symbol-centered token/type account–albeit a deconstructed, paradoxical version–of the classical system. In short, ironic postmodern can only think itself within the paradigm of the sign and is highly dependent on that paradigm remaining in place as a failed system.

     

    If weak connectionism proves to be the proper model for representation, then what we will see is a return to classical theory and a demonstration that at least in some realm it is possible to defend the classical account of reason, indeed that the classical account of reason is rooted in natural evolution. In this case, the postmodern ironists will have bet on the wrong reading of the symbolic order, and their arcane jargon will rapidly look as out of date as the discourse of Ptolemaic astronomy. But if strong connectionism proves true, that is, if representation is driven by the logic of vector/matrix interactions, then ironic postmodernism also fails because of its dependency on the deconstructed sign. The triumph of strong connectionism would support the claim that ironic postmodernism is simply a very late, very belated and desperate version of modernism (Cascardi). The true end of modernism then would come not with the deconstruction of the classical system, a deconstruction which leaves in place and cultivates the ruins of the system. Modernism would end, rather, when the recipe for making the illusion of signs is finally revealed.

     

    What is most radical about strong connectionism is its claim that such a recipe exists and that it can be formulated. This recipe for thought is going to include both sensory and propositional modes in a single model of figural forms. Ironic postmodernism tells us that we live in an economy of undecipherable hieroglyphs, condemned to know but unable to change their fictive, arbitrary status. Strong connectionism suggest that we might be able to refigure this notion and see ourselves as living in the first post-symbolic culture, a culture where we know how to make and unmake signs, a culture where it is possible to limit and resist the sublime allure of unlimited semiosis, a culture which knows itself to be a natural and necessary illusion.

     

    Works Cited

     

    • Bechtel, William and Abrahamsen, Adele. Connectionism and the Mind: An Introduction to Parallel Processing in Networks. Oxford: Blackwell, 1991.
    • Canfield, Kip. “The Microstructure of Logocentricism: Sign Models in Derrida and Smolensky.” Postmodern Culture May (1993).
    • Cascardi, Anthony J. The Subject of Modernity. Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 1992.
    • Churchland, Patricia S. and Sejnowski, Terrence. The Computational Brain. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1992.
    • Edelman, Gerald. Neural Darwinism: The Theory of Neuronal Group Selection. New York: Basic Books, 1987.
    • Fodor, Jerry. The Language of Thought. Cambridge, MA: Harvard UP, 1975.
    • —, and Pylyshlyn, Zenon. “Connectionism and Cognitive Architecture.” Cognition 28 (1988): 3-71.
    • Miers, Paul. “The Other Side of Representation: Critical Theory and the New Cognitivism.” MLN 107 (1992): 950-975.

     

  • The Sound of the Avant-Garde

    Timothy D. Taylor

    Music Department
    Denison University

    taylort@cc.denison.edu

     

    Kahn, Douglas, and Gregory Whitehead, eds. The Wireless Imagination: Sound, Radio, and the Avant-Garde. Cambridge: MIT Press, 1992.

     

    Co-editors Kahn and White describe their purpose in The Wireless Imagination as an attempt to compile a collection of “first utterances” rather than a Last Word on the subject of abstract sound. But these utterances are so disparate, so dispersed, that the reader may be more frustrated than enlightened, perhaps wishing instead for something a little less pomo and a little more old-fashioned: coherence. Kahn and Whitehead write, “Rather than simply starting to pull theories of aurality out of a hat, we have chosen to ground Wireless Imagination in the more modest intent of documenting and charting sonographic resonances among the above existing histories, strangely dissonant and cacophonous as they may strike the naked ear” (x).

     

    Fair enough. Some of the essays are indeed historical and useful (Mel Gordon’s “Songs from the Museum of the Future: Russian Sound Creation (1910-1930)”; Mark E. Cory’s “Soundplay: The Polyphonous Tradition of German Radio Art”; Christopher Schiff’s “Banging on the Windowpane: Sound in Early Surrealism”). But what’s wrong with theorizing? Perhaps the fault of the volume is that it suffers from sprawling theory: there’s theory all over the place, and some of it makes little sense. A few essays indulge in the kind of critspeak that would turn off all but the most ardent theory fetishist (Charles Grivel’s “The Phonograph’s Horned Mouth”; Gregory Whitehead’s “Out of the Dark: Notes on the Nobodies of Radio Art”; Allen S. Weiss’s “Radio, Death, and the Devil: Artaud’s Pour en Finir avec le Jugement de Dieu“). I do not mean to make a blanket attack against theoretical work. The problem with these essays is not that they deploy theory, but that they do so in a way that makes them appear both elitist and every bit as non-significant as the abstract sounds they’re ostensibly about.

     

    Probably the most interesting portions of The Wireless Imagination are those that detail someone’s response to sound. Alexander Graham Bell worked with his father to try to find a written language for non-language sounds; the young Bell and his brother tried to get their dog to speak by moving its jaws, eventually getting it to “say,” “How are you, grandmamma?”; Thomas Edison believed that each person has small, noise-producing beings within them, and devised a machine to record these “life units” exiting dead bodies as they lay in their coffins.

     

    Nearly as interesting are the fictions, or prose inventions. Velimir Khlebnikov, in “The Radio of the Future,” presages Muzak: “During periods of intense hard work like summer harvests orduring the construction of great buildings, these sounds [“la” and “ti,” or the pitches A and B] can be broadcast by Radio over the entire country, increasing its collective strength enormously” (21). Khlebnikov resurfaces in a detailed essay by Mel Gordon on Russian sound creation from 1910-1930 as a proponent of zaum, Alexei Kruchenykh’s “language” that incorporated all kinds of random sounds, from baby talk to the speech of schizophrenics. Khlebnikov’s zaum was meant to transcend all cultural barriers. Additionally, Khlebnikov invented a “universal alphabet,” in which each phoneme (just 25 in all) causes a certain emotional response, and is linked synesthetically with a color. So the phoneme “P,” for example, causes “explosion, release of pressure,” and is related to the color black outlined in red. Raymond Roussel’s Locus Solus (1914) tells of a deboned head stored in a liquid called aqua micans. This head can be reanimated through the efforts of a hairless cat, who, upon taking a red pill which turns it temporarily into an electric battery, swims to a metal cone and completes a connection with the head through the cone.

     

    It seemed as though life once more inhabited this recently immobile remnant of faces. Certain muscles appeared to make the absent eyes turn in all directions, while others periodically went into action as if to raise,lower, screw up or relax the area of the eyebrows and forehead; but those of the lips in particular moved with wild agility.(80)

     

    Still, the many attempts, fictional and actual, to record sound make fascinating reading, even if the contributors’ discussions of these attempts aren’t always satisfying. Alexander Graham Bell seemed to be fixated on the subject of sound recording, devoting years of his life to working with his father on an attempt to notate in written symbols all kinds of sounds. Co-editor Douglas Kahn offers an unbelievable story from a 1922 article by Bell, describing his near-vaudevillian demonstrations of this “language”:

     

    The members of the audience were invited to make any sorts of sound they desired, to be symbolized by my father. It was just as easy for him to spell the sound of a cough, or a sneeze, or a click to a horse as a sound that formed an element of human speech. Volunteers were called to the platform, where they uttered the most weird and uncanny noises, while my father studied their mouths and attempted to express in symbols the actions of the vocal organs he had observed. I was then called in, and the symbols were presented to me to interpret; and I could read in each symbol a direction to do something with my mouth. I remember on one occasion the attempt to follow directions resulted in a curious rasping noise that was utterly unintelligible to me. The audience, however, at once responded with loud applause. They recognized it as an imitation of the noise of sawing wood, which had been given by an amateur ventriloquist as a test.(86)

     

    Bell writes that he was close to inventing the phonograph but that Edison beat him to it. If Bell hadn’t invented the telephone, this claim might sound far-fetched given the foregoing excerpt.

     

    There are some lacunae. The aestheticization of abstract sounds seems to have led the creators of these sounds, and their chroniclers in this volume, to overlook politics, or real people “on the ground.” For example, co-editor Kahn quotes in his introduction a passage from Apollinaire’s 1916 “The Moon King” which is redolent of the kinds of surveillance that sound recording and broadcasting devices have facilitated (as Jacques Attali potently observes in his 1985 Noise):

     

    The flawless microphones of the king's device were set so as to bring in to this underground the most distant sounds of terrestrial life. Each key activated a microphone set for such-and-such a distance. Now we were hearing a Japanese countryside. The wind soughed in the trees--a village was probably there, because I heard servants' laughter, a carpenter's plane, and the spray of an icy waterfall. Then another key pressed down, we were taken straight into morning, the king greeting the socialist labor of New Zealand, and I heard geysers spewing hot water. Then this wonderful morning continued in sweet Tahiti. Here we are at the market in Papeete, with the lascivious wahinees of New Cytheria wandering through it--you could hear their lovely guttural language, very much like ancient Greek. You could also hear the Chinese selling tea, coffee, butter, and cakes. The sound of accordions and Jew's harps.(23)

     

    The authors offer this excerpt as an example of Apollinaire’s “wirelessness,” his interest in abstracted sound, but don’t examine the issues of power and surveillance pervading the passage, or, for that matter, the proto-pomo implications of juxtapositions of disparate sounds from all over the world.

     

    But the most disturbing omissions concern gender. Some of the material presented is so outrageous that it would seem to demand some kind of interrogation involving considerations of gender. For example, the first essay, Charles Grivel’s “The Phonograph’s Horned Mouth,” avoids inclusive language, and at one point adds “the other” gender as an afterthought, as though Grivel at the last minute imagines a feminist reader looking over his shoulder. Like so much French theory, Grivel’s essay is quote proof: “Symbol ‘become life,’ that is, substance, of a being articulated like a sex (or rather like two!) and violently applied upon the listener” (33). Grivel describes Villiers del l’Isle-Adam’s L’Eve Future (1886), which features a “fictitious” Edison who constructs a woman with two phonographs instead of lungs, beneath her breasts. (An excerpt from del l’Isle-Adam’s story follows Grivel’s essay.) Grivel’s consideration of Marcel Schwob’s “La Machine parler” of 1892 likewise skirts gender considerations. Schwob’s story tells of a frightening device that makes horrific sounds, which, it seems, are played by a woman, who is, in Grivel’s words, “servant to the ingenious inventor and slave to the monstrous ‘mechanical mouth’.” Another example is Allen S. Weiss’s discussion of Antonin Artaud in his essay, “Radio, Death, and the Devil.” Weiss, like most of the contributors to this volume, notes the invention of a sound-producing vehicle–evidence of the “wireless imagination”–but does little more. His discussion of Artaud’sIl n’y a plus de firmament (c. 1932) describes “an archetypically Artaudian figure . . . the human body transformed into a musical instrument”:

     

    Then the noise of a bizarre drum envelops everything, a nearly human noise which begins sharply and ends dully, always the same noise; and then we see enter a woman with an enormous belly, upon which two men alternately strike with drumbeats.(297)

     

    So, what is the relationship between sound and gender in such passages? Sound, it seems, can stand in for heterosexual sex, something that women “possess” and can “give” to men, or something that men violently take from, or beat out of, women.

     

    All of the book’s discussions of gender serve as yet another example of the ways in which Western culture has mapped binary oppositions on top of each other; in this case “abstract” sound/non-abstract sound is made to coexist with male/female, so that the violence often voiced in abstract sounds comes to reflect deferred, actual violence perpetrated against women. Or ethnic minorities, or whatever oppressed group the dominant culture chooses to attack. This flexible binarism of violence has worked all too well throughout Western history, whether the target of the drumsticks was a woman’s belly or Rodney King’s head. But it goes without comment in all of these essays.

     

    More satisfying considerations of the gendered nature of sound as it appears in these pages might have been possible if any of the authors had examined the ways that sound, including musical sound, signifies: here’s where the subject of the book is most notably undertheorized. Hardly any musicologist deals with this issue (and most contemporary discussions of music aesthetics by philosophers are hopeless–unmusical, unmusicological, and unconcerned with social and performance issues), so it would seem that the range of professions practiced by the authors of these ten essays would include someone who would tackle the problem. All of the writers and thinkers whose work is chronicled in the pages of The Wireless Imagination attempt to deal with sound as a means of expression. But what does it “express,” if anything? Some of the primary texts under consideration address the issue. Surrealist Giorgio de Chirico’s No Music (1913), for example, begins, “Music cannot express the essence of sensation. One never knows what music is about . . .” (162). De Chirico and the other Surrealists turned against music because of their disaffection with first Erik Satie (1866-1925) and then Georges Auric (1899-1983, a Parisian composer of “Les Six”), and Christopher Schiff writes that the Surrealist movement eventually attempted to do without music altogether. But de Chirico’s writings on musical signification go without close examination. Arseni Avraamov’s The Symphony of Sirens (1923) begins at the opposite end of the spectrum: “Of all the arts, music possesses the greatest power for social organization” (245). Perhaps. The authors of these essays fail to examine this central problematic, and thus miss opportunities to track the related issues, mainly the relationship of the abstraction of music and sound to larger cultural and political concerns and to the other arts. Frances Dyson’s insightful essay–perhaps the most valuable chapter in the book–on John Cage comes closest to such a discussion, and makes a crucial assertion (which he unfortunately discounts): that Cage, in his emancipation of sounds and noises, perpetuates the object-status of music in Western bourgeois culture, despite Cage’s systematic critique of the aesthetic premises of that culture.

     

    The translations of historic texts that aren’t often available are welcome; many of these form an important companion to Umbro Apollonio’s Futurist Manifestos (1973). Included are de l’Isle-Adam’s “The Lamentations of Edison,” from L’Eve Future (1886); Alberto Savinio’s “Give me the Anathema, Lascivious Thing” (1915); Avraamov’s The Symphony of Sirens (1923); F.T. Marinetti and Pino Masnata’s La Radia (1933); and Artaud’s To have done with the Judgment of God (1947). These are important to have in recent translations, for they are texts that we readers can examine further in explicating the myriad ways Western culture has attempted to deal with sound as sound.

     

    In sum, it’s about time somebody looked at the role of abstract sound and radio in the “avant-garde.” But as a starting point or “first word” on the subject, we might have done better with a volume more firmly grounded in the everyday world, a world where wireless sound has served not merely as a conceptual and aesthetic challenge but as a concrete reality on the social field and, at times, as an effective weapon of political domination.

     

  • Idioculture: De-Massifying the Popular Music Audience

    Marc Perlman

    Department of Music
    Tufts University

    perlman@pearl.tufts.edu

     

    Crafts, Susan D., Daniel Cavicchi, Charles Keil and the Music in Daily Life Project. My Music. Foreword by George Lipsitz. Hanover, NH: University Press of New England for Wesleyan University Press, 1993.

     

    Cultural Studies frequently constructs popular music as a particularly disruptive sort of object, a form of resistance (Frith: 179). Part of the resistance displayed by consumers of popular culture has been seen in their reinterpretation and creative appropriation of mass-marketed products. Though the best-known examples of this process have been literary (e.g. Radway on the romance, or Penley on K/S zines), Frith sees popular music consumption “becoming the model for ‘active’ popular cultural consumption in general” (Frith: 180).

     

    The book under review features ‘active’ consumption as resistance, though in a way not limited to popular music. In this book the disruptive moment of consumption is generalized beyond pop: here it is the moment of listening across genre borders. In a world where the music market and musical institutions impose strict boundaries between styles, people resist by having eclectic tastes. The “most important message” of this book is that there is “far more complexity and far more self-directed searching, testing, and experimenting than either music schools or commercial market categories can account for.” People find their way to “an astonishing range of musical choices, despite the inhibiting constrictions of the music industry” (Lipsitz: xiii). Their tastes are broader than the “confines imposed upon them by marketing specialists” (xiv).

     

    That is the book’s message; but My Music is much more than an illustration of a thesis. Whatever the plausibility of this view of eclectic listening–and I shall add my reflections on this subject below–the book presents a lively cross-section of lay commentary on music. My Music is an edited selection of 41 interviews out of 150 conducted in Buffalo, NY. The interviewees range in age from 4 to 83. Most are white Americans, though five African-Americans, one Hispanic, and one Asian-American are included, as well as one Bolivian and one Ethiopian.

     

    The Music in Daily Life Project started in 1984, when Carol Hadley, a student at SUNY Buffalo pursuing an independent study project, asked a few people about the role of music in their lives. She found people with unsuspected combinations of tastes (for example, one woman’s listening revolved around a Bette Midler/Allman Brothers/Joni Mitchell configuration) or striking trajectories (a woman who moved from classical music to Neil Diamond). That was the stimulus. Two undergraduate classes carried out further interviews, and three graduate seminars edited and organized the results. The result is this kaleidoscope of individual voices, too diverse and specific to be easily grouped into subcultures.

     

    My Music is a portrait of particularity. As Keil puts it in his Introduction, “Like your fingerprints, your signature, and your voice, your choices of music and the ways you relate to music are plural and interconnected in a pattern that is all yours, an ‘idioculture’ or idiosyncratic culture in sound” (2).

     

    The interviews illustrate Keil’s notion of musical idioculture. A few seem to fit common stereotypes, but just as many defy such caricatures. May, for example, is an overachieving high school violinist who attends Julliard on weekends. Her favorite listening music is Italian opera, but she grew up on the Rolling Stones and the Who, has tapes of Talking Heads, and can play Grateful Dead tunes on request.

     

    The editorial choice to present whole (edited) interviews was made to spotlight the interviewees, many of whom prove to be trenchant observers and witty conversationalists. Molly (age 11) comments on how music videos interfere with individual visualizations, “because you just think of what you saw on TV and not what your mind sees” when you listen (31). The insufferably cute Lisa (age 12) listens to the radio while studying for a test: “when it comes to the test, I remember the song, I remember the question, and I remember the answer” (40). Ralph, the polymath truckdriver (113-16), notices the “Ride of the Valkyries” in an Elmer Fudd cartoon, holds forth on the connection between the Jewish diaspora and polka music, likes the Beach Boys (“all a rip-off of black music … but white fun”) as well as the Mahavishnu Orchestra, but draws the line at opera (“Well, ‘Madam Butterfly’ is okay, but that’s the only one I really appreciate”). Stella, who emigrated from Greece thirty years ago, doesn’t consider Greek music to be her music: “It’s not mine, it’s a couple million other people’s” (159). She thinks country and western is the only adult music–not the “male bonding party songs,” but the ones where “the cliches are given reasons as to why they became cliches” (161).

     

    In short, the interviews are very rich, and not only for their musical content. There are miniature psychodramas, and some clouded glimpses into private lives. Betty, for example, converted from classical music to Neil Diamond. The reader involuntarily wonders about the significance of this conversion when Betty tells us it accompanied her divorce from a classical-music-loving husband. There are also bits of intergenerational sitcom. Nineteen-year-old Abby, interviewed by her father, mentions Grace Jones. Her father, in a follow-up question, mistakenly refers to the singer as Grace Slick, which elicits this putdown: “Grace Jones, honey. Grace Slick? For-give me. Never in a million years” (87).

     

    Nevertheless, while I applaud Crafts et al.’s decision to focus on people’s own words, I wonder if it was perhaps too zealously implemented. My Music is half of the book the authors originally envisioned; it lacks the planned set of essays reflecting on the interviews. In the end they chose to include more voices rather than reserve space for their own pronouncements. As one of the student members of the Project put it, “Isn’t the main point to hear from more people rather than from the critic and expert types again?” (xxii).

     

    It is indeed good to hear from so many people, but there is much we would like to know about them that they do not tell us. We know their age, sex, and (sometimes) ethnic identification. We are given their occupation in a few words: “pastor”; “student”; “music teacher”; “heavy truck salesman”; “works in her husband’s office”; “works at Allstate.” Some seem to be housewives. We know little else about their lives except what they choose to tell the interviewers. Crafts et al. refrain from fleshing out the picture, even when extra information would significantly alter our reading of the interview.

     

    For example, Beth does not tell us that she plays music. We only learn this from Keil, who mentions it in order to make a point about the possible negative effects of the dominance of mediated music in our lives (2). We are told that Charles is a music teacher and composer; he is obviously also a performer, probably a pianist. But it would help us to interpret his diatribes against commercialism, his admiration for Beethoven and Jimi Hendrix, and his quotations from Plotinus, if we knew a bit more about him. Is he a classically-trained pianist performing in a general business band? An aspiring Frank Zappa–or Glenn Branca?

     

    Crafts et al. minimize contextualization and all but abstain from comment. Keil invites us to make our own correlations and interpretations (3), but we can hardly do so without knowing more about these people. Their voices remain only voices, and we remain eavesdroppers on invisible conversations. (Other sorts of contextualization would be helpful, too. For example, some readers will be unable to understand some of the references to specific performers–Rick James, David Sylvian, etc.)

     

    It is instructive to compare this collection of ordinary people’s voices with the results of a somewhat similar project, another book organized around quotations from listeners: Music and Its Lovers, by Vernon Lee (pseudonym of Violet Paget). Whether or not it is a unique precursor of My Music, it is surely the first such study to appear in America: published in 1933, it is based on research conducted before World War I. The two books draw on samples of similar size, but apart from that the differences are striking. Lee used a questionnaire, and usually collected written responses. She worked in French and German as well as English, and reached many of her respondents through a periodical. Her sample seems to have included a disproportionate number of musicians, poets, essayists, critics, and PhDs. She seems to have asked only about ‘high art’ music. In her presentation, too, she kept a firm authorial grip on the material: her respondents’ voices are dispersed throughout her text, surfacing as a sentence here, a paragraph there. Though she was interested in individual responses to music, her questions were narrowly focused: she wanted to know if people listened to music for “a meaning which seems beyond itself, a message,” or if they heard it as “ just music” (Lee: 25).

     

    In other words, Lee was preoccupied with the aesthetic problems of her time: the question whether music was an “absolute” art, inhabiting a realm of its own, independent of programmatic content. As a result, her book has a fairly strict psychological focus. We learn about the inner worlds of her respondents, but hardly anything about their external, practical concerns. (Except in the case of an unnamed suffragette, who disliked Brahms because of the masculine self-satisfaction she heard in his music [211, 531].)

     

    The interview format of My Music insures that it escapes Lee’s overriding tendentiousness. However, it too is clearly a child of its time, and its framing essays show its relationship to some recent themes in the study of popular music.

     

    I have already mentioned the idea that eclectic, exploratory listening represents resistance to the market-imposed pigeonholing of musical styles, the “inhibiting constrictions of the music industry” (xiii). This notion is the main source of celebratory energy in the book. (Though Keil dampens the parade with a light drizzle of cultural criticism: “Aren’t all these headphoned people alienated, enjoying mediated ‘my music’ at the expense of a live and more spontaneous ‘our music’?” [3].)

     

    My Music seems to show that musical tastes cannot be predicted by the usual demographic categories: as Keil puts it, the “Billboard Charts view” of people’s musical worlds is a tremendous oversimplification (2). But is Keil’s notion of “idioculture” the only alternative to the Billboard Charts view? [18] The entire question of cross-genre listening as musical resistance surely needs to be discussed in a larger socio-economic and historical context. The marketplace does not inherently solidify genre or style categories. Under certain circumstances it can collocate diverse styles as well as differentiate them. Indeed, Max Weber argued that the market declassifies culture: presenters seeking large audiences try to provide something for everybody. This does seem to explain the behavior of for-profit, privately owned firms in some circumstances (DiMaggio: 36). Under other conditions (demand uncertainty, high competition, etc.) firms prefer to target narrowly-defined taste bands. This is evident (for example) in the fragmentation of radio formats.

     

    We should recall that the decline of eclectic music programming on commercial radio is a relatively recent phenomenon, hastened by the migration of the radio audience to television in the early 1950s, the proliferation of stations in major markets, etc. (Peterson and Davis: 169-71). With increased competition, stations had more incentive to narrow their appeal to specific demographic groups–those attractive to advertisers.

     

    The fractionalization of radio was noted at the time, and even greeted as evidence that the prophets of massification were wrong: the mass media could be “a vigorous force working for cultural diversity” (Honan: 76). In retrospect, it is clear that radio’s commitment to cultural diversity was contingent on changes in industry structure and market conditions that made it more profitable to differentiate tastes than to agglomerate them.

     

    Finally, it is true that the interviews in My Music show the subtlety, variety, and depth of meaning music has in the lives of 41 individuals. This book represents a welcome complement to the macro-results of survey-based research; as such, it justifiably emphasizes the moment of autonomy in musical reception. Unfortunately, it could easily be read as a romanticized portrait of musical individualism. Aside from a brief mention of the “constraints” and “broader systemic practices” (xiv-xvi) within which listeners operate, My Music does little to avert such a reading. Its micro-vision needs to be articulated with a macro-vision. Recent developments in the sociology of cultural choice should make this articulation especially fruitful.

     

    The past few decades have been marked by two paradigm shifts in the study of popular culture: first, by a drift away from the Adornoesque view of musical massification to an acknowledgement of plural “taste cultures” defined by demographic parameters (class, race, age, geography, etc.); and second, to a view of “culture classes” less tightly bound to social class, defined instead by consumption patterns (Lewis 1975; Peterson and DiMaggio 1975; Peterson 1983; DiMaggio 1987). Turning away from Bourdieu’s Durkheimian correlations of musical taste with position in social space (1984), recent writers reject earlier assumptions of isomorphism between taste and class.

     

    The insistence of Crafts et al. on individuals’ unique configurations of musical taste, it seems to me, is consistent with these sociological results, and could even enrich them. But My Music‘s resolutely idiographic stance seems to forclose the possibility of a sociological account of eclecticism.

     

    In fact, we already have at least one such account. DiMaggio (1987) suggests that broad tastes correlate with high socio-economic status, assuming that those in high positions have wider social networks and hence need to be familiar with a wide range of artistic styles. Might the patterns of musical choice revealed in My Music be explicable in these terms?

     

    We badly need a study of musical taste that combines My Music‘s attention to detail with panoramic views of the social, economic, and historical context. Until one appears, however, we do well to appreciate this book for what it is. It is unique in its use of open-ended, more-or-less nondirective interviews, and its focus on the voices of ordinary people. I don’t know if this book is part of an “emancipatory cultural project” (xvii), but it is valuable in its own right. And I suspect it will prove especially useful in the classroom.

     

    Works Cited

     

    • Bourdieu, Pierre. Distinction: A Sociological Critique of the Judgment of Taste. Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1984.
    • DiMaggio, Paul. “Cultural Entrepreneurship in Nineteenth-Century Boston: The Creation of an Organizational Base for High Culture in America.” Media, Culture and Society 4 (1982): 33-50.
    • “Classification in Art.” American Sociological Review 52 (1987): 440-55.
    • Frith, Simon. “The Cultural Study of Popular Music.” Cultural Studies. Ed. L. Grossberg, C. Nelson and P. Treichler. New York: Routledge, 1992.
    • Honan, William H. “The New Sound of Radio.” New York Times Magazine 3 Dec. 1967.
    • Lee, Vernon. Music and Its Lovers: An Empirical Study of Emotional and Imaginative Responses to Music. New York: E. P. Dutton, 1933.
    • Lewis, George H. “Cultural Socialization and the Development of Taste Cultures and Culture Classes in American Popular Music: Existing Evidence and Proposed Research Directions.” Popular Music and Society 4 (1975): 226-41.
    • Peterson, Richard A. “Patterns of Cultural Choice.” American Behavior Scientist 26 (1983): 422-38.
    • Peterson, Richard A., and Russell B. Davis, Jr. “The Contemporary American Radio Audience.” Popular Music and Society 6 (1978): 169-83.
    • Peterson, Richard A., and Paul DiMaggio. “From Region to Class, The Changing Locus of Country Music: A Test of the Massification Hypothesis.” Social Forces 53 (1975): 497-506.

     

  • Fear Of Music

    Andrew Herman

    Department of Sociology
    Drake University

    ah7301r@acad.drake.edu

     

    Goodwin, Andrew. Dancing in the Distraction Factory: Music Televison and Popular Culture. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1992.

     

    I. Fear of Music: Postmodernism and Music Television

     

    The first time I heard the terms “postmodernism” and “the postmodern” was at the “Marxism and Interpretation of Culture Conference” at the University of Illinois during the torpid summer of 1983. Like the inhuman heat and humidity of the Midwestern July, the terms hung heavily in the conference atmosphere, a prominent feature of almost every presentation, debate, and discussion. The omnipresence of the terms was particularly frustrating as almost nobody had anything close to resembling a straight explanation of them. Clearly, I thought, these terms must have some shared intersubjective meaning, otherwise all these people wouldn’t be enunciating them with such zest and enthusiasm. Finally, in desperation, I nearly assaulted a fellow conference participant during an incredibly hot and hazy dance party, determined to extract at least a basic definition of this hot and hazy chimera, “the postmodern.”

     

    This individual did her best to satisfy my inquisitorial hunger by telling me of “the crisis in representation,” the “death of the author,” the “collapse of master narratives,” “pastiche and parody,” the “waning of affect,” and so on. Unfortunately, none of these characterizations of “postmodernism” or “the postmodern” made much sense to me. And so I just stood there nodding and grinning, hoping to convey vague understanding. Sensing a lack of comprehension on my part, and desperate to extricate herself from what was rapidly becoming a dead-end conversation, my reluctant interlocutor directed my attention to the spectral glow of a television monitor that hung in the corner of the room. “Look,” she said triumphantly, “the postmodern is in this very room. If you want to understand the postmodern, watch music television.” She then slipped away, leaving me to ponder the connection between music video, MTV, and postmodernism.

     

    My companion that evening was probably not the first, and most certainly not the last, to note that there was an intimate connection between the postmodern, music video in general, and MTV: Music Television in particular. Indeed, the argument that music video as cultural form and MTV as televisual apparatus were quintessential exemplars of postmodern culture has become the dominant interpretation of music television within cultural studies. For example, John Fiske (1986, 1989) argues that music video as textual form is postmodern because of its fragmentary and disjointed nature. In its privileging of signifier over signified, contends Fiske, music video produces the distinctively postmodern experience of decentered subjectivity. Similarly, E. Ann Kaplan (1987) and David Tetzlaff (1986) maintain that MTV, as a regime of televisual experience, is postmodern because of the atemporal, ahistorical and dreamlike quality of its programming flow. Although they draw widely different political conclusions from their analyses, Kaplan, Kim Chen (1986), and Will Straw (1988) locate the postmodern nature of music video in its palimpsistic intertextuality and representational practices of pastiche and parody. Finally, Larry Grossberg (1988, 1989, 1992) argues that MTV evinces a cultural logic of “authentic inauthenticity,” a peculiarly postmodern form of identity politics that self-consciously celebrates the temporary affective commitments of style and pose. As an expression of the logic of postmodern culture, Grossberg maintains that music television locates identity and difference in the surface appearances of mood and attitude rather than in the meaningful modernist depths of ideology. What makes this superficial, “inauthentic” politics of style “authentic” (and therefore postmodern), according to Grossberg, is that performers, programmers, and audiences all know that there is nothing beyond the pose. In the cynical postmodern sensibility of MTV (and, for Grossberg, popular culture as a whole), there is no pretension to making a difference in the structure or fabric of everyday life beyond the differences of image and appearance.

     

    It would be an understatement to say that Andrew Goodwin finds the predominance of such accounts within cultural studies a bit troublesome. Indeed, much of Dancing in the Distraction Factory is a sustained, if uneven and somewhat contradictory, polemic against the understanding of music television as distinctively postmodern. For Goodwin, the aforementioned authors and their analyses (with the partial exception of Grossberg) represent a theoretical arrogance and political naivete of egregious proportions. They are part of a “current fashion for conflating the specificities of different media and genre into a ragbag category of ‘postmodernism’ that does injustice in equal measure to both the conceptual field [i.e., postmodernism] and the object of study [i.e., music television]” (17). Although Goodwin grudgingly admits that there are certain features of contemporary society and popular culture that might be accurately and fruitfully understood as “postmodern,” music television is not one of them.

     

    According to Goodwin, the fundamental problem of the postmodernist take on music television is that it fails to take into account that music television is, quite simply, music television. Although there has been some work done in media studies on the aural dimension of television (e.g. Williams, 1974; Altman, 1987), according to Goodwin, “very few analyses of music television have thought to consider that it might be music” (5). Goodwin devotes much of the first part of the book to detailing the deleterious results of the bias in studies of music television towards the visual.

     

    For example, Goodwin takes issue with two widely held positions that represent polar extremes of the postmodern assessment of the politics of music television. The first is the pessimistic argument that music video has had a detrimental impact on the interpretative imagination of the audience because its visual images tyrannically fix the lyrical and musical meaning of a song. The second is the more optimistic, “avant-garde” argument that music videos represent a radical, subversive break with “classic realist” modes of representation and subjectivity because of their temporally fractured narrative and distinctive mode of address. Due to their narrow emphasis on the visual text of music video, both arguments ignore two con-textual dimensions of music television that are central to Goodwin’s own analysis.

     

    The first dimension is the interdiscursive polysemy of music television. Goodwin argues that there are a multiplicity of extratextual discourses beyond the visual image which help constitute any particular song’s meaning. These include discourses of performance, promotion, and stardom that are crucial to understanding the institutional context of music television. Secondly, the hermeneutical valences of music video can be understood only by taking into account the phenomenology of synaesthesia, or the complex relationship between sound and image that was central to the production of the pleasure and meaning of songs long before music television.

     

    When both dimensions are foregrounded in the analysis of music television, Goodwin maintains, the aforementioned arguments make little sense. In the case of the “meaning-fixing” dominance of video-text images, because of the array of discourses that are both inscribed in a music video as well as brought to the video by an audience, there is a multiplicity of visual associations that are conjured by the audience, many of which have little to do with a particular video’s images. Rereading the avant-garde argument about the anti-realist nature of music video, Goodwin points out that if one understands the institutional history of pop music discourses and the aesthetics of performance, the supposedly radical mode of address of music video (where the performer often directly addresses the audience) is, in fact, revealed to be “entirely conventional and thoroughly ordinary” (76). Further, if one considers the ways sound and image are linked through the process of synaesthesia, the fractured narratives and other “instabilities” in the music-video text (which are supposedly indicative of its postmodern character) can be understood as visual analogs of the musical structure of a song in terms of voice, rhythm, tempo, timbre, harmonic development and, of course, lyrics. Thus, according to Goodwin, much of what makes “no sense” to postmodernists (c.f. Chen, 1986; Fiske, 1989) makes a great deal of sense in terms of what he calls a “musicology of the image.” Indeed, from this perspective, music television represents “the making musical of television” through the subordination of vision to sound as much as it does the triumph of the visual over the musical (70). Consequently, as Goodwin concludes with a nice rhetorical flourish,

     

    music television does not, generally speaking, indulge in a rapture with the Symbolic; nor does it defy our understanding or attempt to elude logic and rationality through its refusal to make sense. Far from constituting a radical break with the social processes of meaning production, music television constantly reworks themes (work, school, authority, romance, poverty, and so on) that are deeply implicated in the question of how meaning serves power.(180)

     

    II. Meaning, Power and the “Scandal” of “New Populism”

     

    It is this issue of “how meaning serves power”, and how it’s currently being addressed within contemporary cultural studies, that is Goodwin’s ultimate concern in the book. As should be clear by now, he believes that the postmodern perspective is ill-equipped to explore the “social process of meaning production” in music television because of its fascination with the surfaces of visual imagery. However, Goodwin is equally critical of what he terms the “new populism” of cultural studies. Although he never specifies precisely to what work the epithet refers, one gathers that this new populism is characterized by an ethnographic focus on the processes of reception and a concomitant privileging of the audience’s power in terms of interpretation and pleasure (e.g. Ang, 1985; Lewis, 1990). For Goodwin, this so-called new populism accords “too much autonomy” to audiences because it implies that they “could construct meaning from media texts at will,” thus denying the salience of hegemonic or preferred meanings that emanate from cultural institutions and are inscribed in cultural artifacts and texts (14). This valorization of the audience in cultural studies, Goodwin insists, has entailed an abandonment of the project of ideology critique and its concern with the relationship between meaning and power. To my knowledge, even the most optimistic of those who might fall under the Goodwin’s rubric of new populism, such as John Fiske (1989, 1992), do not in any way maintain that power or preferred meanings are inoperative in the process of reception. Nonetheless, Goodwin dramatically asserts that the new populism’s supposed abandonment of concern with ideology as power constitutes “the ‘scandal’” of cultural studies (158).

     

    How, then, is this “scandal” to be stopped? In order to have an adequate grasp of the social processes of meaning and ideology involved in music television in particular and popular culture as a whole, Goodwin maintains that cultural studies must adopt a mode of analysis that is “more adequate to the real.” The “real” for Goodwin is constituted by “actual, historical relations of power” and production (158, 167). In other words, the scandalous state of cultural studies can be rectified by its reorientation within a framework of Marxist political economy. Of course, Goodwin is quick to point out that he is not advocating a return to the good old days of crude base/superstructure certitude where the masses were manipulated into false consciousness by the products of the culture industry, products whose ideological content could be explained solely in terms of the imperatives of capital accumulation. Rather, Goodwin’s political economic approach is meant to be a “non-reductionist” examination of the institution/text and text/audience nexi of popular culture that situates textual aesthetics and ideology, as well as audience reception, squarely within the conditions of cultural production in a capitalist society.

     

    Accordingly, from his perspective, a materialist analysis of music television that is “more adequate to real” adheres to the following logic. First, one must examine the historical development and contemporary dynamics of the institutional politics of production in the music and television industries. This institutional analysis establishes a contextual framework for understanding the aesthetics and ideology of music videos as texts. Although Goodwin claims he is not suggesting that textual content is determined by conditions of cultural production, he does want to emphasize that such conditions have a constraining effect upon texts. Finally, having examined the nexus of institution and text, one can proceed to the final step of analysis wherein one examines the nexus of text and audience, or the relationship between the politics of production and the politics of consumption.

     

    Again, while not claiming that the meaning and pleasures of music video are predetermined and fixed by the institutional imperatives of production, Goodwin clearly argues that there are limits to the polysemy of music television which are set by its political economy. Accordingly, he insists that the first and second levels of analysis can produce an understanding of the third by illuminating what he suggestively terms (but, unfortunately, never explicitly defines) “reading formations.” Such reading formations are multidiscursive regimes of representation and pleasure that privilege certain subject positions in terms of ideology and affect. One example of a “reading formation” is what Goodwin terms a “star-text.” The star-text is composed of the repertoire of images and discourses which constitute a musician’s or band’s persona and is central to the meaning of music videos. Such star-texts operate as a “metanarrative” that structure a musician’s or band’s identity. Thus, even before audiences have seen a particular video clip of, say, the band U2, they are probably familiar with the band’s metanarrative or star-text as the spiritual and political “conscience of rock and roll.” Further, argues Goodwin, such star-texts are inextricably linked to the imperatives of the music industry as they are an essential component of the effort to package and sell musicians as commodities. After all, it was the promotions department at Island Records that came up with the “conscience of rock and roll” moniker for U2 in order to sell The Joshua Tree album. Thus, even though at the book’s beginning Goodwin hedges his bets by disavowing any “claim to provide a definitive account of textual reception” (xxiii), by its end he feels entitled to state unequivocally that “while different parts of the audience will be positioned differently, music television viewers are nonetheless still positioned” (180). It is this claim about the audience which, I would argue, represents the major flaw in the logic of cultural analysis followed by Goodwin and ultimately undermines his claim to provide a coherent alternative to both postmodernism and the “new populism.” [13] When it comes to the first moment of Goodwin’s preferred mode of analysis, exploring the trends in the music and television industries that fostered the development of music video and music television, Dancing in the Distraction Factory is superb. Building upon Wolfgang Haug’s work on advertising and commodity aesthetics (1986), Goodwin offers a compelling argument that it is impossible to comprehend the pleasure and meaning of music video texts without considering their status as unique promotional commodities. Goodwin is certainly not the first to examine the emergence of music television in terms of pressures of market demographics, programming needs, and promotional imperatives of the music and television industries (c.f., in particular, Denisoff, 1988). However, his argument concerning the confluence of industrial marketing and programming imperatives with the emergence of new aesthetics and ideologies of performance and musicianship which privileged the artifice of the visual image (e.g. as articulated by the “New Romantics” such as the Pet Shop Boys), is startlingly original and convincing.

     

    Similarly, Goodwin’s analysis of how the institutional discourses and practices of promotion, performance, and stardom become encoded into the sounds, images, and iconography of music video texts is nuanced and sophisticated. Indeed, the chapter on what Goodwin terms the “musicology of the image” should be required reading for all students of music television and music in general. Yet in spite of the complex relationship between sound, visual image, and narrative structure that engenders the ideology and aesthetics of music video, Goodwin maintains one cannot escape the political economic fact that all video clips are, first and foremost, promotional devices meant to entice consumers to purchase other commodities. Further, both music videos and the programming flow of networks such as MTV operate as a “super-text” which constantly directs the attention and desire of the audience towards commodities that promise solutions to individual and social problems. Accordingly, Goodwin argues, the polysemy of music video is limited by a hegemonic reading formation of commercialism which “attempts to restructure the subject-as-citizen . . . along the lines of subject as consumer” (169). Therefore, the central way in which in which Goodwin’s political economic approach is able to show how meaning serves power in music television is to demonstrate how text, programming, and audience are, to use an old Althusserian chestnut, structured in dominance by the ideology of the marketplace.

     

    Naturally, when one makes such strong claims regarding the hegemonic structuring of the reading formations of music television one runs the risk of creeping (if not galloping) reductionism. That is, there is a danger of assuming that the politics of consumption in terms of use, meaning, and pleasure can be read off the politics of production like elephant tracks. Goodwin is well aware of this danger and, to pre-empt such criticisms, says:

     

    The objection to such arguments is that they tell us too little about what particular television programs mean, what use-values are obtained in the consumption of popular culture and so on. . . . However, to argue that diverse audience readings and real use-values must also be taken into account is not to argue that a politics of individual consumption, based around the promotion of market relations, does not also operate. Indeed, to suggest that the former actually cancels out the latter is every bit as reductionist and simplistic as the most brazen economism.(174)

     

    [16] And, indeed it is. Yet what vitiates Goodwin’s otherwise reasonable argument here is the contradictory way in which he deploys the audience in his analysis elsewhere. On the one hand, he frequently appeals to an audience of “music fans” to validate his hermeneutic analysis of the multi-discursivity of music video texts. For example, when discussing the visual iconography of performance, Goodwin forthrightly claims that he is simply “describing the process by which video clips make sense to the audience” (90). On the other hand, while this may indeed be true, Goodwin has absolutely no evidence to support his conclusions (and admits as much, 95). Further, although he concedes that his analysis “needs to be related to audience interpretation and reader competence” (130), he does not attempt to do so and dismisses almost out of hand other attempts along these lines (e.g. Lewis, 1990). The “audience” seems to exist for Goodwin only as a convenient rhetorical device that enables him to claim a face validity for his textual analysis and thus obviates the need for engaging in or with ethnographies of the music television audience. Doggedly sticking to his Marxist guns against the new populists, whom he condescendingly terms the “bright young things of cultural studies” (xxiii), Goodwin refuses to believe that the audience might tell him something about the politics of consumption that he doesn’t already know.

     

    In the end, Goodwin’s cavalier attitude towards the audience and ethnographic study of the politics of consumption both blinds and deafens him to the salience of the concept of postmodernism for understanding the cultural politics of music television. At this point in the debate around postmodernism within cultural studies, it should be clear that the concept entails much more than simply textual aesthetics. The postmodern is not simply a style, attitude, or pose, but a fundamental mutation in the fabric of everyday life from the political economy of production to the rituals of consumption. In order to understand the politics of music television, to assess how meaning serves power, it would seem to me that it is imperative to examine how the postmodern is evinced in the everyday life of the audience. Goodwin seems to suspect that this might be the case when he notes in passing that “work on postmodernism as a condition of reception might be extremely fruitful” (153). Yes it would, but only if one is less dismissive of ethnographic dialogue with the audience. And, in spite of the many virtues of Dancing in the Distraction Factory, it is this refusal to take the postmodern seriously that is truly a scandal.

    Works Cited

     

    • Altman, R. “Television/Sound.” Television: The Critical View. Ed. H. Newcomb. New York: Oxford University Press, 1987.
    • Ang, I. Watching Dallas: Soap Opera and the Melodramatic Imagination. New York: Methuen, 1985
    • Chen, K. “MTV: The (Dis)Appearance of Postmodern Semiosis, or the Cultural Politics of Resistance.” Journal of Communication Inquiry 10.1 (1986).
    • Denisoff, R. S. Inside MTV. New Brunswick, N.J.: Transaction Books, 1988.
    • Fiske, J. “MTV: Post structural Post modern.” Journal of Communication Inquiry 10.1 (1986).
    • Fiske, J. Reading Popular Culture. Winchester, MA: Unwin Hyman, 1989.
    • Fiske, J. “Cultural Studies and the Culture of Everyday Life.” Cultural Studies. Ed. L. Grossberg, C. Nelson, and P. Treichler. New York: Routledge, 1992.
    • Grossberg, L. “‘You Still Have to Fight For Your Right to Party’: Music Television as Billboards of Post-Modern Difference.” Popular Music 7.3 (1988).
    • Grossberg, L. “MTV: Swinging On A (Postmodern) Star,” Cultural Politics in Contemporary America. Ed. I. Angus and S. Jhally. New York: Routledge, 1989.
    • Grossberg, L. We Gotta Get Outta This Place: Popular Conservatism and Postmodern Culture. New York: Routledge, 1992.
    • Haug, W. Critique of Commodity Aesthetics: Appearance, Sexuality and Advertising in Capitalist Society. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1986.
    • Kaplan, E.A. Rocking Around the Clock: Music Television, Postmodernism and Consumer Culture. New York: Methuen, 1987.
    • Lewis, L. Gender Politics and MTV: Voicing the Difference. Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 1990.
    • Straw, W. “Music Video in Its Contexts: Popular Music and Post-Modernism in the 1980’s.” Popular Music 7.3 (1988).
    • Williams, R. Television: Technology and Cultural Form. London: Fontana, 1974.

     

  • Postmodernist Purity

    John McGowan

    Department of English
    University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill

    jpm@unc.bitnet

     

    Owens, Craig. Beyond Recognition: Representation, Power, and Culture. Ed. Scott Bryson, Barbara Kruger, Lynne Tillman, and Jane Weinstock. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1992.

     

    Craig Owens was a critic/theorist of contemporary art, best known for his essays in October and Art in America, who died of complications stemming from AIDS in 1990. Just about everything he ever published–plus the syllabi and bibliographies for courses he taught on postmodern art, on critical theory, and on visualizing AIDS–has been collected in the volume under review. It makes for sad reading, not just because Owens should still be among us, but also because the shifting yet intractable aporias of a certain postmodernist discourse haunt this work. Owens’s intellectual trajectory–from Derrida to Foucault to Lacan as the major influence on his work–follows that of much of his (and my) generation in this country. From an aestheticist, textual rejection of modernist pieties inspired by Derrida, Owens moved to a political analysis of modernism that focused on relations of power and from there to a cultural critique of the construction of gender identities and of desire (sexual and social) itself. In the process, Derrida and Foucault do not completely disappear, but the prevalence of psychoanalysis in much feminist thought had shaped Owens’s discourse in a particularly distinctive way by the mid-eighties.

     

    The thread that runs through these various sub-periods in Owens’s work is the problematic of representation. An early (1979) essay on Derrida’s critique of classical aesthetics ends with the enigmatic statement from which the editors of this volume take its title:

     

    If in 'The Parergon' Derrida offers us no alternative theory of art, it is because the theoretical investigation of works of art according to philosophical principles is what is deconstructed. Still, 'The Parergon" signals a necessity: not of a renovated aesthetics, but of transforming the object, the work of art, beyond recognition."(38)

     

    What is the nature of the “necessity” here? Necessary for what and to whom? And how would we know (if) something (was) beyond recognition? A few years later (1982), Foucault has led Owens to be more willing to name names, to suggest why an escape from representation, from recognition, might be desirable. He calls our attention to “the ways in which domination and subjugation are inscribed within the representational systems of the West. Representation, then, is not–nor can it be–neutral; it is an act–indeed, the founding act–of power in our culture” (91). The wholesale condemnation of the West’s representational systems is retained in this shift from Derrida to Foucault, but now Owens can at least specify particular harmful effects of powerful representations and the groups most likely to suffer those harms.

     

    Three years later (1985) Owens criticizes Foucault for only telling “half the story”; what “Foucault would excise” is the half “that concerned desire and representation” (204). Here we need Lacan, who teaches us to “regard all human sexuality as masquerade” (214), as a representation of presence/plenitude/identity over the absence/lack that is castration. Appropriately enough, the Lacanian essay on “Posing” brings Owens full circle. He ends with a quote from Derrida. “If the alterity of the other is posed, that is simply posed, doesn’t it amount to the same . . . . From this point of view I would even go so far as to say that the alterity of the other inscribes something on the relation which can in no way be posed” (215).

     

    The critique of representation, then, keeps coming back to the desire for that which exceeds representation, which cannot be represented. I use the word “desire” deliberately here because, while fascinated by the inscription, formation, and constraints of conventional desire, Owens follows his models in never thinking through his own desire to question and disrupt the conventional. This postmodern discourse adopts without question a certain oppositional posture traditionally associated with the avant-garde. This blind spot is particularly irritating because Owens recognizes that the avant-garde was never the revolutionary force it set itself up as and that contemporary re-runs of avant-garde movements are the farcical versions that follow tragedy in Marx’s version of historical repetition. “Honor, Power, and the Love of Women” offers a wonderful send-up of neoexpressionism, while “The Problem with Puerilism” argues convincingly that “what has been constructed in the East Village is a simulacrum of the social formation from which the modernist avant-garde first emerged” (263). But, lest we allow this talk of simulacrum to entice us into nostalgia for the original modernist avant-garde, Owens is quick to sketch for us the role that avant-garde played in making “difference . . . become an object of consumption”:

     

    The fact that avant-garde artists had only partially withdrawn from the middle-class elite--which also constitutes the primary, if not the only, audience for avant-garde production--placed them in a contradictory position; but this position also equipped them for the economic function they would eventually be called upon to perform--that of broker between the culture industry and subcultures.(264)

     

    [5] Armed with this awareness of the modernist avant-garde’s failure, Owens offers nothing beyond calls for a purity more stringent than the modernists could achieve. Writing during the boom art market years of the 80s (which, again, he wonderfully satirizes when discussing enemies like Robert Hughes in “The Yen for Art”), Owens is reduced to denial when asked to contemplate the relation of the artists he champions to that market. Andars Stephanson asks: “But isn’t it true that oppositional artists themselves became marketable, say, after 1980?”–to which Owens replies: “This is seriously overplayed. Hans Haacke does not sell much work, and he has not had a show in an American museum until now. Kruger’s work is also interesting because it costs far more to produce in terms of photomechanical work, labs and so forth, than it costs to produce a painting, yet it sells for one-tenth of the latter’s price” (307). What’s significant here is not the fact of the matter, but the form that the defense of oppositional artists takes. Owens has not gotten past the association of purity and integrity with poverty, with producing the art work which does not become a commodity. He is setting himself up to reach the same dead end that avant-garde art has been reaching for seventy-five years: the dead end of silence as the only pure act and the dead end of isolation from every audience because to appeal to anyone outside the self (or, in some cases, outside a small coterie) is to become implicated in social forms of exchange that are repudiated.

     

    In this context, the poststructuralist critique of representation comes across as a new variant on this long-standing modernist obsession with purity. To even engage in debate with the culture, it seems, would be to succumb to its terms.

     

    It is not the ideological content of representation of these Others that is at issue. Nor do contemporary artists oppose their own representations to existing ones; they do not subscribe to the phallacy of the positive image. (To do so would be to oppose some 'true' representivity to a 'false' one.) Rather, these artists challenge the activity of representation itself which, by denying them speech, consciousness, the ability to represent themselves, stands indicted as the primary agent of their domination."(262)

     

    What would it mean to “indict” the “activity of representation itself” in the name of “the ability to represent themselves”? By rejecting a conflict within the social over different representations with the assertion that every positive image is a phallacy, Owens places the artist on the path of pure negation that has been a modernist treadmill since at least Flaubert’s desire to write a novel about nothing.

     

    The critic is left in even a worse position than the artist.

     

    "What you are saying, then, is that to represent is to subjugate?" "Precisely. There is a remarkable statement by Gilles Deleuze . . . that encapsulates the political ramifications of the contemporary critique of representation: 'you [Deleuze says to Foucault] were the first . . . to teach us something absolutely fundamental: the indignity of speaking for others.'"(261-2)

     

    Owens as critic does nothing else but speak for others. He wrote only one essay–“Outlaws: Gay Men in Feminism”–that is even remotely self-referential, and he is still speaking for gay men, not of this particular gay man. Everything he writes performs the traditional critical task of mediating between audience and work (of art, of theory). A sometime academic who wrote academic prose to introduce academic theory to a nonacademic audience (the New York art world), Owens was primarily a translator, re-representing representations to facilitate their entry into different contexts. His success is attested to by the fact that his work was widely read and highly influential. Through his efforts and those of some collaborators, Art in America became a conduit point between the academy and the art world. Owens was a mediator whose work keeps circling around his distrust of the means of mediation. By adopting a simple-minded and wholesale condemnation of representation, Owens boxed himself into a corner where he had to suspect anything he would write of bad faith. He wrote only three essays the last four years of his life; he did not write about AIDS. I know nothing about Owens personally; his health as well as other commitments could easily explain this relative silence. But his own theoretical views had, by that time, left him very little space to work in.

     

    No doubt Owens would have struck out in new directions. What is fascinating and rewarding about these collected essays is the combination of Owens’s sharp eye (this is someone whose representations of others’ art I came to trust) with his continued fascination with and ability to learn from theoretical arguments. If I focus on the theoretical impasse at which his work ends, it is because I find it sad that one version of postmodernism is currently stuck right there, unable (apparently) to apply its own strictures against universals to this universal condemnation of representation, unable to think its own retrograde (modernist) desire for purity within its critique of discourses that aim for homogeneity. Not surprisingly, the specifics of Owen’s wonderful essays on William Wegman, Barbara Kruger, and Lothar Baumgarten already suggest some ways to move beyond a vague and unsatisfiable desire for absolute alterity. The conclusion to the essay on Wegman talks of “necessity” again, but this time it is the necessity of recognition, not of getting beyond it:

     

    When we laugh at Man Ray's foiling of Wegman's designs, we are also acknowledging the possibility, indeed the necessity, of another, nonnarcissistic mode of relating to the Other--one based not on the denial of difference, but upon its recognition. Thus, inscribed within the social space in which both Bakhtin and Freud situate laughter, Wegman's refusal of mastery is ultimately political in its implications.(163-4)

     

    Postmodern thought needs to turn to the question of the social space which would enable this recognition of difference; it is the absence of the social and its myriad forms of interaction between self and other that constitutes both the purity and the peculiar emptiness of so much postmodernist cultural critique. For what could be more narcissistic than a total repudiation of all the forms of representation by which the other might try to make contact?

     

  • Practice, Politique, Postmodernism

    J.L. Lemke

    Sociology Department
    City University of New York

    jllbc@cunyvm.cuny.edu

     

    Bourdieu, Pierre and Lois J.D. Wacquant. An Invitation to Reflexive Sociology. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1992.

     

    I. The Text

     

    Invitation to Reflexive Sociology is a book that is not quite a text. Tiles in a genre mosaic abut one another: Fantasy Interview with the Great Man (Part Deux, a construction not a transcript), Fatherly Advice on Becoming a Sociologist (Part 3, from a seminar for Bourdieu’s students), several essays at a “How to Read Bourdieu” (Part 1, Appendices, Notes, from Wacquant). The unbounded border mosaic of intertexts, present and absent, draws down readers’ accumulated cultural capital toward indebtedness.

     

    If you have read Bourdieu’s The Logic of Practice (1990), whose first half sets forth his most original theoretical ideas (elaborating and superseding the older Outline of a Theory of Practice, 1977), and at least one of his major sociological studies Distinction, 1984; Homo Academicus, 1988; La Noblesse d’Etat, 1989), then Invitation may help you decide whether to read more from Bourdieu, and what. If you have only a vague sense that Bourdieu is a leading social theorist who engages the telling intellectual issues of the day, Invitation may convince you that, along with his near neighbors in social space (as he himself defines them in Homo Academicus, 276), Foucault and Derrida, Bourdieu sets the stage for our postmodernist play.

     

    And if you have ever wondered what Bourdieu thinks of his actual and potential rivals: sociological, intellectual, and philosophical (except Derrida and Foucault), or simply enjoy stockpiling ammunition for use in future intellectual battles of your own, Invitation is a fully-stocked armamentarium.

     

    But Invitation is also a voice, one that resonates with our own, speaking as we would like to speak (if not necessarily saying what we would like to say), about the construction of reality and society, experience and meaning, language and power, the social and the personal, time and the body, gender and domination, science and politics, academics and intellectuals. Perhaps it is only an illusion, but in this text as nowhere else, we seem to hear Bourdieu speaking, rather than writing. Bourdieu writes himself out of his writing in too many ways. However written his speaking may be here, however defensive, didactic, or undialogical, to a small degree at least it allows us to write him back in.

     

    And if you are a student, or any sort of newcomer, to academic and intellectual discourse in what was once humanistic and social studies, I advise you to read and challenge this book.

     

    II. Postmodernism, Si or No?

     

    So, is he or isn’t he? The short answer, I think, is that Bourdieu writes as a chastened defender of the great modernist projects, a modernist for postmodern times. But while his desire is with the best of modernism, his method is shaped by the same rebellion against modernism and structuralism that characterizes his close contemporaries Foucault and Derrida.

     

    Here, taken from Invitation, is my reading of Bourdieu’s project and consequent overt stance against postmodernism, to be followed by a counter-construction of Bourdieu as postmodern in spite of himself.

     

    The project of Bourdieu’s desire is a grand sociology which realizes in part the modernist dream of a scientific objectivity hard won through its own reflexivity: “Sociology can escape to a degree [from its necessarily socially determined point of view on the social world] by drawing on its knowledge of the social universe in which social science is produced to control the effects of the determinisms that operate in this universe and, at the same time, bear on sociologists themselves” (67).

     

    This is the motivation for Bourdieu’s many studies of the academic and educational systems of his native France, and generally for his studies of how the social system shapes our perceptions and desires. He constructs his notion of what scientific objectivity about such matters means following Marx’s criterion that social facts exist “independently of individual consciousness and will.” But what exist objectively for Bourdieu in the social world are pre-eminently relations, not positive entities, and with this he has already taken the first, structuralist step into postmodernism.

     

    Still, he wants to draw a line against critiques of social science that see its/his writings as merely “poetics and politics,” opening the door to “nihilistic relativism” of the same sort found in the “strong program of the sociology of science” (Feyerabend? Bruno Latour?). He opposes “the false radicalism of the questioning of science” and “those who would reduce scientific discourse to rhetorical strategies about a world reduced to the state of a text” (246-7). How can I hope to rehabilitate the author of such reactionary sentiments?

     

    By better understanding the terms of the debate as Bourdieu constructs it. When, just following this last point, he characterizes the goal of his own project as “to wrench scientific reason from the embrace of practical reason, to prevent the latter from contaminating the former,” we need to understand his critical distinction of the practical from the scientific, and his own critique of positivistic objectivity:

     

    Against positivistic materialism, the theory of practice posits that objects of knowledge are constructed, and not passively recorded; against intellectual idealism, it reminds us that the principle of this construction is found in the socially constituted system of structured and struc- turing dispositions acquired in practice . . . and that all knowledge . . . presupposes a work of construction . . . that consists of an activity of practical construction, even of practical reflection, that ordinary notions of thought, consciousness, knowledge prevent us from thinking . . . . [This view aims] to escape from under the philosophy of the subject without doing away with the agent, as well as from the philosophy of the [social, semiotic] structure, but without forgetting to take into account the effects it wields upon and through the agent.(121)

     

    III. Practice, Temporality, Embodiedness

     

    For a systematic account of this Logic of Practice, we have to turn to that text. Its tour-de-force Introduction is mainly a critique of every form of objectivism, and more profoundly of the conditions of possibility of theoretical and scientific perspectives:

     

    Social science must not only, as objectivism [vs. phenomenological subjectivisms] would have it, break with native experience and the native representation of that experience, but also, by a second break, call into question the presuppositions inherent in the position of the "objective" observer who, seeking to interpret practices, tends to bring into the object the principles of his relation to the object.... Knowledge does not only depend, as an elementary relativism would have it, on the particular viewpoint that at "situated and dated" observer takes us via-a-vis the object. A much more fundamental alteration ... is performed on practice by the sheer fact of taking up a "viewpoint" on it and so constituting it as an object ... this sovereign viewpoint is most easily adopted from elevated positions in the social space, where the social world presents itself as a spectacle seen from afar and from above, as a representation.(Logic of Practice, 27)

     

    In The Logic of Practice Bourdieu inquires into those aspects of experience and social reality which look different precisely because we are in the midst of action and not theoretically and scientifically distancing ourselves from it: the contingency and anticipatability of events when they have yet to happen, the absence of synoptic order and structure from the logic of action, the construction of dynamic vs synoptic time, the role of the body in action without reflection (and in reflection itself), the importance of tempo, rhythm, pacing, duration, delay, and haste in the meaning of events-in-flow. This is the perspective from which Bourdieu originally criticized Levi-Straussian structuralism for its theoreticist blindness to whatever is elided from synoptic representations made from the sovereign viewpoint of a science outside of event-time and the pressures of the moment.

     

    It also provides a counterpoint against which to examine both the conditions of possibility and the otherwise unthinkable biases of all theoretical and scientific discourses and perspectives, as such. Dialectically, it allows us to interrogate the practices of science as practice, and to see in them the role of the practical, embodied logics, the famous dispositions toward practice that Bourdieu calls “habitus”, and which derive from the trajectories of practice of individual social agents as they take up the lives available to them.

     

    I have found this dynamic perspective on social practice, and its dialectical relations with the synoptic perspectives of theoretical representation, extremely useful in my own work on social semiotics, discourse analysis, and text semantics (Lemke 1984, 1990, 1991) and so have many others (e.g. Martin 1985, Thibault 1991) in these fields whose underlying disciplines and methods are quite distant from Bourdieu’s. The re-centering of the body in alternatives to mentalist accounts of subjectivity, cognition, and action; in deconstructing the idealist cheats of a natural science self-disembodied from its own practice; and in theorizing gender issues, domination relations, and the repressed role of bodily violence in constituting the social order are but some of the postmodernist projects that will eventually build on Bourdieu’s theory of practice.

     

    IV. Gender, Habitus, and Us

     

    For all that Bourdieu lays the foundations of a productive critical dialectic between the logics of theory and practice, of semiotic structures and bodies in action, social structures and personal trajectories, and for all the centrality of reflexivity in his notion of social science, there seems to be more preparing-the-way than radical self-critique in his work. There is no profound self-examination, for example, of masculinism, Eurocentrism, or even the essentially bourgeois perspectives in his own theoretical metaphors and paradigms.

     

    Homo Academicus comes closest to being a self- analysis “by proxy,” as he says in the Preface. But it is a micro-analysis, situating Bourdieu in his generation, and in the academy, but not in his gender, social class (bourgeois, as such), or culture (European, as such). By proxy and indirection it suggests that various elements of his scientific and career trajectory are shaped, as his theory requires, by his own initial social position and the effects of the dispostions it engendered in him on his encounters with later opportunities. In Invitation he argues that he keeps the personal Bourdieu on the margins so as not to make facile argumenta ad hominem too easy for his rivals. In doing so, however, he may have kept himself from deploying the full power of sociological reflexivity toward his own theorizing. Enabling such self-critique is, after all, the point of his scientific project and the absence of such self-analysis the very point on which, in the Postscript to Distinction, he criticizes Derrida.

     

    Who, Bourdieu included, can read his texts and not see that he models the whole social universe as a struggle and competition among agents for status, domination, profit, and accumulation in one guise or another? In every field of social action, whatever their habitus, agents deploy and convert their capital (economic, cultural, and social) in an effort to win the game as defined in that field. If the game, and especially the competitive game of sport, is Bourdieu’s favorite simile, his master trope is the agon, the struggle for dominance.

     

    The field of fields, the master field, for Bourdieu is the field of power, in relation to which all others are defined, and power for Bourdieu is the power to win the game, to maximize one’s capital position, to overcome adversaries. Any such summary is caricature, of course, but with the truth of caricature, as well. When Bourdieu speaks, rarely, of what happens “in the family and in other relations of philia,” what he sees is “violence suspended in a kind of pact of symbolic non-aggression,” the pervasive potentiality of every utterance to function as an act of power “bracketed” (145).

     

    The social relations of philia are defined as exceptions to the underlying principle of the agon. The institutions of philia are marginalized, those of the agon made central. Economic competition, cultural competition, personal competition, metaphoric competition among abstracted social positions and roles. This is a view of social reality constructed with the dispositions of masculinism. It survives as doxa for Bourdieu precisely for the reasons his theory offers: because the world as he sees it and lives it fits perfectly with the masculinist dispositions it has produced in him.

     

    Power for Bourdieu is the power to dominate, to control, to win. It is not also the power to nurture, to befriend, to console, to inspire, to share, to yield, to cooperate. It is not the power, in general, to engage in, and so to engage with others in, every social practice that comprises the social reality of every agent–a social reality, therefore, remade from every perspective of practice, and not only from that of the specialized practice of the straight, male, bourgeois academic theorist.

     

    Bourdieu began his career as an anthropologist, and all his theoretical work, and most of his insights, arise from and are illustrated by examples from his fieldwork among the berber Kabyle of Algeria. The view he offers is not meant to be restricted to European culture or to the social reality of the bourgeoisie. He offers brilliant analyses (in the Logic) of the differences between barter and monetary economies and the cultures that support them, but still he models all of social reality as an economics, he takes economic capital and the relations of the economic field to be primus inter pares among all forms of capital and all dimensions of the field of power. This is a view of social reality constructed with the dispositions of the bourgeoisie.

     

    And what does Bourdieu add to economism, even as he transforms simplistic models of base and superstructure into something more dialectical and flexible? Cultural capital and social capital, the capital par excellence of the intellectual, the academic, and the cosmopolite. Know-what and Know-who compete with Have-bucks for power in every field of social practice for Bourdieu. This, too, is a view of social reality constructed with the dispositions of a successful academic and intellectual.

     

    All of these dispositions and their theoretical effects are in need of correction according to Bourdieu’s desire for scientific objectivity. Or they are all in need of diversification and multiplication by the perspectives of feminist and gay alternatives to masculinism, working class and other non-bourgeois viewpoints about social reality, and cultural models of the social world that do not privilege agon over philia, or imagine the social world out of an experience of economism, according to we Others’ desire to make meanings troubling to us and ours.

     

    V. Present and Absent Others

     

    I have probably said too much already about some of the absent Others at Bourdieu’s banquet. I should say a little more about some of the theoretical absences here. Bourdieu is a marvelous describer of how things are. He announces, but does not labor at, a “genetic sociology,” an understanding of the historical trajectories by which not just individuals, but institutions and theoretical objects, came to be made as they are. This he seems to have left largely to the most present absence in his work, Michel Foucault. He does not deal well with matters of social and cultural change.

     

    Invitation points to the final chapter of Homo Academicus for the kernel of a theory of change and revolution, but what we find there is much less, mainly a scheme for describing moments of crisis, turning points, the visible tips of the icebergs of long-term social dynamics. Bourdieu seems to have too profound an awe of the stability of social systems to be willing to see on what chaotic foundations of contingent self-organization they rest (cf. Lemke, in press). His emphasis on embodied habitus should point Bourdieu, and all of us, toward the potential of bodies in (inter-) action to find themselves acting as they should not, acted upon in ways their habitus cannot make canonical sense of, because the material relations into which bodies can enter cannot be exhausted by the semiotic relations of any culture, even an embodied one.

     

    Among the present Others, there are many who help orient our reading of Bourdieu. There are the German philosophers, the first intellectual love of the younger Bourdieu, abandoned by him for social science in order to challenge the stranglehold of philosophy on the academic field of Bourdieu’s youth. There are the sociological and philosophical rivals of the phenomenological-hermeneutic school (especially Geertz and the ethnomethodologists) against whom he argues passsionately (and at least in the case of ethnomethodology, for me, rather persuasively). There are the methodological rivals, especially discourse analysis, which he quite properly resituates back in the sociological context (as do Bakhtin and the social functionalists). There are Sartre and Levi-Strauss, whose debate shaped Bourdieu’s choice between philosophy and social science, and the Algerian war, which defined the more difficult choice between politics and the meta-politics.

     

    And always there is this presence-by-absence, Michel Foucault (and to a lesser degree Jacques Derrida), not simply as individual, but as proximate proxy in the academic social space Bourdieu himself defines Homo Academicus, 276). These three followed closely similar academic and social trajectories, and in Bourdieu’s rather convincing view, we should expect them to be critical keys to reading one another. But Bourdieu scrupulously avoids reading Foucault for us, almost as if he would be reading his mirror-self. The parallels of their projects are evident, and Bourdieu notes this himself, but only notes it, and no more. Perhaps self-reflexivity, like agon, meets its limit in philia.

     

    Note

     

    I have said next to nothing about Bourdieu’s discussions of education, particularly higher education, language and symbolic power, or the nature of science. I plan to address at least some of these areas, in which I have considerable personal interest, first in a separate review (of Bourdieu’s Language and Symbolic Power for the journal Linguistics and Education) and then in a book in preparation Textual Politics: Discourse and Social Theory).

     

    Works Cited

     

    • Bourdieu, Pierre. Outline of a Theory of Practice. Cam- bridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 1977.
    • Bourdieu, Pierre. Distinction: A Social Critique of the Judgment of Taste. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1984.
    • Bourdieu, Pierre. La Noblesse d’Etat: Grands Corps et Grandes Ecoles. Paris: Editions de Minuit, 1989.
    • Bourdieu, Pierre. Homo Academicus. Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1990.
    • Bourdieu, Pierre. The Logic of Practice. Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1990.
    • Bourdieu, Pierre. Language and Symbolic Power. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1991.
    • Lemke, J.L. Semiotics and Education. Monograph in Toronto Semiotic Circle Monographs Series, Victoria University, Toronto, 1984.
    • Lemke, J.L. Talking Science: Language, Learning, and Values. Norwood, NJ: Ablex Publishing, 1990.
    • Lemke, J.L. “Text Production and Dynamic Text Semantics.” Functional and Systemic Linguistics: Approaches and Uses. Ed. E. Ventola. Berlin: Mouton/deGruyter (Trends in Linguistics: Studies and Monographs 55), 1991.
    • Lemke, J.L. “Discourse, Dynamics, and Social Change.” Language as Cultural Dynamic [Focus issue of Cultural Dynamics (Leiden: Brill), in press].
    • Martin, James R. “Process and Text: Two Aspects of Human Semiosis.” Systemic Perspectives on Discourse. Ed. J.D. Benson and W.S. Greaves. Norwood, NJ: Ablex Publishing, 1985.
    • Thibault, Paul. Social Semiotics as Praxis. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1991.

     

  • Postmodern Communities: The Politics of Oscillation

    Heesok Chang

    Department of English
    Vassar College

    hechang@vaxsar.vassar.edu

     

    Vattimo, Gianni. The Transparent Society. Trans. David Webb. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1992.

     

    Agamben, Giorgio. The Coming Community. Trans. Michael Hardt. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1993.

     

    I. Philosophical Homelessness

     

    Readers of the young Georg Lukacs may recall this memorable citation from The Theory of the Novel: “‘Philosophy is really homesickness,’ says Novalis: ‘it is the urge to be at home everywhere.’”

     

    According to Lukacs that is why “integrated civilizations”–where the soul feels at home everywhere, both in the self and in the world–have no philosophy. Or “why (it comes to the same thing) all men in such ages are philosophers, sharing the utopian aim of every philosophy. For what is the task of true philosophy if not to draw that archetypal map?”1

     

    Needless to say (especially in the [virtual] pages of the present journal) this endorsement of philosophy’s “utopian aim” would not find many adherents today. If anything, the “task” of contemporary philosophy would be to debunk the notion of its universalizing, “archetypal” vocation. The subsumptive mapping of the world by reason is no longer an unquestioned telos of occidental thought.

     

    Today, especially in France, philosophy has addressed itself to a nonappropriative understanding of exteriority, a “thought from the outside.”2 Modern thought has deterritorialized its claims to dialectical resolution; it has become homeless, so to speak, once and for all. Against the grain of philosophy’s utopian memory–its nostalgic stance in being, its nostalgia for Being–the philosophers of our moment urge a “nomadic” thinking.

     

    This sort of generalization about “postmodern” philosophy (such as it is) is well known. Like journalism, it is useful up to a certain point–let’s say until the end of the day. But like all more or less accurate journalistic descriptions it tries to say too much in one breath. Decisive opinions about “postmodern” or “poststructuralist” thought “today” leave the philosophical terrain largely undifferentiated. For example, we might be overly hasty to isolate “poststructuralism” from a certain “homesickness.” This philosophical “malady” (maladie du pays) need not be grounded in a Judaeo-Christian or Romantic nostalgia for lost origins; it might point to a more urgent need to rethink the social constitution of our being. I am thinking here not only of Richard Rorty’s recent attempts to imagine a “contingent” community (a sense of human solidarity not founded on an essentialist understanding of the human, but on an expanding recognition of human sufferance).3

     

    I am thinking particularly of those thinkers (again, largely French) who write explicitly “within” a Heideggerean idiom–or rather, those writers who continue to stage a critical confrontation, an Auseinandersetzung, with Heidegger’s thought. I am thinking, for example, of Jacques Derrida’s recent meditations on spirit, friendship, and today’s Europe; or Phillipe Lacoue-Labarthe’s exemplary work on the aesthetic assumptions informing modern national identity formation (National Socialism). And I am thinking of Jean-Luc Nancy’s extended research on the finitude of our daily, nightly existence–our “being-in-common”–which has given new rigor and new impetus to thinking about what community actually means.

     

    Nancy’s appeal to rethink community could not really be characterized as nostalgic (quite the contrary). Nevertheless, something of the philosopher’s “transcendental homelessness,” the registration of a shared pain or loss, and therefore of a desire, is distinctly audible in these words: “The gravest and most painful testimony of the modern world, the one that possibly involves all other testimonies to which this epoch must answer . . . is the testimony of the dissolution, the dislocation, or the conflagration of community.”4

     

    This sentence could stand as a more or less appropriate epigraph for both the texts under review (more so for The Coming Community, less so for The Transparent Society). Like Nancy, both Gianni Vattimo and Giorgio Agamben address questions of our contemporaneity on a very broad scale. They too write in response to this epochal demand: not to “be at home everywhere,” but to free the very idea of “home,” of a certain belonging, from the planetary administration of techno-economic forces. And like Nancy, both authors draw considerably on Heidegger to articulate not only their diagnoses of our (post)modernity, but also their prescriptions for rethinking our being-in-the-world.

     

    Despite marked differences in tone, style, content, and indeed, quality, The Transparent Society and The Coming Community contribute to our political imagination, to our ideas about “freedom” and “singularity,” “heterotopia” and “community.” With varying success, they outline new ways of being at home in a world that is increasingly no longer, quite simply, “ours.”

     

    II. Hermeneutic Oscillations

     

    English readers of Gianni Vattimo’s previously translated work–particularly the later essays collected in The End of Modernity–will not discover much that is radically new in The Transparent Society (but given Vattimo’s thesis about the impossibility of a definitive overcoming, an Uberwindung, this should certainly come as no surprise). Those who are unfamiliar with his writing, or who have only heard his name in association with the miserable label “weak thought” (pensiero diebole), will find this book a lucid and economical (120 pages of largish type) summary of his latest views on “the postmodern question.”5

     

    The brevity of his text does not inhibit Vattimo from fielding a wide range of academic topoi: the evolution of the human sciences, the modern resurgence of myth, the privilege of “shock” in aesthetic experience, the disappearance of utopian models, the centrality of interpretation in a radically plural society. These discussions do not dwell on example and illustration (with the exception of a brief and unexceptional look at Blade Runner). Rather, Vattimo engages his interlocuters–Nietzsche, Heidegger, Benjamin, Adorno, Apel, Habermas, Gadamer–at a pace of brisk generality we might as well call journalistic.

     

    Despite the liberal scope of the contents, however, the book’s eight chapters elaborate a consistent politico-philosophical vision. At the risk of oversimplifying, I believe Vattimo’s essential argument is encapsulated in this sentence from the opening chapter: “To live in this pluralistic world means to experience freedom as a continual oscillation between belonging and disorientation” (10). I will direct my review of the book towards a critical gloss on this sentence.

     

    The Transparent Society takes up where the last book left off–namely, at “the end of modernity.” Vattimo elegantly defines modernity as “the epoch in which simply being modern became a decisive value in itself” (1). This cultural capitalization of the new, which emerges in art with the cult of genius, is eventually incorporated into a greater narrative of human progress and emancipation. Within a unilinear, Enlightenment conception of history the intrinsic value of anything modern consists in its being simply the latest, the most advanced, the nearest to the ends of man.

     

    In a hypothesis which clearly resonates with Jean-Francois Lyotard’s, Vattimo states: “modernity ends when–for a number of reasons–it no longer seems possible to regard history as unilinear” (2). In The End of Modernity the “reasons” he gives are confined principally to philosophical ones–in particular, the forceful anti-foundationalist thinking of Nietzsche and Heidegger. In the present work, however, the advent of postmodernity is no longer an emphatically “theoretical” event. Vattimo foregrounds two major sociological causes for the dissolution of unilinear history.

     

    First, decolonization. The global rebellion against European colonialism and imperialism renders the very notion of a single, centralized story of human progress “de facto problematic”; “The European ideal of humanity has been revealed as one ideal amongst others, not necessarily worse, but unable, without violence, to obtain as the true essence of man, of all men” (4).

     

    Second, planetary mass media. Vattimo seems to regard this factor to be more decisive in ending modernity than the emergence of post-colonial voices because (although he does not say this explicitly) the former is the technological condition of possibility for the latter. A “society of generalized communication” must be in place for multiculturalism to get on the map. The relentless expansion of informational media enables “Cultures and subcultures of all sorts [to step] into the limelight of public opinion” (5).

     

    According to Vattimo, this “giddy proliferation of communication” seems to equip the world for actualizing a fully “transparent society.” We should note, however, that the book is misleadingly, or at least provocatively, titled. For “the transparent society” does not name Vattimo’s vision of a utopian postmodernity. Rather, it describes the belated, modernist ideal of our socius championed by every postmodernist’s favourite straw men: Karl Otto Apel and Jurgen Habermas.

     

    Vattimo argues that Apel’s community of “unrestricted communication” and Habermas’ universe of “communicative action” are informed by the old dream of a self-transparent society. More specifically, their normative ideals of communicative rationality are modelled on the communal drive for self-knowledge exemplified by the human sciences. “But,” Vattimo objects, “can one legitimately model the emancipated human subject, and ultimately society, on the ideal of the scientist in her laboratory, whose objectivity and disinterest are demanded by what is at bottom a technological interest and who conceives of nature as an object only to the extent that it is marked out as a place for potential domination . . . ?” (24).

     

    Here Vattimo sides with the Frankfurt School (and Heideggerean) critique of instrumental reason. The Enlightenment ideal of a perfectly self-transparent society–in which the subject (the Subject) seamlessly enframes the world as an object of reflexive knowledge–does not augur human liberation. Instead, it installs a logic of domination. Man is not emancipated from his social labour, but dehumanized by technology. The transparent society is the totally administered and regulated society.

     

    Now does the ungovernable or “giddy” expansion of information technology today mean we are on the verge of realizing such a transparent society?

     

    According to Vattimo, no.

     

    Adorno’s pessimistic vision of an increasingly instrumentalized modernity is well taken. But “–and this is what Adorno missed–within the communication system itself, mechanisms develop (the ‘rise of new centres of history’) that make the realization of self-transparency in principle impossible” (23). Vattimo does not specify what these “mechanisms” might be. Instead, he testifies repeatedly that the generalization of communication guarantees the dissolution of a monolithic history of human knowledge; “the freedom given by the mass media to so many cultures and Weltanschauungen has belied the very ideal of a transparent society” (6). In postmodernity, it seems everyone gets to step up to the mike.

     

    We should object here that the “liberation of differences” Vattimo has in mind–a sort of “giddy” multicultural polylogue–does not necessarily entail a radical challenge to the existing order.6 The fact that everybody now can have their “say” does not automatically disrupt the present constitution of our public sphere. Perhaps real political differences, differences that won’t make a difference by their mere “say” are everywhere today, to borrow Claude Lefort’s phrase, “dissolved into the ceremony of communication.”7

     

    Vattimo acknowledges this objection, but hastens to emphasize the “irreducible pluralization” (6) accompanying the veritable explosion of mass media in our daily lives. Moreover–and here we return to his central argument–emancipation today should not, he urges, be thought on the model of self-authentication (this would return us to the dream of self-transparency). What is liberating about postmodernism is not the parading of different identities per se.

     

    Rather, “The emancipatory significance of the liberation of differences and dialects consists . . . in the general disorientation accompanying their initial identification. If, in a world of dialects, I speak my own dialect, I shall be conscious that it is not the only ‘language,’ but that it is precisely one amongst many” (9). In this irreducibly multicultural and heterotopian world I carry around a “weakened” sense of my “reality.” Freedom here does not come from asserting the particularity of my (linguistic) being. Rather, I experience freedom in a totally new way: by “oscillating” continually between feeling at home in my language and sensing how thoroughly finite, transient, and contingent it actually is.

     

    Without commenting on the viability of this weird notion of “freedom” (how could such a thing be judged in all rigour?), I would like to close out this discussion by dwelling a bit on the key word “oscillation.”

     

    The figurative movement of vibrating or fluctuating is certainly not new to Vattimo’s thinking. Indeed, oscillation in the present work may well be read as a spatial translation of the temporal or (post)historical notion of Verwindung which is described in the last essay of The End of Modernity. Readers of that work may recall this Heideggerean word signifies a going-beyond of metaphysics which is not a complete overcoming of metaphysics (the modernist myth), but rather a sort of deepening, healing resignation to its tracelike survival. Amongst Verwindung’s other lexical meanings Vattimo points out “twisting” and “distortion.” We experience Being in postmodernity not as an emancipated presence, but as an ironic twist or distortion. Being is only approachable in its estrangement from our nostalgic grasp–as a constant oscillation between revelation and concealment.

     

    In The Transparent Society Vattimo fleshes out this meaning of oscillation as ongoing estrangement by referring us to the realm of the aesthetic. The fluid play of differences we find in postmodernity is likened to the disorienting encounter with the artwork–the blow (Stoss) or “shock”–described by Heidegger and Benjamin. Vattimo explicitly gives ontology and aesthetic theory a defining role in conceptualizing the oscillation and disorientation peculiar to postmodern being.

     

    But I would suggest the metaphor of oscillation in Vattimo’s argument does not only derive from his interpretations of philosophy and postmodernity. Oscillation is a crucial feature of his interpretive methodology itself.

     

    An implicit aim of The Transparent Society (but made explicit in the final chapter) is to defend a ramified understanding of Gadamerian hermeneutics. To move very quickly here, Vattimo wants to rescue hermeneutics from unacceptable axioms like this one: “To recognize oneself (or one’s own) in the other and find a home abroad–this is the basic movement of spirit whose being consists in this return to itself from otherness.”8 Hermeneutics’ universalizing appropriation of other worlds can only be corrected by breaking its circular understanding. Thus, the hermeneutic circle gives way to a trembling arc of interpretation. The figure of swaying between the poles of belonging and disorientation, home and away, assure Vattimo’s hermeneutic procedure “cannot appear . . .[under the] logics of subsumption.”9

     

    But this metaphor of oscillation is hardly a postmodern twist on interpretation. The methodological notion of oscillation appears at the pre-Gadamerian beginnings of hermeneutics. As Werner Hamacher has noted: “Schleiermacher’s concept for the delicate relationship between the general and the individual, within which all verbal and language-generative acts manifest themselves, is called the ‘schema of oscillation between the general and the particular.’”10

     

    Vattimo’s hermeneutic oscillation guarantees his understanding of postmodern alterity will remain disoriented. But this does not allow other “dialects” to appear outside the sway of hermeneutic understanding (no matter how “weakened”) itself. In this oscillation differences can only appear as trembling versions of themselves–as different or “contaminated” identities11 –and not as differences indifferent to identity. To borrow a term from Agamben, nothing singular may appear.

     

    It does not occur to Vattimo that the postmodern experience of freedom may be post-hermeneutic as well.

     

    III. Whatever Being

     

    “Marginality and homelessness are not, in my opinion, to be gloried in; they are to be brought to an end, so that more, not fewer, people can enjoy the benefits of what has for centuries been denied the victims of race, class, or gender.”12

     

    Edward Said’s words testify, in their own way, to what Nancy calls “the dissolution, the dislocation, or the conflagration of community.” Said here is criticizing the politics of identity–the “unreconstructed nationalism”–that grips not only the academy, but the postcolonial world at large. Reclamations of cultural identity were useful and necessary for asserting independence from colonial rule. But, today, nationalist affirmations of identity for their own sake act only in the interests of a clamorous separatism. Nancy concurs with this diagnosis when he remarks that “the emergence . . . of decolonized communities has not . . . triggered any genuine renewal of the question of community.”13

     

    Unlike Said, however, Nancy does not presuppose the question of community to be a question about reclaiming our humanity. He does not think community on the traditional humanist model of a lost or broken immanence (“what has for centuries been denied”) which must be restored. Like Vattimo, he does not imagine our future in the direction of a “transparent society.”

     

    But what other than a local or universal affiliation–a sense of belonging to this tribe, this nation, this race, or to the human race as a whole–could form the basis for any meaningful community? This is where Agamben’s latest book makes, I think, a fundamental contribution to our political thought. The Coming Community delineates the topos of belonging without mobilizing identity politics and without falling back on the idees fixes of humanist discourse.

     

    It is impossible, in the space that remains, to give the reader an adequate sense of the immense scope of Agamben’s philosophical and philological learning. The expected readings of Kant and Heidegger, Benjamin and Kafka, are supplemented at every turn with astonishing examples drawn from medieval logic and analytic philosophy, Talmudic tales and Provencal poetry.

     

    Dense though it is, Agamben’s writing is never turgid or pedantic. Rather, his terse, fluid style is reminiscent (the likeness has been drawn before and will be drawn again) of Walter Benjamin’s.

     

    And like Benjamin (at least in this latest book), Agamben probes contemporary social phenomena–technology and media, the society of the spectacle and the modern fate of social classes, a stocking commercial and Tiananmen Square–in the light of his theoretical expositions.

     

    A lengthier discussion would need to sample some of these exemplary readings (and this entire text proceeds through the by-play, the Bei-spiel, of examples). It might be more useful here, however, to summarize for the reader, against the grain of the text’s singular movement, the gist of the argument. To enhance the critical significance of such a reductive reading, I will place Agamben’s conception of “the coming being” in relation to Nancy’s groundbreaking ideas about community.

     

    In order to rescue community from its nostalgic (and finally Christian) assumptions we must, Nancy thinks, return to ontology (first philosophy). A serious reflection on community requires we answer the call to rethink–at the most mundane level–what it means to be-in-common.

     

    For Nancy this call does not arise from a utopian or humanist appeal for a reorganization of social relations in which community is posited as the end result, the work, of a subject labouring on itself. The obscure exigency of community comes from the existential position of our being-there, thrown into the world. This being-there is not a punctual self-presence, a being-oneself. Community or being-in-common is not a predicate of an essentially solitary entity. Rather, being-there (Dasein) is none other than a being-with (Mitsein). The very possibility of my being alone depends on my ontological potential to share my existence.

     

    Emphasizing Heidegger’s differential and relational definition of Dasein in order to underline our constitutive being-in-common may be easy enough to follow. What is much more difficult to grasp is that for Nancy, our strange built-in sociality does not provide any groundwork for building a community in any identifiable sense. On the contrary, the fact that we are (ontologically) only in relation to one another thwarts–or resists (a key word for Nancy)–in advance any self- or communitarian identification with this or that identity trait (being red, being Italian, being communist–to cite Agamben’s examples). Our being-in-common is a limit-experience, a feeling for our finitude. What we share at the end of ourselves, ecstatically (so to speak), is not our shared individuality, but our uncommon singularity.

     

    The experience of this sharing should not be understood as a selfless fusion into a group (both Nancy and Agamben write continuously against the unsurpassed danger of our political modernity: fascism, Nazism). Rather, our shared singularity takes the form of an exposure. We are exposed to the absence of any substantial identity to which we could belong. Exposure to singularity: that means to be scattered together, like strangers on a train, not quite face-to-face, oscillating between the poles of communion and disaggregation.14 It is this banal relation without relation that exposes our pre-identical singularity, our being-in-common.

     

    Coming now to Agamben, I believe his work helps us to approach this renewed question of community from another angle. Specifically, he gives positive content to what Nancy is inclined, I think, to describe negatively: namely, the concept of singularity.

     

    The Coming Community opens like this: “The coming being is whatever being. In the Scholastic enumeration of transcendentals (quodlibet ens est unum, verum, bonum seu perfectum–whatever entity is one, true, good, or perfect), the term that, remaining unthought in each, conditions the meaning of all the others is the adjective quodlibet. The common translation of this term as ‘whatever’ in the sense of ‘it does not matter which, indifferently’ is certainly correct, but in its form the Latin says exactly the opposite: Quodlibet ens is not ‘being, it does not matter which,’ but rather ‘being such that it always matters.’ The Latin always already contains, that is, a reference to the will (libet). Whatever being has an original relation to desire” (1).

     

    The basis of the coming community, the singular being, is whatever being–not in the sense of “I don’t care what you are,” but rather, “I care for you such as you are.” As such you are freed from belonging either to the emptiness of the universal or the ineffability of the individual.

     

    In Agamben’s elaboration of singularity, human identity is not mediated by its belonging to some set or class (being old, being American, being gay). Nor does it consist in the simple negation of all belonging (here Agamben parts company with Bataille’s notion of the “negative community,” the community of those who have no community). Rather, whatever names a sort of radical generosity with respect to belonging. The singular being is not the being who belongs only here or there, but nor is it the being who belongs everywhere and nowhere (flipsides of the same empty generality). This other being always matters to me not because I am drawn to this or that trait, nor because I identify him or her with a favoured race, class, or gender. And certainly not because he or she belongs to a putatively universal set like humanity or the human race.

     

    The other always matters to me only when I am taken with all of his/her traits, such as they are. This defining generosity of the singular means that quodlibet ens is not determined by this or that belonging, but by the condition of belonging itself. It belongs to belonging. The singularity of being resides in its exposure to an unconditional belonging. [51] Such a singularly exposed being wants to belong–which is to say, it belongs to want, or, for lack of a less semantically burdened and empty word, to love: “The singularity exposed as such is whatever you want, that is, lovable” (2).

     

    We must be careful here not to conflate Agamben’s exposition of whatever being with a more familiar discourse on love: “Love is never directed toward this or that property of the loved one (being blond, being small, being tender, being lame), but neither does it neglect the properties in favor of an insipid generality (universal love): The lover wants the loved one with all of its predicates, its being such as it is. The lover desires the as only insofar as it is such–this is the lover’s particular fetishism” (2).

     

    But what could a thing with all of its predicates look like? Agamben gives us the example of the human face. Every face is singular. This does not mean a face individuates a pre-existing form or universalizes individual features. The face as such is utterly indifferent to what makes it different and yet similar. It is impossible to determine from which sphere–the common or the proper–the face derives its singular expressivity.

     

    In this the face is not unlike handwriting in which it is impossible to draw the line between what makes this signature at the same time common and proper, legible and unique. We cannot say for certain whether this hand and this face actualize a universal form, or whether the universal form is engendered by these million different scripts and faces.

     

    Whatever being emerges, like handwriting, like the face, on “a line of sparkling alternation” (20) between language and word, form and expression, potentiality and act. “This is how we must read the theory of those medieval philosophers,” Agamben writes, “who held that the passage from potentiality to act, from common form to singularity, is not an event accomplished once and for all, but an infinite series of modal oscillations” (19).15 The coming community is founded on the imperceptible oscillations of whatever being.

     

    But what, finally, might the politics of whatever belonging be?

     

    Agamben envisions the coming politics not as a hegemonic struggle between classes for control of the State, but as an inexorable agon between whatever singularity and state organization. What the State cannot digest is not the political affirmations of identity (on the contrary), but the formation of a community not grounded in any belonging except for the human co-belonging to whatever being.

     

    “What was most striking about the demonstrations of the Chinese May,” Agamben points out, “was the relative absence of determinate contents in their demands” (85).

     

    Here Agamben surely also has in mind the singular example of May 68. I would even say The Coming Community is (not unlike Vattimo’s book) a belated response to the radical promise–let’s say (using the wrong idiom perhaps), the promise of human happiness–exposed in that event.

     

    In these works by two important Italian thinkers, philosophy becomes once again, perhaps, a kind of homesickness, a longing to belong. To a permanent disorientation. To oscillation. To whatever.

     

     Notes

     

    1. The Theory of the Novel, trans. Anna Bostock (Cambridge: MIT UP, 1971), 29.

     

    2. This phrase, “La pensee du dehors,” is the title of Michel Foucault’s important essay on Maurice Blanchot (first published in Critique 229, 1966). Gilles Deleuze elaborates on the theme of exteriority in his excellent book on Foucault Foucault, trans. Sean Hand [Minneapolis: U of Minnesota P, 1988]). See especially the chapter entitled “Strategies or the Non-stratified: the Thought of the Outside (Power)” where he links up this early essay with Foucault’s later and better known piece on Nietzschean genealogy.

     

    3. Contingency, Irony, and Solidarity Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 1989.

     

    4. This is the opening sentence of “The Inoperative Community” (trans. Peter Connor, in The Inoperative Community, ed. Peter Connor [Minneapolis and Oxford: U of Minnesota P, 1991], 1).

     

    5. I take this phrase from a blurb on the back jacket of the book: “‘This book is of major importance to the debate on the postmodern question.’–Jean-Francois Lyotard.”

     

    6. For a recent–and typical (that is, typically anti-academic)–articulation of this objection see David Rieff’s piece “Multiculturalism’s Silent Partner: It’s the newly globalized economy, stupid,” Harper’s 287 August 1993: 17-19.

     

    7. The Political Forms of Modern Society: Bureaucracy, Democracy, Totalitarianism (Cambridge: MIT Press, 1986), 226.

     

    8. Hans-Georg Gadamer, Truth and Method, ed. Garrett Barden and John Cumming (New York: Seabury Press, 1975), 15.

     

    9. This quote, not to mention my understanding of the role of oscillation in hermeneutics, comes from Werner Hamacher’s essay “Hermeneutic Ellipses: Writing the Hermeneutical Circle in Schleiermacher,” trans. Timothy Bahti, in Transforming the Hermeneutic Context: From Nietzsche to Nancy, ed. Gayle L. Ormiston and Alan D. Schrift (Albany: SUNY Press, 1990), 190.

     

    10. Ibid. 190.

     

    11. In an essay entitled “Hermeneutics and Anthropology” Vattimo is careful to underscore the ideological nature of ethnographic otherness. Anticipating the theme of generalized communication he writes: “The hermeneutic–but also anthropological–illusion of encountering the other, with all its theoretical grandiosity, finds itself faced with a mixed reality in which alterity is entirely exhausted. The disappearance of alterity does not occur as a part of the dreamed-for total organization of the world, but rather as a condition of widespread contamination” The End of Modernity 159). This sobering reminder about the Westernization of third world cultures seems to drop out of Vattimo’s discussion in The Transparent Society where the emphasis falls on heterogeneity not homologation.

     

    12. Edward Said, “The Politics of Knowledge,” Raritan 11 (Summer 1991): 31.

     

    13. Nancy 22.

     

    14. “Passengers in the same train compartment are simply seated next to each other in an accidental, arbitrary, and completely exterior manner. They are not linked. But they are also quite together inasmuch as they are travelers on this train, in this same space and for this same period of time. They are between the disintegration of the ‘crowd’ and the aggregation of the group, both extremes remaining possible, virtual, and near at every moment. This suspension is what makes ‘being-with’: a relation without relation, or rather, being exposed simultaneously to relationship and absence of relationship” (Nancy, “Of Being-in-Common,” trans. James Creech, Community at Loose Ends, ed. Miami Theory Collective [Minneapolis: U of Minnesota Press, 1991] 7).

     

    15. “Oscillation” is an entirely appropriate word to use in this context for, as Hamacher points out, “oscillum is in fact a derivation of os, mouth, face, and thus means little mouth, little face and mask. Oscillation, understood in its etymological context, would indicate that ‘originary’ movement of language in which it is allotted to something or someone, which has neither language nor face, is neither intuition or concept” (190).

     

    16. This sentence concludes, in parentheses: “(democracy and freedom are notions too generic and broadly defined to constitute the real object of a conflict, and the only concrete demand, the rehabilitation of Hu Yao–Bang, was immediately granted)” (85).

     

  • ‘Imagining The Unimaginable’: J.M. Coetzee, History, and Autobiography

    Rita Barnard

    English Department
    University of Pennsylvania

    rbarnard@mail.sas.upenn.edu

     

    Attwell, David. J.M. Coetzee: South Africa and the Politics of Writing. Perspectives on South Africa 48. Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1993.

     

    Coetzee, J.M. Doubling the Point: Essays and Interviews. Ed. David Attwell. Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1992.

     

    David Attwell’s important new critical account of J.M. Coetzee’s work takes as its epigraph a statement from one of his interviews with Coetzee, recently collected in Doubling the Point:

     

    I am not a herald of community or anything else, as you correctly recognize. I am someone who has intimations of freedom (as every chained prisoner has) and constructs representations--which are shadows themselves--of people slipping their chains and turning their faces to the light.(341)

     

    The remark is in many ways characteristic of Coetzee: it does not refer in a direct and unproblematic way to any one of his novels; and yet it captures their rigorous sense of their own limitations, as well as their muted utopian dimension. The allusiveness of the statement is also characteristic, in that it rewrites, rather than merely echoes, Plato’s allegory of the cave. Deeply conscious, as always, of our inevitably mediated and tenuous sense of reality (perhaps, in this context, we might call it “History”), Coetzee shares something of Plato’s skepticism about what the poet might do in the world: a body still chained in darkness can scarcely be an “unacknowledged legislator,” nor a herald, nor even a truthful witness. (South African literature, Coetzee once remarked, is “exactly the kind of literature you would expect people to write in a prison” [Doubling, 98]). Yet the shadow-play he evokes here–and, he feels, in his fiction–is not quite the trivial passage of objects before the firelight which Plato has us conceive. It is a shadowy premonition of the impossible, of a different way of seeing: one that can only begin at that moment when, first, the body is unshackled, and then the eyes turn to a new order.

     

    This statement, though far more personal, is reminiscent of a moment in Coetzee’s 1986 essay, “Into the Dark Chamber.” The piece recalls how Rosa Burger, the protagonist of Gordimer’s Burger’s Daughter, is thrown into utter confusion as she watches a “black, poor, brutalized” man cruelly whip his donkey in a drunken fury. The act brings to Rosa’s mind, in the rush of an instant, a vision of the entirety of human suffering and torture, especially politically motivated cruelty: “solitary confinement … the Siberias of snow or sun, the lives of Mandela, Sisulu, Mbeki, Kathrada, Kgosana, gull-picked on the Island” (Doubling 367). But it does so in such a way as to render moral judgement impossible: here is “torture without the torturer,” victim hurting victim. How does one proceed beyond this vision? Coetzee asks. He ends his essay with an expression of his longing, with Rosa, for a restoration of ethics, for a “time when all human acts … will be returned to the ambit of moral judgment,” for a society in which it will “once again be meaningful for the gaze of the author, the gaze of authority and authoritative judgement”–the gaze of one who has faced the light outside the prison-cave–“to be turned upon scenes of torture” (Doubling, 368).

     

    The imperative to proceed “beyond” is, of course not one that is often indulged in Coetzee’s novels, nor is it clear, from a strictly logical or materialist point of view, that such a move is really possible. What is at stake, when Coetzee, and his critic/interlocutor, ponder this question, is the relationship between the imagination and the real, or, if you will, between textuality and history. This relationship is the main concern of David Attwell’s book. The project of J.M. Coetzee: South Africa and the Politics of Writing could be understood as an attempt to negotiate the distance between two contradictory attitudes towards history on the novelist’s part. The first position, discussed in Attwell’s opening chapter, finds its most forceful expression in Coetzee’s controversial address (“The Novel Today”) to the Weekly Mail Book Week in 1987. Coetzee here insists on the discursive nature of history, and its difference from–and even its enmity to–the discourse of the novel. He describes the position of the South African novelist as follows:

     

    In times of intense ideological pressure like the present, when the space in which the novel and history normally coexist like two cows on the same pasture, each minding its own business, is squeezed to almost nothing, the novel, it seems to me, has only two options: supplementarity or rivalry.... (15)

     

    In the face of what we might call the dominant counter- hegemonic discourse of the mass democratic movement, in which literature must become a weapon in “the struggle,” Coetzee resolutely refuses the “correct” position of supplementarity, and claims the separate discourse of the novel, of the story, as his own–beleaguered–terrain.

     

    The second position, discussed in Attwell’s final chapter, emerges from Coetzee’s 1990 interview with the Washington Post, in which “real history” seems to be reaffirmed. A propos of Francis Fukiyama’s (premature) post-Cold War declarations about the global achievement of liberal democracy, the novelist observes:

     

    There is a certain controversy, isn't there, going on right at the moment in the United States about "the end of history"?... The position, expressed in a very crude way, is that the Western democracies have reached a stage in their historical development in which development ceases because there is no stage beyond it.... That very way of seeing the history of mankind is a symptom of the First World ... moving to a plateau of inconsequentiality or irrelevance. It's actually the Third World where history, real history is happening. And the First World has played itself out of the game.(Attwell, 124)

     

    This observation, with which Attwell brings his study to its close, is read as a return to the site of history, “real history,” as a place of privilege.

     

    For Attwell, whose approach to literature is theoretically eclectic but fundamentally historicist, and whose declared purpose is not only to explicate, but to offer a “tribute” to Coetzee’s oeuvre (7), Coetzee’s insistence on novelistic autonomy in “The Novel Today” essay presents something of a political and a methodological problem. As a South African academic, he is only too aware of the critical protest which this kind of position could– and did–elicit; namely, that Coetzee is guilty of a decadent, elitist aestheticism.1 He seems somewhat embarrassed by the “chilly political choice” and the “exclusively and unhappily Manichean” terms in which it is offered (16-17; Trump 107). It is tempting, therefore, to speculate that this might be the reason why “The Novel Today”–surely one of Coetzee’s most provocative and least circulated pieces–is not included in Doubling the Point.

     

    In fact, however, the main impulse in J.M. Coetzee: Politics and Writing in South Africa is not to evade, but to challenge and complicate such a polarization of history and fictionality, by exploring the ways in which Coetzee’s novels are themselves contextualized. Attwell offers the term “situational metafiction” as a way of suggesting that the tension between the two contradictory positions is both irresolvable and productive. The term, as he argues, is by no means paradoxical: “Coetzee’s figuring of the tension between text and history is itself a historical act, one that must be read back into the discourses of South Africa where on can discern its illuminating power” (3).2 Whether or not Coetzee chooses to represent South African history is then far less important, in this study, than the fact that his work consistently registers, even when it tries to escape, the political pressures that shape the act of writing. The historical contextualization we see in Attwell’s text is not the kind Coetzee excoriates in “The Novel Today”: the kind that treats the novels’ conclusions as checkable by history “as a child’s schoolwork is checked by a school mistress” [3].3 Attwell suggests that for Coetzee, as for Jameson, “History” per se is unrepresentable, but, as a political unconscious, leaves its mark on all forms of expression. The position is formulated as follows in Doubling the Point: “it is rare that history should emerge … as Necessity, as an absolute limit to consciousness. History, in [Coetzee’s] work, seems less a process that can be represented than a force acting on representation …” (66).

     

    Compared to the other three full-length studies of Coetzee’s work (by Penner, Dovey, and Gallagher) Attwell’s is by far the most knowledgeable and sophisticated in its treatment of the South African context–historical, political, and literary. Indeed, it is fair to say that only Susan Van Zanten Gallagher’s A Story of South Africa: J.M. Coetzee’s Fiction in Context, makes much of an attempt to offer a historicist reading.4 Attwell’s book situates the novels not only in terms of political events–the Soweto uprisings, the death in detention of Steve Biko, etc.–the kind of thing that Gallagher, at her greater remove from South Africa, also provides–but in terms of both the academic and political discourses prevalent in South Africa at a given moment.

     

    Attwell is able, for instance, to relate the political stance of Dusklands (1974) to the emergence of a post- liberal discourse in South Africa during the seventies: a phenomenon shaped, in various ways, by the Black Consciousness movement, by Beyers Naude’s Study Project on Christianity in Apartheid Society (SPRO-CAS), by the first contributions of a South African Marxist historiography, and by the first challenges to the comfortable Leavisite humanism that had dominated South African English departments up to that point. Or, in the case of Waiting for the Barbarians (1981), he is able to demonstrate that the novel, despite its fictional location and indeterminate time–and despite its stated theme of resistance to “the time of History” as the imposition of a vicious Empire– responds rather specifically to the discourse and practice of the state at a particularly paranoid moment. In the wake of the Soweto uprising, and the fall of colonial regimes to the north, the Apartheid regime developed a “total strategy” to counter the “total onslaught” of terrorists, communists, and agitators at the border (not to mention those in the backyard, under the bed, and behind every bush). The novel’s challenge to “Empire’s” cruel certainties in its quest for self-preservation and its elimination of the “Other,” clearly responds to this time of detentions, bannings, torture, and rumors of torture in South Africa. Moreover, as Attwell argues, the very phantasmagoric remoteness of the novel’s mise-en-scene, has the paradoxically representational dimension of mimicking the phantasmagoric character of the state’s paranoid projections. As one who was subjected at school to classes in “Youth Resistance,” who joked that the Communists invented sex to seduce the Afrikaner teenager, and who listened in astonishment to the callous excuses given for the deaths in detention in the years just before the novel’s publication, I can only confirm the aptness of this contextualization: it is impossible for someone who lived through the late seventies in South Africa to read the novel only as “being about” a fictive never-never land.

     

    But to say this is to minimize the caution with which both Attwell, and Coetzee in Doubling the Point, approach the question of relevant “facts” and “contexts.” (At the beginning of the latter book, for instance, we find Coetzee pondering the problem of writing the history of his intellectual career: “But which facts? All the facts? No. All the facts are too many facts. You choose the facts insofar as they fall with your evolving purpose. What is the purpose in the present case?” [Doubling 18].) Attwell’s introduction, significantly, offers a kind of apology for his own historicizing efforts: he recognizes that these might go against Coetzee’s “evolving purpose” (which Attwell admits seems to be shifting, in the later novels, in the direction of a kind of self-exploding textuality that opposes the fixed structures of historical consciousness).

     

    The reason for this deference lies in Attwell’s realization that Coetzee’s resistance to history is based on what the novelist sees as an ethical and liberatory imperative. In the interview I referred to at the beginning of this essay, Coetzee reminds Attwell–and all of us–that not just history and necessity, but also freedom, stands beyond representation (freedom is, as Kant argued “the unimaginable”); and insists that (paradoxically) because of the way the overwhelmingly brutal facts of South African history tend to short-circuit the imagination, “the task becomes imagining [the] unimaginable, imagining a form of address that permits the play of the imagination to start taking place” (66-8). Coetzee, in short, does not deny his own status as a prisoner of history–but insists on the importance of those shadowy projections: the need to also think of “people slipping off their chains.” Attwell’s historicist study therefore remains constantly, and self- critically aware of Coetzee’s urgent insistence on the qualified freedom of fiction. The result is the first reading of Coetzee’s work that contextualizes and politicizes Coetzee’s novels, even as it articulates the theoretical problem of “history” and recognizes the possible limitations of historically demystifying criticism.5

     

    The value and character of Doubling the Point is rather more difficult to pinpoint. It is, as the subtitle announces, a collection of critical essays and interviews. But it is perhaps primarily an autobiography of sorts; and while, as I suggested above, the collection frequently reveals Coetzee’s connections to the modernist tradition, it has to be seen as a rather postmodern autobiography. It offers only a few moments of conventional first person recollection (notably in the essay “Remembering Texas”), as is consistent with Coetzee’s suspicions about any claim to self-presence–a suspicion that makes him favor the mode of the interview, “as a way of getting around the impasse of my own monologue” (19). What we end up with is, therefore, fragmentary and dialogic; and, while the collection does conclude with a very revealing retrospective statement in the final interview, this too is rather self-deconstructive. Written in the third person, it identifies, as the pivotal moment of the intellectual life we have just reviewed, the essay on “Confession and Double Thoughts”: a skeptical exploration of the infinite nature of confession, of the impossibility to ever tell the truth in autobiography.

     

    All this is not to say that many interesting “facts” about Coetzee’s life and thinking do not emerge from Doubling the Point; but that, as I have already suggested, the idea of a personal “history” is from the start problematic. As the final essay states, there is little distinction to be made between the writing of fiction, of criticism, and of autobiography: all of these are modes of storytelling–and in Coetzee’s hand stories are always fictions that will claim no final closure, that are skeptical even of skepticism. Doubling the Point is thus an intriguingly contradictory text: authoritative (the rigor and range of Coetzee’s intellect inevitably give it that austere quality) and anti-authoritarian.

     

    It is perhaps fair to say that none of the critical essays here–to turn to another aspect of Doubling the Point–are as good as, for instance, the introduction and the first chapter of White Writing; nor (inevitably) does the collection, selected for the sake of a more or less chronological intellectual biography, have the thematic coherence of that earlier book. The essays do reveal an impressive range of intellectual work: in addition to the pieces on Beckett, Kafka, Gordimer, and Achterberg, already mentioned, Doubling the Point includes discussions of Tolstoy, Dosteyevsky, Gibbon, Newton, Rousseau, Nabokov, Musil, Barthes, Godard, Girard, Derrida, Lacan, Fugard, La Guma, and also of advertising, censorship, and even rugby. I can live without some of the essays included here, especially those in the “Popular Culture” and the “Syntax” subsections of the book (though Attwell’s attempts to relate them to the fiction are consistently interesting). But at least two of essays in the collection, the Jerusalem Prize acceptance speech and the essay on torture (“Into the Dark Chamber: The Writer and the South African State”), have always seemed to me essential to an understanding of Coetzee’s political vision. I am also delighted that the sardonic Barthesian essay “The Burden of Consciousness in Africa” (on the Fugard/Devenish film The Guest [1977]) will now be available to a wider audience. On the whole, it seems to me that Coetzee is revealed in these essays as something quite rare, if not paradoxical: a very academic, very sophisticated autodidact. I don’t think this assessment would strike him as out of line: Coetzee observes at one point that he has no “field” as a literary scholar, and therefore frequently finds himself in the position of “reinventing philosophical wheels” (243). The results are sometimes extremely rewarding for the reader, and sometimes less so. 14] But the essays per se, do not make Doubling the Point: the book’s extraordinary interest lies in the interviews, which are by far the most engaged, the most revealing, and the most suggestive for readings of Coetzee’s fiction yet to appear. One interview even offers a disarmingly candid assessment (or would the essay on confession rule out my use of the word “candid”?) of the reason why so many of Coetzee’s previous interviews seem so terse and unrevealing. Coetzee quite frankly acknowledges his reputation for being “evasive, arrogant, generally unpleasant” to journalistic interviewers (65), but suggests that his difficulty with the ordinary interview ultimately comes from a profound philosophical disagreement with their basic assumptions. On some level, he argues, they believe in the confession, whether as something that comes out of a legal interrogation, or (in a more Rousseauvian mode) from the “transports of unrehearsed speech”; while for Coetzee truth is in silence, and in the dialogic possibilities of writing–in the war between the counter-voices which the act of writing evokes within the writer. (The questions and answers here collected were written, not taped.)

     

    Comments like these illustrate perfectly what we may find in the best moments of Doubling the Point: observations that are both personally revealing, and that suggest, rather than dictate, ways in which we might read Coetzee’s novels. The remarks on the interview, for instance, present us with an extremely important caveat against reading Coetzee too monologically, or against any simplistic identification of Coetzee’s position with a single character. Let us apply this suggestion to a controversial example: in the case of Life and Times of Michael K. we are not necessarily called upon to read the humble gardener as a figure for Coetzee’s putative political, or more exactly, a-political, position. The novel does not straightforwardly tell us (as such commentators as Gordimer and Steven Clingman seem to have thought) to “cultivate our own garden” as Michael K. does. (That position would seem to reach its limit after all when the garden is mined.) Rather, the novel sets in motion a struggle (a “war” in the novel’s terminology) between certain principles, possibilities, readings, and stories.

     

    Another revealing moment in Doubling the Point can be discovered in Coetzee’s moving comments on suffering and the body in the interview preceding the section on “Autobiography and Confession.” I cite his confession at some length:

     

    If I look back over my own fiction, I see a simple (simple-minded?) standard erected. That standard is the body. Whatever else, the body is not "that which is not," and the proof that it is is the pain it feels. The body with its pain becomes the counter to the endless trials of doubt. (One can get away with such crudeness in fiction; one can't in philosophy, I'm sure.) ... Let me put it baldly, in South Africa it is not possible to deny the authority of suffering and therefore of the body. It is not possible, not for logical reasons, not for ethical reasons (I would not assert the ethical superiority of pain over pleasure), but for political reasons, for reasons of power. And let me again be unambiguous: it is not that one grants the authority of the suffering body: the suffering body takes this authority: that is its power. To use other words: its power is undeniable. (Let me add, entirely parenthetically, that I as a person, as a personality, am overwhelmed, that my thinking is thrown into confusion and helplessness, by the fact of suffering in the world, and not only human suffering. These fictional constructions of mine are paltry, ludicrous defenses against that being- overwhelmed, and, to me, transparently so.)(248)

     

    These comments are offered to account for the curious authority of Friday, the mute, mutilated, unassimilable figure from Foe, whom we are finally called upon to think of as standing outside language. (His home, we are told at the novel’s end, is “a place where bodies are their own signs” [157].) But they remind us, more generally, of the importance of the body in all of Coetzee’s novels: the bitten ear of the Hottentot child and the (unforgettable!) anal carbuncle of the explorer in Dusklands, the broken feet and bloodied backs of the prisoners in Waiting for the Barbarians, the harelip and bony frame of the starved Michael K., and the cancer that is slowly destroying Elizabeth Curren in Age of Iron. These remarks explain, moreover, why Coetzee identifies so strongly with the moment in Burger’s Daughter I discussed above: that short- circuiting of moral understanding in the face of human brutality is something that he shares, and tries to repair in his fiction.

     

    At the conclusion of Doubling the Point, Coetzee returns us again, surprisingly, to Plato, with a simple insistence that we are somehow born with an idea of justice and truth. This is, as Coetzee is all too aware, a vulnerable and perhaps a naive position, but it is the only way he finds himself able to explain his own marginal position–the paradox of the “colonial postcoloniality” of his texts; the fact that like the Magistrate in Waiting for the Barbarians he seems compelled to “choose the side of justice when it is not in one’s material interests to do so” (394-5). The reconstruction of an ethical vision, against the odds of an unbearably violent history, is the imperative with which both these texts finally leave us: Coetzee’s writings, as Attwell concludes, do project beyond their situation, “alerting us to the as yet unrealized promise of freedom” (125).

     

    Notes

     

    1. See for instance Michael Chapman’s comments on Foe as a “kind of masturbatory release, in this country, of the Europeanizing dreams of an intellectual coterie” (335). Cited in Attwell 127-8 fn.

     

    2. In his essay “The Problem of History in the Fiction of J.M. Coetzee,” Attwell elaborates on the theoretical position underpinning his book (Trump, 128).

     

    3. For a discussion of such readings, see Teresa Dovey, “Coetzee and his Critics: The Case of Dusklands,” English in Africa 14 (1987): 15-30.

     

    4. The title of Dick Penner’s book, Countries of the Mind, declares candidly that his interest lies elsewhere; and Teresa Dovey, while deploying an extremely limited notion of South African discursive codes which Coetzee subverts, has even less interest in any kind of historical specificity. (Schreiner seems to be the only other South African writer she has actually read.) As Attwell so neatly puts it, Dovey challenges those naive critics who would turn Coetzee’s work into a supplement to history, but then turns it into a supplement to Lacan (2).

     

    5. There is an interesting discussion in Doubling the Point of Coetzee’s increasing resistance to symptomatic readings in his own criticism: “Why am I now suspicious of such suspiciousness?” Coetzee asks himself (106). The answer he ventures is that demystificatory criticism tends to privilege mystification. Attwell’s criticism seems to me to be influenced by this discussion. (See, for instance, 118-19.)

    Works Cited

     

    • Attwell, David. “J.M. Coetzee and the Problem of History.” Trump 94-133. Rpt. Poetics Today 11 (Fall 1990): 579-615.
    • Chapman, Michael. “The Writing of Politics and the Writing of Writing: On Reading Dovey on Reading Lacan on Reading Coetzee on Reading … (?)” Rev. of Dovey. Journal of Literary Studies 4 (1988): 327-41.
    • Clingman, Stephen. “Revolution and Reality: South African Fiction in the 1980s.” Trump 41-60.
    • Coetzee, J.M. “Author on History’s Cutting Edge. South Africa’s J.M. Coetzee: Visions of Doomed Heroics.” Interview. Washington Post 27 Nov, 1990: C1, C4.
    • —. Foe. New York: Penguin, 1987.
    • —. “The Novel Today.” Upstream 6 (1988): 2-5.
    • Dovey, Teresa. The Novels of J.M. Coetzee: Lacanian Allegories. Johannesburg: Ad. Donker, 1988.
    • Fukiyama, Francis. “The End of History?” National Interest 16 (Summer 1989): 3-18.
    • Gallagher, Susan Van Zanten. A Story of South Africa: J.M. Coetzee’s Fiction in Context. Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1991.
    • Gordimer, Nadine. “The Idea of Gardening.” Rev. of Life and Times of Michael K. New York Review of Books 2 Feb. 1984: 3,6.
    • Penner, Dick. Countries of the Mind: The Fiction of J.M. Coetzee. Westport, CT: Greenwood, 1989.
    • Trump, Martin. Rendering Things Visible: Essays on South African Literary Culture. Athens: Ohio UP, 1990): 94-133.

     

  • Authorizing Memory, Remembering Authority

    Mark Fenster

    Department of Telecommunications
    Indiana University

    fenster@silver.ucs.indiana.edu

     

    Schudson, Michael. Watergate in American Memory: How We Remember, Forget, and Reconstruct the Past. New York: Basic Books, 1992.

     

    Zelizer, Barbie. Covering the Body: The Kennedy Assassination, the Media, and the Shaping of Collective Memory. Chicago: U of Chicago Press, 1992.

     

    Best Evidence is the story of my journey in search of the truth about the autopsy [of John F. Kennedy]. When my literary agent first read this manuscript, he said, ‘You have written a book about authority.’ No, I said, I’ve written a book about the assassination. I didn’t understand, but he did. This is a book about authority because it delves into the process by which we–as individuals and as a society–decide what is true and what is false; what is to be believed and what is not” (Lifton 1992, xviii).

     

    Michael Schudson’s Watergate in American Memory and Barbie Zelizer’s Covering the Body are quite removed from the often heady world of Kennedy assassination researchers, a world in which David Lifton is a lofty, though somewhat controversial figure. Schudson is a sociologist, Zelizer is in a rhetoric and communication department, and neither is interested in the minutiae of medical evidence and the geopolitical speculation that are at the heart of Warren Commission critics. However, they would both agree with Lifton that the debates around such “critical incidents” as the Kennedy assassination(s) and Watergate are indeed as much about authority as they are about “truth” and the never ending and seemingly impossible search for it. While Schudson and Zelizer have written very different books on these events and their implications in their own time and in the present, their projects are quite similar and are worthy of comparison for the study of social memory and contemporary culture.

     

    Specifically, they share the purpose of attempting to use the very problematic events that they discuss in order to make arguments about contemporary American culture. Schudson is interested in “collective memory,” and how societies institutionalize memories, and particularly historical memories, in cultural forms and social practices. Zelizer traces the establishment of journalistic authority in and over the Kennedy assassination–the title phrase, “covering the body,” refers to the actual media “coverage” of Kennedy and his death (ironically, the term was used before the assassination to refer to those whose beat was following the President to Dallas or wherever he went). Both authors, then, are using these events as case studies for projects that seek to move beyond mere historical chronicles, and this movement beyond history and into memory and authority are among the main strengths and weaknesses of these books. These were and remain, as both authors document, important events in recent American history and memory, and their reverberations throughout politics and culture are still felt; in the past year, for example, the twentieth anniversary of the Watergate break-in was commemorated by a CBS documentary, while a “Director’s Cut” of Oliver Stone’s controversial JFK has just been released on video, with a number of scenes “restored” from the shorter version that met the time constraints imposed by Time-Warner. As powerful historical events that took place at crucial conjunctures in recent American history, Watergate and the Kennedy assassination can tell us much about such diverse topics as the function of memory and the practice of journalism; however, as such, these events can and often do exceed such attempts to “use” them. In other words, because there is far more to Watergate and JFK’s assassination than the rather specific theoretical and political interests with which these authors come to these events, their attempts to somewhat sharply focus, or to cut off a discursive slice of an “event” in order to examine “American Culture,” at times yields frustrating results.

     

    * * * * *

     

    Zelizer is most interested in the “interpretive community” of journalists, and how the “cultural authority” of (certain) journalists is asserted and maintained. “Journalism,” in this sense, refers to more than merely the printed page or the broadcast; it comprises the discursive practices authorized and legitimated in professional meetings of journalists, journalism textbooks, codes of professionalism, journalists’ folklore, memoirs, historical accounts, etc. Zelizer argues that the overarching narrative of journalism and the journalist is a structuring principle of journalistic discourse; the journalistic community constitutes itself, she argues, via the stories it tells about itself in order to legitimate itself and what it does.

     

    Within this interpretive community and American culture in general, the Kennedy assassination serves as a “critical incident” (a moment ‘by means of which people air, challenge, and negotiate their own standards of action'[4]) in its historical position within the emergence of television news as a primary form of journalism, the chaotic circumstances of the assassination and the ability of the media to narrate and explain seemingly inexplicable information, and the close ties between the Kennedy administration and many members of the press. This was a story that was clearly “told” first and foremost by journalists–the trickling out of facts, the live coverage of the Oswald murder and the Kennedy funeral, and the early legitimation of the Warren Commission report were all dependent upon the reporting of the news media. And a number of prominent journalists, among them current CBS news anchor Dan Rather and Washington Post pundit David Broder, established themselves as important news figures while covering this event, and continue to keep the event alive within their own work and autobiographies (none more so than Rather, who seems to obsessively cover the story whenever it seems necessary for CBS to give it further prime time coverage). Zelizer is at her best when documenting and describing this obsessive use of the coverage by news organizations and journalists, and persuasively documents how journalists established themselves as “preferred spokespersons of the assassination story” (137).

     

    In addition, her discussion of the struggles over journalism’s association with this story provides a good framework for understanding both the conflicts between journalistic and historical discourse, and those between “legitimate” explanations of the assassination and the explanations offered by Warren Commission critics, as exemplified by Stone and JFK. By asserting themselves as main spokespersons of the assassination story, journalists and news organizations were, and remain, poachers on the territory of historians; this was, after all, a presidential assassination, and can only be understood, so historians argue, within its proper historical context and with the “disinterested” and distanced care of the historian. Yet the assassination remains in the realm of the popular; the “explanations” of the event provided by Dan Rather or James Reston are more widely circulated and have greater purchase on social memories of the event than those of prominent historians (the recent “forum” in the American Historical Review on JFK [1992] was itself a rather problematic attempt to enable historians to engage in the popular debate about the popular film).

     

    If historians represent one challenge to journalistic authority (or, more precisely, if journalists represent one challenge to the authority of historians), then Warren Commission critics represent a similar, though quite different struggle over the meaning of the event. Indeed, no group is more willing to provide an extended critique of the mass media and news organizations as instruments of propaganda than these “independent researchers,” who often come across as a poor person’s Noam Chomsky (this is intended as a compliment to the researchers). At the same time, the mainstream media view the work of these researchers with disdain, if indeed they view it at all. The incredible backlash against Stone and his film, which began before the film was even released, was, as Zelizer argues, as much an attempt to re-assert journalistic authority as it was an attempt to review a film; after all, if Stone was in any way correct, then journalistic accounts are willing or unwilling accomplices to a great cover-up. Thus the debate over the ethics of cinematic representation (i.e., which sequences and images were “real” and which were “fiction”?) was often a displacement of journalistic and mainstream political anxiety over who was telling the tale of the assassination and how it was being told. In this sense, this debate over the Kennedy assassination as a public event, no matter whether Stone is right, is very much about authority.

     

    Yet a central problem of the book lies precisely in questions that arise in Zelizer’s definition of “authority,” as she seems reluctant to explain fully how she would define journalistic (and media) authority. On the one hand, she wants to emphasize what she sees as a “collective” set of knowledge and practices, and she seems to reject or at least to modify the classic left association of the media with the protection of and assistance to power and influence in the transmission of ideologically limited and distorted information (6-7). And yet she closes her book with a discussion of the importance of an “acquiescent,” “relatively uncritical and inattentive” American public in the crafting of journalistic authority. How “collective” is a media complex so removed from an invisible and seemingly powerless public and dependent upon electronic media and stars, and how does journalistic authority survive if not via the transmission of certain types of narratives and not others?

     

    Despite these lingering political and theoretical questions, the book admirably meets its central objective of chronicling and critiquing journalistic discourses of authority. Yet it leaves me dissatisfied because of its inadequate recognition of what I would call the “excesses” of popular political/cultural events like the Kennedy assassination and Watergate. I’m referring here to both disciplinary and phenomenological excess: the assassination was “experienced” and continues to be remembered and “experienced” on a seemingly infinite number of personal, cultural and political levels, and can and has been argued over and “explained” by as many disciplinary authorities as have looked into it. This is why, in some ways, Don Delillo’s Libra can represent the event more powerfully than sociology of journalism can (or should be expected to); it is also why the vast and polymorphous corpus of pro- and anti-Warren Commission authors provides a fascinating, Joycean vision of virtually all aspects of the event.

     

    This is not to say that Zelizer’s project is inherently flawed or that it tells us nothing; rather, it represents a good starting point for understanding the workings of discursive practices of authority in popular historical events such as this. It does, however, mean that in so tightly focusing her study on an event that needs a very wide screen, her argument at times becomes diffused within the broader implications of the murder of a president. Her very controlled academic prose and her staid sociological approach can explain the workings of journalists quite well; yet they can only describe one aspect of the event and the discourse that surrounded and still surrounds it. And at times, this excess seems to overwhelm the book’s premise–after all, if, as polls indicate, the American public disbelieves the findings of the Warren Commission and distrusts the media, then what exactly does “journalistic authority” over the event amount to? What is an authority that has a virtual monopoly on the circulation of information and the construction of historical narratives, and yet is so ineffectual that after thirty years of reiterating its official story of the Kennedy assassination almost nobody appears to believe what it tells them? Sociology of journalism such as Zelizer’s can help us to understand the attempt to control the excess of events like the Kennedy assassination. It remains for further work to explain the institutional and popular practices that attempt, sometimes successfully, to exceed this control.

     

    * * * * *

     

    Schudson’s book is more directly concerned with issues that are central to theorizing the practices of postmodernity: the construction, circulation and institutionalization of memory. Like Zelizer, Schudson is interested in authority, although his emphasis is less on the interests of any one specific group than on the use of and struggle over the events and meanings of Watergate. The book is written in engaging and, compared with Covering the Body, relatively informal and enjoyable prose; it is also neat and tightly constructed, beginning with a concise discussion of theories of social memory, a review of the central political elements of Watergate, and a series of case studies of the use of memory in post-Watergate reform politics, journalistic practice, and historical accounts, as well as in popular culture, language, autobiographies of Watergate participants, and in the self-serving Richard Nixon Library. Among other uses Schudson describes, memories of Watergate have been “mobilized” for the sake of political careers, “contested” in political practice, “ignited” in the discourse surrounding the revelations of and responses to the Iran-Contra scandal, and “besieged” in Nixon’s campaign to restore his personal reputation. In addition, Schudson argues that the revelations of Watergate were easily articulated with growing suspicions and distrust of government (which, as he cogently asserts, had begun prior to Nixon’s fall) as well as with the release of information about the sins of the American security apparatus at home and abroad. At the same time, he demonstrates how the discourse concerning Watergate generally ignores a central source for the conflict between Nixon, the Congress, and popular protest–the Vietnam War and the secret bombing of Cambodia.

     

    Watergate in American Memory is particularly effective in its mapping out of the various reactions to Watergate by different political groups. Schudson divides and sub-divides such responses: first, in terms of whether the event was understood as a constitutional crisis (generally by liberal and conservative centrists) or a scandal (i.e., as a superficial “show” that covered up greater manipulation by elite groups, generally believed by what he terms “ultraconservatives” and the “radical left”), and then by virtue of whether the problem that Watergate represented was caused by systemic shortcomings within the American political system (liberals and leftists) or was peculiar to the Nixon presidency (centrists and conservatives of all stripes). Clearly, these differing reactions concern the construction of larger historical narratives and the placement of Watergate within these narratives; as Schudson argues, understanding and remembering Watergate is an ongoing process and struggle over identifying actors, motives and context.

     

    In this sense, Watergate represents the process of contemporary historical knowledge and memory; it was, at once, a Historical Event, an object of intense media scrutiny, and a site of popular knowledge and debate. Against the tirades of academics and intellectuals on the right and left which posit an American culture that lacks any memory of itself and others, Schudson conceives of a United States that immerses itself in certain texts and practices of popular history, such as the memory of the historical in relation to the personal remembrance, “amateur” historical research, and the popular political discourse of the mass media and everyday life. Like the Kennedy Assassination, Watergate is both popularly “forgotten” (in the “properly” historical sense of the knowledge of specific facts and human agents) and obsessed over in the struggle to understand and define the implications of these events and their relationship to the present. To remember Watergate is to remember Bob Woodward and Carl Bernstein, the Ervin committee hearings, and Robert Redford and Dustin Hoffman–thus illustrating the continuing importance of popular narratives and memories in understanding contemporary political events and crises. For the study of contemporary culture, this emergent notion of memory as popular and (mass) mediated rather than as authoritative and mediated through “proper” historical channels is of considerable value.

     

    My frustration with Schudson’s book is his tendency to set up a continuum of political and theoretical positions and to attempt to occupy what he constructs as a reasonable, yet transcendent, middle ground. This appears first in his validation and appropriation of virtually every political response to Watergate; he agrees, yet limits his own agreement, with those who see it as scandal and constitutional crisis, as peculiar to Nixon and as part of systemic problems with the Presidency. Unwilling to assume any one of these positions, he seems ready to occupy all at once. Yet taken to their logical conclusions, these positions are mutually exclusive: if Watergate was the successful resolution of a crisis through the removal of the constitutional threat and the reform of legislation and policy, then it could not have been a scandal constructed by the power or media elite to retain legitimacy for a corrupted system or to depose a conservative president. Similarly, while one might agree that Nixon’s was a singular presidency, the reign of Reagan was competitive in the breadth and fury of its domestic and foreign covert operations–and thus, clearly, Nixon’s singularity is far less significant than the systemic structures that allow for two such imperial presidencies in successive decades. While Schudson notes this, his apparent desire to remain above such “partisan” politics demonstrates an unwillingness to confront the issues of power that (what he might term) the “radical left” position would require of him. Because he chose Watergate as a case study of social memory, Schudson is obliged, it seems to me, to express a good deal more righteous indignation at the politics of the era and the treachery of the Nixon regime; this is neither a question of “objectivity” nor correct politics, but part of the terrain that comes with choosing such a controversial event for a case study of social memory.

     

    This becomes more apparent in his lack of a satisfactory theory of memory. He provides worthy critiques of some of the problems with “interest” theories (i.e., critical theories of the ideological uses of memory), “cultural” theories (the symbolic logic of remembrance within specific cultures) and social constructionist theories (the construction of the past in the memory of present observers), yet seems to argue neither for a singular different theory nor for one that appropriates the best aspects of all of them. While he posits memory as a “scarce resource” that is “handed down through particular cultural forms and transmitted in particular cultural vehicles” (207, 5), he seems unwilling to note the degree to which, in his case studies, it is the power and media elite who construct the dominant, though not unchallenged, narratives of Watergate. While one would certainly want to qualify simplistic notions of ideology that would claim such discourse as all-powerful, the sheer dominance of certain ways of understanding and using Watergate for political ends demonstrates the viability of radical critiques of dominant discourse. Clearly, “American memory” is a site of struggle, but one in which certain groups and interests enjoy greater ability than others to manage what is remembered and how it is remembered.

     

    If, as I would argue, an important dimension of postmodernity is the increasingly sophisticated array of strategies and technologies by means of which certain groups attempt to “manage” the construction and reconstruction of historical knowledge, then Watergate, as a text that was at its very core covert and opaque, seems a seminal example of the relationship between power, the realm of the political, and memory in contemporary American culture. As with the Kennedy assassination, memories of Watergate are aspects of the cultural struggle to construct and authorize certain narratives and explanations of the past. Zelizer and Schudson successfully document aspects of this process; the challenge for theories of postmodernity is to further map social memory within matrices of knowledge, power, and domination.

     

    Works Cited

     

    • “AHR Forum: JFK.” American Historical Review Apr. 1992: 486-511.
    • Lifton, David. Best Evidence. New York: Signet, 1992.
    • Stone, Oliver and Zachary Sklar. JFK: The Book of the Film. New York: Applause Books, 1992.

     

  • If I Only Had a Brain

    Steven Shaviro

    Department of English
    University of Washington
    shaviro@u.washington.edu

     

    Burroughs writes: “in this life we have to take things as we find them as the torso murderer said when he discovered his victim was a quadruple amputee.” Good advice for the anatomically deranged, like Cliff Steele. He’s a character in the DC/Vertigo comic book DOOM PATROL; I refer in particular to the issues written by Grant Morrison and illustrated by Richard Case, between 1989 and 1992 (#s 19-63). Cliff has a problem with his body, you see. It happened like this. He used to be a daredevil racing car driver; he had a horrible wreck. Nearly all of him was burned to ashes, but they snatched his brain from the flames. And then they implanted that brain in a new prosthetic body, all shiny metal, ultra high tech, a veritable fighting machine. Now Cliff is the muscle of the DOOM PATROL, a brain turned into brawn. They expect him to be a macho bruiser, when actually he’s quite sensitive underneath. And to add insult to injury, they call him Robotman–a name he violently hates. What would that do for your sense of self-esteem? The life of a superhero these days! Cliff thinks of himself as just a regular guy; Robocop fantasies are the last thing on his mind. But with a metallic casing like this, he can’t exactly blend into the crowd. It’s what Baudrillard calls hyper-visibility, the postmodern condition par excellence. No chance of chilling out with a secret identity, like old Clark Kent used to do. All this metal is a clunky encumbrance, no matter how great its tensile strength. You know you’re in bad shape when you bang your head against a wall, and you still don’t feel a thing. At this point, Cliff doesn’t even really know what his body can do. How good is all this cyber-tech stuff anyway? How accurate and detailed is sensory input? How fast is motor response? What unaccustomed relays and connections now trigger the pain and pleasure centers in Cliff’s brain? Will he ever be able to taste and smell? Can he ever have sex again? What about getting drunk or stoned? “The only good thing about having a human brain in a robot body,” Cliff remarks sardonically at one point, “is that it’s easier to control brain chemistry.” Just the touch of a button, and anxiety is dissipated, alertness is heightened, or memory is enhanced. But alas, this techno-manipulation seems to work only for utilitarian ends, and not for hedonistic ones. “Our machines are disturbingly lively,” Donna Haraway writes, “and we ourselves frighteningly inert.” It might not be so bad, if only you could get used to the situation. After all, Descartes argued long ago that the body is a machine. It shouldn’t matter all that much whether metal or flesh is the medium. In either case, it’s simply a matter of mastering the electrochemical interface: regularizing chains of association, facilitating neural feedback patterns, reinforcing the appropriate re-entrant connections. In short, a question of recognition and memory, of cultivating habits over the course of time. The problem is that Cliff’s mechanical body never stays the same. He’s continually being sent back to the shop for upgrades and repairs. Transistors burn out; programming errors and faulty couplings throw him off stride. He gets into fights, and enemies regularly mangle his metal to bits. As if that weren’t bad enough, Doc Magnus (who built and programmed his body in the first place) and Niles Caulder (the Chief of the DOOM PATROL) tend to use Cliff as a pawn in their ongoing professional rivalry. Neither of them is content to let well enough alone; they are both all too eager to retool him in order to try out their latest cybernetic design ideas. And let’s not even think about those insectoid aliens who at one point fit Cliff out in a new metal carapace with six legs. Life in a robot body, even if you’re strong, is just one humiliation after another. The persistence of memory in the brain only makes things worse. Amputees typically feel phantom sensations in their lost limbs; poor Cliff has this problem multiplied many times over. He must endlessly relive numerous episodes of mutilation and dismemberment. Neither Clint Eastwood nor Woody Allen–our two best-known icons of hetero-male angst–ever had to go through anything remotely like this.

     

    The worst part, though, is the waiting. All these body modifications take time, just as it takes time to alter a dress or a pair of pants. Cliff’s brain is disconnected meanwhile, and left in a vat of nutrient fluids. The experience isn’t exactly like returning to the womb. You don’t get some soothing “oceanic feeling”; rather, you freak out from sensory deprivation. The first stage is “boredom: hearing nothing, seeing nothing, experiencing nothing. Boredom and irritation and then panic.” Panic, because the brain (like nature) abhors a vacuum. So that’s when the hallucinations begin: “nightmares of sound and vision, grotesque sensory distortions.” Cliff is overwhelmed by paranoid delusions of a world controlled by malevolent insects and soulless infernal machines. “The body becomes remote, robotic, disconnected,” a symptom of the schizophrenic’s “sense of being abstracted from the day-to-day physical world.” But if this is the case with me, then what about other people? “Maybe I’m not the robot, and everyone else is.” It doesn’t help to realize that this is just a virtual world, and that your own brain is generating all these visions. If anything, such an awareness only makes things worse: your ontological insecurity is heightened, while the horrors you confront don’t for all that become any less vivid and intense. If only I could attribute these appearances to a malevolent programmer, to somebody like Descartes’ evil demon! Then at least I’d have the comfort of knowing that somebody else is out there, that I’m not absolutely alone. True hell for Cliff is the solipsistic universe of Bishop Berkeley, in which nothing exists except one’s own inner perceptions: a closed circle from which there is no escape.

     

    But fortunately this idealist delirium doesn’t last forever; eventually the hallucinations subside. Virtual reality is a great leveller: “nothing can pass through without being broken down, disintegrated.” And so Cliff finally reaches a sort of nirvana, “something I can’t describe: the center of the cyclone, the room without doors.” Now becoming grinds to a halt; time no longer passes, you have all the time in the world. Plenty of time to meditate upon the Smiths lyric that opens and closes one episode of DOOM PATROL: “Does the body rule the mind or does the mind rule the body?” The question resonates in the emptiness like a Zen koan: ironic, unanswerable, absurd. Meditate long enough, and the inner self, the first person of the Cartesian cogito, drops out of the picture. You’re left with the great postmodern discovery, anticipated alike by Hume and by the Buddhists: that personal identity is a fiction. The Cartesian subject disappears, together with all that it created. When I introspect deeply, I may come across all sorts of experiential contents and structures: feelings, desires, perceptions, memories, multiple personalities, and so on. But the one thing I am absolutely unable to find is myself.

     

    The conundrum of the brain in a vat is an old philosophical slapstick routine, our updated postmodern version of Descartes’ original Meditations. The question is always the same: how can I know for sure that these inner representations correspond to something out there, that what I experience is real? How can I be absolutely certain that I’m not just a disembodied mind dreaming the external world, or that it isn’t all a computer simulation fed into my brain through direct innervation of the neuronal fibers? The comedy lies in this: that it’s only my hysterical demand for certainty that first introduces the element of doubt. It’s only by subjecting myself to the horrors of sensory deprivation that I approach the delirious limit at which the senses become questionable. Descartes does just that in his Third Meditation: “I will now shut my eyes, stop my ears, and withdraw all my senses . . . .” Descartes “proves God,” as Samuel Beckett puts it, “by exhaustion.” As metaphysics goes, it’s the oldest trick in the book: first you take something away, then you complain that it isn’t there, and then you invent a theory grounded in–and compensating for–its very absence. Deleuze and Guattari call it the Theology of Lack. A seductive ruse, to be sure: once you accept the premises, you’ve already been suckered into the conclusions.

     

    “If I only had a brain . . . .” For as one character in DOOM PATROL remarks, “Descartes was nothing but a miserable git who never had a good time in his entire life!” Postmodern philosophers rightly reject the very logic that gets us into the dualist impasse. Descartes’ methodical doubt is ultimately a distinction without a difference, since it has no pragmatic consequences whatsoever. For consider the alternatives. Either there’s some telltale sign, which allows us empirically to determine whether or not we’re just brains kept in vats: in which case the whole sorry mess is merely a question of fact, without any deeper epistemological import. Or else, there’s no way of telling: but in this case, we have nothing to worry about, since experience remains the same one way or the other. “The mystery, as Cormac McCarthy’s Judge Holden says, “is that there is no mystery.” Perhaps the evil demon posited by Descartes gets some private, masturbatory delectation out of fooling us like this; but that needn’t be any concern of ours. For the evil demon can’t do anything to us, can’t harm us or change us or otherwise affect us, without thereby tipping his hand and revealing his existence. Descartes’ dilemma is resolved without dualism, then, and without positing a transcendent self, simply by noting that appearances and simulacra are themselves perfectly real. The cogito is reduced to a third-person tautology: things are exactly as they are, “everything is what it seems.” In this postmodern life, “we have to take things as we find them.”

     

    But such logic and such consolations are of little help to Cliff Steele, trapped as he is in all that heavy metal–except for the even worse times when his naked brain is actually left to stew and hallucinate in a vat. If modern Western rationality begins with Descartes’ self-mutilating gesture, perhaps it culminates in Cliff’s absurd disembodiment. For Cliff is the final, helpless, involuntary victim of a whole history of amputations. He iss compelled literally to live out the disabling paradoxes of Cartesian dualism. He suffers every day from schizophrenic disjunctions between the real and the imaginary, between self and other, between vitalism and mechanism, between mind and body. The problem may be a false one philosophically, but it’s still inscribed in our technology. Descartes’ idle speculations are now as it were incised in Cliff’s very flesh. Doc Magnus and the Chief mess with Cliff’s head more insidiously than the evil demon ever could. Their operations give dualism a delirious new twist: for now it’s Cliff’s mind that is materially incarnated, while his corporeality is entirely notional, virtual, simulacral. Such is our postmodern refinement of those old metaphysical endeavors to find the ultimate reality, to separate essence from accident. Descartes’ cogito and Husserl’s epoche were merely thought experiments; but now we can realize their equivalents in actual surgical procedures. Strip everything away that is not indubitably “Cliff Steele,” that is not necessarily contained in the very notion of his essence; and what’s left is precisely these three pounds of neuronal tissue, a fleshy lump “so full of water that it tends to slump like a blancmange if placed without support on a firm surface” (Anthony Smith, The Body). Since Cliff’s only ‘identity’ is that of this actual, physical brain, you might say that his sole grounding certitude is that he is an extended thing–as against Descartes’ claim to be a thinking thing. Just as you can’t make an omelette without breaking eggs, so you can’t get amputated unless you have a body.

     

    The Chief claims that the operation was a success, that it’s all turned out for Cliff’s own greater good. The old Cliff Steele, he says, was “selfish, arrogant, overconfident, ill-educated . . . a loudmouthed, misogynistic boor”; it’s only through the traumas of amputation and cyborgization that the new Cliff has “learned kindness and compassion and a selfless heroism.” DOOM PATROL is quite different from the revisionist superhero comics that made a big splash in the mid to late 80s: Alan Moore’s Watchmen (with Dave Gibbons), Frank Miller’s Batman: The Dark Knight Returns (with Klaus Janson and Lynn Varley), and Grant Morrison’s own Batman: Arkham Asylum (with Dave McKean). All these works “deconstruct” our familiar images of comic book superheroes. They go behind the scenes to reveal what we should’ve suspected all along: that Batman and all those other patriotic, costumed crime-fighters are really violent sociopaths with fascist-cum-messianic leanings and a kinky underwear fetish. Everything gets played out for these sordid characters in the registers of secrecy, disguise, and paranoia: literally in the form of their jealous anxieties about maintaining a “secret identity,” and more figuratively in terms of those notorious paradoxes of destroying the world in order to save it, or stepping outside of the law in order to enforce the law. As old Mayor Daley of Chicago once said, “the police are not there to create disorder; the police are there to preserve disorder.” Miller’s Batman and Moore’s tormented anti-heroes owe much to the creepy affectlessness and suppressed fury of Clint Eastwood’s Dirty Harry. Indeed, their hoods and masks go Clint one better, when it comes to maintaining an unreadable, deadpan exterior. The crimefighter’s costume is a literal “character armor,” rigidly neutralizing whatever may rage beneath–and thereby perpetuating the modernist fantasy that there is a “beneath,” something like manhood or interiority or selfhood. Most of these psychotic superheroes are still organically human; but it’s only one more step to outright cyborgs like Arnold Schwarzenegger’s Terminator and Peter Weller’s Robocop (in fact, Frank Miller wrote the scripts for Robocop II and III). And hasn’t there always been something cyborg-like about Clint? In these cyborg fantasy films, in any case, the superhero’s costume–I include Arnold’s muscles in this category–no longer works as a disguise. Now it’s a prosthetic organ of strength, a kind of supplemental, rebuilt manhood. Todd McFarlane’s comic book Spawn (a series to which Alan Moore and Grant Morrison have both contributed) presents an even more fascinating case. Here, the protagonist’s costume is not just an article of clothing, nor even a mechanical interface, but a living inhuman being in its own right: a sexually voracious, “constantly-evolving neural parasite” from Hell that brings Al Simmons back from the dead, heightens his metabolism, encases him in an unbreachable protective carapace, and takes command of his central nervous system. The image is definitely arthropodal: hard armor on the outside, guarding some soft squishy stuff within. Al’s body is nearly invulnerable; but this security only intensifies his hidden anguish. He wallows in the misery of living in back alleys with the homeless, and mourns the loss of his wife and child. And so Al gets to display his macho prowess, while at the same time laying claim to a deep inner sensitivity, a self-righteous feeling of vulnerability and victimization. Can Robert Bly and his “men’s movement” be far behind? Again and again it’s the same old story: a near-catatonic rigidity that can be breached only in outbursts of extreme cathartic violence, whether by banging drums in the woods, or by blowing away the slavering hordes of sickos and scumbags with your .357 Magnum. At least Clint has a keen sense of irony about it all–which is more than you can say for Bly or for Woody Allen. Some guys’ll do anything to redeem their lonely, frustrated lives. And so they endow their experience with a certain self-aggrandizing pathos, by entertaining reactive, resentful fantasies of masculinity under siege. It feels so good to be a victim, ’cause then you’ve got the perfect excuse to demand recompense, to make others pay like you’ve had to pay, to lash out at the bitch who started it all.

     

    A man’s gotta do what a man’s gotta do. You imagine your ‘manhood’ as something both strong and fragile, hard and tough and yet continually in peril. Like a penis that might go limp, or a mind weighted down with a body. But why even bother, why hold back? Why not just let yourself go? Why cling to this rigid exterior armor, why nurture this aggrieved inner self? Can Cartesian dignity mean that much to you? OK, OK, you’ll say–together with Descartes and with Arnold–this body is only a machine, but there’s still something inside that’s really me. I had to destroy my cock in order to save it: I tore it apart and had it recast in hard, cutting metal–a strategy implicit in many of these films, and savagely literalized in Shinya Tsukamoto’s Iron Man. McLuhan describes such techno-hysteria as an inevitable defensive reaction to change, “a desperate and suicidal autoamputation, as if the central nervous system could no longer depend on the physical organs to be protective buffers against the slings and arrows of outrageous mechanism.” But McLuhan also insists that there’s no backing away from the dilemma: “there is, for example, no way of refusing to comply with the new sense ratios or sense ‘closure’ evoked by the TV image.” It isn’t a question of adapting ourselves to the new technological environment, but of realizing that this technology already is our adaptation. We must cultivate the new sensations offered to us by our new organs. And if masculinity can’t keep up with the changes, then so much the worse for masculinity.

     

    Grant Morrison understands these dynamics better than anybody. His Batman: Arkham Asylum pushes the revisionist superhero comic to a parodic point of no return. Batman’s old enemies, now inmates of this asylum for the criminally insane, tauntingly invite him to join them. For isn’t the ‘virtual’ freedom of madness more appealing than the tedium of life in the ‘real’ world, “confined to the Euclidean prison that is sanity”? Batman is all too receptive to this seduction. He knows he’s as crazy as any of them, what with his bizarre fixations and his hysterical rage for order. He senses that walking through the doors of Arkham Asylum will be “just like coming home.” And indeed, once he arrives, the blood of self-mutilation flows unchecked. Virility crumbles in an onslaught of psychedelic dislocation. The Cartesian fiction of the mind as a faithful “mirror of nature” (Rorty) is shattered and scattered into the multiple grotesque reflections of the Asylum’s funhouse mirrors. The Joker captures Batman, but declines to unmask him and reveal his secret identity; for he knows that the Caped Crusader’s mask already “is his real face.” I’ve loved the Joker ever since I was a child, so I was thrilled by Morrison’s reinvention of his character. The Joker may well be a gleefully sadistic mass murderer, but he’s also an exemplary postmodern subject. For he “has no real personality; he creates himself each day. He sees himself as the Lord of Misrule, and the world as a theatre of the absurd.” The Joker responds to the “chaotic barrage” of his overloaded senses–the postmodern information glut–in a radically new manner. Not by choosing and discriminating among his perceptions; and not by striving to maintain a fixed ego structure. But simply by “going with the flow”; he immerses himself in the postmodern flux and just lets it all happen. Unlike Batman, the Joker no longer needs the “protective buffers” that McLuhan feared were numbing us to change. He knows that the only way out is first of all a way in and through. His great adaptive innovation is to hold nothing back; he lives and enjoys the postmodern condition, this mutation of our sensibility into non-linear, non-Euclidean forms. Far from being mad, the Joker may in fact represent “some kind of super-sanity . . . . a brilliant new modification of human perception, more suited to urban life at the end of the twentieth century.”

     

    The Joker’s difference from Batman parallels McLuhan’s distinction between hot and cool media. “A hot medium,” McLuhan says, “is one that extends one single sense in ‘high definition.’” Its chief characteristics are “homogeneity, uniformity, and linear continuity.” Hot media are imperious, unidirectional, even terroristic. They demand rapt contemplation or close, obsessive attentiveness. Your life at every second depends upon their dictates, and yet they leave you feeling strangely uninvolved. They keep you at a proper, ‘alienated’ distance, drawing you into a paranoid frenzy of endless interpretation. This is the culture of the Book: of fundamentalist Christians scrutinizing their Bibles, and of academic Marxists “reading” the insidious ideologies embedded in the seemingly innocuous practices of everyday life. Batman is a quintessentially hot figure, ever on the lookout for miniscule clues that will confirm his Manichean sense of the world’s depravity. Cool media, to the contrary, are ‘low-definition,’ and for that very reason “high in participation or completion by the audience.” Their sparse spaces welcome and envelop us. They are characterized by “pluralism, uniqueness, and discontinuity,” and they solicit high levels of feedback and involvement. A cool medium, McLuhan says in a famous pun, offers you a massage rather than a message: a multi-textured, tactile and sensual experience, rather than the rational finality of a meaning to be decoded. There is nothing to interpret. Instead, cool media invite the kind of open reception that Michael Taussig, elaborating on Walter Benjamin, calls distraction: “a very different apperceptive mode, a type of flitting and barely conscious peripheral visual perception.” This is the Joker’s random drift, a delirious passivity brilliantly adapted to our state of continual technological shock. With innovation running at so fast a pace, alienation is out of date. It’s no longer a case of me against the world. Contrary to the overwrought claims of Neil Postman, Jerry Mander, and other such high-minded media pundits, nobody’s ever been brainwashed by watching TV. In fact, most people talk back to their sets. As Clark Humphrey puts it, “people who consume lots of media are very cynical about what they’re consuming . . . . A typical nonviewer may believe almost anything, [but] a typical TV viewer treats everything with (excess?) skepticism.” Our cheerful postmodern skepticism–reacting as if everything were just “on TV,” or always already in quotation marks–is poles apart from modernist angst or from Cartesian methodical doubt. You can’t ever defeat the evil demon in open battle, but you can put him in his place once you realize that he has more in common with Chuck Barris and Maury Povich than he does with Satan or with God.

     

    You might say that when Cliff Steele lost everything except for his brain, he was thrust willy-nilly into this cool new postmodern world. With all his “protective buffers” gone, he was preadapted to change. He had no choice but to be plugged directly into the “extension of the central nervous system” that electronic media have made of our planet. The Chief is right: something inside Cliff has been altered forever, so there’s no point in even trying to recover what was lost. “We have to take things as we find them,” amputations and all. This is “what it’s like” to be a postmodern cyborg. Prosthetic surgery is painful, but it can powerfully renew our sense of involvement in the world. It’s all a question of where you locate the information interface: how much you can stand to lop off, or just how far back you’re willing to go. Daniel Dennett notes that the question of the interface is the fatal weak point of every mind/body dualism: how can something be wholly immaterial, and yet still have material effects? Descartes placed the transfer point in the pineal gland; phenomenologists extend it to the surface of the skin; spiritualists push it even further out, to the ectoplasmic aura that surrounds us like a crustacean carapace or a superhero’s sheath. But for Cliff it no longer makes sense even to draw the line. Neurons and wires are much the same stuff. The electro-chemical feedback loops that constitute Cliff’s brain are of the same nature as those that are wired into his prosthetic body, or that course across the entirety of the postmodern “global village.” Cliff’s feelings, like the ashes of his former body, are scattered more or less everywhere. But there’s no one single point at which the experiences become “his own.”

     

    So in this strange way, Cliff is the postmodern Everyman. He hasn’t quite become feminized, but at least he’s no “misogynistic boor.” It’s true that he suffers from a certain baffled frustration, from a perpetual sense of unfulfilled duty, from frequent bouts of self-pity, and from a chronic inability to relax. It’s true also that his lovely thirst for the concrete can’t be quenched by any number of virtual or psychedelic wonders. Nothing seems vital to Cliff any more; as his psychiatrist asks him at one point, “how must it feel to have saved a world you don’t really believe is worth saving?” But unlike the old superheroes, Cliff doesn’t feel any differently about the world than he does about himself. The distinction of inner and outer simply isn’t relevant any more. That’s why Cliff’s pathos has nothing vengeful about it; it can’t be seen as the reaction of a resentful masculine ego. This pathos is rather the very affect or quality of that ego’s having been dispersed. It’s the expression, not of Cliff’s subjectivity, but precisely of his no longer being a “subject” in the old Cartesian/Freudian sense. It’s the feeling of not having a center–but also of not even lacking one. A cool, prosthetic pathos, perfect for an age of television and computers. What is the ontological status of this “soul of a new machine” (as one episode of DOOM PATROL calls it), this deeply intimate, yet strangely unlocalizable, affect? Call it a secondary, sympathetic resonance; or an uneliminable redundancy; or an effect of multiple interference patterns; or an emergent property of information flows accelerated beyond a certain threshold. As Deleuze suggests, we need to replace the old phenomenological slogan (“all consciousness is consciousness of something”) with a new, radically decentered one: “all consciousness is something.” For this is what happens when your brain is plugged directly into the ‘real’ world’s “mixing board”; but also when it’s isolated in a vat, or when its contents are downloaded into the virtual-reality matrix of a supercomputer. Round and round and round it goes; where it stops, nobody knows. “Does the body rule the mind or does the mind rule the body? I don’t know.” No cogito, then; no ergo, and no sum. “I don’t know if the world is better or worse than it has been”–as Kathy Acker writes in a different context–“I know the only anguish comes from running away.”

     

  • Dynamic and Thermodynamic Tropes of the Subject in Freud and in Deleuze and Guattari

    Martin Rosenberg

    Visiting Assistant Professor
    Department of English
    Texas A&M University

    mer1911@tamvm1.tamu.edu

     

    [O]rators and others who are in variance are mutually experiencing something that is bound to befall those who engage in senseless rivalry: believing that they are expressing opposite views, they fail to perceive that the theory of the opposite party is inherent in their own theory.

     

    –Thrasymachus of Chalcedon

     

    Introduction

     

    In their recent work Qu’est-ce que la philosophie? (1991), Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari make explicit the role that the concept of chaos plays in their representations of subjectivity, with respect to philosophy, science and the arts.1 I wish to exfoliate the chaotic in Deleuze and Guattari’s works, for their analysis of the ways in which chaos may be used referentially in philosophy, science and the arts in this later work may interfere with readers’ attempts to grapple with manifestations of chaos as a referent in their earlier collaboration, the two volumes subtitled Captialism and Schizophrenia: Anti-Oedipus and A Thousand Plateaus. One way to make visible Deleuze and Guattari’s recourse to the chaotic in these two works is to examine the role that particular physics tropes play in their representation of subjectivity, especially since the tropes that model the subject in these two works engage agonistically with those that model subjectivity in the works of Sigmund Freud.2

     

    The descriptions of human consciousness in Freud and in Deleuze and Guattari are problematic precisely in their inverse, mirrored opposition, and we may discover the “ground” for that opposition by examining the role played by tropes from the discipline of physics in these theorists’ representations of subjectivity. We will need to notice particularly the historical differences in the ideological use of these tropes–at the end of the nineteenth century, and since the mid-twentieth century. As we will see, these two periods are interesting because they represent moments when the term entropy, a concept describing the amount of disorder in a physical system, has very different meanings– in physics, and in the cultural matrix as well. In the mid- to-late nineteenth century, entropy (in the context of equilibrium thermodynamics) refers largely to terminal processes of disorder for a physical system; since the nineteen-sixties, however, entropy (in the context of non- equilibrium thermodynamics) came to be understood as an initial condition enabling greater order and complexity in a physical system. Since Freud draws on the first version of entropy as referent, and Deleuze and Guattari draw on the second version of entropy as referent, two questions emerge: Can we say that Freud and Deleuze and Guattari are making the same claims for tropes of chaos (or entropy, or disorder) as grounds for their contending representations of subjectivity? If so, what can we then say about the stability of such claims for a correspondence between laws of physics and the forces and processes of human consciousness? In order to confront these questions, we should first examine trope theories that might illuminate the problematic construction of correspondences.

     

    Physics and Tropes

     

    The problematic of the subject becomes the problem of representation when the particular forms of representation of the subject, such as tropes, come into question. This problem of representation then requires a rhetoric of the tropes of subjectivity that will discover the relationships among particular tropes representing specific functions of consciousness, such as the dreamwork, or the Oedipal scenario.

     

    By the term trope, we may refer to what Hayden White calls the irreducible nature of metaphor in imaginative and realistic discourses. A trope is a turn of phrase that links an abstract concept to the physical world, and as such, establishes a correspondence between the physical world and human ideation. According to White, tropes are “inexpungeable from discourse in the human sciences” (White 1-2). In other words, for White, every trope is a fiction, the authorship of which all writers must deny, in order to preserve their claim for the truth-content of their discourse. But even contemporary theories of tropes have had recourse to the discipline of physics in order to model how tropes work. Thus, for the sake of this inquiry, we must first question the motives for such recourse, not only in psychology, but in theories of the trope as well.

     

    Jacques Derrida argues that tropes (or one particular form, metaphors) function explicitly as the onto-theological manifestation of a “White Mythology” that tolerates a “provisional loss of meaning” to arrive at “what is proper” (Derrida 45). Tropes demonstrate their truth-content by grounding discourse in the phenomenal world, with the given that there must be some essential connection posited between word and thing:

     

    Like mimesis, metaphor comes back to physis, to its own truth and its presence. Nature always finds in it its own analogy, its own resemblance to itself, and finds increase there only of itself.(Derrida 45)

     
    Yet Derrida argues that metaphors serve both to “menace” and to function as “accomplices.” They menace by the way that the connection between name and thing is subject to “wear and tear” (13): by the tendency of tropes to wear themselves out like coins through the “repetition” of use; and by tearing that precise link between name and thing through deviation, or tropical “divergence” (71).

     

    Derrida associates this precise link with “Physis,” or the claim for natural law, a law that apparently must decay, “wear and tear” through time–as implied by the nineteenth-century conventional understanding of the thermodynamic term entropy as a kind of end-game. Both Jacques Derrida and Harold Bloom have noticed that interest in tropes and in entropy coincided in the middle of the nineteenth century (Derrida 60-74; Bloom 83-105). Yet, according to Derrida, tropes are also accomplices, allowing for “an inevitable detour,” in order to maintain “a horizon of circular reappropriation of the proper sense” (Derrida 73). That sense, of course, remains dependent upon the fiction that there lies an essential connection between word and thing: these tropes imply a correspondence between a pull or force among planets in a solar system, and with the sun; or, among electrons swarming around a nucleus and the energized link among the tropes in a system of signification, with the significance that it surrounds. As opposed to the borrowing of thermodynamic tropes to describe the irreversible decay of an individual sign, here systems of signification are described with reference to the reversible laws of dynamics–Newtonian mechanics and quantum mechanics. Here one finds the conceit that the irreversible “decay” of individual signs can be arrested by situating signs in a system governed by stasis, or inertia. After all, it was Friedrich Nietzsche who said: “What is Truth? Inertia; that hypothesis which gives rise to contentment; smallest expenditure of physical force, etc.” Will to Power 291).

     

    Derrida’s deconstructive agenda involves demonstrating both the instability of individual signs, and the contradictory traces always present within the inertia of a system of signification. William R. Paulson has argued that Derrida draws on information theory, on the relationship between entropy as formulated in physics, and “noise” in the channel between sender and receiver as a problematic (1988, 26-28, 92-99). In this view, Derrida seeks therefore to subvert philosophical discourse by foregrounding the noise present in every possible message. More recently, Alex Argyrous explores Derridean discourse by formulating a theory of order which emerges out of the noise generated by his tactics, thus presenting a positive gloss on what Derrida’s critics have argued constitutes a nihilistic agenda (1991, 57-85). Yet Hans Kellner identifies the agenda of all tropical relations metaphorically (!) with catastrophe theory, particularly with the relations established in the shift from one master trope to another, as suggested by Vico’s notion of “ricorso” (1981, 24-28).

     

    Within the field of trope theory, we can demonstrate the instability of a tropical system, based as it is on “circular reappropriation,” by observing trans-disciplinary borrowings. In recent theories of rhetoric, there has been a return to the four master tropes discussed by Aristotle– metaphor, metonymy, synecdoche and irony–in order to ground trans-disciplinary borrowings.3

     

    Both Hayden White and Frank D’Angelo have asserted the primacy of the four master tropes from Aristotle’s Rhetoric to demonstrate the stability of certain cognitive structures beneath specific disciplinary formations, history and psychology. They argue that Freud’s mechanisms of the dreamwork–which would be useful to review here: condensation, displacement, representation and secondary revision–are their psychological equivalents. Condensation, the process of fusing several elements or images into one, is equivalent to metaphorical identification; displacement, by which one idea, image or element “surrenders to another, signaling a shift in meaning and emotional intensity,” is equivalent to metonymic displacement; representation, the “process of transposing ideas, feelings into symbols,” is equivalent to synecdoche; secondary revision, which with the help of an analyst converts dream elements into comprehensive form through the intrusion of self-conscious distance, is equivalent to irony.4

     

    We may accept or reject D’Angelo’s more pointed defense of the continued study of classical rhetoric by positing (in cognitive psychology) an ontological ground for the four master tropes. Still, and this is crucial, that rhetoric may supply tropes for clinical psychology, and that developmental psychology may provide tropes for rhetoric, indicates the potential circularity inherent in any attempt to ground tropes by recourse to other disciplines. For example, White becomes quite dependent upon a cultural application of Freud’s psycho-analytic approach when he claims that within a cultural field, schemes of tropes function “unconsciously” (White 13-20), thus circulating the grounds of his discourse between psychoanalysis and linguistics, with reference to the work of Jacques Lacan. White’s key word for describing tropical function here is defense, and I am most directly interested in exploring the defensive posture implicit in the recourse to tropes from other disciplines.

     

    As Hayden White points out, Harold Bloom has taken the further, Freudian step in pronouncing tropes “the linguistic equivalent of a psychological mechanism of defense” that, while directed “against literal meaning in discourse,” must always assume that literal meaning is something possible (Bloom 88). For Bloom, however, literal meaning is “death,” what would occur if electrons spun into the nucleus, or planets spiraled into the sun. Bloom refers here, of course, to Freud’s Life and Death drives. Thus, out of “survival,” tropes form a reversible system of false signification that he compares to Newtonian mechanics (93), or even to a chess game (96), both of which are premised on reversible laws. This suggests that even what Bloom calls the romantic undoing [kenosis] of an existing tropical system marks merely the commitment to a “personalized countersublime” that itself then systematizes suddenly freed tropical patterns in order to avoid the “threat” of the literal meaning that is death (Bloom 89). We have here a physics of romantic revolution, of private epistemic shifts, a physis of deterritorializations and reterritorializations of the tropical approximations that constitute the limits of representation.

     

    Yet we must force Bloom’s influence theory into a further step that he would resist, by insisting that tropes “defend” an ideological as well as a psychological state, and thus that the disintegration of an accepted tropical field constitutes a public as well as a private event. Scientists resort to tropes of cultural phenomena to make their explanations of physical forces and processes accessible; social philosophers, artists and psychologists resort to tropes from physical forces and processes in order to similarly explain cultural, aesthetic and psychological phenomena. This borrowing from other disciplines reveals, first, a consensual dependence upon a given set of assumptions about the laws governing physical or human phenomena to which these tropes refer; and second, a mutual complicity in suppressing the fictive nature of the tropes that are used. Thus, physicists, philosophers, artists and psychologists betray their dependence on the fictive correspondence between the laws governing nature and the laws governing culture because it makes their thoughts intelligible. Furthermore, this dependence points ultimately to an essentialist perspective underlying even the thoughts of those whose project is to demystify, to deterritorialize old systems of tropical approximations. We address, therefore, how the institution of the avant-garde functions in complicity with the dominant systems it seeks to destabilize. But, before discussing historical examples of this complicity in two avant-garde moments in the history of theories of the subject, Freud’s, and Deleuze and Guattari’s, we should address motive more directly.

     

    The problem of cross-disciplinary borrowing becomes complicated further by the relative status of each discipline in the cultural field. By this I mean that the borrowing of physical tropes by the arts, philosophy and psychology marks their marginalized position more than their cosmological reach. In contrast, the borrowing of cultural tropes (Richard Feynman’s use of the chessboard to describe the laws governing the interactions of sub-atomic particles, for example) to illustrate physical laws extends mastery, which in turn reflects the domination of the sciences across the spectrum of social discourses. As Michel Serres writes of the poverty of literature:

     

    Science is on the side of power, on the side of effectiveness; it has and will have more and more credit, more intellectual and social legitimacy, and the best positions in government; it will attract strong minds--strong in reason and ambition; it will take up space.(1990, 4)

     
    Here, Serres emphasizes the legitimating power as well as the fictiveness of tropes from physics, and we must recognize, when examining the internally contradictory use of these tropes, that the motive for constructing such correspondences lies with the will to power. The source of internal contradiction generated by the tropes themselves comes from an ideological difference, a struggle from within the discipline of physics itself. This struggle arises out of the difference between the precision possible with the time-reversible geometrical perspective usually associated with dynamics, and the statistically-approached contingencies of the time-irreversible perspective normally associated with equilibrium and non-equilibrium thermodynamics.

     

    Here I am drawing on the works of Ilya Prigogine, particularly on his work to make visible an ideological war within the physical sciences, a war of what he calls “Clashing Doctrines,” between time-reversible and time-bound models of physical processes. In this “war,” time-bound theories are marginalized by time-reversible theories. Prigogine’s work in the physics of turbulent systems far- from-equilibrium brought him the Nobel Prize in Chemistry (1977), not Physics. A further illustration of the marginal status of Prigogine’s own work comes from chaos theory, which was introduced to the public through James Gleick’s popular work, Chaos. This work emphasizes the geometry of fractals without once mentioning Ilya Prigogine’s works on self-organizing systems (Gleick, 1990; 1984, 1-26 and 79-102). Yet Prigogine’s work may provide the most help in confronting problems created by the ideological appropriation of tropes from physics by other disciplines.5

     

    We can situate the historical determinants of the construction of theories of subjectivity by identifying tropes from the very different conceptions of physical laws, identified here simplistically by the familiar terms dynamics and thermodynamics, as they are found in the works of Freud and in the works of Deleuze and Guattari.

     

    After discussing dynamics and thermodynamics, particularly with reference to the internal combustion engine, we will then limit discussion to the allusions to machinery in Freud’s description of dreamwork and of the unconscious; and to Deleuze and Guattari’s description of human consciousness as an aleatory subject embedded in the schizo-fluxes of cultural machinery as a means of resistance to these machines of cultural signification. Finally, we will address Deleuze and Guattari’s transgressive yet fundamentally complicitous relationship with the Freudian hegemony of the subject’s representation.

     

    Dynamics and Thermodynamics

     

    The mechanistic world-view of dynamics involves the study of matter and its interactions; that is, the dynamic view reduces natural events to simple laws that can explain the motion of planets, cannon ball trajectories, the movement of molecules and atoms, the interactions of sub- atomic particles, even the time-lines of Einstein’s Twins. Crucial to the success of this view is the search for absolute precision in the description of these forces, in accounting for the history of, and in predicting the future of the systems upon which these forces work. This precision becomes actualized by the capacity of calculus to determine mathematically the time-line of any dynamic system by freezing time itself into an infinite series of still frames, thus tracing that system into the past or into the future at will.

     

    This assumption of absolute certainty as the criterion for the success of physical investigations was challenged for the first time in the mid-ninetenth century by the Second Law of Thermodynamics, equilibrium thermodynamics, or entropy: given any isolated system, that system moves in the direction of greater entropy or disorder. Articulated further by Boltzmann’s Order Principle (given a closed system, that system will always choose the direction of greatest probability), this Second Law forces observers to recognize the roles that randomness and the irreversibility of time play in physical processes: a Mazda Miata is more likely to turn into a pile of rust then a pile of rust will turn into a Mazda Miata. Most important, however, the state of any system is perpetually contingent until it arrives at its rest state or equilibrium. The precise predictions possible in charting a planetary system, or in plotting the recursive trajectories of comets, are impossible in the investigation of processes governed by thermodynamic laws.

     

    In dynamics, therefore, we have precision and certainty in the prediction of the behavior of any system; in thermodynamics, we have only statistical probabilities that remain contingent until equilibrium or, in the case of non-equilibrium thermodynamics, a steady-state is achieved.

     

    In the design of the internal combustion engine, we have a relationship between dynamics and thermodynamics that illustrates through metaphor, first, the hegemonic domination of dynamics within physics, and second, Freud’s agonistic model of the subject as a dynamic equilibrium of (dynamic) drives forcefully modulating unconscious (thermodynamic) processes.

     

    Prigogine argues that as engineering became the context for the question of thermodynamic processes (mechanical, thermal or chemical), two constraints on the observation of those processes emerged. First, the classical method for accounting for every element in a system became replaced by statistical approximations called “macroscopic parameters.” Second, “boundary conditions” needed definition to account for the relationship between the system and its surroundings (1984, xxx). In engines, these referred, first, to the need for statistical analysis in order to predict the behavior of the energy utilized by the engine; and second, to the need to account for the active movement of that energy from one part of an engine to another, as well as the loss of energy from the engine altogether.

     

    Internal combustion engines require two systems, each with a different energy level, to accomplish work. If both systems can be the source of heat flow from hot to cold, then any engine is reversible in the dynamic sense. Yet the Second Law also describes a universal tendency to erase thermal difference through diffusion, resulting in a limit to the utility of controlling heat to produce work. If engines depend upon the Second Law to do work, and yet have to fight the Second Law to do work, then two constraints occur: engines function inefficiently, and there is a limit to the amount of energy available. This does not mention the threat to the integrity of the mechanical system that friction produces, as well as threats created by imperfections in the dynamic system itself: there are limits to precision even in the manufacturing of the parts for the engine.

     

    Thus, the industrial revolution brought about a war of domination by applying the principles of dynamics to mechanical dissipative structures against the inefficiencies that plague those systems. These inefficiencies are due, in turn, to processes governed by the same law of thermodynamics that enable work to be generated by dynamic machines in the first place. In the nineteenth century, the contradictions inherent in the application of dynamic systems and thermodyanmic processes culminates in a world- view, best described by Lord Kelvin, that the universe itself tends toward the degradation of mechanical energy. As Prigogine notes:

     

    This world is described as an engine in which heat is converted into motion only at the price of some irreversible waste and useless dissipation. Effect-producing differences in nature progressively diminish. The world uses up its differences as it goes from one conversion to another and tends toward a final state of thermal equilibrium, "heat death." (1984, 115-116)

     
    The philosophical implications for this irreversible process were not lost on the nineteenth-century mind. Aside from the shift from a fascination with system and classification in the eighteenth century to the seeming domination of time over the imaginations of all the disciplines in the nineteenth century, the association of time with disorder, decay and death shaped the imaginations of social philosophers such as Henry Adams and Oswald Spengler well into the twentieth century. Here we may situate Freud’s recourse to the discipline of physics in modeling the unconscious and the dreamwork, while anticipating the cultural as well as clinical implications of Deleuze and Guattari’s polemical statement that “Everything is a machine” Anti-Oedipus 2, 8).

     

    Physics, Hegemony and the Freudian Subject

     

    If we examine the stages of the dreamwork– condensation, displacement, representation and secondary revision–these stages seem similar to the stages of the function of a steam engine as it does work. Condensation, or the mixing and fusing of disparate elements into one, corresponds to the initial activity of the chamber, the function of which is to mix coal or other fuel and oxygen before ignition produces heat. Displacement, or the surrender of meaning and emotion as it is transferred from one image to another, corresponds to the generating of heat in the chamber after ignition, that is then channelled to the steam engine used to drive the machinery being worked.

     

    Representation, or the translation of those elementary ideas and feelings into symbols, corresponds to the commodity that can be manufactured by harnessing the process of conversion taking place in the secondary chamber of the machine. Secondary revision, or the conversion of the elements of the dream into coherent form with the aid of a therapist, corresponds to the attachment of public value to the commodity created by this dream machine. The dreamwork, then, modulates the flow of desire through a process that transforms that desire into a system of valuation cultured, even manufactured (in process), with the aid of the therapist.

     

    Psycho-analysis, in this sense, becomes one of many cultural machines that control desire. Furthermore, Freud describes thought itself as the fundamental transformation: the sublimation of effulgent desire becomes by itself a threat to the health of the system that generates the desire in the first place. The purpose of thought itself, of which the dreamwork is only one manifestation, is to channel the libido, defined thus in thermodynamic terms, into acceptable behavior. As Freud writes in The Ego and the Id:

     

    If this displaceable energy is desexualized libido, it may also be described as sublimated energy . . . . If thought processes in the wider sense are to be included among these displacements, then the activity of thinking is also supplied from the sublimation of erotic motive drives.(45)

     
    In other words, the entire subject-system, expressed in terms of the Id, Ego and Superego, can be made to correpond to a mechanical dissipative structure, in which desire, as heat or entropy, motivates the system, and is modulated through drives for the purposes of psychological survival.

     

    LaPlanche and Pontalis have identified two different subject-systems in Freud’s works: the narcissistic ego/ideal-ego system; and the superego/ego-ideal system (1973, 144-5, 201-2). Both systems modulate flows of sublimated energy-desire to different ends. One may inquire (as LaPlanche does, for example) into how these differing structures function in terms of the life and death drives respectively (1976, 8-24), especially if we remember Bloom’s conceit that the literalization of tropes brings “death” to the system-subject. What most concerns us, though, is that the function of the subject appears to be the control of energy-as-desire, to limit the representations of motivated thought by modulating motivated thought through systems that drive thought into acceptable forms. If forms are unacceptable, as in the case of disturbing dreams, the function of psychoanalysis, with reference to dreamwork, is to remodulate desire through a symbolic system navigated, and therefore mapped, in the dynamic, geometrical sense, by the therapist. To undertand how this system might work at the level of culture-dynamics, we should digress briefly to the work of Peter Stallybrass and Allon White.

     

    In The Politics and Poetics of Transgression, Stallybrass and White demonstrate, first, the disappearance of carnival forms in Northern European (British) society, and second, the reconfiguration of the carnivalesque into the lowest and basest of social interactions, that become a threat to emerging middle-class values (1986, 1-26). In two chapters on Freud, these authors demonstrate the function of the unconscious as the seat of the carnivalesque in the discourse of the bourgeoisie, the seat of dissolved hierarchies and vital turbulence that threatens the carefully modulated orderings of the European middle-class. They also demonstrate the institutions of control, associated with the Family Romance, that enforce the control of desire, seated in the Id, through the triangulation of the Oedipal scenario (149-91). As we have seen, the dynamic forces modulating the thermodynamics of desire for the individual, as a synecdoche, are now applied to the dynamic control of entropic forces throughout culture as a whole.

     

    It will now be useful to negotiate a transition from Freud’s Oedipus to the anti-oedipal strategies of Deleuze and Guattari by situating the public mechanisms at work at the level of individual neurosis and psychosis.

     

    In Deleuze and Guattari’s collaborative volumes, Anti-Oedipus and A Thousand Plateaus, lies a Nietzschean synthesis of the Marxist theory of production (dominated, as it is, by the dynamics and thermodynamics of the Industrial Revolution), and by Freud’s theory of the libido. They do so through the conflated term “desiring-production.” They state that the Oedipal scenario structures desire in capitalist countries, and that psychoanalysis helps to enforce the restrictions imposed by that structure. Also, they agree with the Marxist formulation that capitalism reduces all human interactions to “commodity-relations of universal equivalency.” As Ronald Bogue points out, capitalism therefore “deterritorializes” desire by exploding not only the limits created by the Oedipal scenario, but the limits created by other traditional structures as well (1989, 88-92). Yet capitalism also “reterritorializes” desire by forcing it to manifest itself through the network of commodity relations. While Oedipus helps to focus human desire through the family, leaving its residue to wander the leveled field of “universal equivalency,” capitalism also generates “schzophrenic fluxes,” a mixing up of material and human refuse in the diffused heat of undifferentiated desire which, if all goes well, is redirected through the Oedipal machinery. As trope, the “residue” of desire– “schizophrenic fluxes” of human and material refuse–makes sense when we recognize its thermodynamic origin, while tropes for capitalism and psychoanalysis take on the dynamic properties of machines modulating “fluxes.”

     

    Deleuze and Guattari then define clinical schizophrenia as the psychological equivalent of a thermodynamic state of equilibrium, the human refuse (institutionalized or not) in which the machinery of Oedipus, and even the more primal subject-structures, have been overthrown. Their project is to build a psychoanalysis, aesthetics and politics that valorizes the schizo-flux. They provide a schizo-analysis of the multiple cultural machines of desiring-production, and a program for resistance to those machines.

     

    Deleuze and Guattari’s program for resistance lies in two related tropes for thought and action: the nomad and the rhizome. Representing subjective and cultural contingency on the one hand, and spontaneous aggregation of contingent subjective and cultural formations on the other, these terms constitute a theory of self-organization: the nomad and the rhizome have explanatory power across the human sciences: the writings of Kafka, the contingencies and collectivity of jazz performance, Pynchon’s Tristero postal subculture, the multiple human formations of the dance troop Pilobolus (itself a name for a rhizome), the “cells” of the Kuwaiti resistance.

     

    Physis, Nomos and the “Grounds” for Subjectivity in Deleuze and Guattari

     

    First of all, it should be clear that Deleuze and Guattari merely valorize the heat-energy fluxes (limited by Freud to the chamber of the subject-machine as dissipative structure) over the machine itself: they argue for the sustained play of entropic thought and action, as that play may exist independent of the machinery that depends upon entropy to produce work and controls the chaos that seems necessarily to pose a threat to the system itself. Up until this point we have been discussing entropy as an end-game phenomenon, but it is precisely Prigogine’s work, over the last thirty years, on processes of self-organization possible in chaos or turbulence, that may provide a model for how Deleuze and Guattari’s answer to Freud is not merely destructive, but nihilistic in the affirmative sense. We will then need to confront how their response to Freud also remains complicitous in the rhetorical sense.6

     

    Yet Deleuze and Guattari are sly, and they do not wish to seem invested in an essentialist correspondence between the laws of physics and the laws that may govern consciousness and culture. In the chapter from A Thousand Plateaus, entitled “1227: Treatise on Nomadology–The War Machine,” Deleuze and Guattari analize war by opposing chess and Go as opposing game theories: “from the standpoint of the game pieces, the relations between the pieces and the space involved” (1987, 34-52-3). Yet this concept of war involves processes within the subject as well as the most violent manifestations of social dynamics. While Deleuze and Guattari state that “Chess is a game of State, or of the court; the emperor of China played it” (352), we must also remember that chess tropes signifying systems that determine the socially-constituted subject, with rigid rules governing identity. Go pieces, on the other hand, “have only an anonymous, collective or third-person function,” with “only a milieu of exteriority, or extrinsic relations” (353). The properties of Go involve not semiotic precision but strategic flows that obey not cause and effect, as with chess, but dissemination that is contingent upon situation. They write, “it is a question of arraying oneself in an open space, of holding space, of maintaining the possibility of springing up at any point: the movement is not from one point to another, but becomes perpetual, without aim or destination, without departure or arrival” (353).

     

    The oppositions in the tropes generated by their analysis of these two games are useful for our purposes: a closed system against an open system; precise identity against the anonymity of numbers; determined trajectory of the pieces against contingent dissemination; fixed function against virtual potential. Clearly, these tropes from chess and Go draw respectively on the opposing models of pysical forces and processes, the dynamic and the thermodynmic.

     

    We should note that by opposing the “‘smooth’ space of Go against the ‘striated’ space of chess,” Deleuze and Guattari make the distinction between the “Nomos of Go against the State of chess, nomos against polis” (353). By opposing polis to nomos, they imply that chess is premised upon physis, or natural law, while Go is premised upon nomos, or law agreed upon by convention. In their discourse, Go is valorized over chess in order to valorize nomos over the State’s claims for physis. Deleuze and Guattari assault the assumptions of natural law, proposing their avant-garde social philosophy in order to demystify the State. They do so by denying the correspondence between the laws of nature and the laws describing forces governing culture (physis). In their discourse, the laws of nature refer specifically to classical mechanics, and especially to the chess tropes used by Richard Feynman to describe the dynamics of quantum electrodynamics and by Saussure to describe the laws governing signification.7

     

    But in using the game of Go as a source of tropes, Deleuze and Guattari must make recourse to physis themselves by valorizing contingency and aggregation as an essential condition of nomadic and rhizomatic thought and action. These concepts refer respectively to the initial conditions necessary for thermodynamic processes (contingency as a condition of freedom), and to one possible behavior for physical systems governed by those processes (prairie grassroots as a collectivity of blades of grass; slime mold as an aggregation of unicellular nomads).

     

    We can trace fairly precisely a genealogy of concepts related to equilibrium and non-equilibrium thermodynamics in Gilles Deleuze’s earlier works, indicating his debt to nineteenth and twentieth-century theories of chaos or disorder that provide the tropical grounds for his theory of subjective and collective resistance to cultural machinery. In Nietzsche and Philosophy (1962, 83), Deleuze describes Nietzsche’s Eternal Return as the return to difference, not sameness, an analysis of the contingent dimension of cultural systems and human consciousness affirming for any physical system, and, by implication, any human subjective or cultural system, the always-already contingency of past and future as it is reformulated in every present moment. This seems, in turn, to indicate a reformulation of Boltzmann’s Order Principle, first defined in Deleuze’s earlier Bergsonism (1966, 1988). In this work, Deleuze defines Bergson’s theory of creative evolution as a dialectic between contingent duration as “pure becoming” and the memory of a system engaged by elan vital or a physical/metaphysical principle of desire, a dialectic explored with remarkable subtlety in his recently translated Difference and Repetition (1968; 1993, forthcoming), particularly when repetition becomes a referent for pathology applicable both to the individual isolate and to the cultural field. The specific applications of these concepts–of the Eternal Return and of contingent duration as Becoming to human subjectivity and to the forces and processes of culture–lead to the nomad, and to nomad thought (“Nomad Thought” 1973, 1985). This is true as well of the passages on becoming as an initial condition for schizophrenia in The Logic of Sense (1969; 1990). This genealogy, in turn, helps to locate in Deleuze’s corpus, as well as in his collaboration, a continuous commitment to the concept of an intense, irreversible and irresistible impetus underlying the relational grids superimposed upon the subject by various visible and invisible cultural machines, machinery that produces aesthetic objects such as cinema (see Cinema I [1983, 1986] and Cinema II [1985, 1989]), or fiction Proust and Signs [1964, 72]; Kafka: Toward a Minor Literature [1975, 1986]). And it is in The Logic of Sense that Deleuze first comes to terms with the cultural as well as clinical implication of schizophrenia as a theory of subjective and cultural chaos (1-3, 82-93). With the help of Felix Guattari, Deleuze offers in A Thousand Plateaus an extended meditation on the role of Becoming as a form of resistance (232-309), a role recognized in Brian Massumi’s recent reading of the two-volume Capitalism and Schizophrenia.8

     

    But what interests us further in this passage on game theories of war are the attempts to disguise the nature and function of the system of tropical oppositions that I have demonstrated are crucial to Deleuze and Guattari’s representations of subjectivity. We can find other examples of oppositions disguising a recourse to physis.

     

    Deleuze and Guattari’s recourse to the thermodynamics of open systems far-from-equilibrium, systems grounded in contingency and multiplicity, permeable membranes instead of rigid lines, enables them to articulate their program against the laws of dynamics as applied to human affairs, while hiding their own affiliations with the claim for physis:

     

    A rhizome has no beginning or end; it is always in the middle, between things, interbeing, intermezzo. The tree is filiation, but the rhizome is alliance, uniquely alliance. The tree imposes the verb "to be," but the fabric of the rhizome is the conjunction "and...and...and...." (A Thousand Plateaus 25)

     
    Here we may find, hidden in this parable of two opposing “organic” tropes (the arboreal against the rhizomatic), the implicit reference to the structures of dynamics against the processes of thermodynamics–the definitive static, vertical structure of the tree versus the open conjunction of the spontaneous aggregation of wandering cells into a weaving of roots constructed by simple addition. Chess and Go, tree and grass–sedentary structure and flows of openness: at the center of Deleuze and Guattari’s writing machine lies a programmatic commitment to one side of the ideological opposition between dynamics and thermodynamics, as well as a complicitous commitment to ground their discourses in natural laws of a different sort than those justifying the dominance of our machine age.

     

    Notes

     

    1. I’d like to thank Ronald Bogue for pointing out the crucial role of chaos theory in this work and its relevance to this essay. An extension of the lines of inquiry pursued in this essay will serve as the springboard for a panel on chaos theory and subjectivity in the works of Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari at the 1993 Modern Language Association, with the following essays: my “Chess and Go: The Physis/Nomos Debate in Deleuze and Guattari’s Game Theory of War”; William R. Paulson, “Self-Organization and Figures of Resistance”; and Ronald Bogue, “The Micropolitics of the Fractal Fold.”

     

    2. This requires an extension of the concept of chaos, as it is currently employed, to include an earlier theory of disorder associated with nineteenth-century entropy theory. We can suggest such a connection through the works of the contemporary physicist Ilya Prigogine, whose particular approach to chaos theory draws on a genealogy that begins with those nineteenth-century physicists working in thermodynamics, and whose work is central to my argument.

     

    3. One exception has been George Lakoff, who, by drawing on generational grammar as well as on cognitive psychology, argues not only that all conceptual systems are metaphorical, but that the systems of human knowledge that depend upon these metaphors are grounded in the biology of cognition. Expanding beyond the four tropes, he argues that even the most abstract systems from any discipline are dependent upon spatio-temporal metaphors. Lakoff claims that these spatio-temporal metaphors are not arbitrary constructions, but function systematically and have universal status, precisely because they are rooted essentially in the biological fact of a complex organic orientation determined by gravity, by the perception of up and down, of inside and outside, of near and far (Lakoff 3- 24, 56-68). But Lakoff’s tactical representation of those grounded categories of metaphors in terms of maps remains problematic because using maps implies a structuralist methodology. In other words, despite Lakoff’s claims that there may be a “natural” order to metaphors, his use of maps involves the embrace of a conflicting assumption, which of course can be traced to Saussure’s argument that signs are, for the most part, constructed arbitrarily.

     

    4. D’Angelo’s brilliant demonstration of the seemingly arbitrary correspondence between dreamwork and the master tropes of classical rhetoric requires a further negotiation. Specifically, D’Angelo shifts his fascination with the function of tropes in Freud’s account of the process of dreaming toward the discipline of developmental psychology by demonstrating that these tropes also correspond to the four stages of cognitive development as described by Piaget (1987, 37, 36). In fact he argues elsewhere, as Lakoff does, that the master tropes of Aristotle are similarly grounded in human cognition; that is, rhetoric itself, as the science of inquiring into the available means of persuasion, has ontological status in the deep structures of human cognition, structures that can be understood developmentally (1982, 105-117) and in fact may be described with reference to theories of evolution such as that of Pierre de Chardin. Another source for this kind of grounding comes from Gerald Edelman, whose Bright Air, Brilliant Fire: On the Matter of the Mind grounds the work not only of George Lakoff, but of Mark Turner and Mark Johnson as well. Another example of the dangers inherent in cross-disciplinary borrowings comes from Mark Turner’s Reading Minds: The Study of English in the Age of Cognitive Science. Turner suggests that contemporary theory has led to a dead end in English studies; he considers their discourses suspect because of their complexity and inaccessibility. Calling contemporary theory “ungrounded bootstrapping” and “fragmented,” Turner argues that “contemporary theory fails to connect with the full human world to the extent that it treats objects in literature that can be seen only by means of the theory: in that case, if the theory vanishes, its objects vanish” (4). Turner argues for humanistic studies grounded in schemes and tropes that are working metaphors in the physical world. He grounds his systematic exploration of the matrix of schemes and tropes by resurrecting classical stasis theory: “image schemas to structure our understanding of forces,” in other words, through ordered forms or geometric structures. What makes Turner’s polemic so astonishing is its deliberate ignoring of a new paradigm in cognitive science that bears some relationship to the chaos theory discussed in this essay: emergence. Instead of connecting cognitive science and English studies through reference to geometric schemes and tropes organized by an implied and unified subjectivity, one could pursue such an interdisciplinary connection by postulating a human cognizing subject that has no unity but the unity that it perceives in itself is a fiction constructed to encompass all the heterogeneity of cognitions occurring. “Emergence” is a theory of self-organization that shares certain characteristics with Prigogine’s formulation of self-organizing systems theory. What Turner misses so egregiously in his attack on contemporary critical theory is that Maurice Merleau-Ponty, the crucial developer of this connectionist/emergence paradigm (dormant though it was for some twenty years after he first conceived of the possibility of human perception without autonomous consciousness), is responsible for certain grounding concepts that led to Barthes’, Foucault’s and others’ assaults on naive concepts of authorships. Turner therefore attempts to ground his assault on contemporary critical theory in one paradigm of cognitive science, ignoring (or ignorant of) how another, competing paradigm within cognitive science grounds the very theories he attempts to refute.

     

    5. One must say at this point that not all physicists have been drafted into this war, only those that are interested in the ideological dimension of the formations of their discipline. Prigogine’s reputation within the human sciences also lacks unanimous support. For example, take N. Katherine Hayle’s account of Prigogine’s position within the field of chaos studies, Chaos Bound: Orderly Disorder in Contemporary Literature and Science (91-114). Yet if we apply Prigogine’s ideological categories to her own account, Hayles demonstrates a clear bias toward a time-reversible, geometrical perspective on chaos, something she shares with James Gleick. This becomes visible in her chapter on physics concepts in the fiction of Thomas Pynchon from her earlier The Cosmic Web: Scientific Field Theories and Literary Strategies in the Twentieth Century (168-198). In addressing the concept of the “field” in physics, she ignores physics tropes that have to do with time irreversiblity and with self-organization. These tropes play a crucial role in the representation of subjectivity and cultural processes in that novel. See my “Invisibility, the War Machine and Prigogine: Dissipative Structures and Aggregation Processes in the Zone of Gravity’s Rainbow,” forthcoming in Pynchon Notes 21. See also David Porush’s response to Gleick’s account of chaos, “Making Chaos: Two Views of a New Science,” in New England Review and Breadloaf Quarterly (“On Science” Volume XII, 4, Summer, 1990, 427-442), which may also serve as a useful critique of Hayles’ own methodology.

     

    6. By the term “complicity,” I refer to the implied “contract” embraced by contending opponents to perpetuate the struggle indefinitely. I consider the opening quotation from Thrasymachus a useful arche for this implication. Baudrillard calls this seduction. See “On Seduction,” in Jean Baudrillard: Selected Writings, edited with an Introduction by Mark Poster, 149-165.

     

    7. Ferdinand de Saussure, Course in General Linguistics, 22; 88; 110; Richard Feynman, The Character of Physical Law. For the most sustained treatment by an avant-gardist of the cultural implications of the game of chess, see Marcel Duchamp and H. Halberstadt, Opposition et les cases congugee sont reconciliees (Brussels: l’Echiquier/Edmund Lancel, 1932). The opposition of the Kings at endgame is described in terms of the dynamics of the reversible movement of the pieces, and of the thermodymamics of equilibrium, preserving the opposition and breach of equilibrium which precipitate the end of the endgame. At this stage, the kings remain complicitous in attempting to preserve the endgame for as long as possible by seeking only to avoid making a mistake.

     

    8. See Brian Massumi, A User’s Guide to Capitalism and Schizophrenia: Deviations from Deleuze and Guattari; citations with secondary references too numerous to count here. For a different reading of the significance of the concept becoming, as it indicates continuity between Deleuze’s work on Bergson and his work on Nietzsche, see Michael Hardt, Gilles Deleuze: An Apprenticeship in Philosophy, especially 19-25, 47-55.

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    • Serres, Michel. “Literature and the Exact Sciences.” SubStance: A Review of Theory and Literary Criticism 59, xviii, #2, 1989, 4.
    • Stallybrass, Peter, and Allon White. The Politics and Poetics of Transgression. New York: Cornell University Press, 1986.
    • Turner, Mark. Reading Minds: The Study of English in the Age of Cognitive Science. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1991.
    • White, Hayden. Metahistory. Baltimore: The Johns Hopkins University Press, 1973.
    • —. Tropics of Discourse. Baltimore: The Johns Hopkins University Press, 1978.

     

  • That Was Then: This Is Now: Ex-Changing the Phallus

    Lynda Hart

    Department of English
    The University of Pennsylvania

     

    In A Taste for Pain, Maria Marcus recounts an anecdote about a women’s studies conference in 1972. Germaine Greer, the keynote speaker, was interrupted by a young woman from the audience who suddenly cried out: “But how can we start a women’s movement when I bet three-quarters of us sitting in this room are masochists?” Greer replied: “Yes, we know women are masochists–that’s what it’s all about!”1

     

    Twenty years later, I am more likely to hear the complaint that all women are masochists in the context of lesbians lamenting the scarcity of tops in the community. Whether they are “real” butches, or the newly popular femme- tops, a good top is hard to find; most lesbians prefer being bottoms.

     

    While feminists continue to debate the pros and cons of lesbian sexual practices, “masochism,” the term that has become synonomous for some feminists with internalized oppression, has undergone a theoretical renaissance in which the erotics of submission have been reclaimed by a diverse group of scholars as an emancipatory sexuality for men. Indeed if we are to follow Leo Bersani’s argument, which strikingly concludes that “sexuality–at least in the mode in which it is constituted–could be thought of as a tautology for masochism,” anti-s/m feminist arguments would be tantamount to barring women from sex altogether.2

     

    For feminists who are struggling to articulate a sexual subjectivity that does not submit to the psychoanalytic imperative of an exclusively masculine libido, which ineluctably consigns femininity to a masculinized fetish, Bersani’s theory might be welcomed since it takes us out of the discourse of the symptom into a “nonreferential version of sexual thought.” Parental identifications, which inevitably reify Oedipus, are no longer constitutive; and the “lost object,” which is relentlessly relegated to a feminized fetish, is diffused so that any object and any part of the body can become an erotogenic zone.3 This theory does not of course undo the historical/social attribution of masochism to women, but it does suggest a psychic model in which the sexual positions one takes up are not necessarily gendered. Nevertheless, Bersani implicitly assumes the now privileged masochistic position as a male preogative, and hence claims sexuality itself for men. This presumption is clearer in his essay, “Is the Rectum a Grave?” when he describes the dominant culture’s revulsion at the sight of a man seductively and intolerably imaged with “legs high in the air, unable to refuse the suicidal ecstasy of being a woman.”4

     

    This is a graphic enactment of Freud’s third form of masochism, “feminine masochism,” which he also presumes to be occupied by a male subject in a feminine situation. The male subject in this space signifies “being castrated, or copulated with, or giving birth to a baby.”5 Since women presumably already experience one or more of the above, the notion of a feminine “feminine masochism” is redundant at best, if not impossible. In short, linguistically masculine feminine masochism is performative; feminine feminine masochism is constative. The latter merely reports an adequation; it corresponds with the “facts.” The feminist campaign to free women from their masochism was never then about giving up something that they had, but extricating women from something that they were.

     

    Although Kaja Silverman acknowledges that psychoanalytic sexual difference relegates female masochism to a virtually ontological condition when she defends her focus on male subjectivity by explaining that the female subject’s masochism is difficult to conceptualize as perverse because it represents “such a logical extension of those desires which are assumed to be ‘natural’ for the female subject,” she nonetheless accepts and repeats the terms of a psychoanalytic symbolic in which there is only one libido and it is masculine.6 Women are denied sexual agency because they are incapable of mimesis. Their options are to take up the position of passive “normal femininity,” or to reverse the position and appropriate masculine subjectivity and its desires, in which case they can “perform” sexuality, but only through their “masculinity complex.” Bersani’s desire is aimed at the pleasures gay men might experience from an alignment with femininity, as is Silverman’s, though her project is to produce a revolutionary subject in a “feminine” yet heterosexual man. Both of these analyses add weight to feminist arguments against sadomasochism, for following their logic the lesbian masochist is either enacting the dominant culture’s degradation of women or she is playing out the desire to be a man. Even if she psychically occupies the position of a man with another man, she is still only a “fag hag” within the terms of sexual difference. These theories that posit male masochism as emancipatory thus continue to depend on the impossibility of desire between women. In this context, truth claims about lesbian sexuality such as this one made by Jan Brown,

     

    We practice the kind of sex in which cruelty has value, where mercy does not. What keeps those of us who refused to abandon our "unacceptable" fantasies sane is the knowledge that there are others like us who would not leave because we scream "Kill me," at the moment we orgasm. . . . We lied to you about controlling the fantasy. It is the lack of control that makes us come, that has the only power to move us . . . . 7

     

    would easily fall prey to the argument that lesbian sadomasochists are merely reproducing heterosexist models, or at best, male homosocial ones. The referent for Brown’s “lies” can be located in earlier rhetoric by s/m practitioners who justified the acting out of their fantasies by claiming they were means of exorcising their real hold on the individual. Tacitly accepting the feminist contention that s/m lesbians had internalized cultural misogyny, these defenses asked for a tolerant reprieve, a period of playing through the fantasies in order to transcend them. S/M then, ironically, became therapeutic, like a homeopathic cure.

     

    Theatrical metaphors were central to this defense. Susan Farr, for example, described s/m as “pure theatre,” “a drama [in which] two principals . . . act at being master and slave, play at being fearsome and fearful.” She cites the clues to the drama in the interchangeability of the roles and the repetitive, scripted dialogue. Even though, she acknowledges, much of the scene may be “pure improvisation,” it is still “theater.”8 This dialectic between the scriptural and the spontaneous is prevalent in early pro s/m accounts. On the one hand, there is the insistence that the scene is rigidly controlled, with a decided emphasis on the bottom’s mastery of the limits. On the other hand, the eroticism depends on the anticipation that the limits will be pushed to the breaking point, that the “scene” will cross over into the “real.”

     

    To a certain extent, the controversy about whether s/m is “real” or performed is naive, since we are always already in representation even when we are enacting our seemingly most private fantasies. The extent to which we recognize the presence of the edge of the stage may determine what kind of performance we are enacting, but willing ourselves to forget the stage altogether is not to return to the real, as s/m opponents would have it; rather, this will to forget is classical mimesis, which, as Derrida points out, is “the most naive form of representation.”9 Nevertheless, it is precisely this most naive form of representation that would seem to be the most desirable of sexual performances. Bersani’s objections to the frequent theorization of such things as “the gay-macho style, the butch-fem lesbian couple, and gay and lesbian sado-masochism” as . . . “subversive parodies of the very formations and behaviours they appear to ape,” rather than, “unqualified and uncontrollable complicities with, correlatively, “a brutal and misogynous ideal of masculinity” [gay macho], . . . “the heterosexual couple permanently locked into a power structure of male sexual and social mastery over female sexual and social passivity” [butch-fem], or “fascism” [s/m], are clearly based on his contention that these sexual practices are not performative. Parody, Bersani states emphatically, “is an erotic turn-off, and all gay men know this.”10 Although Bersani audaciously speaks for all gay men, I would have to agree with him and add that many lesbians know this too. Self-conscious mimicry of heterosexuality is a side show; when the main act comes to town, we all want the “real thing,” or, more precisely, we all want the Real thing. That is, sexuality is always, I think, about our desire for the impossible-real, not the real of the illusion that passes for reality, but the Real that eludes symbolization.

     

    Lesbian s/m erotica has become increasingly assertive about claiming dildoes as the “real thing.” Although strap- ons are advertised as “toys,” inside the narratives and testimonials of lesbian s/m practitioners references to an outside or a “model” are most often discarded in favor of descriptions that simply occupy the status of the real. So, for example, it has become common to speak of “watching her play with her dick,” or “sucking her off,” or “your dick find[ing] its way inside of me.”11 As one contributor to Quim puts it: “When I put on a strap on I feel male. I feel my dick as real otherwise I can’t use it well.”12 Rarely if ever does one find lesbian erotica that refers to the dildo as a joke, an imitation, or a substitute, whether these narratives are explicitly in an s/m context or in the more prevalent accounts of butch/femme vanilla erotica. On the contrary, the erotic charge of these narratives depends on both tops and bottoms, butches and femmes exhibiting nothing less than respect for the “phallic” instrument.

     

    Bersani’s argument about gay macho depends on this notion of respect for masculinity as a model. But the slide from gay macho to lesbian butch-fem and s/m is too facilely made. Whereas gay macho’s “mad identifications” are between gay and straight men, which he argues is a “direct line (not so heavily mediated) from excitement to sexuality,”13 the identifications made by b/f and s/m lesbians follow a more circuitous route in which the condensations and displacements are more complex. Most obviously, gay macho’s relationship to straight masculinity remains a homo-sexual affair; whereas lesbian b/f and s/m, as long as we are caught within the logic of this binary, would be hetero- sexual. In both cases, however, the erotic charge can only be articulated within the terms of a symbolic order that depends for its coherency on maintaining the distinction between homosexuality and heterosexuality. Nonetheless, even within the terms of this symbolic order, which I presume is what Bersani refers to when he speaks of sex “as we know it,” there is already dissidence, rather than resemblence, in the image of a woman penetrating another woman with a dildo. Although both might be interpreted as a yearning toward “masculinity,” in the gay man’s case it is a masculinity that the dominant culture at least marginally assigns to him and that he thus might willingly surrender. In the lesbian top’s case, it is a “masculinity” that she aggressively appropriates without any prior cultural ownership only then to give it up. If we look at it from the bottom’s perspective, there is quite a difference between the gay man who cannot “refuse the suicidal ecstasy of being a woman,” and the lesbian who is presumed by the dominant sexual order already to be a woman.

     

    Over a decade ago, Monique Wittig implicitly enjoined us to write The Symbolic Order with a slash through the article, just as Lacan writes The Woman, when she made her then startling announcment that “Lesbians are not women.”14 The straight mind, she pointed out, “speaks of the difference between the sexes, the symbolic order, the Unconsious . . . giving an absolute meaning to these concepts when they are only categories founded upon heterosexuality . . . .”15 Returning to this article, it is interesting to remember that the example Wittig chooses to demonstrate the material oppression effected through discourses is pornography. Pornography, she argues, signifies simply that “women are dominated.”16 Thus Wittig might be aligned with Mackinnon when she argues that pornography “institutionalizes the sexuality of male supremacy, fusing the eroticization of dominance and submission with the social construction of male and female.”17 It is this position that Bersani perversely asks us to reconsider when he temporarilly allies himself with Mackinnon and Dworkin only in order to argue for the necessity of proliferating pornography rather than banning it. However, if the ultimate logic of the radical feminist argument for the realism of porn is “the criminalization of sex itself until it has been reinvented,”18 whether one takes up a position for or against pornography on this basis, are we not then already acceding to the “straight mind” that can only think homosexuality as “nothing but heterosexuality”?19

     

    What has fallen out of these discussions is heterosexuality as a social contract, one that as Wittig argues can not only be but already is broken by practicing lesbians. For when we hear of “sex as we know it” or the ultimate logic of anti-porn feminists as the “criminalization of sex,” this “sex” is always already heterosexuality, and implicitly, a relationship of identity between the phallus and the penis. Lacan seems to free us from this difficulty when he argues that the Phallus is a signifier (without a signified), not a body part, nor a partial object, nor an imaginary construct.20 However, in her recent reading of Lacan’s “The Meaning of the Phallus,” back through “The Mirror Stage,” Judith Butler shows that Lacan’s denial of the Phallus as an imaginary effect is “constitutive of the Phallus as a privileged signifier.”21 At the risk of reductively summarizing her nuanced argument, what Butler’s essay seems to conclude is that the Symbolic is always only a masculine imaginary that produces the Phallus as its privileged signifier by denying the mechanisms of its own production.

     

    Lacan’s move to locate the Phallus within the Symbolic presumably breaks its relation of identity with the penis since symbolization “depletes that which is symbolized of its ontological connection with the symbol itself.”22 Just as Magritte’s painting of a pipe is not a/the pipe, so the penis and phallus are not equivalent.23 But, as Butler points out, they do retain a priveleged relationship to one another through “determinate negation.”24 If symbolization is what effects ontological disconnection, we might ask what happens to those “pipes” that are excessive to representation. Would not those things that cannot take place within any given symbolic end up accorded a radically negative ontological status? Would they not, in other words, become that which is real, and therefore impossible?25

     

    When Wittig argues that rejecting heterosexuality and its institutions is, from the straight mind’s perspective, “simply an impossibility” since to do so would mean rejecting the “symbolic order” and therefore the constitution of meaning “without which no one can maintain an internal coherence,”26 she seems to suggest that the straight mind simply denies the possibility of lesbianism. But phallocentrism/heterosexism does not merely secure its dominance through a simple negation. Rather, it needs lesbianism as a negative ontology. It needs its status as both radically real and impossible.

     

    That this is the case can be seen in Silverman’s reconceptualization of the borders of male subjectivity in which her analysis at once ignores lesbian sexuality and persistently depends on it as yet another instance of a constitutive outside. Determined to undo the tenacious assumption that there are only two possible sexual subject positions, Silverman ends by positing three possible “same- sex” combinations: 1. two morphological men 2. a gay man and a lesbian [both occupying psychically masculine positions] 3. a lesbian and a gay man [both occupying psychically feminine positions].27 Given Silverman’s sophisticated psychoanalytic rendering of the body’s imaginary production, it might sound naive to suggest that the latter two positions are morphologically heterosexual, i.e., one of each. Yet she retains the category of two morphological men, so there is obviously still some recourse to a materiality of the body outside its imaginary formations.

     

    Silverman concludes her book by asserting that her third paradigm for male homosexuality has the “most resonance for feminism,” which she claims to represent politically.28 But what is striking is that this is the only place in her analysis where lesbianism is represented. For it is in this most politically productive model of male homosexuality that the “authorial subjectivity” can be accessed “only through lesbianism.”29 What could this “lesbianism” be if not two morphologically female bodies, which oddly do not appear in her liberating models for “same-sex” desire? The feminism that Silverman speaks for politically is once again a heterosexual feminism; for her ability to make cases for imaginary gay sexualities is only intelligible through the assumption of a lesbian sexuality that remains stable and constitutively outside her recombinations of the relationships between psychic identifications and imaginary morphologies. Thus she depends on the orthodoxy of the impossibility of lesbian desire in order to challenge and break with the other orthodoxies that limit sexual choices for (heterosexual) women.

     

    The model that proposes the impossiblity of lesbian desire, constructed as two morphological females with psychic feminine identities, is impossible within psychoanalytic terms precisely because there is no desire without a phallic signifier. In order for lesbianism to escape from its stabilizing function as the place-holder of a lack, Butler’s fictive lesbian phallus would seem to be indispensable. Yet there is still in this formulation a submission to psychoanalytic orthodoxy; and lesbian sado- masochists have thought of much more interesting ways to practice dominance and submission.

     

    Suppose we agree with Bersani’s argument that phallocentrism is “above all the denial of the value of powerlessness in both men and women,”30 and consider what value women might find in powerlessness. I would agree with Tania Modleski that from a heterosexual woman’s perspective there might not be much to value in powerlessness.31 But from a lesbian perspective things look different. Powerlessness, in Bersani’s argument, seems to mean little more than submitting to penetration. When he takes anatomical considerations into account, he refers to the “real” of bodies which are constructed in such a way that “it’s almost impossible not to associate mastery and subordination with intense pleasures.”32 If the value of powerlessness is equivalent to being penetrated, note that the “woman” in Bersani’s imaginary must be either a heterosexual female or a gay man. Not only does Bersani then retain an equivalency between the phallus and the penis, but he also reinforces a morphological conflation of the vagina and the anus. At the same time, he insists upon a fantasmatic gender distinction that depends on these anatomical parts as referents. Bersani’s argument, then, surely exceeds his intentions. For while he means to value the powerlessness of both men and women, it is paradoxically between these two penetrable orifices, which are at once the same and different, that on their front/to/back axis the illusion of an impermeable male body is sustained. As D.A. Miller puts it: “only between the woman and the homosexual together may the normal male subject imagine himself covered front and back.”33

     

    If, as Butler argues, Lacan retains a relationship of identity between the phallus and the penis through “determinate negation,” it is also possible to understand the valorization of a masochism that is explicitly male as further consolidation of this relation of equivalence. For male masochism, which presumably relinquishes the phallus by occupying the being of woman, would necessarily assume that she is the one who does not “have it.” In other words, it is only by giving it up that one gets it. Hence the continuing postulation that female masochism is impossible depends on the assurance that she has nothing to give up. The female masochist would have to give up something that she does not have; and if she were represented as giving it up, then it would have to be admittted that the phallus is nothing more than an imaginary construct. According to Freud’s narrative, women are presumed to have once “had” the penis. The phallus/penis as “lost object” always refers us to the past of a woman’s body and the dreaded future of a man’s body. Hence the cultural horror associated with “becoming a woman.”

     

    Lesbians who regard their strap-ons as the “real thing” instigate a representational crisis by producing an imaginary in which the fetishistic/hallucinatory “return” of the penis onto a woman’s body goes beyond the “transferable or plastic property”34 of the phallus to other body parts by depicting a phallus that has no reference to the “real” of the penis. The lesbian-dick is the phallus as floating signifier that has no ground on which to rest. It neither returns to the male body, originates from it, nor refers to it. Lesbian-dicks are the ultimate simulacra. They occupy the ontological status of the model, appropriate the privilege, and refuse to acknowledge an origin outside their own self-reflexivity. They make claims to the real without submitting to “truth.” If the phallus was banned from feminist orthodoxy because it was presumed to signify the persistence of a masculine or heterosexual identification, and butch lesbians or s/m tops who wore strap-ons were thus represented, as Butler points out, as “vain and/or pathetic effort[s] to mime the real thing,”35 this “real thing” was at least two real things, which were only each other’s opposites. There was not much difference between the straight “real thing,” and the lesbian “real thing,” since the latter was only the absence of the former. Both these prohibitions converged on the assumption of an identity between the phallus and the penis. Without that identification, the top who wears the strap-on is not the one who “has” the phallus; rather it is always already the bottom who “has it” by giving up what no one can have. In the lesbian imaginary, the phallus is not where it appears. That’s why so many butches, as most lesbians know, are bottoms.

     

    Notes

     

    1. Maria Marcus, A Taste for Pain: on Masochism and Female Sexuality, trans. Joan Tate (New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1981), 181.

     

    2. Leo Bersani, The Freudian Body: Psychoanalysis and Art (New York: Columbia University Press, 1986), 39.

     

    3. Ibid, 45.

     

    4. Leo Bersani, “Is the Rectum a Grave?” in AIDS: Cultural Analysis, Cultural Activism, ed. Douglas Crimp (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1988), 212.

     

    5. Sigmund Freud, “The Economic Problem in Masochism,” The Standard Edition of the Complete Psychological Works, trans. James Strachey (London: Hogarth Press, 1966) vol. 19, 162.

     

    6. Kaja Silverman, “Masochism and Male Subjectivity” Camera Obscura, 17 (1988), 52.

     

    7. Jan Brown, “Sex, lies, and penetration: A Butch finally ‘fesses up,” The Persistent Desire: A Femme-Butch Reader, ed. Joan Nestle (Boston: Alyson Publications, 1992), 412.

     

    8. Susan Farr, “The Art of Discipline: Creating Erotic Dramas of Play and Power,” Coming to Power: Writings and Graphics on Lesbian S/M (Boston: Alyson, 1981) 185.

     

    9. Jacques Derrida, “The Theater of Cruelty and the Closure of Representation,” Writing and Difference, trans. Alan Bass (Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 1978), 234.

     

    10. Bersani, “Rectum,” 208.

     

    11. Quim, Issue 3 (Winter 1991), 10 and 13. Similar language can be found in almost any issue of On Our Backs or Bad Attitude. And, in fact, in periodicals such as the now defunct Outrageous Women (which was published during the 80’s) one also finds such references to “lesbian dicks,” sometimes without the qualifier. What is apparent is that s/m dykes have always considered their dildoes to be the “real thing.”

     

    12. Anonymous, Quim Issue 3 (Winter 1991), 36.

     

    13. Bersani, “Rectum,” 208.

     

    14. Monique Wittig, “The Straight Mind,” The Straight Mind and Other Essays (Boston: Beacon Press, 1992) 32.

     

    15. Wittig, 27-28.

     

    16. Ibid, 25.

     

    17. Catherine A. MacKinnon, Feminism Unmodified: Discourses on Life and Law (Cambridge, MA.: Harvard University Press, 1987), 3 and 172.

     

    18. Bersani, “Rectum,” 214.

     

    19. Wittig, “The Straight Mind,” 28.

     

    20. Jacques Lacan, “The Meaning of the Phallus,” Feminine Sexuality: Jacques Lacan and the ecole freudienne, trans. Jacqueline Rose (New York: W.W. Norton, 1985), 74-85.

     

    21. Judith Butler, “The Lesbian Phallus and the Morphological Imaginary,” differences, “The Phallus Issue,” 4, no.1 (Spring 1992), 156.

     

    22. Ibid, 157.

     

    23. Michel Foucault, This is Not a Pipe, trans. and ed. James Harkness (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1982).

     

    24. Butler, 157.

     

    25. If the “realesbian” of lesbian-feminism was a socially impossible identity, so in the psychoanalytic symbolic are lesbians only possible in/as the “Real,” since they are foreclosed from the Symbolic order–they drop out of symbolization. If they can be signified at all it is only as an algebraic x. Given that the “Real” is, in part, the brute, inscrutable core of existence, the “Real” lesbian is in this sense coincident with the “realesbian.” Hence as both real/Real, these figures make her “identical with [her] existence–self-identical–raw, sudden, and unfettered,” but impossible to “see, speak or to hear, since in any case [she] is always already there.” See Catherine Clement’s illuminating discussion of the Lacanian “real-impossible” in The Lives and Legends of Jacques Lacan, trans. Arthur Goldhammer (New York: Columbia University Press, 1983), 168-169.

     

    26. Wittig, “The Straight Mind,” 26.

     

    27. Kaja Silverman, Male Subjectivity at the Margins (New York: Routledge, 1992), 381.

     

    28. Ibid, p.387.

     

    29. Ibid, p.383.

     

    30. Bersani, “Rectum,” 217.

     

    31. Tania Modleski, Feminism Without Women: Culture and Criticism in a ‘Postfeminist’ Age (New York: Routledge, 1991), 145-158. I agree with Modleski that Bersani loses the sympathy of a feminist reader when he “declines to factor in the ‘history of male power’” (148). However, though she acknowledges that lesbian sadomasochists’ arguments must be taken seriously and points to the unresolvable contradiction between the acting out of power and the presumption of consensuality, I take exception to her assertion that the “defining feature of s/m [is] the infliction of pain and humiliation by one individual on another” (154). As her own discussion indicates, the s/m relationship resists that definition. I have taken up these questions at length elsewhere. What is important to point out here is that Modleski subtly posits the same distinction between “the feminist” reader and the “lesbian” that Silverman holds. The former is a heterosexually-gendered subject, the latter is something like an “exception” to the feminist “rule.” Thus, once again, the “lesbian” becomes that (constitutive) “outside” that facilitates “the feminist” argument.

     

    32. Bersani, “Rectum,” p. 216.

     

    33. D.A. Miller, “Anal Rope,” Inside/Out: Lesbian Theories, Gay Theories, ed. Diana Fuss (New York and London: Routledge, 1991), 135.

     

    34. Butler, p. 138.

     

    35. Ibid, p. 159.

     

  • “Another Autumn Refrain” and “Two Thirds of a Second at the Center of the Universe”

    George Bradley

     
     

    Another Autumn Refrain

     

    He kept trying to get it right, trying to catch
    That wisp of melody, that snatch of sound, listening
    And trying, like a man playing music, practicing scales;

     

    He kept trying to remember, though it would not come,
    About the leaves and the ghosts hung in the trees,
    Trying to recall the closing cadences of a song

     

    That started in his head again, again, again,
    About the light that came to him on autumn afternoons,
    About the weak sun that peeked around the branches;

     

    He kept trying to remember or trying to forget,
    Though that insistent tune returned when he would
    That it would not, revolved, rephrased, a sibilance

     

    Like the heavy wash of seashores in the distance,
    Like blood that rushes in the inner ear all night;
    He kept trying to get it right, though there was no right,

     

    About the wind that whistled through the dry dead grass,
    The sap that sank below a brittle crust of frost,
    About the earth that spun and came again undone.

     
     

    Two Thirds of a Second at the Center of the Universe

     

    Still waiting, with less than no time to decide,

    You think almost nothing, you thought become a sense,

    Become an activity, a woman dancing, a sun rising,

    Become persistent voices washing over you once more

    As sea air might and with it the sound of waves;

    Still waiting, waiting, the tiny object unseen,

    The elusive blur that covers your whole ambition,

    As it has each day since you first conceived your task,

    First elected this improbable pursuit, with its boredom,

    Its mundane rehearsals and childish superstitions;

    Still waiting, one man at the center of the universe,

    Preparing a moment that can never be yours alone,

    The issue shared instead with ones who gather watching,

    Their faces drawn in distance to form a sort of landscape,

    Flames, say, licking the ridgeline of encircling hills;

    Still waiting, and they wait also, await the spectacle

    Of your deepest satisfaction, your most intimate defeat,

    Watching and waiting as you put them from your mind,

    As you hold or try to only the image of your attempt,

    Of what will be your substitute for every human act,

    A motion tinged with memory and its fond mutation;

    Waiting, and surely it will soon be taking place again,

    The instant out of time which you feel most yourself,

    In which hands clutch and hearts gorge with blood

    And sweat bursts out like condensation on ripe fruit,

    A fraction of a second happening once and forever,

    A stream descending, a horse running, a man striding,

    Now.

    You imagined the triumphant cries far away in your head

    Before you gasped, as in pain, betrayed, betrayed.

    Strike three, the umpire said.
     

  • Mapplethorpe’s Art: Playing with the Byronic Postmodern

    Elizabeth Fay

    Department of English
    University of Massachusetts at Boston

    EFAY@UMBSKY.CC.UMB.EDU

     

    The term “the Byronic postmodern” is coined here specifically for the purpose of uncovering and exploring a congruency in the works of those artists invested in some aspect of the Byronic hero. The Byronic, which was both encoded by Byron and beyond his control, exudes a transgressive, dark, and seductive appeal that speaks to any artist interested in crossing boundaries. The Byronic postmodern, then, implicates a romanticism within postmodernism and a postmodernism within romanticism that is at odds with more general assessments of the postmodern as a self-romanticizing and self-conflicted phase in the modern era (see Kaplan and Elam), or as a counter-enlightenment and irrationalist philosophical and aesthetic movement whose “post” positionality precludes or throws over prior systems of knowledge.1

     

    The Byronic postmodern as defined here is not the ironizing superficial and self-aware contemplation that is usually considered to be the link between romantic irony and the postmodern aesthetic; nor do I rest easy in a Lyotardian alternation of modernist and postmodernist impulses. Rather, the Byronic postmodern redefines the historical and social formations called romanticism and postmodernism, and offers them instead as aesthetic impulses that appeal congruously to those artists whose sexual aesthetics overwhelm their perception of the art form. That is, in seeing the world bisexually or homosexually, the Byronic artist understands the nature of mask and the exchangeable subjectivity more clearly than does the artist confirmed in his/her normative sexuality. The relation between Byron and Mapplethorpe as Byronic artists cannot be confined to them alone, but they provide powerful parameters for artists of similar amplitude such as Baudelaire, Emily Bronte, Oscar Wilde, Andy Warhol.

     

    What Mapplethorpe’s photography has to do with Byron’s poetry, or Byron’s art with Mapplethorpe’s, is an argument these two artists initiate themselves: Byron through his postmodernist self-display and questioning of frames, and Mapplethorpe through his critical reassessment of romantic self-presentation. Mapplethorpe’s romantic rereading is most overt in pieces such as “James Ford, 1979,” where the subject is depicted lying in a deep, tiled bathtub in a pose that cannot but recall David’s “Death of Marat” (1793); less obvious are his photographs of classical marble statuary. The clearest example of his romantic revisionism, however, is Mapplethorpe’s “Manfred, 1974,” a four-frame sequence that comprehends Byron’s 1816 poem Manfred more succinctly than literary criticism has been able to do. The significance of Mapplethorpe’s title is pointed; of all the Faustian texts available, including the extreme romanticism offered by Goethe’s version, the twentieth-century photographer fixes on the Byronic Manfred. In the agency of his revisionism, Mapplethorpe has captured the postmodern impetus that drives Byron’s powerful drama, and at the same time reveals the deep romanticism of his own art.

     

    The role of sexual repositioning in Byronic postmodernism is crucial to the Byronist’s ability to reduce experience to a “staged” effect. This sense of staging is the outcome of a knowing difference, and a self-presentation that is at once the aestheticized self and serious art. Mapplethorpe’s choice of artistic medium makes his awareness of staging an open acknowledgement, as does his frequent use of dramatically posed portraiture and tableaux. But Byron’s self-staging required a sequence of transgressive events before he knew himself to be onstage.

     

    At age eight Byron became heir to his great uncle’s title, inheriting it at age ten. He is seduced by his nurse, Mary Gray, at age nine, and probably by Lord Grey de Ruthyn (who was renting the Byron home) during a holiday from Harrow at age fifteen. In between these two events he fell passionately in love with his cousin, Mary Chaworth, when he was fifteen, and Lord Delawarr at sixteen. However, the first to return his love and thus capture his imagination was the younger John Edlestone. The precocity of Byron’s peership coincides with the precocity of his sexual initiations, and his response to the demands of adult experience was accompanied by confusion and guilt. He characterizes this period of his life with the secrecy and ambivalence that becomes typical of his later responses to his double sexual identity. To his step-sister Augusta he writes of Grey, “My reasons for ceasing that Friendship are such as I cannot explain, not even to you my Dear Sister . . . but they will even remain hidden in my own breast” (March 26, 1804); the next year he hints at his affection for Edlestone by writing, “My melancholy proceeds from a very different cause to that which you assign,” one which “you could not alleviate, and might possibly be painful (January 7, 1805; both quoted in Crompton, pp. 100-101). Melancholy, the term literary reviewers associated both with Byron and his poetic heroes, becomes a code word much earlier in his own mind for his `dark’ passions. For Augusta, this melancholy so changed Byron from his boyish disposition that she thought him transformed, almost unrecognizable. His beloved, Edlestone, thought the same when Byron lost more than fifty pounds of bodyweight by vigorous dieting and exercise. Both transformations–from joy to melancholy, from chubby to sleek–are bodily changes that correspond with a new bodily awareness. And this new awareness signifies an understanding that the body now has two kinds of admirers that desire it, and two kinds of passions itself. Yet these must be secreted, coded, costumed, and playacted in order to be legitimated at all: the one must be made to signify the other, or to cover it up, or to displace it momentarily.

     

    In comparison to Byron, the most Byronic of modern artists found an equally Grecian, equally bodily way to express the differences in his taste. Mapplethorpe’s sexual tastes may not have been bipolar, but his artistry was. His black gay friends and lovers are translated into hellenized athletes and gods, with a special emphasis on the textures made possible by photographing black skin in black and white, or countering it with white skin as a way to emphasize not sex but bipolarity as form and mode. Yet when he also photographed his women friends with exquisite sensitivity and sexual daring, his work resonates less to the bipolarized schemata of his male photographs than to Byron’s daring exploits with married and thus inaccessible women: safe and yet satisfyingly seductive adventures. Byron’s seduction of the strong-minded Lady Frances Webster, for instance, resonates to Mapplethorpe’s photography of Lisa Lyon, a woman bodybuilder whose very name suggests gender play.

     

    Serious play becomes the byword for both Byron and Mapplethorpe as artists. The myth of the postmodern is that a series of tableaux produces a pastiche that is seamless truth. The tableaux by which Byron presents himself in his poetry and in society are also stitched together into a fated and apparently seamless narrative, marking him as postmodern and puzzling his romantic interpreters. Mappelthorpe’s work makes the tableau a dramatically postmodern image, imposing on the setpiece a dark, fated quality that signals his transgressive play in much the same way that Byron’s narrative poems do. Like Byron, Mapplethorpe’s apparent seeming comes from a literal seaming, a putting together to produce a new costume and new self. Dancing across the stage or camera’s eye focuses attention on the costume and bodily surface as a semiotic display of sign systems at war. Byron puts on Albanian dress, Mapplethorpe dons that of the Nazi secret police; both bespeak a sign system associated with homosocial fantasy life and self. The Byronic hero of either historical period is concerned in particular with harnessing sexuality, the display of identity, and the sheer play of a textual erotics. For textual erotics must be seen as sheer play, or it loses all signification; however, this is a specifically Byronic gesture which cannot be read into all postmodern texts. Within Byronic aesthetics, play is both a dance on the edge of the allowable/foreseeable/conditional, and a violence done to the sutures that hold–however tenuously–meaning, syntax, consent together.

     

    Certainly desire is part of this behavior, but it is not the only mechanism at work. Dalliance with comprehension and violation are both attributes of depressive melancholy. The bi-polarity of manic depression becomes in the postmodern period hyperactivity, mania as frenzy. Romantic mania, however, is a slow, deliberately tasted dying into, a depressive move into a psychology without faith. Byron laughs at this debilitating gesture even as he exploits its charm. And the charm itself is seductively duplicitous, doubling back with an ironic laugh: “Postmodernism’s distinctive character lies in [a] kind of wholesale `nudging’ commitment to doubleness, or duplicity,” Linda Hutcheon notes (1). The duplicity amounts not to a loss of faith, but to a cynicism thrust at the very heart of belief: both Byron and Mapplethorpe exhibit this awareness of disrupted yet retained foundations via seductive posturing.

     

    The allure that draws in the viewer is born of the wholesale nudge that allots both the one and the other a place onstage. The spectator who feels the safety of familiar principles is seduced and caught before feeling the shifting ground. The seduction for both Byron and Mapplethorpe begins by viewing the viewer as an initially antagonistic eye which must be converted, or mocked, or both. Two of Mapplethorpe’s works especially distill this gendered antagonism and recall earlier heroes of melancholy, metaphor, and misogyny.

     

    “Manfred” (1974) provocatively speaks to Byron’s closet drama, as well as his closeted drama of self, presenting the Faustian man as a multiply-framed modernist who assumes his capacity to redesign the architecture that contains him. The first of the sequenced four frames in “Manfred” is stark white, its blankness signifying not only original purity but also the absence of myth, and therefore of identity. In the second frame, the youth’s pose allows him to fill the arch which is the central of three framings or sculptings of the space around him. He is classically nude and relaxed, a lover not an athlete, yet his frontal revelation mocks classical aesthetics, the contrapposto which makes the figure “a true acting unit,” according to Gardner (132).

     

    In the third frame, the youth has assumed clothing, jewelry, and thus identity; he is poised to step out of the arch or closet, at the same time putting on a dark and melancholic expression that reestablishes the closet as protective and chosen, the space from which he will emerge. He is the `angry young man,’ the rebel and dreamer: Manfred himself. The final frame again finds the youth nude, but this time in full erection yet equal relaxation. He asserts his self upon the frame by placing his arms on its edge, again stepping precisely on its boundary, half-in, half-out.

     

    Outage, whether accomplished in emotional projection or physical projection, places dangerous demands on the dancer, as Byron’s Faustian hero discovered. The power of abstraction, of multiple identities beyond the socially condoned, leads both to love and to the leap of death, two modes of action that Bataille contends are reflexively identificatory. Mapplethorpe’s Manfred declines to indicate who has conjured whom, but the urge to death remains.

     

    In his Hamlet-like “Self-Portrait, 1988,” Mapplethorpe examines himself in light of death, as a death mask, and as a dying Hamlet. In his journal for Feb. 19, 1814 Byron notes that “Kemble’s Hamlet is perfect; but Hamlet is not Nature. Richard is a man; and Kean is Richard.” Mapplethorpe also understands Hamlet as more than nature, more than man. The photograph’s subject transmits his pain and mortal angst as he stares directly at the viewer; his stare is all the eerier for being disembodied and slightly out of focus, as if already fading from this particular world. At the same time, his severed hand floats clearly in the foreground, grasping a death-head cane with intense strength. Hamlet’s existential worry over whether to be, as well as his graveside meditation, is troped here both melancholically and whimsically. And it is but intertextual play that the epigram Byron chooses for his “Manfred” is from Hamlet I.v: “There are more things in heaven and earth, Horatio,/ Than are dreamt of in your philosophy.” Mapplethorpe’s Hamlet intimates this about death too.

     

    Hamlet knew that death defined love, and that the love of a woman is defiling if it is unaccompanied by the proper view and frame. Improper women for Byron are “strumpets,” of whom he requests one friend to “never . . . even allude to the existence of the sex.” Unlike Greek verbs of amorous frenzy, Byron announces “I won’t even read a word of the feminine gender” (16 Feb, 1812). Mapplethorpe would read such words, but would code and frame them to redefine gender itself into the fascination created by the tease of the camera’s eye. This is the posture of Byron’s romanticism and of Mapplethorpe’s postmodernism, and of the improper artist who is poised to leap both because he is willing and because the leap defines and sexes him.

     

    The Byronist’s internalizing of the specular takes place both between men, as well as within the dresser who must then seek other ways to display it. As such, it is an aspect of modernism Mapplethorpe will more fully exploit through the closely controlled space of photographic interiors, and through a cross-dressing which requires no clothes because it is written on the body. This is best incurred through a gender play that is both a natural outcome of specularization and an unnatural doubleness that is doubly enticing. Byron’s self-representations as the Byronic hero and Mapplethorpe’s self-portraits show the face as effeminate because it is seductive, the costuming as gender-play because it is teasing, and both offering relations between men. However, one important qualification must be made here: male costuming is not fashion in the sense of fashion photography because it does not pretend to be for a specifically women’s venue; its focus is the overt disruption of gender binaries rather than the covert exploitation of them. Thus, if women are seduced into buying Byron’s poems or making love to him, he can claim to have no agency in their desire since his overt offer seeks another comer: Women “ought to mind home . . . [and] to read neither poetry nor politics–nothing but books of piety and cookery. Music–drawing–dancing–also a little gardening and ploughing now and then” (Jan. 6, 1821, 1821 Journal). This difference in the visual contract specific to the Byronic postmodern allows for the incorporation of women’s bodies into men’s, and even women’s into men’s, as a statement of excess. Put another way: fashion photography, which can be seen as the extreme version of visual art, implies an absence (of the artist) predicated on the metaphorical use of the model’s body, as well as a covert expenditure of sexual energy between men. Male costuming in the Byronic postmodern posits presence rather than absence because the clothing literally (rather than metaphorically) implicates the artist, and it does so overtly. The clothing is so explicit in its homosexual seduction that it spells out what the fashion model suggestively hides: the clothes become the man. The model’s wardrobe fabricates sexuality, makes it up, while the transvestite poseur or dandy wears seduction as one aspect of his sexual identity.

     

    Thus the artistry that finds itself to be Byronic marginalizes itself from normative aesthetic practices or exaggerates them. It expresses its uncentered status by seeking revenge on its audience through expressive violence contained within a visual stillness. The artist uses this containment beyond the cultural center to artifice alternative worlds of seductive exile; but because the staging is transient rather than verifiable, it threatens the viewer with the possibility of transgressed boundaries and frames. And because the revenge is as much self-annihilating as it is viewer-threatening in its excess, its seductive posture invokes a pathos and an invitation difficult to ignore.

     

    The invitation is necessarily sexual, devastating in its promise to break through the frames of its staging; the Byronic postmodern is always a sexual or sexed violence, an exile caused by sexual transgression, a transvestism. Through this disruptive sexuality, the Byronic artist redistributes the contractual code between producer and consumer, forcing the viewer to make love to him by initiating and teasing out an active reciprocity and transgression.2 This contractual aberration is not present in all postmodernisms; nor is it a generally accepted view of the most Byronic of artists, Byron himself. If we accept this precept, however, we accept that postmodernism is not a single current of artistic and intellectual conflux. We also accept that the Byronic artist is not a single manifestation of a single current, but a self-creator who is most himself when playing out the flux and its staging possibilities.

     

    Closet drama may dispense with the need for visible costuming, but the multiple masks it allows the authorizing persona provide an arena for symbolic codes that costume disparate versions of the poetical self. The sexualities, genders, and temperaments that clothe closet characters virtually play out the alternative identities that transvestism frees up to the experiencing subject: closet dramas, at least for Byron, are in drag. Critics interested in Byron’s self-romanticism usually cite this aspect of Byron’s selfhood, finding the poet speaking not only as Sardanapalus but as each of the other main characters, not only as Don Juan but also as the poem’s narrator.3 They do so, however, to prove the biographical nature of Byron’s dramas, locating multiple Byrons (rather than multiple distributions of self) in order to sort out the more important family relations portrayed in the other characters; they do so most often in order to prove the Freudian nature of Byron’s self-obsessive narratives (see also Wolfson). But some critics go further; for instance, Jerome J. McGann argues that Byron exploited the self-identificatory possibilities of costuming from the very first. “Byron was operating en masque from his first appearances in print . . . Childe Harold, evolving from [his] earlier fictional selves, mutates quickly and repeatedly: the Giaour, the Corsair, Lara, Manfred, are all masks of Byron.” Similarly, Sardanapalus is “an autobiographical work . . . carried out in masquerade” (295-96). McGann reads Byron’s texts/masks as double-directed, but not in the contractual sense of artist-viewer; rather, McGann finds a doubled seeing which is, on the one hand, directed “`referentially’ toward certain socio-historical frameworks, and `reflexively’ toward the poetical environments within which they are aesthetically active” (296-97). In other words, the masks provide a way to deliteralize transvestite seeing without seeming to do so through a reflexive vision; at the same time, they reinstitute the metaphorical or referential nature of the homosocial visual contract. Doing so, McGann argues, allows the movement from theatrical to closet drama and thus into temptation: “Byron’s masquerades are requests (or perhaps temptations) for someone to play a correspondent part in the imagined scene,” but they are also “wicked and seductive invitations” (302). These invitations in the end “become the principal subject of his own fictions” because the move into private space allows the mask a literalizing power as well as a metaphorizing one, and thus a wicked dalliance with sincerity.

     

    The wickedness, the temptation, is that of the homosexual openly beckoning within the privacy of the closet: this referential, and paradoxically socio-historical move (Childe Harold amid the battlegrounds of Europe) authorizes that wicked privacy toward the open and public market of the visual contract. The double-edge term which allows this conflation of the opposed ways of seeing (homosexual and homosocial) is “mask.” Mask is not the trickier “masquerade,” in which costumes allow one to put one’s face, person, and morals aside in order to allow the libido and the uncanny full rein; instead, masks are veritable faces, costumes that cannot so readily be put aside. The mask effectively makes the other a self–without making it the self, thus reserving the possibility of a `true’ or recuperable self. The mask also allows for a certain amount of controlled outage within the purview of the closet(ed) drama.

     

    Masking locates this other-self in the face, the doubled site of vision and visage. But the face is itself the site of cupola and thus of excess; the multiplicitous connections it makes possible are different for each viewer, and not precisely controllable by the performer himself. The imprecise nature of the mask/face makes the performer a discourse facilitator through the visage/vision cupola by which he is seen by seeing. When the face is mask, as it forcefully is in the literal faces Mapplethorpe puts forth in his self-portraits, and as it figuratively is in Byron’s narrative voices, it acts as the focal point of the costume, of the other self, and thereby of sexualized difference. As the site of excessive sex, of the doubly male, it thus alters the visual contract in order to force the diffident artist on the viewer: he confronts us face-to-face.

     

    One of the best texts in which to explore Byron’s use of masks, according to McGann, is Manfred:

     

    Byron, like Manfred, ceases to justify himself or his romantic imaginations only when he makes those imaginations the self-conscious subject of his work. There is a power working upon Byron forcing him to display those aspects of the imagination that are seldom exposed to view.(303)

     
    The power working on Byron or his mask, Manfred, is the power of the mask-face in a place of contained excess, the closet. Closet space internalizes the play, making the literal quality of dress, like Mapplethorpe’s Bondage and Discipline leather, unnecessary. Costume refutes metaphor and the need for a covert visual contract and installs a literalized invitation on the body surface; mask reinstates metaphor without refuting costume, and the conflation of the two at once–like the conflation of transvestism with homosexuality–provides a double being, a reference and a reflex, a writing on the body.

     

    That is to say, Byron’s textual masks mark out the space of the Byronic postmodern as a closet space in which the relation between artist and viewer is specifically contracted through bodily inscription. The Byronic hero’s scowl and the feminine makeup and pseudo-Hamlet of Mapplethorpe’s self-portraits all point to the same conceit: that once the wicked invitation is inscribed on the body of the artist, he must then step in front of the artistic/photographic eye to become the feminized body over which contracts get made and invitations exchanged. For this reason Mapplethorpe’s subject-selves stare straight into the camera’s eye: they do not need the fashion model’s flirtatious glance because they know their eye (as artist and poseur) reciprocates the viewer’s gaze–they know because it is written on their face.

     

    Byron’s eye, if not in his portraits then certainly in his poetry, also stares straight into the viewer’s eye, looking for internalized relations and closeted desires. Contemporaneous reviewers were made uncomfortable by the game Byron played, that was playing on himself, and their discomfort may have come in part from the Byronic artist’s self-conscious play with identity and agency. The reviewers as a body, in fact, see Byron as performing the opposite operation from an exchange of masks and identity switches; they read him as inhabiting each Byronic character as himself, without permutation. How the reader is led to see in a particular way becomes a critical question: How has Byron seduced us into this understanding of his person? And the danger of this wicked invitation is that both the viewer and the artist himself are seduced: “the text becomes a kind of precipice that draws one in–like Manfred, like Byron–either to the self or to the destruction of the self” (McGann, 311). Yet the precipice is not as sincere as the critics believe nor as sensual as Byron would have it: within the erotics of a self-constituting dance there is also the artist’s awareness of how that self is not making, is merely a dressing without the deep center so alluringly promised. As David Joselit writes of Mapplethorpe, his popularity “is often explained (or explained away) as a form of sophisticated naughtiness. . . . It is Mapplethorpe’s broader relevance that is typically denied to him–typically obscured by labeling him a subcultural fetishist–by ignoring the hauntingly unstable vision of masculinity and femininity his art proposes” (19).

     

    What Byron and Mapplethorpe share is not merely in their transgressive sexual curiosity; it is also in their transgression into the exotic. Both artists construct travelogues into a fantasy land where costumes signify otherly selves against which the self must struggle or be seduced. And if Byron stepped further out, acting out the travelogue as well as imagining its space in fantastic verses, Mapplethorpe maintained an interior space that contained and transmuted his experience to an equally devastating and self-seducing degree.

     

    Don Juan’s travels necessarily lead eastward, for the Spain of his birth is a Moorish land, and the Moors’ power originates in their hoarding of classical knowledge.4 Thus, underneath the oriental tales of Romantic imagination is a love of the Grecian. It was widely known that Araby had absorbed Hellenic culture and preserved it through the middle ages. But what Byron understands, perhaps most from donning his Albanian dress and Turkish masks, is how much this is like boys looking like girls. Pederasty, or Greek love, is the love of nubile boys who looked like girls, boys who are girls underneath just as Arabs are Grecian underneath. When Byron was seen leading young women in his madly promiscuous London period, he was assumed to have been closeted with young women dressed as boys. Don Juan reverses and replays this moment several times as Juan himself dresses in female costume, replaying the London escapades in which Byron was simply closeted with nubile boys who could seem either gender or both.5

     

    The fascination Byron exhibits, no less than Mapplethorpe, is with that play between polarized positions, a play Araby exhibits even more than does Greece. Thus in his eastern tales Byron professes his desire for the Grecian costumed as its polarized contrary, the Turkish-Moorish-Arabian, and in doing so recasts his desire for cross-dressed or interstitial gendering. It cannot be surprising, then, to read art critic David Joselit assessing Mapplethorpe’s photographs as producing a “hauntingly unstable vision of masculinity and femininity . . . Mapplethorpe’s sexual aggression and submission–in men and women, heterosexual and homosexual–is clearly evident in the relationship he establishes between his own self-portraits and the photographs of his models.” Indeed, he “has envisioned a world in which masculinity is not stable but a constantly shifting terrain between hyperaggressiveness and submission” (Kardon, 19). Another way of saying this is that the Byronist understands sexuality as an unstable producer of identity. When Byron moves from self to self, and reproduces those shifts in variable dramatic masks, he understands sexuality as self in the moment of sex–not in the moment of self. And these shifts are always restricted by the calculable and incalculable audience response which is itself a thing of contingency and flux. If Mapplethorpe conceives the stillpoint of an erratic world through the classical moment of fixity–fixing the subject with a single frame of its dance across the stage, Byron embraces the fluidity of the shifting self as well as the return upon itself of each mask–and yet in doing so, he fixes his poetical character even more surely than does Mapplethorpe. The fix–the addiction to a dramatic moment of selfhood that one puts on in order to put over–is a mechanism of absolute charisma. And charisma, both in verse and on paper, demands a specular fixation.

     

    Walter Benjamin (in many ways a postmodern romantic himself6) reconstructs the nature of that which is “hauntingly unstable” that we locate in both Mapplethorpe’s and Byron’s postmodern romanticism, as a problem of two other Byronists: Baudelaire and Proust. In his essay, “On Some Motifs in Baudelaire,” Benjamin recasts Proust–a spiritual Orientalist–by saying that, “[t]o perceive the aura of an object we look at means to invest it with the ability to look at us in return” (188). This point is specific to photography: whereas painting feeds imaginative appetites (“that of which our eyes will never have their fill”), photography operates within a different paradigm of perception (the mechanical reproduction of images). Painting portrays the living quality of being; photography records it but cannot imbue its images with life, or what Benjamin calls “aura.” Susan Sontag confirms this perception when she writes of Mapplethorpe that his works do not reveal truth, but rather “the strongest version of it”; this is a claim about the mystical ability of art to reveal truth, but it is a postmodern version in that it ironizes art’s attempt to provide a truth where there can be none.

     

    What Sontag knows is that Mapplethorpe’s art gives life back to the viewer through the imbued object–through its aura. This gift, this truth, crosses transcendent boundaries so that the viewer is pulled into, or contracted into, the experience. In contrast, the romantic poet experiences and expresses epiphany while the reader vicariously witnesses its effect but does not participate. The Byronist achieves what we might describe as a sideways transcendence, a boundary crossing of epic proportions which nevertheless laughs at its own indecency.7 Benjamin’s “aura,” on the other hand, is meant to refer to a romanticized notion of the visionary’s artistry, the poet’s ability to capture `beauty in truth and truth in beauty,’ to paraphrase Keats. Yet that he comes to the notion of aura through Baudelaire with overtones of Proust means that the vision is available from both the sincere and the sardonic poet, that both assist the provision of what Kardon, after Sontag, calls the “aura of veracity” (12).

     

    It is this aura, according to Benjamin, in which objects hoard the life we lend them through our active looking, and by it they mystically return our gaze from a distance determined by their inscrutability that is somehow yet recognizable. The subject who looks in the camera eye sees nothing, and thus loses his own gaze; at the same time, when he looks at the photograph of himself the lost gaze cannot be met or recaptured because there is no room for aura. The photographer, on the other hand, sees a different picture, or to put it another way, becomes the camera eye and–to rephrase–exchanges glances with the subject, which he can then recall and cast into his own aural perception of each photograph as the authentic aspect of the subject no longer present. These arguments permit us to reconstruct the magnetism of Mapplethorpe’s photographs as visual renditions of that intensely magnetic glance Byron had mastered both in his life and his art–a glance that so captured the passions of both women and men. When Joselit explains that “Mapplethorpe’s presence, in front of the camera as well as behind it, brackets every representation” (19), he is attributing to the photographer’s doubled glance a doubled presence and a double aura. Like the doubled sex of the girlish boy dressed as a boy and so taken for a girl in boy’s costume, as in Byron’s premarital flings, or like the doubly enticing bisexual Byron himself, the double aura works like a double penis, a twice present and twice authenticated contractual power. Bracketing a representation does not fix it within a historical moment, but releases it into the flux of the auteur’s own cross-historical and defiantly untranscendent staging.

     

    Mapplethorpe has been called a classicist because of his painterly approach to photography, but he also deserves the term for his deliberate fostering of aura in both his human and inanimate subjects. It is this relation to the living that both Mapplethorpe and Byron share, for where Mapplethorpe produces works that return one’s gaze, Byron’s works are so aurally replete with his own identifiable persona that they vibrate with his seductive or scorning glance. Annabella Milbanke recalls Byron’s haughty, disdainful posturing at salons she attended before his first marriage proposal; his careful poses and distancing survey of the room both converted his shyness into a powerful tool, and increased his charismatic appeal.

     

    Mapplethorpe’s calm yet distancing stare into the camera in his self-portraits exude a similar aural fascination; significantly, the portraits that convey the same defiance and yet appealing plasticity are those of the two women friends he photographed numerous times: Patti Smith and Lisa Lyon. In two years Mapplethorpe produced more than a hundred photographs of Lyon, works which Kardon notes, reveal “his talents as an impresario, his ability to create images . . . . He discovered some of her latent personas and probably invented others” (11). The “probably” that qualifies Kardon’s insight is also the cupola on which Mapplethorpe provokes Lyon and Smith to become alternative masks for his own continual self-exploration.8 For it is through photography that Mapplethorpe “could touch `forbidden’ acts and states of consciousness, using the camera as an instrument of provocation,” according to Kay Larson. Using sexual positioning instead of mystical auras, Larson identifies the Byronic attitude as postmodern: “There is a kind of sexuality–the kind we think of as modern–that pursues self-interest to its limits, and sublimation be damned” (15). The transgression Mapplethorpe pursues in his art–across the bounds between classicism and eroticism, homo and hetero, male and female, pleasure and pain–are precisely the terms of Byron’s journey east, across the transcendental alps to the transnationalism of the Byronically Grecian aesthetic.

     

    In his last years Mapplethorpe begins to photograph Greek statuary, but by evading the cracks and missing limbs in order to imply a perfect whole, he nonetheless conveys the fragmentary nature of existence. The statement produced is that of death in life and life in death, a doubled concept that recalls the Grecian underdressing of Araby, the girl under the boy and boy under the girl, the transvestism of erotic spectacle. For both Byron and Mapplethorpe, classical culture provides a Rosetta Stone for a homoerotic aesthetic. “The Greeks, of course, were the first in Western civilization to erect a culture–a literature, an art, a philosophy–around the homoerotic . . . . Homoeroticism, Mapplethorpe suggests, has been around since the beginning of the world” (Larson, 17). And if Byron learned to write of his wrong-sexed, illicit adventures in the code of Greek phrases and oblique references to fellow sodomists, Mapplethorpe also learned the lexical value of classicism. The Byronist both voices and obscures the homoerotic aesthetic when he turns the classicism of a marble statue or a perfect flower inside out to produce the eroticism already inherent in it. The societies that contextualize both artists also knew and did not know this: Byron’s publisher and closest friends burned his memoirs and altered his letters to hide the first term of the Byronic aesthetic, while the intent of the prosecution of Dennis Barrie, the Cincinnati museum director who exhibited Mapplethorpe’s photographs, was to figuratively burn those photographs that leave no room for sentimental misreadings. Charged with pandering and obscenity charges, Barrie had to defend his “exhibition” of the very sexuality Mapplethorpe intentionally provokes us by: Barrie is indeed a panderer, but of the spirit and not the flesh, for it is the aura Mapplethorpe imparts to his work that so threatens and unsexes us.

     

    Certainly it is part of any Byronist’s threat to the viewer that the artist’s own aura is retained in his endless self-portraiture through sequences of masks and counter-masks. Photography “is a process of two-way looking: looking at, and being looked at,” as Larson notes. Each artist continues to entice the viewer into a witting and unwitting appreciation for a titillating aesthetics. Mapplethorpe is both a “voyeur” and a “provocateur,” writes Larson, and as such “he is not averse to running guns into forbidden territory” (16). The reference is to Mapplethorpe’s excursions into the nightworld of Bondage and Discipline, but it is a wonderful comment on Byron’s own particular form of gun running. He is still remembered in Greece today for his liberatory endeavors there before dying of disease. Like Byron, Mapplethorpe also died young by disease, and his Hamlet-like self-portrait of full-blown AIDS concurs that both artists associate themselves with self-annihilating heroes. As such, both might say with Manfred when the summoning Spirit pronounces, “But thy crimes/ Have made thee–“: “I have not been thy dupe, nor am thy prey–/ But was my own destroyer.” There is a sanctity in this statement that is leveled in the aura, the gaze returned–precisely the seductive threat of both Byronists’ postmodern works.

    Notes

     

    1. Christopher Norris takes to task those critics who essentialize postmodern thought in this manner, including Habermas, Rorty and Gasche. Although Norris supports Habermas’ critique in such works as The Philosophical Discourse of Modernity (1987), he asserts that Habermas misunderstands Derrida’s self-positioning within philosophical traditions as “a species of latter-day Nietzschean irrationalism . . . that rejects the whole legacy of post-Kantian enlightened thought.” See Norris, What’s Wrong with Postmodernism: Critical Theory and the Ends of Philosophy (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins Press, 1990), esp. pp. 49-76.

     

    2. The contract itself has recently been revitalized as a romantic term, however with tonalities other than the visual, by scholars such as Jerome Christensen and Barbara Charlesworth Gelpi influenced by Carole Pateman’s The Problem of Political Obligation (1979; Berkeley, 1985) and The Sexual Contract (Stanford, 1988). The conceptual contract as I understand it here, however, is itself artwork, and as such is specifically set in visual terms. I borrow these terms from de Lauretis, esp. p. 105, and Fuss.

     

    3. Byron’s journals, written with at least an intimate audience in mind, if not simply to the audience of himself, exemplifies the rapidity of his mood and voice shifts. Commenting on a journal passage regarding Napoleon’s abdication, Peter Manning writes: “Byron confessed that he was `utterly bewildered and confounded,’ and the threat to his own identity produced a dispersal of voices notable even in his habitually echoing prose” Reading Romantics, 146).

     

    4. Dorothee Metlitzki provides an important overview of the relation between Orientalism and romanticism in The Matter of Araby in Medieval England (New Haven: Yale Univ. Press, 1977); the final chapter, “The Matter of Araby and the Making of Romance,” is especially helpful (pp. 240-250).

     

    5. Louis Crompton notes that “[t]hough his involvements were overwhelmingly heterosexual, various stories circulated, all at second hand, about how he disguised his inamoratas as boys to deceive his mother or others . . . Since Byron was often attracted by boys with girlish looks, Marchand suggests that some of the boys in his company were in fact mistaken for girls in disguise” (110).

     

    6. Benjamin’s elusive prose, and the `open-sided’ character of his individual phrases, evinces his particular kind of Byronic dancing. That he partakes of the romantic is evident in his mystical claims about art as being behind history; that he is romantically postmodern is productive of his interest in fragmentation and the occasional essay form.

     

    7. When Karl Kroeber describes the improvisational methodology of Don Juan as “open-sided,” he provides an apt term for the whole of Byronic aesthetics, an idea which Peter Manning underscores in introducing his Reading Romantics (4).

     

    8. Bataille states in “The Solar Anus” that, “It is clear that the world is purely parodic, in other words, that each thing seen is the parody of another, or is the same thing in a deceptive form . . . because with the aid of a copula each sentence ties one thing to another . . . . But the copula of terms is no less irritating than the copulation of bodiesVisions, 5).

    Works Cited

     

    • Bataille, G. “The Solar Anus.” In Visions of Excess: Selected Writings, 1927-1939. Ed. and trans. Allan Stoekl. Minneapolis: Minnesota UP, 1985.
    • Benjamin, Walter. Illuminations. New York: Schocken, 1969.
    • Christensen, J. “Setting Byron Straight: Class, Sexuality, and the Poet,” in Literature and the Body: Essays on Populations and Persons. Ed. Elaine Scarry. Baltimore: The Johns Hopkins UP, 1988.
    • de Lauretis, Theresa. Technologies of Gender: Essays on Theory, Film, and Fiction . Bloomington: Indiana UP, 1987.
    • Elam, D. Romancing the Postmodern. London and New York: Routledge, 1992.
    • Fuss, Diana. “Fashion and the Homospectatorial Look.” Critical Inquiry 18 (Summer 1992): 713-37.
    • Gardner, Helen. Art Through the Ages. Sixth Ed. New York: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1975.
    • Hutcheon, Linda. The Politics of Postmodernism. London and New York: Routledge, 1989.
    • Joselit, D. “Robert Mapplethorpe’s Poses.” In Janet Kardon, 19-21.
    • Kardon, J. Robert Mapplethorpe: The Perfect Moment. Ed. Janet Kardon. Philladelphia: Institute of Contemporary Art/ Univ. of Pennsylvania, 1988.
    • Kaplan, E.A. “Introduction.” Postmodernism and its Discontents: Theories, Practices. Ed. E. Ann Kaplan. London and New York: Verso, 1988.
    • McGann, J. “Hero with a Thousand Faces: The Rhetoric of Byronism.” SiR 31 (Fall 1992): 295-313.
    • Manning, P. Byron and His Fictions. Detroit: Wayne State UP, 1978.
    • Marchand, L., ed. Byron’s Letters and Journals, 6 vols. London: John Murray, 1973.
    • Sontag, Susan. Preface to Robert Mapplethorpe’s Certain People: A Book of Portraits. Pasadena, CA: Twelvetrees Press, 1985.
    • Thorslev, Jr., P. The Byronic Hero: Types and Prototypes. Minneapolis: Minnesota UP, 1962.
    • Wolfson, S. “`A Problem Few Dare Imitate’: Sardanapalus and `Effeminate Character.’” ELH 58 (1991): 867-902.

     

  • A Schizoanalytic Reading of Baudelaire: The Modernist as Postmodernist

    Eugene W. Holland

    Department of French Language and Literature
    The Ohio State University

    eugeneh@humanities1.cohums.ohio-state.edu

     

    Whether Deleuze and Guattari were actually “doing philosophy” in the Anti-Oedipus or not, their last collaborative work Qu’est-ce que la philosophie?) may shed some light on the status of the concepts operating in that early work.1 Unlike scientific concepts, which aim to stabilize and identify specific domains within the real, philosophical concepts operate according to Deleuze and Guattari as what we might call “transformers”: they intervene in established philosophical problematics in order to de-stabilize them, reworking old concepts and forging new connections among the distinctive features composing them.2 What is distinctive about the Anti-Oedipus, in this light (and perhaps this is what makes its mode of intervention seem more than just philosophical), is that its de-stabilization of established problematics involves making new connections with historical context, as well as re- aligning concepts into new constellations.3 A term such as “de-coding,” then, will best be understood not in terms of any content of its own, but in relation to the concepts it transforms in the course of producing schizoanalysis out of the problematics of historical materialism and psychoanalysis in the wake of the events of 1968 in France, and–for the purposes of this essay–how it illuminates the transformative force of the works of that great 19th- century figure of transition, Charles Baudelaire.4 My aim here will thus be not so much to explain what de-coding means as to show how it works and what it can do in the way of textual and socio-historical analysis of Baudelaire.

     

    Since concepts as transformers intervene in other contexts instead of governing domains of their own, they have no independent, autonomous content, and depend instead on their use for whatever content we can ascribe to them. In other words, what makes philosophical concepts “user- friendly” for Deleuze and Guattari is also what makes them so challenging: they are strategically underdetermined, and thus only take shape–to borrow one of Deleuze’s favorite polyvocal expressions–“au milieu”: in context and in between their point of departure and a point of arrival or connection with some other phenomenon or event.5 Connecting schizoanalysis with Baudelaire for one thing endows the notion of de-coding with features– notably the linguistic or rhetorical tools of metaphor and metonymy for close analysis of poetic texts–it does not obviously possess in the Anti-Oedipus itself; and at the same time it in turn situates the evolution of Baudelairean poetics in the broader cultural and historical context of the emergence of market society, which is ultimately responsible for de-coding in the first place. The de-coding of modernism in Baudelaire will, in this context, turn out to be not only what happens to an earlier romanticism he puts behind him with the invention of modernism, but also what happens to that modernism itself, especially in the late prose poems. By repositioning Baudelaire in relation to and somehow already beyond the very modernism he contributed so much to inventing, a schizoanalytic reading can help situate Baudelaire in postmodern context. But first, a few words about de-coding.

     

    De-coding is, in the first place, Deleuze and Guattari’s translation into semiotic terms of the concepts of rationalization and reification, by which Weber and Lukacs designated the historical replacement of meaning by abstract calculation as the basis of social order. More in agreement with Lukacs than with Weber, they explain this process as a function of the capitalist market and the predominance of exchange-value. To be more specific, de-coding is linked to axiomatization, the process central to capitalism whereby streams of quantified factors of production (such as raw materials, skills, and knowledges) are conjoined in order to extract a differential surplus; de-coding both supports and results from axiomatization, transforming meaningful qualities into calculable quantities. Deleuze and Guattari disagree radically with both Weber and Lukacs, however, in considering de-coding not as sterile disenchantment or hopeless fragmentation, but as the positive moment in the dialectic of capitalist development: as the potential for freedom and permanent revolution, opposed by the forces of re-coding and capitalist authoritarianism.

     

    At the same time, however, that de-coding transforms rationalization and reification into semiotic terms, it translates the semiotics of Lacanian psychoanalysis into historical terms. Of central importance here is the pair of concepts that parallel de-coding and re-coding in the Anti- Oedipus: de-territorialization and re-territorialization. Derived from Lacanian usage–where “territorialization” designates the mapping of the infant’s polymorphous erogenous zones by parental care-giving–these terms come to designate a crucial dynamic of the capitalist market: the disconnection and reconnection of bodies and environments (e.g. the disconnection of peasants from common land by the Enclosure Acts in England, and their re-territorialization as wage-labor onto textile looms in the nascent garment industry). The primary difference between these parallel conceptual pairs is that de-territorialization and re- territorialization operate on physical bodies and involve material investments of energy (as in production and consumption), while de-coding and re-coding operate on symbolic representations and involve investments of mental energy (as in cognition and fantasy). This dual transformation of concepts serves to hinge together labor- power and libido (called social and desiring production in the Anti-Oedipus), and produces a revolutionary historical-materialist-semiotic psychiatry: schizoanalysis. I should note that the distinction between material and symbolic investments virtually disappears in Deleuze and Guattari’s later works. But the benefits of retaining the term “de-coding”–for cultural and literary studies at least–are threefold: it designates semiotic processes that are legible as such in texts and cultural artifacts; it construes those semiotic processes in psychoanalytic or psychodynamic terms (following Lacan); and it at the same time connects both texts and psychodynamics with history and political economy–attributing them ultimately to the spread of the market and the rhythms of capitalist development.

     

    The translation of Lacanian psychoanalysis into historical materialist terms depends on an ambiguity inherited from Levi-Strauss as to the status of the Symbolic Order–an ambiguity crucial to Lacanian therapy: is the “Symbolic Order” a purely abstract, logical structure, or is it historical and concrete? For Deleuze and Guattari, the answer is clear: the Symbolic Order is historical; it is the actual ensemble of codes governing meaning and action in a given social formation. But for Lacanian therapy, the Symbolic Order entails the following paradox: On one hand, the Symbolic Order is the basis of human identity-formation: in saying “I” and accepting a proper name derived from the Name-of-the-Father, the organism becomes a human subject spoken by the language-system, forever alienated from his or her “true” pre-linguistic being and dependent for any sense of self on the Symbolic Other. On the other hand, the Symbolic Order is an illusion, and the Symbolic Other is not a person but a place: the place occupied by the “sujet- suppose-savoir” (the subject who is presumed to know, to possess authoritative knowledge)–and this is an empty place, occupied by the Lacanian therapist only in order to refuse the imputation and indeed deny the very possibility of such knowledge and authority. To put this paradox in other terms, the Symbolic Order is lived in two different registers: from the perspective of the Imaginary register, the Symbolic Order is centered on and governed by a Symbolic Other who possesses the phallus as sign of authority and from whom the individual derives his or her sense of fixed identity and meaning; from the perspective of the Symbolic register, the Symbolic Order is a realm of fluid rather than fixed identities, the phallus is a sign of infinite semiosis rather than of stable meaning, and the Other is a fictional persona in an empty place. Following Lacan, Deleuze and Guattari designate the Symbolic register’s radically fluid form of semiosis free from identity-fixations as “schizophrenia”–but they will ultimately locate and define it historically rather than clinically.

     

    For although they acknowledge the radical implications this paradox of the Symbolic perspective on the Symbolic Order entails for therapy, Deleuze and Guattari nonetheless insist that it has specific historical conditions of possibility. And insisting that the Symbolic Order is historical means exposing it irrevocably to difference, contingency, and change: by examining different social formations (in Part III of the Anti-Oedipus), they are able to show that the fiction of a centered Symbolic Order belongs to another, older social formation based on stable codes, and that capitalism by contrast thrives on and indeed fosters through de-coding the meaningless and identity-free “schizophrenic” semiosis characteristic of the Symbolic register; hence the subtitle of the Anti- Oedipus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia. The intervention of de-coding in Lacanian psychoanalysis thus transforms a paradox lying at the heart of radical therapy into a recognition of historical difference, and produces the strong claim that the Lacanian perspective is made possible by market de-coding under capitalism.

     

    The crux of that historical difference is this: Social relations in a coded Symbolic Order are qualitative and significant: women in tribal societies, for example, are valued as the source of life and the very cornerstone of meta-familial social relations in a kinship system fully charged with symbolic meanings. The basic social relations in the de-coded Symbolic order of capitalism, by contrast, are quantitative and strictly meaningless: workers (of whatever gender) are equated as abstract, calculable amounts of labor-power within the cash nexus of the market. In this regard (though without using the term de-coding, of course), Marx had already discerned an illuminating parallel between Martin Luther and Adam Smith: for Luther, the essence of religion was not found in objects of religious devotion, but in subjective religiosity in general; and for Smith, the essence of wealth was not found in objects of economic value, but in abstract productive activity in general. And Smith’s insight, Marx argues, was made possible by the practice under capitalism of measuring value in terms of abstract labor-power.

     

    To this parallel, Deleuze and Guattari add a third term: Sigmund Freud, whom they call “the Luther and the Adam Smith of psychiatry.”6 For Freud, the essence of libidinal value is found not in the objects of desire, but in desire itself as an abstract subjective essence, as objectively-underdetermined, de-coded libido. Freud’s insight, too, Deleuze and Guattari argue, was made possible dialectically by the capitalist subsumption of all social relations under the market and exchange-value–except the relations of reproduction, which restrict desire to the abstract poles of the nuclear family. So between the extremes of Daddy as Oedipal agent of castration and object of identification and Mommy as forbidden object of desire, market de-coding makes “all that is solid melt into air,” as Marx put it: the market “mobilizes” desire, in other words, by freeing it from capture by any stable, all-embracing code–only to recapture it, it must be said, via the re-coding of advertising, for example, which re-territorializes it onto the objects of the latest administered consumer fad.7

     

    Within the framework of psychoanalysis, meanwhile, Lacan takes the de-coding of desire one important step further than Freud: it is not the actual persons of Mommy and Daddy that shape desire in the family, but rather the functions of the metonymic search for mother-substitutes as objects of desire and metaphoric identifications made in the father’s name. And when such metaphoric identifications break down or are refused (“foreclosed”), according to Lacan, the result is a predominantly metonymic form of desire no longer structured by the nuclear family or any other stable code, but mobilized by the infinite semiosis of language as a purely abstract signifying system devoid of meaning: schizophrenia. From the perspective of schizoanalysis, however, such a radically unstructured form of desire constitutes not a clinical case or exception to the norm, but the very historical rule or tendency of capitalism; schizophrenia becomes the absolute horizon (or “limit”) of social (dis)order and psychic functioning, produced by the de-coding processes of the market.8

     

    My claim is that Baudelaire can be added as a fourth term in the series of parallels linking Freud with Luther and Adam Smith: because for Baudelairean modernism, aesthetic value is found not in the objects of poetic appropriation, but in the activity of poetic appropriation itself–whence the oxymoron in the title of his major collection The Flowers of Evil) and his claim to be able to extract modernist poetry from absolutely anything–from Evil, from sheer boredom (spleen), or even from mud (as he says).9 Abandoning and indeed actively rejecting the fixed values imposed in the Symbolic Order, Baudelaire opts instead for a metonymic poetics that approaches the infinite semiosis of a completely de-coded Symbolic register. In the modernity that Baudelaire was among the first to diagnose, value–religious, economic, libidinal, poetic value– does not inhere in objects, but is subjectively (and even schizophrenically) bestowed. Baudelaire is thus in an important sense the Martin Luther-Adam Smith-Sigmund Freud of poetry, an early champion of de-coding within poetry and aesthetics, and one representative of a world-historical transformation in this field just as Luther, Smith, and Freud were in theirs. (There is another, less flattering sense in which Baudelaire represents the Luther-Smith-Freud of poetry, however, to which I will return below.)

     

    It is this figure of Baudelaire as epitomizing a crucial turning-point in the history of Western culture at the emergence of modernism that the notion of de-coding enables us to recover from the so-called “rhetorical” school of deconstructive criticism. Members of this school–I am thinking in particular of Barbara Johnson, and her ground- breaking readings of matched pairs of Baudelaire poems10— were among the first to see important epistemological or ideological implications in the Jakobsonian distinction between metaphor and metonymy, when one or the other aspect of discourse predominates in a given literary text. In comparing verse and prose versions of the same poem, Johnson argued that metaphoric discourse–predominating in the verse poems–represents delusory adherence to the metaphysics of identity, while metonymic discourse– predominating in the prose poems–entails heroic acknowledgment of uncertainty, contingency, and flux. But this seminal insight is then immediately recontained as an undecidable binary opposition–metaphor and metonymy are legible in both verse and prose, she insists–lest it open onto the historical conclusion that Baudelaire’s poetics evolved from predominantly metaphoric to predominantly metonymic, and that this evolution aligns with his rejection of romanticism and the turn to modernism.

     

    This strategy of containment is based on a misreading of Jakobson–who would surely have been very unhappy to hear the rigorous distinction he proposed between metaphor and metonymy considered “undecidable.” According to Jakobson, the metaphoric axis of discourse is based on the identity or equivalence among terms as defined by the storehouse of the language-system functioning “in absentia” (as Saussure put it) “outside” the linear time of utterance. The metonymic axis, by contrast, sustains the process of combining different terms contiguously to form a chain of signification “within” time–that is, in the duration of utterance. The metaphoric axis is thus a function of the language-system, and appears to exist as a given, outside of time, in contrast to the metonymic axis which is precisely the sequentiality of actual discourse as it is produced in context and through time. Jakobson thus concludes that every sign used in discourse has “two sets of interpretants . . . the code and the context.”11 And we may surmise that when one set of interpretants diminishes in strength or importance, the other set will come to the fore.

     

    This is precisely what happens in Baudelaire: metaphoric poetics predominates in the early poetry, but gives way to metonymic poetics in the later poetry. The single Baudelaire poem everyone is likely to be most familiar with–“Correspondences”–is, ironically enough, the very poem against which nearly everything he later wrote is directed; it sums up a metaphoric poetics of romanticism expressing the harmonies enveloping man in nature outside of society and time–and it is this romantic poetics that is virulently rejected by Baudelairean modernism, where metonymic reference to the present moment and context prevail, instead.

     

    “Correspondences” appears in an introductory group of poems that treat the relation between the misunderstood artist and his philistine society: the ungainly poet is cruelly taunted by uncomprehending humanity in “The Albatross,” while in “Elevation” he soars high above the mortifying world of earthly existence and “effortlessly understands/ The language of flowers and all silent things” (lines 19-20). Such inspired communion with nature becomes the subject of the well-known fourth poem of the cycle, “Correspondences,” whose title and first phrase (“Nature is a temple . . .”) depict nature as a realm of equivalences between the divine and the human, a realm where everything ultimately appears to be just like everything else. The poem’s insistent use of metaphor and simile promotes a poetic vision able to unite interior and exterior, essence and appearance into an organic whole.

     

    In the opening poem of the following cycle, “Beauty,” things are very different. Where “Correspondences” abounds in metaphorical figures of equivalence, transparency, and wholeness, “Beauty” insists instead on metonymical figures of exteriority, mechanical causality, and comparisons of degree. The temptations of metaphor and simile are proferred, but ultimately refused, as the poem dictates a very different form of poetic investigation. The simile of the poem’s first line (“I am beautiful, o mortals, like a dream of stone”) is a case in point: a resemblance is proposed, but in terms so bewildering as to obscure the comparison they are supposed to serve. For what is so beautiful about a dream made of stone, or a dream about stone? We may be tempted to posit statuary as an interpretant for this opening simile: but then why does Beauty-as-statue inspire in poets a love that is “eternally mute, like matter” (line 4), as the closing simile of the first stanza puts it? A poetically fruitful comparison would surely not silence poets, who of all people should be able to give it voice.

     

    The opening simile of the second stanza reinforces these perplexities, by comparing beauty with a sphinx that is “incomprehensible” (line 5). And the strange juxtaposition in the next line (“I combine a heart of snow with the whiteness of swans” line 6) demonstrates how misleading external appearances may be: the swans’ whiteness, suggesting innocence and purity, covers a snowy-white heart of coldness and cruelty. By the time we reach the third stanza, correspondences between inside and outside have become completely undeterminable and appearances evidently deceiving: the poets remain transfixed by what Beauty calls her “grand poses” (grandes attitudes, line 9), but are completely unable to determine their authenticity. She appears, she says (line 10), to have borrowed them from the proudest monuments: if she has borrowed them, are they really hers? And if she hasn’t borrowed them, then why is she pretending to? No wonder the poets’ love remains eternally mute: their metaphors prove unable to determine Beauty’s true inner nature.

     

    Yet it turns out that the inaccessibility of Beauty’s essence enables her actual effectivity in the last stanza of the poem:

     

    For I have, to fascinate those docile admirers, Pure mirrors that render everything more beautiful: My eyes, my immense eyes of eternal light!(12-14)

     
    Her identity lost in questionable comparisons of metaphorical equivalence, Beauty’s effects on things are henceforth measured in metonymical comparisons of degree: she renders things more beautiful. It is not through essences that Beauty reaches poets, but through things; not by relations of interiority and transparency, but of exteriority and mechanical causality. Denied access by the “pure mirrors [of] her eyes” to Beauty’s essence, the poets remain fascinated by proliferating images of the more and more beautiful things illuminated by them.12

     

    Defying metaphoric appropriation and totalizing expression, Beauty is henceforth to be appreciated through her incremental effects on the external world. And indeed, in the subsequent poems of the cycle (especially “The Mask” and “Hymne to Beauty,” which Baudelaire added to the second edition of the collection), Beauty appears only in fragments and random images, valued not for her (or as an essence), but for her contingent impact on the poet. This metonymic poetics intensifies in the “Spleen” poems at the end of the first section of the collection, and reaches its zenith in the “Parisian Tableaus” section, with its insistent reference to scenes of Second Empire Paris, despite the agonizing inability to confer meaning on those scenes. The de-coding of metaphor, meaning, and identity thus fosters not sheer meaninglessness, “undecidability,” or the abyss, but rather metonymic reference to context–even if such reference must at the limit forgo any claim to stable meaning.13

     

    The poetics of metaphor and metonymy in Baudelaire therefore do not represent the poles of an undecidable binary opposition, but terms in an historical evolution from romanticism to modernism. Moreover, Baudelaire’s poetry does not merely reflect the processes of de-coding characteristic of modern capitalist society, it actively participates in them. It is true, of course, that Baudelaire’s life-span corresponds to the take-off period of modern French capitalism, with the banking elite coming to power in 1830, followed by the influx of Californian and Australian gold in 1849, and the founding of the first investment banks and the unification of markets by the rail system under Napoleon III in the 1850s and 60s. But even more important was Baudelaire’s personal investment in romantic-socialist hopes for the Revolution of 1848, which was to crown the revolutionary tradition by finally bringing true workers’ democracy to France. For when the radical- democratic ideals of 1848 are crushed by the coup d’etat of Napoleon in 1851, Baudelaire (among many others) responds by actively repudiating his adherence to those ideals and adopting instead a stance of cynical disdain for modern culture and society. Baudelaire’s modernism emerges here, as defensive repudiation of the romantic enthusiasm he once shared for the figures of nature, woman, and the people. So in this literary-critical context, the introduction of the notion of de-coding transforms the deconstructive binary opposition metaphor/metonymy into a historical matrix for understanding the emergence of modernism in Baudelaire as the metonymic de-coding of romantic metaphoricity in revenge for the shattered hopes and ideals of 1848.

     

    Central to Baudelaire’s evolution from romanticism to modernism is his notorious masochism, about which so much has been written (mostly from various psychoanalytic perspectives).14 Schizoanalysis will insist upon transforming masochism from a psychological into a socio- historical category, situating it in the period following the failures of the 1848 revolutions, when the literary works and essays of the “original” masochist, Leopold von Sacher-Masoch, were so popular throughout Europe. Here I refer to Deleuze’s study of Masoch, although it predates schizoanalysis and uses the discipline-bound terms “de- sexualization” and “re-sexualization” in place of de-coding and re-coding.15 To derive the specificity of real masochism from Masoch’s own literary oeuvre, Deleuze draws on the Freud of Beyond the Pleasure Principle, which explores the relationship between pleasure and repetition: what lies “beyond” the pleasure principle is not so much exceptions to it, but rather its grounding in repetition and the death instinct. Under the influence of the death instinct, even the pleasure-principle becomes, as Freud put it, “innately conservative”: repetition grounds the stimulus-binding energy that links present perception with memory-traces of past gratification, thus enabling the pleasure-principle to operate and govern behavior. Usually, repetition and pleasure work hand-in-glove: we repeat what has previously been found pleasurable, which is to say that present perception is eroticized or “sexualized” and governed “conservatively” by memories of gratifications past.

     

    But the relation of pleasure and repetition can vary: less usually, as in the case of trauma dreams, for instance, repetition operates independently of the pleasure-principle, “de-sexualizing” perception and repeating something not pleasurable, but extremely displeasurable, something traumatic. Here repetition is severed from drive- gratification, and serves instead as an ego-defense to reduce anxiety, by developing ex post facto the stimulus- binding recognition-function whose absence occasioned the trauma in the first place. Still less usually, as in the case of perversion, the de-sexualization of perception is accompanied by the re-sexualization of repetition itself: instead of repeating what was initially found pleasurable, pleasure is derived from whatever is repeated. Now we might well expect desperate measures for reducing anxiety to proliferate in a de-coded Symbolic Order, which no longer protects the psyche from traumatic stimuli by binding them according to established codes of meaning. But the question remains: how can the repetition of pain, of all things– and especially one’s own pain–reduce anxiety and procure pleasure? Here, Deleuze invokes the conclusion of Reik’s clinical study of masochism: accepting punishment for the desired act before it occurs effectively resolves guilt and anxiety about the act, thereby sanctioning its consummation.16 But he then goes on to ask, why would preliminary punishment serve the end of obtaining pleasure? Under what conditions does this masochistic narrative-kernel (punishment-before -> pleasure-after) become effective? This is where analysis of Masoch’s fiction proves illuminating.

     

    Masoch’s hero typically arranges a mock contract according to which he willingly suffers regular and systematic domination and punishment at the hands of a beautiful woman. The functions of this fantasy-contract are several: first of all, it reduces anxiety about punishment by meticulously specifying when, where, and how such punishment is to be carried out; secondly, it explicitly excludes the Father, the usual authority-figure, and transfers his Symbolic authority to the woman; then, by actively soliciting punishment, the contract invalidates the Symbolic authority responsible for the suffering incurred: since the punishment is undeserved, blame falls on the figure meting it out, instead. With the Father-figure excluded and his authority denied, the masochist hero ends up enjoying relations with the woman which the Father normally prohibits. In the context of mid-19th century France, this fantasy-scenario presents an allegory of the anti-authoritarian ideals of 1848, with the de-coding of the Father-figure in Louis-Philippe accompanied by re-coding on the Mother-figure of Marianne and the Second Republic.

     

    Yet, in a way Deleuze does not fully appreciate, the masochistic scenario just described is in Masoch’s fiction embedded within a narrative that produces results very different from the utopian ideal projected by the contract. In Masoch’s stories, the Father-figure supposedly excluded from the fantasy-contract suddenly re-appears, and is in fact joined by the woman in administering new forms of torture that exceed and thus break the terms of the contract. So at the end of Masoch’s stories, the masochistic fantasy-scenario crumbles, leaving the hero with a galling sense of having been duped and a bitter desire for revenge. And the ex-masochist hero in Masoch’s stories indeed takes his revenge, with a ferocity bordering on sadism. The conclusion of Masochian narrative thus represents not the anti-authoritarian utopia of idealized relations with the ideal Mother-figure, as pictured in the masochistic scenario, but rather a vitriolic and often violent cynic who now despises anyone (even or most of all himself) foolish enough to have taken his ideals and desires for reality. Such is the story that Masoch told–and that his innumerable readers throughout late-19th century Europe read–over and over and over again: as in a trauma-dream, this compulsion to repeat represents defensive preparation for a cataclysmic event…that has already occurred. And for Baudelaire, as for so many of his French contemporaries, the real event that represents as it were the return of the Father ruining the Mother-and-son’s anti- authoritarian utopia, is the incredible rise to power and coup d’etat of Napoleon III, the founding of the authoritarian Second Empire on the ruins of the democratic Second Republic.

     

    What’s more, anyone familiar with biographies of Baudelaire will recognize this story of the return-of-the- Father destroying the Mother-and-son’s idyllic utopia as a repetition, from Baudelaire’s own childhood, of his mother’s remarriage to an ambitious young military officer several years after the death of Baudelaire’s real father: this uncanny “coincidence” is for schizoanalysis what made Baudelaire the lyric poet of his age, to paraphrase Walter Benjamin. In schizoanalytic terms, then, “masochism” is not the name of a psychological category, but a historical strategy for de-coding social authority while transforming romantic idealism into the disillusioned cynicism of modernism.

     

    This is not to say that the evolution from romanticism to modernism in Baudelaire can be understood as some kind of linear progression from metaphor to metonymy: metaphor doesn’t simply disappear, but reappears in Baudelairean modernism transformed by metonymization into a corrosive irony.17 Our account of the de-coding of modernism in Baudelaire, meanwhile, remains still too abstract as long as metonymy as a free form of desire induced by the market and metonymization as a formal development of Baudelairean poetics are linked by mere parallelism: Lacan’s and Johnson’s quite different transformations of Jakobson’s concept of metonymy must be completed and brought to bear on the evolution of Baudelairean poetics as a whole (not restricted to individual poems or pairs of poems, as in Johnson and in Jakobson himself). Here, Walter Benjamin’s own historicization of psychoanalysis via a reading of Baudelaire constitutes an invaluable point of departure. What Benjamin saw was that Baudelaire’s best poetry was formulated as a defense against the traumatic shocks typical of urban life in the de-coded Symbolic Order of nascent capitalism. Baudelaire’s shock-defense takes two forms, which correspond to the title of the well-known first section of The Flowers of Evil, “Spleen and Ideal.” “Ideal” designates a metaphoric defense that re-codes potentially traumatic experience in the nostalgic terms of a lost yet rememorable harmony with nature outside of time (as in “Former Life,” for example); “Spleen” designates a metonymic defense that defuses potential trauma simply by locating an experience as precisely as possible in time (see “The Clock”)–though at the cost, Benjamin suggests, of robbing it of any lyric content.18

     

    As invaluable as it is, Benjamin’s reading overlooks the importance of the prose poem collection and even of the “Tableaux Parisiens” section added after “Spleen and Ideal” to the second edition of The Flowers of Evil–where a very different form of poetics and response to market de- coding prevail. What Benjamin didn’t see is that cycles of protective re-coding alternate with cycles of exhilarated de-coding in the verse collection, as the poet alternately seeks out and then withdraws from contact with the Real. Nor was he able to appreciate the way in which the predominance of metonymic poetics transforms the cycles of de-coding and re-coding in the verse collection into simultaneous re-coding and de-coding in the individual poems of the prose collection, as the high-anxiety trauma and shock-defenses of earlier work give way in the later work to a very different defense based on psychic splitting.

     

    Historically speaking, once ambient de-coding reaches a certain threshold of intensity, whatever stability and coherence the ego may have possessed dis-integrate, and the unstable, split subjectivity of so-called borderline conditions replaces oedipal neurosis as the predominant form of psychological disturbance–as nearly all the post- Freudian psychoanalytic literature from Fenichel to Kristeva and Kernberg attests.19 But in the case of Baudelaire, who after all experienced de-coding at a considerably earlier stage of capitalist development, there had to have been a precipitating cause for severe splitting: it was, as I have suggested, his experience of Napoleon’s coup d’etat, which shook Baudelaire’s psychic structure to its foundations and propelled him from a relatively stable romanticism, through masochism, and into the supremely flexible, if not indeed self-contradictory, borderline condition characteristic of his modernism.20 Borderline conditions by themselves, however (and regardless of the degree to which Baudelaire “actually” lived or “merely” staged them in his poetry21), are not sufficient to account for Baudelairean modernism; there had to have been some figure to serve as ego-ideal around which a new, post- romantic personality could form, in order to sustain and sanction the enduring ambitions of Baudelaire the writer: this figure, it turns out, was Edgar Allan Poe. Identification with Poe as a fellow writer shunned by contemporary society fosters a narcissistic reaction to the underlying borderline condition, so that the extreme instability and psychic splitting characteristic of the latter become a new form of defense.

     

    This is the stance that emerges in the “Parisian Tableaus” section of the second edition of The Flowers of Evil; it is epitomized in “The Game” (“Le Jeu”), in which the poet sees himself in a dream sitting off in a corner at a gambling-house, silently watching the players and whores feverishly pursuing their ends, and is shocked that he actually envies them their “tenacious passion”:

     

    I saw myself, off in a corner of the grim gambling-den,
    Leaning on my elbows, silent, cold, and envious,
    Envying the gamblers their tenacious passion,
    The old whores their dismal gaiety.
    And all of them cheerfully selling, right in front of me,
    One, his long-held honor, the other her good looks!
     
    And my heart was alarmed at my envy of these poor souls
    Racing zealously toward the gaping abyss,
    Who, drunk with their own passion, in the end all liked
    Pain better than death and hell better than nothingness!(15-24)

     
    Not only is the poet only an observer within the dream (lines 15-16), but he then takes his distance from this dream-self, cynically demystifying in waking consciousness the very passions he envied in the dream (lines 21-24).

     

    Such splitting appears even more starkly in the figure of the prose poem narrator, for whom it serves to establish a more or less comfortable distance from scenes of former selves in degraded commercial context–former selves (romantic idealists, most notably) who have been split off from the observing narrator yet retain a certain fascination as objects of his rapt attention and of poetic depiction.22 This narrative stance is most clearly illustrated in “Loss of a halo,” where the de-coding of romantic views of the poet’s vocation, already accomplished on the level of poetics in “Beauty,” has become an explicit prose theme. In a brothel, the narrator runs into an acquaintance who expresses surprise at finding the illustrious poet in such a mauvais lieu. The poet immediately launches into a long explanation of why he is there: while dodging on-coming traffic on his way across the boulevard, his halo dropped in the mud; not having the courage to retrieve it, he decided it would be better to lose his insignia than to break his neck. Then, looking on the bright side, he realized he could now “stroll about incognito, do nasty things, and indulge in vulgar behavior just like ordinary mortals.” The acquaintance expects him to advertise to get his halo back, but the poet will have none of it: dignity bores him, and now he gets to enjoy himself. Besides, he imagines the fun he will have if some scribbler picks it up and dares to put it on: “What a pleasure to make someone happy!–especially someone who would make me laugh! Think of X, or Z! Wouldn’t that be droll!” Here we see the narrator exercising an invidious superiority over his interlocutor and other writers who still believe in the “aura” of an older, romantic version of the poet, one the narrator has left behind.

     

    But this sense of superiority, it turns out, was not a given but an achievement, and was in fact achieved at the expense of Baudelaire himself in an earlier incarnation. For the journal anecdote on which the poem is based reads very differently from the published version: here, the narrator does recover the halo, and still values it highly enough to consider even its momentary loss a bad omen.23 The lost halo, in this light, would be precisely the one awarded the romantic poet of “Benediction” for his suffering at the beginning of The Flowers of Evil. This idealistic self has in the final version completely disappeared beneath the narrator’s cynicism, having been projected onto X, Z, and the interlocutor, all of whom continue to value the outmoded ideal. Moreover, the loss of the halo is now not merely the subject of a story: it is an event recounted by a narrator to a listener within the poem; it has become an occasion for the narrator to attain a position of superiority over his fictional audience. And he is now at one remove from the experience: Baudelaire has transmuted the original account and the uneasy feeling it provoked into the snide banter of a world-weary and slightly sullied roue, and in the process utterly rejected the romantic ideal of the poet he himself once espoused, if not embodied. Such a position of serene indifference or actual disdain for cultural ideals characterizes Baudelairean modernism at its apogee. And yet…and yet….

     

    And yet there are at least two senses in which Baudelaire’s prose poem collection goes far beyond the split stance of the modernism adumbrated in the “Tableaux Parisiens”–far enough, perhaps, to attain a certain postmodernism. For one thing, although Baudelaire’s identification with Poe as martyr to a philistine society was supposed to elevate him above the crass world of commerce and mass-democratic society, the modernist poetics he developed turned out to be strictly complicitous with the capitalist market. By locating aesthetic value solely in the activity of poetic appropriation and distancing himself from the objects of that appropriation, Baudelaire comes to occupy the position of what Jacques Attali calls the “designer” or “programmer,” whose basic function within capitalism is to endow more or less worthless objects (such as “designer-jeans”) with semiotic surplus-value in order to enable the realization of economic surplus-value by promoting their purchase by consumers; the most familiar form of programming, in other words, is advertising.24 This is the second sense in which Baudelaire can be considered the Martin Luther/Adam Smith/Sigmund Freud of poetry, for each of these figures, too, re-imposed a moment of re-coding on the radical indeterminacy of de-coding, according to Deleuze and Guattari: Luther re-codes pure religiosity onto Scripture; Adam Smith re-codes abstract labor-power onto capital; Freud re-codes polymorphous libido onto the Oedipus complex. Baudelaire, similarly, re-codes an increasingly metonymic poetics onto the prose poem narrator-as-programmer.

     

    Inasmuch as Baudelaire’s mature poetics functions in this way to valorize from the re-coded perspective of the borderline-narcissist narrator various forms of de-coded experience that have been distanced or rendered virtually meaningless in themselves, it acts in complicity with and even as a prototype for the kinds of debased commercial activity modernism was to have rejected and risen above. And this is a complicity that Baudelaire himself acknowledges in the prose poem entitled “The Cake,” where inflated rhetoric endows a nearly worthless scrap of bread with so much semiotic surplus-value that it becomes the prized object of a fratricidal war.25 Such recognition of the ultimate inseparability of high and low culture, of aesthetics and marketing, has become a hallmark of what we today call the postmodern condition–in large part because modernist “defamiliarization” has indeed become the all too familiar marketing strategy Baudelaire “foresaw” it could, now used for selling everything from standard-brand beer to haute couture perfume.

     

    And yet it must be said at the same time that Baudelaire never whole-heartedly adopts the aloof and superior position of the modernist programmer: an abiding sympathy for his idealistic former selves remains a central feature of the prose poem collection, visible in the narrator’s recurring shock of recognition that the poor victims of commerce and philistinism he has been watching from a distance are none other than the poet himself. Nowhere in the prose poem collection is this more poignantly depicted than in “The Old Clown,” in which the narrator happens across an aged carnival clown sitting alone, ignored by the joyous throngs surrounding him. While observing him, the narrator suddenly “feels his throat wrung by the terrible hand of hysteria,” and when he tries to “analyze [his] sudden grief,” he realizes he has just seen an image of “the aging man of letters who has outlived the generation he had so brilliantly amused; [an image] of the old poet bereft of friends, family, children, worn out by poverty and the public’s ingratitude”–an image, that is to say, of his very self. Whereas the narrator of poems such as “Loss of a halo” (and “The Projects”) manages to retain or quickly regain his composure in the face of former selves, defensive splitting in many other poems (including “A Heroic Death” as well as “The Old Clown”) fails abruptly, putting the narrator back into agonzing contact with romantic ideals that are alive in memory despite their historical defeat (which is the theme of the prose poem entitled “Which one is the true one?”).26

     

    To be sure, there is a tendency in Baudelaire to repudiate the romantic narrative of French history as progress toward social democracy in the name of modernism, a tendency to transform erstwhile idealism into pure cynicism. What could be more cynical than to capitalize on the defeat of one’s ideals by adopting the position of programmer and contributing to the realization of surplus-value, including and especially one’s own? Such borderline-narcissist cynicism, incidentally, is precisely the stance of Baudelaire’s current-day, American avatar, Madonna, who acts out degraded split-off selves who she knows will shock and sell, but always from an ironic distance that leaves her integrity as programmer and her command of a share of the profits intact.27 But Baudelaire, it seems to me, never quite occupies such a position. And this is not just because (as Bataille reminds us28) he represents in material terms a colossal failure as the “lyric poet of high capitalism”–unlike Madonna. It is because, however much Baudelaire repudiates narrative and history, he never manages to completely hide his profound sympathy and lasting identification with the victims of the capitalist market: he never fully occupies the modernism he himself invented.

     

    Is such identification with the victims on Baudelaire’s part a mere vestige of his erstwhile romanticism? Biographically speaking, perhaps so. But I would argue that it becomes available or interesting to us under specifically postmodern conditions, when we become willing or able to see more in Baudelaire than the invention of modernism for which he has been canonized. Surely his recognition of the potential of modernist poetry for market programming has little enough to do with romanticism, and everything to do with postmodernism today. In any case, the anti- universalizing and anti-individualist principles of schizoanalysis suggest a version of literary reception theory (akin to Benjamin’s “redemptive” literary history) according to which a process of socio-historical rather than narrowly psychological transference will make certain features of a literary work become visible when changed circumstances bring one historical moment into unexpected alignment with another.29 In this light, as our postmodernism rejoins Baudelaire’s pre- and/or post- modernism by means of such historical transference, modernism appears in between as an attempt to capitalize on market reification itself, with its segregation of formal innovation in the restricted sphere of high culture from homogenizing repetition in the general cultural sphere, as a vehicle or opportunity for aesthetic development.30 And it would appear by now that this attempt has, if not failed in some simple and total way, then certainly run its course, accomplished all that it can–and is therefore being surpassed.

     

    Antonio Negri has, to my mind, proposed the most acute way to situate this historical reconstruction of the relation between the premodern, modern, and postmodern in a figure such as Baudelaire: in terms of the difference between merely formal subsumption and real subsumption of labor by capital.31 If, as Marx said, society sets itself only the tasks it is able to accomplish, then we may understand the kinds of formal freedom and equality associated with romanticism, the sovereign individual, and representative democracy, along with the kinds of formal innovation associated with modernism, as historically necessary and indeed fruitful stages in the development of modern culture, but stages which have by now been superceded, as the full socialization of production under conditions of real subsumption renders the individual romantic subject obsolete, and calls for new developments in collective freedom, substantive equality, and general cultural innovation alike. In this light, “The Voyage” (the concluding poem of the second edition of The Flowers of Evil) might be understood to prefigure, in its insistence on the value of unending travel for its own sake, the notion of permanent revolution as it appears on the historical horizon once capitalism has exhausted all of its positive potential–and more specifically to prefigure, in its strategic use of the anti-lyrical, plural personal pronoun “we” throughout, the kind of collective nomadism on a new earth that Deleuze and Guattari envisage in the Anti- Oedipus as the next stage of social development.32

     

    Notes

     

    1. Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari, The Anti-Oedipus (New York: Viking, 1977) and Qu’est-ce que la philosophie? (Paris: Minuit, 1991).

     

    2. On the differences between philosophical concepts and scientific “functives” (fonctifs), see Chapter 5 of Qu’est-ce que la philosophie?. While not Deleuze and Guattari’s own, I have found the term “transformers” useful for capturing the operational value of Deleuzo-Guattarian concepts; so has Reda Bensma, in “Les transformateurs- Deleuze ou le cinema comme automate spirituel,” forthcoming.

     

    3. This would be the “utopian” dimension of the philosophical concepts deployed in the Anti-Oedipus, according to Qu’est-ce que la philosophie? (95).

     

    4. On the relations of the Anti-Oedipus to May 68, see my “Schizoanalysis: the Postmodern Contextualization of Psychoanalysis” in Marxism and the Interpretation of Culture, Nelson and Grossberg, eds. (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1988), 405-416, esp. 415. For a fuller treatment than is possible here of the evolution of Baudelairean poetics from the perspective of schizoanalysis, see my Baudelaire and Schizoanalysis: the Sociopoetics of Modernism (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1993).

     

    5. On the concept of friend and concepts as friends, see Qu’est-ce que la philosophie?, 8-10 and Chapter 3, “Les personnages conceptuels”. On “milieu,” see Gilles Deleuze and Claire Parnet, Dialogues (Paris: Flammarion, 1977), 69 and passim; and Qu’est-ce que la philosophie?, 94-96.

     

    6. The Anti-Oedipus, 271.

     

    7. Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels, “The Communist Manifesto” in Marx and Engels: Basic Writings on Politics and Philosophy, Lewis Feuer, ed. (Garden City: Doubleday, 1959) 6-41; the quotation is from p.10.

     

    8. The Anti-Oedipus, 176-77; for a similar discussion of the relation between philosophy and the limits of capitalism, see Qu’est-ce que la philosophie?, 92-97.

     

    9. “I have kneaded mud and made it into gold” (my translation), Oeuvres Completes (Paris: Seuil, 1968), 763.

     

    10. Barbara Johnson, Defigurations du langage poetique: la seconde revolution baudelairienne (Paris: Flammarion, 1979), 31-55; and The Critical Difference (Baltimore: The Johns Hopkins University Press, 1980), 23-48.

     

    11. Roman Jakobson, “Two Aspects of Language and Two Types of Aphasic Disturbance” in Fundamentals of Language (with Morris Halle) (The Hague: Mouton, 1956), 67-96; the quotation is from page 75.

     

    12. For a more complete comparison of the poetics of “Correspondences” and “Beauty,” see Baudelaire and Schizoanalysis, Chapter 2.

     

    13. On the metonymic poetics of the “spleen” poems and the “Parisian Tableaus,” see Baudelaire and Schizoanalysis, Chapters 3 and 5. On metonymic or “indexical” reference to context in Baudelairean modernism, see Ross Chambers, Melancolie et opposition: les debuts du modernisme en France (Paris: Jose Corti, 1987).

     

    14. On Baudelaire’s masochism, see Rene Laforgue, The Defeat of Baudelaire (London: Hogarth, 1932); Jean-Paul Sartre, Baudelaire (Paris: Gallimard, 1947); and Leo Bersani, Baudelaire and Freud (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1977).

     

    15. Gilles Deleuze, Presentation de Sacher-Masoch (Paris: Minuit, 1967).

     

    16. Theodor Reik, Masochism in Modern Man (New York: Farrar and Rinehart, 1941).

     

    17. For another, quite different account of metaphor in modernism, see David Lodge, The Modes of Modern Writing: Metaphor, Metonymy, and the Typology of Modern Literature (London: Edward Arnold, 1977); Lodge draws exclusively on Jakobson for his understanding of metaphor and metonymy, and not at all on Lacan.

     

    18. Walter Benjamin, Charles Baudelaire: A Lyric Poet in the Era of High Capitalism (London: Verso/New Left Books, 1973).

     

    19. Otto Fenichel, “Ego-Disturbances and their Treatment,” in Collected Papers, 2 Vols. (New York: Norton, 1953-54), Vol. 2, 109-28; Otto Kernberg, Borderline Conditions and Pathological Narcissism (New York: Jason Aronson, 1975); Julia Kristeva, “Within the Microcosm of ‘The Talking Cure’,” in Interpreting Lacan, Smith and Kerrigan, eds., Psychiatry and the Humanities Vol. 6 (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1983), 33-48.

     

    20. “With all the talk of rights these days, there’s one that everyone has forgotten about . . . the right to contradict oneself” (my translation) Oeuvres Completes, 291. On the contradictory nature of modernism, see Charles Bernheimer, Figures of Ill Repute: Representing Prostitution in Nineteenth-Century France (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1989).

     

    21. As Leo Bersani put it, “I don’t mean that Baudelaire was psychotic when he wrote these poems; he does, however, seem to have represented in them a psychotic relation to the world.” Baudelaire and Freud (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1977), 128.

     

    22. For a fuller discussion of narrative splitting in a broader range of prose poems, see Baudelaire and Schizoanalysis, Chapters 6 and 7.

     

    23. The anecdote is found in “Fusees” #11, Oeuvres Completes, 627.

     

    24. Jacques Attali, Noise: the Political Economy of Music (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1985), esp. 128-32.

     

    25. For a more complete reading of “The Cake,” see Baudelaire and Schizoanalysis, Chapter 7.

     

    26. For discussions of “Which one is the true one?” “A Heroic Death,” and “The Projects” along these lines, see Baudelaire and Schizoanalysis, Chapter 6.

     

    27. See David Tetzlaff, “Metatextual Girl: patriarchy -> postmodernism -> power -> money -> Madonna,” forthcoming; and my “Baudelaire’s Madonna and Ours,” forthcoming.

     

    28. See his essay on Baudelaire in Literature and Evil (London: Calder and Boyars, 1973).

     

    29. On “historical transference” of this kind, see Benjamin’s “Theses on the Philosophy of History,” in Illuminations, Hannah Arendt, ed. (New York: Schocken, 1969), 253-64; Michel de Certeau, The Writing of History (New York: Columbia University Press, 1988); Dominick LaCapra, Soundings in Critical Theory (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1989); and the preface to Baudelaire and Schizoanalysis.

     

    30. On the general and restricted spheres of culture, see Pierre Bourdieu, Distinction: a social critique of the judgment of taste (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1984).

     

    31. See Antonio Negri, Marx Beyond Marx: Lessons on the Grundrisse (New York: Bergin and Garvey, 1984); and The Politics of Subversion: A Manifesto for the Twenty-First Century (London: Polity Press [Basil Blackwell], 1989), especially Chapter 3, “From the mass worker to the socialized worker–and beyond” and Chapter 13, “Postmodern.”

     

    32. On the “new earth,” see the Anti-Oedipus, 35, 131, 318-22, 367-82; and Qu’est-ce que la philosophie?, 95; on nomadism as permanent revolution, see my “Schizoanalysis: the Postmodern Contextualization of Psychoanalysis,” esp. 407.

     

  • On The Bull’s Horn with Peter Handke: Debates, Failures, Essays, and a Postmodern Livre de Moi

    Stephanie Hammer

    Department of Literature and Languages
    University of California, Riverside

    HAMM@ucrac2.ucr.edu

    The time is past when we can plant ourselves in front of a Vernet and sigh along with Diderot, “How beautiful, grand, varied, noble, wise, harmonious, rigorously colored this is!”

     

    (Lyotard, “Contribution to an Idea of Postmodernity”)

     

    What a wise and beautiful book . . . .

     

    (Erich Skwara’s review of the Essay on Fatigue)

     

    Today what subject would the great metaphysical narrative tell about? Would it be the odyssey and for what narratee?

     

    (Lyotard, “Contribution to an Idea of Postmodernity”)

     

    We are dealing with another one of those postmodern texts in which a funky object de pop-art serves as the pretext for self-reflexive excursions through the time and space of memory . . . .

     

    (Theodore Ziolkowski’s review of the Essay on the Jukebox)

     

    Autobiography is abject unless, in the words of Michel Leiris, it exposes itself to the “bull’s horn.”

     

    (Ihab Hassan, “Parabiography”)

     

    This essay obeys two imperatives;1 it is being torn in two directions: a critique of Handke’s critical reception as it pertains to the postmodern and a close read- ing of Handke’s recent Essay Versuch) series. I will allow my text to tear, and rather than suturing it together, I display, in advance, the wound that cannot–at least in this space–be closed. As a tribute to and as a critical apparatus for Handke, I will allow it to split, to be uncertain, to be ambivalent. This move will court failure and ensure insufficiency, but it might “correct” the flatness of most Handke criticism: the thematic studies, the stylistic studies, the countless influence studies on him, and more insidiously, the frequent, incestuous comparisons of him with himself. I will try to show that, for the most part, the articles and books on him cannot understand his work because they would master it (with all that such a term implies), and as Handke’s texts resist such hermeneutic sub- jugation, his critics have often descended either to righteous indignation or into summary and description2 –colorless repetitions of the objects which they want to comprehend but cannot fasten upon. Can one surrender without submitting to the writing of Peter Handke? Can one’s own writing on him allow itself to be gored by his textual challenges to authority and reconstitute itself through that (fatal? pleasurable?) blow to its own integrity? Perhaps.

     

    In his turning-point exercise of the mid 70’s, The Weight of the World Das Gewicht der Welt), Peter Handke exerted a renewed resistance to the narrative tyrannies of form, which he at once invoked and subverted in such novels as The Goalie’s Anxiety at the Penalty Kick and Short Letter, Long Farewell. In Weight he rehearsed the Russian Formalist view of contemporary society gone numb, but rather than just making language “strange”, he exploded the diaristic form (that humble, non-literary history of the every day that anyone can produce) into an elusive encyclopedia of linguistic snippets–autobiographical sound bytes which might contain information, citation, observation, opinion, dream, or memory. Indeed, as several critics have noted (among them Axel Gellhaus and Peter Putz) most of Handke’s output during that decade consisted of narrative forms made difficult by a perceptual loss of one kind or another which they simultaneously narrated and enacted. But The Weight of the World radicalized the problem of narrative; it documented the author’s hardening refusal to tell, and harnessed that refusal to both a utopian dream of a new mythology and an ironic critique of language practices, including and especially his own.

     

    Much critical energy has already been expended on Handke’s evolution during the 60’s and 70’s, so I will not retread that familiar territory here, although I will, inevitably, refer to it. Instead I would examine an apparent problem–namely the fact that, as difficult as Handke’s narrative forms have always been for even the most agile of critical readers, his prose works of the past decade seem, unbelievably enough, to pose even more daunting challenges. As examples of this new difficulty I will read the trilogy (at the time of writing) of slim volumes entitled Essays produced by Handke in the late 80’s and early 90’s against a variety of concerns, including the resonance of that father-essayist, Montaigne. But before doing this, I am compelled to dismantle the discussions of Handke’s “difficulty” during the past decade–a difficulty which has been discussed, increasingly, in terms of the author’s postmodern affiliations–hence the oppositional pairings of Lyotard and Hassan with recent reviews of Handke’s works by way of preface to my own problematic/problematized “essay.”

     

    What is the origin and history of this connection? Handke’s relation with the postmodern was first articulated by the Klinkowitz/Knowlton book Peter Handke and the Postmodern Transformation in 1983. In a brief opening chapter on postmodern art, that book aligned Handke’s work of the 60’s and 70’s with that of Jacques Derrida (assuming, by implication, a congruence between deconstruction and the postmodern [3-6]), and it argued for a view of Handke’s corpus from 1966 to 1981 along a trajectory which shifted from negative to positive poles of postmodern aesthetics (Klinkowitz and Knowlton, 128-9); the book’s conclusion also made a quick appeal to the category of “new Sensibility”– ostensibly as a corrective to Manfred Durzak’s deployment, a year earlier, of “neue Subjektivitat” in a hostile reading of Handke’s repeated usage of autobiographical material. Ten years later, the Klinkowitz/Knowlton perspective looks simplistic when compared to the complex theoretical dis- cussions of postmodernity offered by Hassan and Hutcheon, among others, but the book’s attempt to move Handke out of the prisonhouse of Austro-German literary traditions was brave and continues to be valuable. Yet, far from being settled, the question of Handke’s connections to postmodernism/ity has taken on an odd intensity and a kind of built-in futility in subsequent discussions. This is, for example, the essential non-dynamic which characterizes Norbert Gabriel’s 1991 essay on Handke’s recent prose work; tellingly, the essay raises and then defers the question of Handke’s place to an unwilling conclusion that the Austrian author’s works, unpleasant as they are to read, are in fact “not bad books.”

     

    The lofty tone of Gabriel’s pronouncements and the strategic use of the issue of postmodernity to damn Handke with faint praise are, I think, symptomatic of a theoretical tack which has proven at least as problematic as the problem it wants to solve; namely, the question of Handke and the postmodern has provided critics with an outlet for an anxiety-ridden false debate about his aesthetic worth, as though the question of his place, once settled, could somehow legitimize (or more likely invalidate) his writing practices once and for all. The gesture of invoking the postmodern works in paradoxical ways in assessments of Handke; sometimes it might imply a comforting, and curious understanding of postmodernism as part of an aesthetic/ethical/political duality wherein it must play the part of the good, the beautiful, the true, and the politically progressive to modernism’s shopworn aesthetic program–a duality which ringingly repeats the binarism of classic/romantic.3

     

    This is the agenda of Hans Joseph Ortheil, who uses an earlier, postmodern Handke to condemn the work of the later, reactionary Handke in Die Zeit Die Zeit 24.4, 1987). Such an outlook also indirectly informs the article of Eva- Maria Metcalf, who argues that Handke is an arrogant, impotent modernist: “in 1967 Peter Handke built himself an ivory tower, and he has resided in it ever since” (369). But elsewhere, as in Ziolkowski’s review, the “fact” of Handke’s postmodern aesthetic becomes a way to dismiss him as unoriginal, leaving Erich Skwara the uncomfortable task of defending Handke’s essay on fatigue through an appeal to neo-romantic accolades which would (while they seemingly challenge Lyotard’s contentions) rehabilitate the con- temporary author into a reincarnation of Hugo von Hofmannsthal, or worse, Goethe. Finally, there are those like Handke’s French apologist/translator G.-A. Goldschmidt, who insist on Handke’s essential realistic simplicity, all the while offering a “modest” commentary of 200 pages (supplemented by photographs and utterances of Handke) to assist in this easy enterprise.

     

    The only person who comes close to articulating the relationship between Handke and the postmodern is Diane Shooman, who boldly compares Handke’s work to Ulysses, Wordsworth, and contemporary painting, and then challenges the Handke/Derrida congruence proposed by Klinkowitz and Knowlton (Shooman 94). She does something else remarkable and controversial; she compares Handke’s work, primarily, to that of a female painter–highlighting, by implication, an aspect of his work which had heretofore gone unnoticed: the gender trouble at work in his writing, and its specifically “feminine” markers (when she presented this analysis at the Modern Austrian Literature Conference a few years ago, it was vociferously decried by practically everyone in the room).4

     

    For the most part, Handke’s critical reception veers between an angry dismissal which openly hates what he does and a swooning, predominantly masculine, denial which buries whatever the books might really up to.5 He is postmodern when he writes badly, and he is a bad writer because he is not postmodern. He is difficult, he is almost unreadable (Michael Hofmann TLS), he is arch (J.J. White TLS), he is in a literary cul-de-sac (Anthony Vivis TLS); or he writes books which are our “friends” (Skwara) and which are glowing and moving classics (Volker Hage, blurb on Versuch uber die Jukebox, on the last page of Versuch uber den gegluckten Tag, excerpted from Die Zeit). These discussions about Handke contrast so profoundly with the statements of both theoreticians and ex- plicators of the postmodern such as Ihab Hassan and Steven Connor (who simply include Handke on a list of postmodern writers [Hassan 85; Connor 123] without further comment), that I cannot help asking, as does Warren Montag in his angry indictment of the postmodern debate, what lies be- hind this vociferous, yet strangely off-kilter posturing. What is at stake in these critical (mis)readings of Peter Handke?6

     

    Much. First, Handke has succeeded too well in the formalist challenge which I invoked earlier; he makes the forms so difficult that we feel the difficulty, rather than the feeling, and get deflected by the perception rather than examining (or sharing) the mood which informs it. Second, Handke enrages German critics and American critics alike, because his recent writing repeatedly indicts Austro-German culture, while at the same time using an increasingly high- style literary language that represents, for Wim Wenders at least, “the most beautiful German written nowadays” (Kunzel 212)–as though Kafka were channeling the spirit of Goethe to write “In the Penal Colony.” Third, he plays a scary, threatening game with male subjectivity, and his recent works are disturbing and destabilizing in ways that his early plays and novels rarely were, for all their violent histrionics, and it is this aspect of his work that his defenders most want to deny.7 These threats against male subjectivity are important in another, more immediate way, for they are vocationally and practically, as well as psychically, troubling to literary professionals. By their very nature, Handke’s games with the male subject undermine any “penetrating” analysis which would get to the core of his writing, and so the greatest danger that Handke’s writing incurs on the critic is the almost certain invalidation of the literary-critical project itself, as it is usually constructed; there is throughout Handke’s recent work a questioning of the critical stance as such, and, more precisely, the form through which that stance attempts to legitimize itself and ensure its authority. That form is the essay, and it is no coincidence, both that the essay is the genre of choice for Handke in his work of the late 80’s and early 90’s, and that critical essays about him seem so often doomed to failure. More productive, clearly, would be to shift the ground for the discussion entirely, as Alice Kuzniar has already provisionally done in her powerful Lacanian reading of Across. Her analysis of Handke in terms of the Lacanian “gaze” and what she calls Handke’s “Antwortblick” (seeing oneself being seen [Kuzniar 357]) furthers the critical conversation’s migration out of Germanistik, toward a different realm of poststructuralist theory (psychoanalysis rather than deconstruction) as it pertains to the visual in general and the cinematic in par- ticular–concerns, which as she observes, are sources of continuing interest in Handke’s writing.

     

    But before sketching out the critical venue opened, not only by this shift into visual media, but more importantly, by her invocation of the word “desire” (the ramifications of which Kuzniar does not pursue in her essay), I want to address this difficulty of Handke’s place one more time. The problem is, the non-debate notwithstanding, a fertile one because it points both to the specialness of Handke’s project and to the impossibility of “defining” the postmodern. This impossibility becomes both clear and humorous when, we think of Handke’s aesthetic practices, not against a definition or in terms of a category, into which we must forcibly stuff his corpus, but rather, with the ponderings of Lyotard, who has discussed the postmodern within the following, very large parameters8:

     

    The powers of sensing and phrasing are being probed on the limits of what is possible . . . . Experiments are being made. This is our postmodernity's entire vocation . . . . Today's art consists in exploring things unsayable and things invisible. Strange machines are assembled, where what we didn't have the idea of saying or the mat- ter for feeling can make itself heard and experienced.("Contribution to an Idea of Postmodernity" 190)

     
    This non-definition might certainly adhere to Handke’s writing of the 80’s, where he writes repeatedly about the marginal (the threshold in Across), the invisible, the unsayable, and the downright absent, and this fascination with the presence of absence and with the limits/possibilities of repeatability (overtly marked by such titles as Absence and Repetition) expresses itself most typically in Handke’s Essay on the Jukebox Versuch uber die Jukebox), where the quest of the medieval romance is transmogrified into a writer’s futile meanderings in the Spanish countryside, as he looks repeatedly for a jukebox, and for a hotel room that he can be comfortable in.

     

    But listen to how Lyotard describes the postmodern’s adversary–classical aesthetics:

     

    an aesthetics stemming from Hegel, for whom what was at stake was indeed "experience" in the sense of a passion of the spirit traversing perceptible forms in order to arrive at the total expression of self in the discourse of the philosopher . . . . It can indeed be said that there is no longer any experience in this sense . . . . (191)

     
    Here again we find Handke, for this is precisely the challenge to which he returns over and over again–the challenge to create a new narrative and a new experience which will rectify and make good the very real loss of the feeling of experience; Handke’s writing elaborately and ironically mourns the irrecuperability of traditional, western subjectivity as he uses that grief-ritual to look beyond it (as in Nova’s speech at the end of Beyond the Villages Uber die Dorfer]).

     

    In short, can we not rethink Handke’s relation to the postmodern (both in terms of postmodernity, the moment, and postmodernism, the movement), and in so doing rethink the “use” of this term? Is this not one of the reasons why the Handke case is important insofar as it tests the notion of the “postmodern” even as it testifies to the miscalculated ways that it is being invoked? The postmodern is not, after all a category in an aesthetic periodic table (Hassan 33), it is not an either/or proposition, but a “cluster concept” to be explored, to be expanded (hence Lyotard’s title–a contribution to an idea).9 If the postmodern can be deployed in this manner, does not Handke’s very slipperiness –this ability to fit in everywhere and rest nowhere; to be at once classical, romantic, modernist and at the same time resolutely anti-classical, anti-romantic, and anti-modernist –suggest, in and of itself, not that Handke is postmodern in the way that Schlegel is Romantic or Joyce is modernist, but that Handke uses the postmodern, ably manoeuvering through the different layers of history–where Schlegel, Buddha, and Credence Clearwater Revival are all equally (non)present?10 And, if Handke uses the postmodern, he also uses just about every other possible cultural tool: the language and terminology of German idealist philosophy, the topoi of classical literature–both German and foreign, Western and Asian–as well as autobiography and mass media, and, I would argue, a strong awareness of the thematic/formal structures of psychoanalysis–an awareness which Kuzniar has already signalled.

     

    How might such a comprehension of the postmodern reforms and re-forms critical practice vis-a-vis Peter Handke? It tells us this: any reading of his work according to one thematic line, one theoretical approach, or one periodic “place,” or even one question is–as Michael Hays astutely notes in his reading of Handke’s plays–bound to founder; it must automatically invalidate the critical enterprise by its distortion of the text under critical scrutiny, for Handke’s most recent texts are, to misquote Luce Irigaray, not one. Handke’s recent work can, then, be approached only by circuitous navigation through a series of vectors, such as the ones I just suggested above (but not limited to them), which may or may not form a coherent grid and which may not possess a thematic destination–and this irregular flight-pattern might enable us to begin to appreciate the complexity, richness, and the density of his current project. And if this is so, then perhaps Peter Handke can be defended, after all.

     

    Handke’s defense is, I confess, the directive which orients this essay. But against what charge? Difficulty– insofar as his work refuses to be categorizable? Treason –insofar as his work refuses not to change? And here I sense that I am near the mark, for isn’t Handke the subject of so much argument because he will not compose repetitions of Kaspar for the rest of his life, will not cling to the chic malaise of Short Letter? But, even if I can defend Handke, how am I to defend the form which the present defense takes? If form is to be distrusted, including and especially the essay, then the problem of doing Handke “justice” must become potentially overwhelming, for won’t the (my) literary essay also founder in its attempt to analyze his work at all? Perhaps we should elect not to perform an analysis of Handke; instead, we should make him an instrument rather than an object of scrutiny, as Kathleen McHugh has argued in the case of a very different late 20th Century artist/phenomenon–Madonna. I shy away from this possibility, even as I feel obliged to marshall it, because the unlikely comparison interweaves yet another thread in this tangled grid of Handke-difficulties–namely, the degree to which Handke’s public “persona” shapes and predetermines understandings of his work. I would like to deny that Handke has anything in common with Madonna. He is not the pure object of consumerism, as she is; he is not altogether reducible to a media image; he is the creator of texts more than he is the subject of them. Indeed, the plethora of texts represents yet another one of Handke’s features that drives critics crazy; his productivity ensures that he can not be “kept up with”; he remains always ahead of the critical game and seems determined to hold on to his lead till the finish.

     

    But here the contrast falls back into comparison and further, into a near identity between the two “artists.” For Handke’s maneuvers–his melancholic, apolitical posturing, his deployment of various literary-theatrical media–are by no means dissimilar to Madonna’s–to her continual shift of “subversive” fashion affect and to her multiple appeals to different sorts of media expressions– videos, television interviews, magazine interviews, c.d.’s, books. Certainly, Handke wants to manipulate his own public “image” every bit as much as Madonna does–a fact which, like her, he does not conceal but rather foregrounds. There is a stunning example of this tactic in Goldschmidt’s book about Handke. The study is filled with emotionally charged photographs such as one of Handke as a baby in the arms of his young and beautiful mother (whom the critic will recognize as the heroine of A Sorrow beyond Dreams); near the end, however, appears a photograph of the author kneeling on a living room floor, sorting through a box of photographs. Goldschmidt’s caption explains that this is a picture of the author choosing the photographs for the present book. In this terse undermining of the operator/spectator/spectrum trinity proposed by Roland Barthes Camera Lucida 9), the “subject” Handke–the primary spectator of his own spectral image–ironically imposes his authorial (operational) presence on the work meant to objectify him (make him a spectrum)–signalling among other things, that he will brook no unmediated hermeneutic “mastery” of that cognitive object, the author Peter Handke. He will not, to use the parlance of photography, be captured; instead he will own and use all of photography’s image-repertoires in order not to be seen.11 Autobiographical material becomes, then, for both Madonna and Handke, the screen–the veil and the site of media image–that plays out and thwarts fantasies of control–ours and theirs. And if Madonna struts the stuff of self-conscious, parodistic phallic womanhood with a redundant physical presence, Handke’s mournful, aggressive passivity approaches a hysterical masculinity which would pillory itself in one grand performative gesture–a disappearing act.

     

    Thus, even as I attempt to contemplate the receding object of my inquiry–Peter Handke–even as I essay this essay, I must retain something of McHugh’s Madonna argument; I will have to try to read with him as well as about him. How might one read with as well as about Handke? What would such a reading look like? This is one, tentative, possible, version.

     

    And I can use this digression on Madonna and Handke to circle back to the question of desire raised by Kuzniar and to the constant interpretative reduction of Handke’s work to bloodless readings of one kind or another, which are stripped of any affect other than anger/adulation and inattentive to questions of emotionality and sexuality.12 While Handke’s own writing would appear to shore up such disembodied interpretations, do not readings of his emotionally understated, repressed texts, neglect the very real passion which infuses even his recent works? The question is begged first, by the sheer mass of emotions and violent passions which seethe and explode within the corpus, and second, by the critical oblivion to which they have, for the most part, been relegated. Professional readers of Handke have reflected very little upon the sexually motivated murder in The Goalie’s Anxiety, the conjugal rage between husband and wife in Short Letter, the resentful Oedipal longing to resurrect the dead mother in Sorrow beyond Dreams, and the complementary adulation of the girl-child as muse in Child’s Story. But what of the problematic patriarchal loves invoked in both Across (the father for the son) and Absence (the son’s elegiac adoration of the lost father)? I will speak more of the loves and pleasures of the Essay series in a moment. Finally, we should not forget that there is a profound adoration of the written word in Handke’s writing–an adulation which has become, visceral, desperate, sensual, and topographical.13 Throughout the work of the 80’s we wander the divergent landscapes of Europe: Austria, Slovenia, France, and Spain, and these wanderings are chocked full of literary, cultural evocations, providing a simultaneous geographical and archaeological pleasure–clearly announced as late 20th Century humanity’s only possible, imperfect consolation, at the end of Handke’s strange mock-pastoral, Beyond the Villages. Seen from this point of view, it seems no coincidence that, in the Wim Wenders film Wings of Desire Himmel uber Berlin–for which Handke helped compose the screenplay), Damiel chooses to enter the world of “History” (Geschichte)–at once his story and history through desire; though he is bearer of the divine Logos, the male angel recognizes that the word yields meaning when it is made female flesh–and he must descend from rather than transcend his male sterility by falling down to, not rising with the Goethean “eternal feminine.”14

     

    How then can we not speak of passion, desire, and pleasure when we speak of Peter Handke’s writing? The critical “We” haven’t until now, because to speak of those things in Handke’s writing is to truly expose both him and “us”; to speak about passion/desire/pleasure in his books is to speak about, among other things, misogyny, sado- masochism, womb-envy, paedophilia, passivity, impotence, and castration, and to speak of those things is to come face to face with the deeply problematized vision of male heterosexuality articulated there. Handke is, to paraphrase Woody Allen, polymorphously perverse, but in contrast to Woody Allen’s smugly neurotic eroticism, there is no self- congratulation of that fact in his work.

     

    Within and against this net of observations/questions about Handke, I circle back once more around the tear which originated this essay: Handke and the postmodern/Handke and his refusal to tell in the Essay series. In these pieces, rather than merely detonating logocentrism from the outside, as he had done before, Handke’s work has another exercise in mind. It seems to actively quest for the missing Logos, by looking for it in the “wrong” places. “Fantasy is my faith,” the first-person narrator/actor tells us in Essay on the successful [prosperous, auspicious] Day (55), and a page later proclaims:

     

    And what did this Nothing and again Nothing do? It meant . . . . And so it went here: as for the Nothing of our time, the main thing now is to let it ripen from morning till evening (or even to midnight?). And I repeat: the idea was light, the idea is light.

     

    [Und was tat dieses Nichts und wieder Nichts? Es bedeutete . . . Und darum ging es hier: das Nichts unsrer Tage, das galt es jetzt "fruchten" zu lassen, von Morgen bis Abend (oder auch Mit- ternacht?). Und ich wiederhole: die Idee war Licht. Die Idee ist Licht.](56)

     
    Yet, even as the possibility of Logos is erected, Handke whittles away at the authority of the traditional male subject in increasingly graphic ways as though performing a process of aesthetic self-castration in payment for a new, legitimized, subjectivity. Particularly because he is a male writer–and ostensibly a heterosexual one–it is impossible for me to contemplate the veritable parade of chaste, solitary, passive male speakers who inhabit his works and not see them as postmodern Abelards; nominally heterosexual, but mysteriously incapacitated, they repeatedly express their feelings of and distance from a sexual desire which seems connected to and yet severed from the desire to put the pen to paper. And are not Handke’s cloistered male porte-paroles markers of what Handke is “doing to” meaning, and to meaning’s traditional receiver/producer? To reparaphrase Hassan’s use of Leiris, Handke’s autobiographical doubles not only expose themselves to the bull’s horn, they allow themselves to be gored (they welcome the penetration); this reverse matadorian spectacle is at once the performance to which we are constantly invited to watch in the Handke texts of the 80’s and the radical cure which we might also enact upon ourselves.

     

    The Essays arguably take their cue from the work of Michel de Montaigne,15 whose work sought also to interweave a number of discursive threads and to create a complex junction where bellettristic (in the literal sense of beautiful writing), philosophy, politics, autobiography, psychology, epistemology and scientific experiment meet. Montaigne has been seen, recently with increasing enthusiasm, as the herald of modern narrative subjectivity in the West (Auerbach), and there are good reasons for this. Relentlessly anecdotal, understated, erudite, and often ironic, Montaigne’s essays bore curious titles which sometimes had only the slightest relevance to the matter at hand (as in “On Cannibals” [“Des Cannibales”]–where cannibalism is mentioned in a sentence), were peppered with epigraphs and textual references, while the arguments were typically roundabout, if they were in fact discernible, and closed with a lack of authoritative conclusiveness which can still be gleefully frustrating to readers. Montaigne was one of the first Western authors to choose to write about mundane subjects (in both senses–worldly things and unimportant things) in an ongoing project which–in his own resistance to narrative–he came to call, not the His- toire de moi, but the Livre de moi, the book of me. Not coincidentally, the essays derive from and return to a sense of physicality–to the limits of the body, its sicknesses, its death–for the “me” in question here is “matiere,” material, stuff, flesh and bones.16 There is no transcendental subject in Montaigne, but a quirky mind-body which thinks/feels his way through a writing enterprise that, Lawrence Kritzman writes, becomes both “self- generating” and “autoerogenous” (Kritzman 91), and where a neo-stoic masculine impermeability is repeatedly undercut –but not canceled out–by other subject-voices telling fragments of other stories.17

     

    Handke uses Montaigne–specifically, but not only, the elements mentioned above–and empties him: the eccentric, hidden relevance of the essay titles in Montaigne become non-topics in Handke–passive interim states (Lyotard’s “things unsayable”), useless, peripheral machinery (“things invisible”), and greeting-card cliches which take the place of such idealistic maxims as “to philosophize is to learn to die.” The jouissance which, as Kritzman notes, is appealed to in Montaigne, and which has characterized the modernist sensibility from Joyce to Barthes (and Barth), is excised and–its absence profoundly felt–the procedure leaves Montaigne’s autoerogenous text as a body with uncertain orientations–a masculine text without qualities, though it still desires. And the “subject”–the controlling ego that informs Montaigne– shudders and splits, becoming a series of impossible “selves,” flat subject speakers–at once solemn and droll, lugubrious and elegant–who posture their ways through language gestures in a spectral conversation. Handke’s radical surgery on Montaigne resembles in respects an autopsy performed by a vampire doctor; the postmodern essay drains the life from the modern and lives on, pumped up momentarily with the knowledge and blood of the dissected deceased–undead, glamorous, meticulous, analytical, thirsting. Montaigne’s cannibal text–the admiring com- mentary which devours classical literature whole and becomes itself a literary product–becomes simultaneously Dracula and Von Helsing–the kiss of death and the cure for modernism.

     

    Thus, Handke’s essays tear much further than ever Montaigne did into anecdotal fragmentation, and where Montaigne is smooth, Handke is jagged, jumpy, and pained. The Versuche function ostensibly as ludic reflections upon the interstices where–officially, as far as traditional Western narrative is concerned–nothing is happening,18 but these exercises are both playful and sad; they play with melancholy, they are melancholy games, and the game consists at once of formal experimentation and of a deadly serious self-practice–a practice which is in turns therapeutic, mutilating, and transformative; pleasurable, and painful. A somber I comments on the combination of comedy, mundanity, and death in Essay on the successful Day:

     

    Yes, it is as though a certain irony belonged here, in the face of my own self as day by day regularities and episodes--irony from in- clination--, and still, a kind of humor, which named itself after the gallows.

     

    [Ja, es ist, als gehorten dazu eine besondere Ironie, angesichts meiner selbst wie der tagtaglichen Gesetzlichkeiten und Zwischenfalle-- Ironie aus Zuneigung--, und noch, wenn schon eine Art von Humor, der nach dem Galgen benannte.](41)

     
    The first in the series, Essay on Fatigue (1989), furnishes the clearest intertextual response to Montaigne in so far as it may be read as a re-vision of the essays on idleness and sleep, but it frames its non-subject matter within a strange dialogue which unfolds between a writer (possibly, but not necessarily Handke) and another speaker. Although much of the discussion is aesthetic, there is a therapeutic thrust to the proceedings; the writer opens the discussion by manifesting an anxious connection between fatigue and fear, while his analytical interlocutor guides him with short, pointed questions, toward a recognition and articulation of his motivations for wanting to talk about fatigue.

     

    The recognition is both utopian and disappointed/ing, and the narrative circling, linking apparently unrelated personal memories and images, resonates with the trauma of a Freudian case-history, where, to quote Peter Brooks, “narr- ative discourse works intermittently in a dialogic manner (Brooks 57). But the psychoanalytic process is flattened even as it is pursued–its “significance,” its deep personal meaning, and claim to utter seriousness are simultaneously posited and erased. Typically, as in those histories, much is said about childhood, school, first feelings of difference from others, but the conversation glistens with artificiality, even as it assumes a predictably sexual character, focussing on the exhaustion that occurs between men and women and what that signifies in their relationship. These observations lead in turn to a revealing and ludicrous reworking of that masculine erotic icon, Don Juan:

     

    I imagine Don Juan . . . not as a seducer, but rather as a tired, always tired hero, into whose lap, at any given time, at the right moment, in the presence of a tired woman, every one of them will fall.

     

    [Den Don Juan stelle ich mir . . . nicht als einen Verfuhrer, sondern als einen jeweils zur richtigen Stunde, in Gegenwart einer muden Frau, muden, einen immer-muden Helden vor, dem so eine jede in den Schoss fallt. . . .](Uber die Mudigkeit 48)

     
    This image of a passively erotic, feminized (the German “Schoss” means both “lap” and “womb”) masculine exhaustion, that drastically revises a traditional Western image of energetic masculine prowess (providing an ironic gloss both on Mozart’s and on Camus’ Don Juan–the man driven by an excess of love/eros), opens the possibility of a new kind of narrative which would fuse poetry and prose as well as “high” and “low” artistic enunciations:

     

    The inspiration of fatigue says less, what there is to do, as than can be left to happen . . . . A certain tired one (masculine) as another Orpheus, in order to gather the wildest animals to himself and to finally be tired with them . . . . Phillip Marlowe--still a private detective--became better and better, more and more clear-sighted in the solutions of his cases, the more his sleepless nights added up.

     

    [Die Inspiration der Mudigkeit sagt weniger, was zu tun ist, als was gelassen werden kann . . . . Ein gewisser Mude als ein anderer Orpheus, um den sich die wildesten Tiere versammeln und endlich mitmude sein konnen . . . . Phillip Marlowe--noch ein Privatdetektiv--wurde im Losen seiner Falle, je mehr schlaflose Nachte sich reihten, immer besser und scharfsinniger.](74-75)

     
    And yet, the speaker cannot practice this art, he doesn’t know the recipe/prescription [Rezept], and the project of Fatigue reveals itself to be a failure on both culinary and medicinal fronts; it cannot nourish and it cannot cure. The speaker can only defer his failure to a future project, as he looks forward at the close of the discussion to another Essay, whose failure is also already pointed out as imminent, by his skeptical interlocutor:

     

    But in all of Spain there is no jukebox.

     

    [In ganz Spanien gibt es doch keine Jukebox.](78)

     
    The curious picture of Don Juan and the sexual problematic which it implies, the warning of failure, and the formal challenges of telling otherwise are progressively radicalized in the next two Essays. If Essay on Fatigue wants (and yet refuses) to be a therapeutic dialogic text which, to paraphrase Freud’s title–remembers, repeats and works through (Brooks 57)–the non-dialogic format of Essay on the Jukebox (1990) plays out a personal obsession; it is a neurotic monologic text which repeats instead of remembering the origin of its trouble. But here again, the “trauma” is trivialized (although it still hurts), for the loss/absence which motivates the text is situated within the boundaries of post-World-War 2 Western popular culture, and as such, it plays out as both a truncated travesty of a 60’s road movie–the meanderings of a disenfranchised, blocked, obsessed writer on a futile quest in the Spanish countryside for a jukebox (whose image only he glances in a B-movie)–and a stripped-down reverse of Proust’s self-reflexive narrative project19–the epic novel about the writer’s aesthetic education, which prepares him to compose that same epic novel, pares itself to an essay about an essay (by the same title) which cannot get written. Again, as in Fatigue, the crucial moment of the text concerns a heterosexual encounter, which is once again, viewed in terms of non-action. In the middle of the essay, the writer remembers a chance meeting with an Indian woman in Alaska (an intertextual reference to Slow Homecoming), and compares his refusal of her erotic invitation to Parzival’s failure to ask Anfortas the necessary questions to cure him of his terrible wound (a wound in the testicles). This odd simile suggests that what the chaste, frustrated protagonist of Jukebox may fail to admit, is that his impotence with the pen and with the woman links him not with Parzival but with the castrated Lord of the Grail. The connection with Parzival is not coincidental, for the goal of this essay is, unlike the other two, indeed the obtaining of an object, a feminine vessel which, grail-like, incorporates in its musical contents all of the memories, and well-being of the impotent, exiled protagonist (it is the thing that makes him feel safe, grounded, connected)–all of which suggests that this Versuch can be read, among other things, as an always-already failed quest for the eternal feminine, now recognized as a mere machine, and an outmoded one at that (which connects this work with the impossible quest for the mother’s lost history in A Sorrow Beyond Dreams).

     

    At once a companion piece to and a skeptical corrective of the earlier, more mock-impressionist Afternoon of a Writer, Essay on the Jukebox uses the futile pursuit of the feminine machine as a metaphor to talk about not just desire, and writing, but that other elusive feminine machine called “Geschichte” (the feminine German word for “history”). Writing at the time of the demolition of the Berlin wall, the impotent writer bears symbolic witness to the problem of defining historical moments in our time and questions the rhetoric with which the demise of communism is so celebrated, even as the “execution” of its leaders mimics the violence of the deposed regimes. I read the jukebox as the feminized, fetishized repository of ideological formation, and although the writer can neither vanquish his obsession with it nor replace it with something else, he can bear witness to his own discomfort–aesthetic, sexual, political, historical, physical–and, by transference, to ours. At once a critique of history and HIS STORY, Essay on the Jukebox suggests that any story that the masculine, European, and particularly German subject tells may be a dangerous falsification, but still he is driven to try and fail to write. Like Anfortas, the essayist can neither die nor recover and we, like Parzival, cannot choose but watch the ritual with wonder. “Write yourself free” said the priest to the war traumatized protagonist of Gunther Grass’ Cat and Mouse, but Grass believed in an alternative narrative coherence which might guarantee, if not salvation, then at least a cure to male, German guilt–a grace which Handke’s essayist/assayer both fantasizes about and pointedly denies himself in an act of interrupted metaphysical-political onanism.

     

    Essay on the successful Day (1991) is the most overtly ludic of the three texts. Formally indecisive, it plays compulsively with combinations–the dialogic with the monologic, third, with first and second persons, and verb tenses and moods with each other–toward the accomplishment of a key admission (which comes at the end of the “session”)–namely that the essayist/attempter has never experienced the very day of happiness, success, fulfillment which he repeatedly and unsuccessfully tries to describe. It is here that telling otherwise, pleasure, castration, failure, and writing “come” together in one strangely compelling scene. Telling the story of another person (probably himself) the essayist describes an attempt to saw through a log of wood. The description conveys for seven pages the rhythm and pleasure (“Vergnugen”) of the operation–

     

    but then something threatened, if not the overlooked fork in the bough, (which was about a finger's breadth away from the point, where, the already cut through wood fell anyway, of itself into the lap of the sawer), then that very small and hard layer, in which the steel struck on stone, on nail, on bone in one and so to speak, wrecked the undertaking in the last stroke... There it would have been so close to it, that the sawing for itself, the mere finding-itself- together and being-together with the wood there, its roundness, its fragrance, nothing as the traversal/dimension taking of the material there . . . incarnated for him an ideal from a time of disinterested satisfaction/pleasure. And just as the breaking pencil . . . .

     

    [dann drohte aber, wenn nicht die ubersehene Astgabel, so (meist gerade um eine Fingerbreite weg von dem Punkt, an dem das so weit durchschnittene Holzstuck ohnehin dem Sager von selbst in den Schoss fiel) jene sehr schmale und um so hartere Schicht, in der der Stahl auf Stein, Nagel, Knochen in einem traf und das Unternehmen sozusagen im letzten Takt scheiterte . . . . Dabei ware er doch so nah dran gewesen, dass das Sagen fur sich, das blosse Sich-Zusammenfinden und Zusam- mensein mit dem Holz da, seiner Rundung, seinem Duft, seinem Muster, nichts als das Durchmessen der Materie da . . . ihm ideal den Traum von einer Zeit des Interesselosen Wohlgefallens verkorperte. Und ebenso hatte der abbrechende Bleistift. . . ](48)

     
    This pleasure in pain, this union of the cutter with thing cut which in turn becomes imaginative flesh and bone, suggest that Handke is doing far more than just whittling away at Western literature. His autobiographical narratives, in the Essays at least, have become literally experimental operations–performative attempts (and here narrative becomes for Handke the newest of the new drama)–to enact a bloody refinement, to chop away at himself and at the marker of his writerly masculinity, the pencil and to make this aesthetic unmanning serve to create a new narrative. What is or can be the result? “Not nothing,” says Handke’s essayist–neither nothing nor something, which tells itself in past, present, future, and subjunctive, and which not fear its own demise, its own self-forgetting:

     

    And at the end of the day, this one (masculine) would have called for a book--more than just a chronicle: "the fairy-tale of the successful day." And at the very end the glorious forgetting would still have come, that the day had to succeed.

     

    [Und am Ende des Tags hatte dieser nach einem Buch gerufen--mehr als bloss eine Chronik: "Marchen des gegluckten Tags". Und ganz am Ende ware noch das glorreiche Vergessen gekommen, dass der Tag zu glucken habe . . . . (75)

     
    As the epistle of the imprisoned Paul urgently requests sustenance from Timothy in writing (this is how successful Day closes), so does Handke’s unfolding livre de moi– his postmodern odyssey turned gospel (not “truth,” but “godspell”–good spell, magical phrase, discourse, and tale) according to Peter (the shifting rock of an un- derstanding which must always already deny its ground)– supplicate his fellow-neurotic (the reader, us, me) to move beyond a castrated masculine history towards a feminized (?) narrativity which is by its very nature not one, not finished, which may always give birth to another Essay. “Through our own wounds we shall be healed,” observes the card-playing priest in Across (127), and the Essay series empowers us to reread that resonant line differently, and through that rereading to remap the contours of that gargantuan aesthetic anatomy which we name Handke’s. For is it not precisely within the borders of the wounded space carved out by Handke’s pencil upon the body of his own autobiographical text that we are summoned to perform our own flawed testaments and through that spectacle of failure be made, not whole, but perhaps wholly other and new?

     

    Notes

     

    1. Conversations with Robert Gross, Kathleen McHugh, and John Ganim made this essay “happen.”

     

    2. See for example, June Schleuter’s book.

     

    3. This is a repeat of what Ihab Hassan sees as Richard Porier’s problematic attempt to mediate between the two, The Postmodern Turn, 32.

     

    4. A certain “moral” disgust also permeates many of the recent conversations about Handke which I have been a party to. He was pilloried outright at a special section at the MLA in 1986, where he was accused both of selling out and of writing bad books, and in a more recent MLA session (1992), the post-presentation discussion veered strangely between an outright dismissal of his work as postmodern (which in this context, seemed to mean that it was formulaic and predictable) and a neo-conservative insistence that his art was now concerned purely with “aesthetic problems.” In less formal venues, friends of mine in Germanistik usually roll their eyes in annoyance when I tell them I work on the recent Peter Handke, while acquaintances more directly involved in the arts (in my case, a straight female sculptor from Germany and a gay American director) seem to value what he is doing now.

     

    5. This sexually charged denial has been beautifully evidenced in Peter Strasser’s introduction to his essays on the author in which he declares that he has literally “fallen in love” with the work of Peter Handke twice (the first time being a “naive fascination” in contrast to the second, mature alert understanding of the object), only to insist that such a feeling ensures critical objectivity (Strasser 5).

     

    6. That is not to say that Handke’s earlier work has not encountered negative reception. See Rolf Michaelis, “Ohrfeigen fur das Lieblingskind” in the Works Cited.

     

    7. Skwara is a case in point. He discusses the erotic tiredness in Fatigue without realizing the role it plays–not as a state following the act, but as a replacement for the act itself.

     

    8. I invoke Lyotard here, not because he is the ultimate “authority” on the postmodern, but because the tenor of his writing, his interest in language-games, and his gleeful flirtations with pessimism provide a productive ground on which to think about Peter Handke.

     

    9. Bernd Magnus calls postmodern philosophy a “complex, cluster concept” which includes at least ten elements, but probably more. See “postmodern,” Cambridge Dictionary of Philosophy (in production).

     

    10. This is a corollary to Stanley Fish’s suggestion that we ask, not what postmodernism means but what it does. See Connor on Fish, 10.

     

    11. In front of the lens, I am at the same time: the one I think I am, the one I want others to think I am, the one the photographer thinks I am, and the one he makes use of to exhibit his art. (Barthes 13)

     

    12. An important exception to this rule is Tilmann Moser’s smart, if anxious, discussion of A Moment of True Feeling and A Sorrow beyond Dreams in his general psychoanalytic reading of contemporary German fiction.

     

    13. Richard Arthur Firda is right when he links Handke and Barthes, but the connection has as much to do with erotics as with semiotics (a false dichotomy if ever there was one). See Firda, 51.

     

    14. This is not to say, however, that there are not real problems with this film as bell hooks has observed in her essay.

    15. I am not arguing for an interpretation of Handke in terms of “influence;” rather I am using Montaigne as a concrete example of the many occasions when Handke avails himself of the “common discursive ‘property’” of texts (Hutcheon, 124). Certainly, there are other important essayist-mediators, among them, Barthes, himself an admirer of Montaigne.

    16. See Jefferson Humphries’ discussion of “matiere” in “Montaigne’s Anti-Influential Model of Identity.” In Bloom.

     

    17. See Zhang Longxi’s intriguing reading of Montaigne in conjunction with representations of the Other in Western Literature.

     

    18. This narrative of the interstice is one of the possible answers which Handke explores in conjunction with Lyotard’s question about the odyssey.

     

    19. And also Thomas Wolfe’s You can’t go home again.

    Works Cited

     

    • Auerbach, Erich. “L’Humaine Condition.” In Bloom, 11-39 (originally published in Mimesis 1953).
    • Barthes, Roland. Camera Lucida: Reflections on Photography. Trans. Richard Howard. New York: Hill and Wang, 1993.
    • Bloom, Harold, ed. Montaigne’s Essays. Modern critical interpretations. New York: Chelsea House, 1987.
    • Brooks, Peter. “Psychoanalytic constructions and narrative meanings.” Paragraph 7, 1986. 53-76.
    • Connor, Steven. Postmodernist Culture: An Introduction to Theories of the Contemporary. Basil Blackwell: Oxford and Cambridge, 1989.
    • Durzak, Manfred. Peter Handke und die Gegenwartsliterature: Narziss auf Abwegen. Stuttgart: Kohlhammer, 1982.
    • Firda, Richard Arthur. Peter Handke. Twayne World Authors Series. New York: Twayne, 1993.
    • Gabriel, Norbert. “Neoklassizismus oder Postmoderne? Uberlegungen zu Form und Stil von Peter Handkes Werk seit der Langsamen Heimkehr. Modern Austrian Literature 24.3/4, 1991. 99-109.
    • Grass, Gunther. Cat and Mouse. Trans. Ralph Mannheim. New York: Harcourt Brace, 1963.
    • Handke, Peter. Across. Trans. Ralph Mannheim. New York: Farrar, Strauss, and Giroux, 1986.
    • —-. Versuch uber den gegluckten Tag. Frankfurt a. Main: Suhrkamp, 1991.
    • —-. Versuch uber die Mudigkeit. Frankfurt a. Main: Suhrkamp, 1989.
    • —-. Versuch uber die Jukebox. Frankfurt a. Main: Suhrkamp, 1990.
    • Hassan, Ihab. The Postmodern Turn: Essays in Postmodern Theory and Culture. Ohio State, 1987.
    • Hofmann, Michael. “A superior reality” [a review of Absence]. TLS May 24, 1991, N4599:20.
    • Hays, Michael. “Peter Handke and the End of the Modern.” Modern Drama 23:4, 1981. 346-66.
    • hooks, bell. “Representing Whiteness: seeing wings of desire.” In Yearning: race, gender, and cultural politics. Boston: South End, 1990.
    • Humphries, Jefferson. “Montaigne’s Anti-Influential Model of Identity.” In Bloom, 133-44 (originally published in Losing the Text: Readings of Literary Desire, 1986).
    • Hutcheon, Linda. A Poetics of Postmodernism: History, Theory, Fiction. Routledge: New York and London, 1988.
    • Klinkowitz, Jerome and James Knowlton. Peter Handke and the Postmodern Transformation. Columbia: U of Missouri P, 1983.
    • Kritzman, Lawrence. “My Body, My Text: Montaigne and the Rhetoric of Sexuality.” In Bloom, 81-95 (originally published in the Journal of Medieval and Renaissance Studies 13.1 [1983]).
    • Kunzel, Uwe. Wim Wenders: ein Filmbuch. Freiburg: Dreisam, 1989. [contains an interview with Wenders concerning his collaboration with Handke for Himmel uber Berlin]
    • Kuzniar, Alice. “Desiring Eyes.” Modern Fiction Studies 36.3, 1990. 355-67.
    • Lyotard, Jean-Francois. “Philosophy and Painting in the Age of Their Experimentation: Contribution to an Idea of Postmodernity.” In The Lyotard Reader, Ed. Andrew Benjamin. Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1989.
    • Magnus, Bernd. “Postmodern.” Cambridge Dictionary of Philosophy. In production.
    • McHugh, Kathleen. “Acrostics.” In Sex? Deconstructing Madonna, Ed. Fran Lloyd. London: Batsford Press (in production).
    • Metcalf, Eva-Maria. “Challenging the Arrogance of Power with the Arrogance of Impotence: Peter Handke’s somnambulistic energy.” Moder Fiction Studies 36.3 (1990).
    • Michaelis, Rolf, “Ohrfeigen fur das Lieblingskind. Peter Handke und seine Kritiker.” Text + Kritik, 24/24a (1976). 80-96.
    • Moser, Tilmann. Romane als Krankengeschichten. Frankfurt: Suhrkamp, 1985.
    • Ortheil, Hans-Joseph. “Das Lesen–ein Spiel. Postmoderne Literatur? Die Literatur der Zukunft.” Die Zeit 24.4. 1987
    • Schlueter, June. The Plays and Novels of Peter Handke. Pittsburgh: U of Pittsrugh P, 1981.
    • Slovsky, Viktor. “Art as Technique.” In Russian Formalist Criticism, Ed. Lee T. Lemon and Marion Reis. Lincoln: U of Nebraska P, 1965. 11-12.
    • Shooman, Diane. “From Episodic Space to Narrative Space: The Search for Unity in Peter Handke’s Fiction and the Paintings of Ursula Hubner.” MAL 23.3/4, 1990. 87-97.
    • Skwara, Erich Wolfgang. “Peter Handke, Versuch uber die Mudigkeit.” World Literature Today 64:3, Summer 1990. 460-1.
    • Strasser, Peter. Der Freudenstoff: Zu Handke eine Philosophie. Salzburg: Residenz, 1990.
    • Vivis, Anthony. “Own goal” [review of Handke’s Versuch uber die Jukebox]. TLS N4566:1073, Oct. 5, 1990.
    • White, J.J. “The elusive perfect day” [review of Handke’s Versuch uber den gegluckten Tag]. TLS N4618:34, Oct.4, 1991.
    • Zhang, Longxi. “The cannibals, the ancients, and cultural critique: reading Montaigne in postmodern perspective.” Human Studies 16.51-68, 1993. 51-68.
    • Ziolkowski, Theodore. “Peter Handke, Versuch uber die Jukebox.” World Literature Today 65:2, Spring 1991. 360.

     

  • “It Dread Inna Inglan”: Linton Kwesi Johnson, Dread, and Dub Identity

    Peter Hitchcock

    Department of English
    Baruch College, CUNY

     

    Postmodern Culture Version1

     

    it is noh mistri
    wi mekkin histri
    it is noh mistri
    wi winnin victri

     

    (“Mekkin Histri” LKJ)

     

    “The trouble with the English is that their history happened overseas, so they don’t know what it means”

     

    (The Satanic Verses, Salman Rushdie)

     

    In order to appreciate the achievement of Linton Kwesi Johnson (LKJ), the African/Caribbean/European dub poet, one must come to terms with the cultural specificity of the voice, and what the voice can do. Mekkin histri. Making history? What recidivism might this be at the end of the twentieth century? The double-displacement of an African- Caribbean Black living in England, diaspora upon diaspora, comes with a double-indemnity–making and history. What cultural logic obtains in the construction/reconstruction of subjectivity as subaltern, the articulation of the margin, the trace, the veve, that still allows a trenchant sense of history, of the need to make history? Can we still conceive of subjects that make history, have a history to make, remake at a cacophonous rendezvous of victory? To understand why this notion is not a mystery (the History, for instance, of imperialist certitude) but a problematic, one must understand what makes this history: one must come to terms with the history of the voice, what Kamau Brathwaite calls the “invitation and challenge,”2 or what Edouard Glissant defines as “literature” and “oraliture” (the fragmented and therefore shared histories and voices of peoples).3 One can read this history as an introduction in LKJ’s sonorous beat, and one can see this history in a dissidence of voice, in all its synesthesia and dislocation.

     

    The sounds of dislocation. Our trust in electricity makes the archive of the voice seem a recent technology: LKJ himself is “available in all three formats” (CD, cassette, and the fast disappearing LP). But the voice at issue has, shall we say, a much longer geneology, a history that “happened overseas.” Thanks to Columbus’s “discovery” (the kind of “surprise” common to colonialism), the Amerindians of the Caribbean were soon in short supply and so began one of the darkest chapters in forced relocation and labor in human history. Except, of course, that such a chapter remains largely unwritten, not just because of racist ideology, the loathsome lacuna of the “official story,” but because this history is an archaeology of voice, a history intoned more than inscribed. As such, it is a history articulated in the clash and fierce concatenation of colonial power and resistance characterized by the internecine struggles of languages and cultures, Ashanti, Yoruba, Congolese, French, English, Spanish, and Dutch. The word creole only begins to do justice to the range of this struggle even if its logic of hybridity suggests a new understanding of what constitutes “sound” evidence. Theory has trained us, and rightly so, to be suspicious of the voice and the ontology it confers. Yet, what I am calling dub identity is not about the presence of being, but being in between, the “Middle Passages” that Brathwaite (among others) has elaborated, or the “black atlantic” model that Paul Gilroy has proposed.4 The problem of dub is the sound of diaspora, and its doubling, its versions. Thus, if the following notes are read as an introduction to LKJ, they only begin to imagine the utterance he makes, in all its complexity, as testimony and travelogue: the subjective states of being, in between.

     

    Obviously, in his history of the voice Brathwaite is not claiming that dub poetry, Jamaican “sound” poetry, the righteous riddim of resistance, is purely a phenomenon of sound (who would want to fall into that Cartesian chasm of speech/writing made infamous by Derrida?). He is saying, however, that without an adequate theory of performativity and voice one cannot hope to fathom cultural expression under the mark of cultural erasure, the colonizer/ postcolonizer’s denial of voice, whether poetic, polemical, or political. For Brathwaite, language from the Anglophone Caribbean is “a process of using English,” not just in the well-documented sense of creolization (patois), but a particular socialization of the voice. Brathwaite’s specific concern has been for an anglophone hybridization bred of slavery and colonization with all the linguistic and cultural displacement that that has entailed. For Afro- Caribbean poetry this has meant not just an agonistic social function but a particular struggle over social forms of poetry. As Brathwaite pithily puts it, “the hurricane does not roar in pentameters.”5 Although on one level this means attempting to reproduce the sounds of specific natural experiences of the Caribbean peoples, Brathwaite also wants to emphasize the disruptive potential of these experiences and the resistance riddim they inculcate. So even when Brathwaite displays a particular respect for the poets who challenge English from within (his list includes a tradition from Chaucer to Eliot), they are not the poets of a “nation language,” the product and medium of this radically different purview.

     

    “Nation language” is an extremely problematic term used to register the “submerged” capacity of dialect, of African intonation and derivation. Brathwaite distinguishes nation language from dialect because of the negative connotations associated with the latter (“bad English” etc.) but the concept of nation itself does not arrive free from contaminants, particularly those associated with the identification processes that fueled imperialist subjugation (and in addition leads Cesaire to the abrupt but pertinent conclusion that “nation is a bourgeois phenomenon”). As Benedict Anderson’s oft-quoted analysis of nations and nationality has shown, a national identity may involve active forgetting, a lack of historicity precisely the obverse of Brathwaite’s cultural impetus.6 Yet we cannot simply dismiss the prescience of Brathwaite’s appeal based on the sordid histories of Western imperialism. That is to say, a nation looks considerably different through the perspective of an oppressed collectivity which, while not immune to the power abuses that national selfhood may confer, may produce a significant communal resistance in tracing such an identity. For our purposes the paradox of “nation” is appropriate, for what seems to reify “nation” in the Caribbean context can vilify it in the tortuous confines of Black Britain. LKJ’s deployment of “nation language” then, serves to undermine a particularly nefarious manifestation of the nation state. Before examining LKJ’s particular form of dissidence and dissonance, I want to consider how Glissant figures the nation in Caribbean discourse, for he too is deeply concerned with how the postcolonial Caribbean subject finds a voice, makes a history.

     

    As a Martinican, Glissant is less concerned with the hegemony of the English pentameter, but in his poetry, plays, fiction, and criticism he is keenly aware of the psychic disabilities that can accompany acculturation within imperial and colonial codes. Readers of Fanon will be familiar with this critique, but suprised perhaps to find that, forty years later, the dissociation of self endemic to the colonial moment still conditions to a great degree the formation of Martinican identity. For Glissant, the crisis is severe, for without measured attempts to articulate a collective memory, the break from the non-identity or “non- history” as French history, the prospects are indeed bleak, as he shows in a table imbricating economic and literary production.7 Within a range of contingent possibilities, Glissant sees “oblivion or organization of a Martinican economy,” “isolation as ‘French’ or integration in the Caribbean,” “sterilization or creative explosion,” and “disappearance of a community or birth of a nation.” The either/or rhetoric might seem uncompromising, but Glissant is attempting to ward off a cultural and political complacency that is eroding a viable Caribbean collectivity. But neither is he separatist: Glissant advocates a cross- cultural poetics, a creolization of cultures that celebrates the strategic value of revoicing the Caribbean’s ingrown diversity outwards. In this sense, creole can no longer subsist as a secret code: by opening to the world it changes itself and the world. But, more importantly, this gives the lie to the totalizing force of History, as a Hegelian construct, for this History is “fissured by histories” as Glissant notes, as Literature is fragmented by literatures, by “oraliture” as he calls it–the submerged voice of the collective.

     

    There is no neat equivalence or complementarity in the formulations of Brathwaite and Glissant, just as one would have to specify the discursive alterity of their African- American counterparts (“nation language” and “oraliture” bear comparison with what Henry Louis Gates Jr. in another context has studied as “signifyin’,” or what Houston Baker has pursued in the Blues as forceful variations of the vernacular8), but they both underline that there are conceptual as well as geographic or spatial links between the islands of the Caribbean. Among them, the voice is integral to the function of memory but does not answer the question “Who am I?” that existential staple common to the discourse of colonialist angst (Prospero’s perplexity or Kurtz’s confusion); it does, however, inflect the transcultural “Who are we?” in which the “we,” although radically particularized rather than an illusory unity, recalls a historical dialogue about the cause and course of fragmented community, the diasporic disjunction and displacement wrought by the arrogance of power and the will- to-silence of colonial history. Brathwaite and Glissant, then, speak differently, but they both know the tenor of resistance. And this is as important in LKJ’s Jamaica as it is in Barbados or Martinique–the roots which lead to Inglan.

     

    LKJ was born in Chapelton, Jamaica, 1952. When his mother left for England LKJ soon followed, at the age of 11. They lived on the outskirts of Brixton, well-known for its Afro-Caribbean community, where LKJ experienced not only a taste of home but a new perspective on the metropolitan centre. He recalls: “I [saw] a white man sweeping the streets. All the white people I saw in Jamaica drove fish- tail cars and smoked cigars. So when I saw someone, a white person, actually sweeping the streets it was a bit of a revelation.”9 So along with a profound consciousness of racism in London, the postcolonial heart of Inglan, LKJ quickly learned that the white man’s History was also “fissured” by the history of class, a constituent feature of the doubling of diaspora, and a significant mark of LKJ’s political perspicacity. In general, LKJ defies the assumptions that make poet and activist mutually exclusive terms. Not long after leaving school LKJ became involved with the Black Panthers and, although he had a full time job with the GLC (the now defunct Greater London Council) he spent as much time again organizing members, attending meetings, and distributing pamphlets. When the British government found ways to break up the Panther movement it did not stop LKJ’s involvement in Black community politics. By 1976 he was an official member of the Race Today Collective which, under the leadership of LKJ’s friend, Darcus Howe, has become a leading force in Black British struggle. Many of LKJ’s cultural initiatives, like “Creation for Liberation,” have developed under the aegis of Race Today. And, for much of his career, LKJ has maintained a gruelling schedule of readings in schools, universities, colleges, youth centres, community centres, and concert halls (which in part explains why his voice has remained defiantly public and sensitive to community issues). Among many other cultural activities LKJ has organized an international poetry reading (and produced the album of this event), presented a documentary on Carifesta for BBC television called “From Brixton to Barbados” and narrated a series on the history of Jamaican popular music for BBC radio called “From Mento to Lovers Rock.” LKJ is not interested in replacing the Ivory Tower with an Ebony one.

     

    But what are the salient characteristics of the voice that LKJ brings from Jamaica? The voice is set to a rhythm, a beat that enunciates a conundrum, what Glissant calls “inscrutability” as an expression of freedom of Caribbean peoples. If for Glissant, this rhythm is initially characterized by beguine and later by a vibrant hybrid of salsa, reggae, and jazz; and if for Brathwaite what shatters the pentameter is primarily calypso; then for LKJ the riddim is reggae, which invokes both his Jamaican home, and the specific realities of Britain’s Afro-Caribbean communities. Interestingly, the origin of the word “reggae” is largely unknown. In Jamaican English it may recall rege-rege, a quarrel or a row, but it also has been linked to the sound of the guitar in the rhythm and to “raggedy,” meaning everyday or from the people. One thing is certain, since Toots Hibbert, who is usually credited with coining the word, wrote “Do the Reggay” in 1968, reggae followed LKJ to London, rather than him taking it with him.10 This is important because Black Britons do not just remember the countries of their past, they continually reinvent them as a challenge to the nationhood they now confront. And, as Paul Gilroy has noted, the focus of the alternative public spheres they create is musical.11 Nation languages are sound systems.

     

    If LKJ’s poetry deploys Brathwaite’s sense of “nation language” it does so as an impasse, a knot that cannot simply be untied by more generally accepted definitions of national selfhood. The doubling of diaspora requires a supplementary (simultaneous rather than sequential) notion of such language to acknowledge both the geographic displacement and that, to borrow a popular phrase, “the empire strikes back.” This would be a “version” of “dissemiNation,” in Homi Bhabha’s terms, “the moment of the scattering of the people that in other times and other places, in the nations of others, becomes a time of gathering.”12 Again, the version is characterized by sound, the community is gathered in an aural mix which, because it is sound (and not whole) is in continual flux: there are versions of versions. The version supplements both the nation and dissemiNation because, although the latter is characterized by a theory of performativity, it elides the “inscription” of the voice in the other narration of nation. For once, the perquisites of deconstruction would seem to mitigate against the realities of a specific diasporic culture even as it aptly describes the decentering and irreducible processes at work. For the sake of argument, let us say (in a creolized version of Marx’s eleventh thesis) that philosophers have grafted the world, the point here is to dub it.

     

    Of course, the heritage of sound serves another national function. Indeed, LKJ’s voice is at once a critique of the imagined community of “Britishness” resplendent in the lamentable wave of authoritarian populism now known as Thatcherism13 (Thatcher herself is described by LKJ as the “wicked wan”14). That nation, despite its recalcitrant xenophobia, is all but dead. The problem, of course, is that this older paradigm of national purity (the little englander mentality) has, in its death throes, created a new culture of white anomie which, though assured of failure, seriously disables a more edifying vision of human community. And the African-Caribbean peoples of Britain, like their post-colonial Asian counterparts, are caught up in the manichean logic of exclusion/inclusion that drives the hegemonic ethnos and its attendant phantasms. From New Cross to Brixton, from Toxteth to Moss Side, from Southall to Notting Hill (a geography not of violence, but resistance and affirmation), this is what I want to critique as the culture and condition of dread. Dread, here, has several meanings that have to be thought simultaneously and in collision for LKJ’s voice and voicing to be understood. Dread has its roots (!) in Jamaican Rastafari, the religious cultural movement, and, in that declension, describes a communal realization: “the awesome, fearful confrontation of a people with a primordial but historically denied racial selfhood.”15 More generally, it connotes a sense of crisis (“Dread in a Babylon”), whether political or cultural, of apocalyptic nature in which social contradictions cannot be answered accept by an intense destabilization of the “order of things.” And, of course, there is dread as danger, because every stand against injustice invites retribution from those who see inequity as a niggling but necessary byproduct of their barbarism. Then there is dread as defiance:

     

    Maggi Tatcha on di go
    wid a racist show
    but a she haffi go
    kaw,
    rite now,
    African
    Asian
    West Indian
    an' Black British
    stan firm inna Inglan
    inna disya time yah.
    far noh mattah wat dey say,
    come wat may,
    we are here to stay
    inna Inglan,
    inn disya time yah....

     

    (LKJ “It Dread Inna Inglan”16)

     

    This marks a significant difference with LKJ’s Caribbean counterparts, for there is no ideology of return in LKJ’s view. Brathwaite, for one, went back to Africa, to Ghana, to rediscover his roots, then crossed the Atlantic once more to elaborate on his experiences. And, as is well known, Jamaican Rastafari includes a roots thematic specifically focused on Ethiopia as the domain of Haile Selassie, the reincarnation of Jah (and therefore Ethiopia is viewed as a promised land). Even when fronting Rasta Love, the band he named, LKJ never felt comfortable with this view: “I couldn’t identify with this Selassie thing. I just couldn’t identify with that at all.”17 So even though rasta provides an oppositional politics for LKJ (in its various challenges to ideologies of racial subordination and, indeed, capitalism), the deployment of dread is quite specific in his work, and is overdetermined by Inglan’s situation.

     

    dis is di age af reality
    but some a wi a deal wid mitalagy
    dis is di age of science an' teknalagy
    but some a wi a check fi antiquity
    w'en we can't face reality
    wi leggo wi clarity

     

    (“Reality Poem,” LKJ)18

     

    In a way, this is closer to Glissant’s notion of decentered Caribbeanness, a condition much more suspicious of prelapsarian origins as a solution to psychological dislocation. When Glissant left Martinique, it was for Paris on a scholarship. The relocation of Afro-Caribbeans to England after the Second World War was not primarily a function of educational opportunities (although these cannot be discounted), but an economic decision fostered by the machinations of a British government newly cognizant of its labor shortages. Dread manifests itself in many ways in LKJ’s poetry but in general it is used to describe the material conditions of Black Britain, or Inglan, an existence suppressed or marginalized in the consciousness of England, or White authority.

     

    Dread is underlined by dub. Dub sharpens the defiance by writing over the OED, by spelling the sounds of actual English usage in the anglophone African/Caribbean community. Dub itself describes the paradox of the poet’s voice, for dub means both the presence and the absence of Jamaican speech rhythms. Again, a confrontation with deconstruction’s primary reflex might seem in order (the word as the presence of an absent voice) but that only partially explains the paradox at issue. Dub is instrumental reggae, reggae with the lead vocal track removed and replaced (by a sound engineer) with various sound effects (echoes, reverberation, loops, vocal bites, etc.). Dub reggae’s very emphasis on production, on mixing, is itself a challenge to the ideology of the artist as performer or originator (and is sometimes snubbed by reggae artists precisely because it threatens or subverts their copy-rights). This feature emerges in many other forms of popular music (for instance, rap, techno-punk, and rave), which all sample each other with wild abandon, but often as much with the voice track as without. But if dub reggae mixes out the vocals, dub poetry lays down the voice as an instrument within the reggae beat; indeed, the voice is so closely allied with this beat that if you remove the reggae instrumentation you can still hear its sound in the voice of the poem. Dub means simultaneously instruments without voices and voices without instruments. This neat chiasmus is not a tribute to the wily signifier so much as a product of dread identity, subaltern subjectivity as sound, silence, and warning. Dub is underlined by dread.

     

    The paradox of dub as it signifies dread is a function of its multi-levelled etymology. Obviously, the lingo of the sound engineer is paramount, although this was formerly associated with the manipulation of sound and voice tracks in cinematic production or the copying of film onto film. Copying is important, both as a productive capacity and as a logic of repetition. Because of the question of property rights, dubbing is tantamount to repetition as sedition (dub has also meant “to forge keys” as well as “to lock up”; and “to invest with a dignity” as well as “to smear with grease” in two other instances of self-deconstruction). Coincidentally, perhaps, dub has an onomatopoeic function, specifically in “dub” and “dub-a-dub,” the sound of a beating drum. As LKJ recalls in “Reggae Sounds,” the drum is integral to the beat: “Thunda from a bass drum sounding/ lightning from a trumpet and a organ/ bass and rhythm and trumpet double-up/ team-up with drums for a deep doun searching.”19 I will say more about the bass in due course, but the point here is to emphasize dub’s undecidability and its technical associations which are both highly evocative of its cultural politics. The latter, ultimately, is what dread is all about.

     

    Although dub poetry is now associated with a number of poets (Oku Onuora, Mikey Smith, Mutubaruka, Brian Meeks, Breeze, Anita Stewart, etc.) it is almost synonymous with LKJ. Indeed, he claims to have coined the term in the early Seventies.20 For LKJ, dub poetry should be distinguished from dub lyricism, the latter being the process by which deejays lay down their own voice track over reggae (he has in mind Big Youth, U-Roy, I-Roy)–we know this more commonly as “talk-over” or “toasting.”21 Dub lyricism is the voice at its most spontaneous for (with the original voice track removed) the deejay can directly involve his or her audience through call and response methods, or by using current events to recontextualize the dread. Toasting, then, is a special skill tuned in to the tenor of the live event which in the Seventies and early Eighties was epitomized by the one thousand watt-plus sound system discos (either those of the clubs, or the more underground roving systems set up in abandoned houses or warehouses or sometimes just in the street until the police or authorities found a way to pull the plug). Obviously, there is some overlap in LKJ’s work: “It Dread Inna Inglan” on the album Dread Beat and Blood begins with call and response and features a crowd chanting “Free George Lindo” (the reference is to a wrongful arrest case in Bradford). Also, the fact that LKJ himself has released dub versions of his dub poetry (most conspicuously, the album LKJ in Dub) and thereby allows his music to be “talked over” would seem to make the practical separation of dub poetry from dub lyricism problematic. The main difference, however, is that dub poetry privileges the word over the music, or else incorporates the rhythm of the instruments into its enunciation. For LKJ in particular, the poetry should outlast its musical accompaniment or affiliation. This is an oddly purist and anti-populist stance but it has several explanations.

     

    The first is that LKJ considers himself a poet, and not a reggae artist. Clearly, he has learned much from reggae and the musical traditions on which it is based (like mento, ska, rude-boy, and rock-steady) but he does not believe that reggae can exhaust the possibilities of poetry in African/Caribbean cultural expression. Indeed, in a scathing review of Bob Marley in 1975 LKJ suggests that it is reggae music’s commercialization which underlines the danger in the poet becoming overly dependent on it. He cites the example of Marley being “found” by Island Records’ Chris Blackwell (referred to as the “descendant of slave masters”) and promoted as a “Rasta rebel” to boost lagging record sales. The irony is obvious:

     

    The "image" is derived from rastafarianism and rebellion, which are rooted in the historical experience of the oppressed of Jamaica. It then becomes an instrument of capital to sell Marley and his music, thereby negating the power which is the cultural manifestation of this historical experience. So though Marley is singing about "roots" and "natty," his fans know not. Neither do they understand the meaning or the feeling of dread. And there is really no dread in Marley's music. The dread has been replaced by the howling rock guitar and the funky rhythm and what we get is the enigma of "roots" and rock.22

     

    One wonders what LKJ would have to say about Shabba Ranks and other notables of Ragga (a hybridization of rap and reggae) or dancehall stylee? Dread, here, seems to contain its own fear, in this case connected to the rock industry’s economic and race relations: in short, the twin demons of sell-out and cross-over. For LKJ, commercial dread is either dreck or simply a contradiction in terms: it is reggae shorn of its sense of crisis, of its political edge. One could argue that Marley contradicts LKJ’s case, but LKJ’s musical career itself proves that the rock industry is not quite the monolothic capitalist entity that he makes it out to be. Indeed, LKJ’s break into pop occurred a couple of years later in his relationship with Virgin Records. Initially, he wrote biographies to accompany Virgin’s emerging list of reggae artists but eventually he got a chance to cut a record of his poems (drawn principally from the Dread Beat and Blood collection) with a reggae backing (LKJ had been doing this since 1973 with his band Rasta Love, but without a recording contract). While it was Mike Oldfield rather than reggae that catapulted Virgin towards multinational goliath status, LKJ’s point about capital remains pertinent: the corporate deployment of reggae directly supports those it putatively opposes. Taking poetry seriously simultaneously distances the white-dominated media conglomerates for which multiculturalism means capital diversity, while it also assures that the poetry itself can only have a local effect. With the market for printed poetry being so small, the dub poet must rely on live performance as the focus for the message, but for LKJ this means reading principally without the reggae band. Since his “farewell performance” in December, 1985 in Camden, LKJ has made less band-backed appearances, although the release of a new music collection Tings an Times in 1991 underlines that his concert farewell did not end his desire to produce reggae albums. Yet if economic exigency can be seen to compromise LKJ’s poetic principles the general rule remains that he is suspicious of reggae more because of the industry in which it is entwined than its tendency to demote the voice and the dread it embodies.

     

    Connecting this notion of voicing dread and making history suggests an important way of understanding the construction of the subaltern subject. Dub has its own code of othering which distances and/or alienates official discourse while addressing the real foundations of the Black community (the economic plight of postcolonialism, the racism of neo-colonialism, etc.). That the subaltern subject is an active political subject is crucial to LKJ’s history of/in the voice, which provides a significant documentary record of recent race relations in Britain. “New Cross Massakhah,” for instance, is not just a harrowing description of the arson murder of at least thirteen young Blacks attending a birthday party in South London in 1981, but also a story of community outrage, mobilisation, and protest. The Race Today Collective organized a mass demonstration to call attention both to the burgeoning violence against Blacks and to the woeful misrepresentation of the Massacre in the British press.23 For the poem, the point of crisis is also the point of memory. The narrator of the poem recalls the party as a celebration of community culture (“di dubbin/ an di rubbin/ an di rackin to di riddim”) and the violence and subsequent hypocrisy as an affront to the same, while constantly appealing to the community’s sense of this crisis (“yu noh remembah”). In particular, the poem draws a distinction between this community identity and the infamous “public” which is seen to be much too malleable before the police, the press, and the government’s “official story.” The rhythm of the story switches between the liveliness of the party and the heavier bass beat of the aftermath and this itself is a measure of dread. But the beat underscores the resistance polemic that is the content of the poem (“wi refuse fi surrendah/ to dem ugly inuendoh”). As with many of LKJ’s poems, the dread emerges in the difference between the “England” of the dominant public sphere and the “Inglan” of a historically specific English community. Although the outrage over New Cross was not the only cause, the riots across England in 1981 were a product of this glaring cultural, social, and political discrepancy. In this sense, the dub poet does not describe the crisis but articulates it as a function of contemporary community relations (in Jamaica dub serves a similar agonistic purpose). The aesthetics of dub poetry are not founded on description but praxis and the “wi” of its community appeal.

     

    “New Cross Massakhah,” (like LKJ’s “Di Great Insohreckshan” about the riots of ’81, and “Sonny’s Lettah” about the notorious “sus” law) evokes a poignant aesthetic of song and solidarity–the “Other” talks back, and dialogically. By this I mean to invoke Bakhtin’s sense of the utterance being authored by the other.24 Since the addressor anticipates audience response, the other voice is embedded in the speaker’s text. Each word is structured by the relationship between speaker and listener and the immediate conditions in which that “exchange” takes place. As we know, Bakhtin tended to hypostatize the novel as form, but there is good reason to dialogize dialogics through and beyond that domain. Thus, if the subaltern does not speak, as such, it is only within the restrictive logics and codes of the dominant discourse. This raises the paradox of dub once more, for there the subaltern is not represented but is heard. On the one hand, the social conditions dub critiques engage a particular community and context; on the other, the alienating English of dub distances the normative and normalizing tones of the linguistic orthodoxy (“Queen’s English” or “BBC English,” for instance).

     

    But the language of dub also calls attention to the racial differences that stratify Britain’s working classes. This, of course, has been the explicit subject of several reggae talk-over hits, the most famous of which is Smiley Culture’s “Cockney Translation.” Both Gilroy and Hebdige have provided cogent analyses of this brilliant paean to multiple voicing, but Smiley was not the first to highlight the differences within, in this case, working-class London. Cockney meets patois in LKJ’s 1979 poem “Fite Dem Back” which ventriloquizes London’s white working class as a harbinger of racist attitudes. The clash of language is also a struggle of race relations. The first verse of “Fite Dem back” begins with a “version” of Cockney: “we gonna smash their brains in/ cause they ain’t got nofink in ’em.”25 The second verse replies to this National Front mentality with “some a dem say dem a niggah haytah” and continues, “fashist an di attack/ noh baddah worry ’bout dat/ fashist an di attack/ wi wi’ fite dem back.” The simplified sociology of “us” and “them” (“wi” and “dem”) is, as I’ve argued elsewhere, not a function of crass dichotomous thinking, but a register of strategic opposition.26 Not all Cockneys are fascists, but “dem” who are must be challenged. The value of Bakhtin’s theory of the utterance and, indeed, Brathwaite’s notion of nation language, is that both provide models for understanding community address at the macro- and micro- social levels. And the artist, in both cases, must have a highly developed sense of public voice and responsibility, or what Bakhtin calls “answerability.”

     

    Dub emphasizes what constitutes a voice in social discourse.27 Mikey Smith, whose brutal murder in 1983 cut short the career of Jamaica’s premier dub poet, always wrote his poems, but the scripts do little justice to the instrumentation of his voice in live performance. Brathwaite comments that Smith “published” his poetry at public poetry readings, and notes that transcription of Smith’s voice is especially difficult when he includes noise, such as an imitation of a motorbike, to extend syllables at key moments (I will return to noise in due course). The word “woe” in his poem, “Me Cyaan Believe It” on the album version is a scream of almost four seconds in length, yet in his poetry collection, It A Come, it is rendered as “woeeeeeeee” which, while emphatic, does not convey the effect. Interestingly, at a recent conference in New York honoring Brathwaite, LKJ recited Smith’s poem from memory and followed the rhythm and stress of the album version almost exactly. Clearly, LKJ was dependent on Smith’s oraliture and his own experience of Smith recitations for his performance (the vocal clues are not sufficient in the written text). This underlines a paradoxical degree of unrepeatability and untranslatability in dub poetry that resists its reproduction as writing. The coding of dub is in tune with the live event and the community in which that event occurs.28 Bakhtin’s term “eventness” (sobytiinost’) describes this material specificity, a moment that constrains abstract transcription. Although Bakhtin has in mind an “act” rather than a speech act, he believes such activity should be linked to the process of art, art as an event of being rather than an object of “purely theoretical cognition.”29 Again, the key to the event is the co- authoring of the addressee, a sympathetic “co-experiencing” certainly more possible in an Afro-Caribbean community than, for instance, the halls of Westminster or Scotland Yard in their current forms. What makes for identification in one context might make for alienation and hostility in another. The dub poet is sensitive to the “eventness” of dub poetry and knows that one community’s dread is another community’s fear. LKJ, then, does not “give voice to the struggle” so much as explore how the voice is structured from within by struggle as a material context, both as social oppression and as linguistic violence.

     

    Thus, Bakhtin’s assertion that cultural voice always exceeds the personal, the individual, has a particular resonance in the dub poet’s community address–and for Black Britain at present, this voice is constructed at the margin where it (dialogically) confounds the centripetal logic of a “little englander” mentality. In addition to Bakhtin’s dialogism, such a reading picks up on Homi Bhabha’s notion of “dissemiNation” as a liminality of cultural identity, but double-voicing, in principle, is also highly evocative of dub’s doubling of English. This doubling forms a coda to Gates’s elaboration of the “talking book” in African vernacular traditions because here we have not just texts talking to one another in their revoicing of the history of black struggles but an emphasis on speech qua speech as a (dis)figuring of moribund nationalist ideology. Dub poetry would seem to be a rather obvious “speakerly text,” but it is my contention that it is better heard as a textualizing voice. The four beat bass rhythm of reggae (with its stress on beats two and four) might carry this voice, but what articulates it as such is the ambivalent subjectivity of dread. This is not a jargon of authenticity but an intimation of crisis in excess of its putative speaker. Voice, then, instantiates dread in two ways, the first of which is characterized by Kobena Mercer in his Bakhtinian model of Black British aesthetics: At a micro-level, the textual work of creolizing appropriation activated in new forms of black cultural practice awakens the thought that such strategies of disarticulation and rearticulation may be capable of transforming the ‘democratic imaginary’ at a macro- level by ‘othering’ inherited discourses of English identity.30

     

    The second instantiation, which is not presence but present danger, is (like Mikey Smith’s “woe”) to make the voice noisy; that is, to employ sound as syntax, as syncopation, as “sonority contrasts” (Brathwaite), and as instrumentation. This is the measure of dread beat, for it picks away at authority’s rationalism (Thatcher’s and now Major’s monotonous “common sense”). Dread beat interrogates and interpolates this often harmful status quo by not being quiet. As LKJ notes, “To us, who were of necessary birth, for the earth’s hard and thankless toil, silence ‘as no meaning” (“Two Sides of Silence”). While African American rap has provided an exhortation to “bring the noise,” dub poetry has been doing this for quite some time and belongs to the same tradition of affective sound. But LKJ’s move beyond silence suggests a doubling or troubling of identity for, as Jacques Attali has pointed out, what noise is to chaos, music is to community. Dub fashions both: the noise destabilizes the false ontology of Britishness (an oxymoronic discordant harmony) while the dread riddim provides a musical gloss on the fractured and tenuous realities of the diasporic subject.

     

    I have been trying to suggest how the voice of dub poetry instantiates a version of making history: the voice, here, as an active component of community identity. In the main, reggae has provided dub with its dread riddim but, as we have noted, LKJ believes that dub is not reducible to reggae even if it owes it a rhythmic allegiance. As with most “sound” protest, dub’s doubling provides a subaltern community with a medium for resistance and active intervention in the political arena. While this might seem to confine dub poetry to the margins as subculture, this does not mean cultural subservience. In fact, I believe it is closer to what Deleuze and Guattari have examined as the deterritorializations of “minor literature,” but in this case as a textualizing voice.31 LKJ’s “Bass Culture” is typical of the (sub)cultural (sub)version of dub. Obviously, the title puns on bass as being both the instrument of the beat and as being somehow obnoxious or repulsive. Who finds the bass base goes to the heart of the politics of culture that dub foregrounds. On the face of it, “Bass Culture” exudes all the major features discussed so far: the thumping beat of bass is its subject matter, here tied to the beating of the heart but also to Brathwaite’s point about the rhythm of the storm; it is a poem about dread, both as threat and as cultural identity (“dread people”); the violence it registers has everything to do with the tropical storm it imitates and the history of oppression it records and from which it learns; the voice is both musical as it follows the bass line, and noisy, as it makes a thunder crack (“SCATTA-MATTA-SHATTA-SHACK”) a slogan of defiance; the voice is specific about its own musical moment (“an di beat will shiff/as di culture altah/when oppression scatta”) which will pass according to a particular historical situation; in acknowledging the power of the voice (partially indicated in the dedication to Mr.Talk-Over, “Big Yout”) it makes no claims as to its originality but instead emphasizes a shared sense of “latent powa” as a bloodline of history, a “muzik of blood”; and the dread is a threat because it challenges the norm (“the false fold”) in its language, its riddim, and, of course, in its title. But there is also an ambivalence of context in “Bass Culture” that allows dread to signify simultaneously in two moments of identity. The first is the colonial condition in which dread is the “latent powa” that eventually comes “burstin outta slave shackle/ look ya! boun fi harm di wicked.” The second moment, however, is the dread present where this same latency must be utilized to “scatta” oppression within postcoloniality. Dread keeps the “culture pulsin” with bass riddim as long as it is “BAD OUT DEY”–a situation that did not necessarily end with the independence of Jamaica or the migration of some of its population to Britain. Dread, then, becomes a conceptual as well as experiential link in the story of Afro-Caribbeans. Thus, when I suggest that dub identity is about being-in-between this does not mean that the community voiced by LKJ has not arrived in England (we have already noted that it “stan firm inna Inglan”) but that arrival in itself does not end the legacy of racism that structures England’s national selfhood. The dread beat still has that to beat.

     

    But we are left with a central question: does the voice make history or simply record it? The answer lies in the ambiguity of “telling history.” History is that which has disallowed the subaltern voice, and yet talking history permits a trenchant sense of both a subject without a voice and a voice without a subject. That which makes history telling depends upon the specific positions of speaker and listener which are in excess of individuality. LKJ is, therefore, a vessel of history–he carries the voice rather than being coterminous with it. What makes history telling is not the individuation of the voice, as the griots well know, but the process in which the story keeps getting told. If the little englander subject makes the voice self present with the speaker, then dub identity answers by making history a function of the voice. In this sense, you know when LKJ is making history, because the community voice is telling it. Aime Cesaire once pointed out a massive contradiction in European identity in just three words, “Colonization and civilization?” The questions are different now (for instance, racism and multiculturalism?) but LKJ gives voice to current crises in Black Britain by historicizing them. While I have only begun to detail the importance of this history I hope the version here at least underlines that there is a history at stake and a role for the poet in speaking it, in something other than pentameters, and somewhere other than overseas.

     

    Notes

     

    1. A shorter “version” of this essay was first given at the MLA conference in New York, December 1992. The talk was backed with dub reggae, and the intonation of each sentence picked up on that bass beat. The form of the presentation, therefore, attempted to demonstrate the instrumentation of voice in dub poetry. This, of course, included an example of LKJ’s performance–the poem I will discuss later, “Bass Culture.” The present “re-mix” pushes against the impossibility of reproducing that event even as it admits the importance of this form of irreducibility. It is itself a dub version, the voiceless B-side of a reggae record–toned down, of course! A longer version will follow. For more on versions, see Dick Hebdige, Cut ‘N’ Mix (London: Comedia, 1987). Hebdige’s book exemplifies the ability to hear and read the riddim crucial to dread.

     

    2. I refer here to Brathwaite’s provocative essay, “History of the Voice” first presented at Carifesta 76 in Jamaica and subsequently expanded and revised as a lecture given at Harvard University, August 1979. The full text with bibliography has been published as Edward Kamau Brathwaite, History of the Voice (London: New Beacon Books, 1984). My efforts here are strongly influenced by Brathwaite’s emphasis on orality in his essay (his talk, like mine, has an audio track), although I will also focus on the difficulties of representation in his concept of the “nation language.”

     

    3. See Edouard Glissant, Caribbean Discourse (Charlottesville: University of Virginia Press, 1992): 77. Both Glissant’s and Brathwaite’s notion of history challenge the totalizing paradigms of Western history (particularly the Hegelian model). The status of the voice in relation to writing, however, is perceived somewhat differently as we will see. Glissant has a deconstructor’s flair for writing that remains suspicious of speech even as he wants to instantiate a “scriptible” voice. Brathwaite, however, is much more sanguine about the scriptability of the voice in its a radical distancing of the colonial word. “Dread” emerges in the tension between these polemics.

     

    4. The dilemma of being in between, or crossing is explored in Kamau Brathwaite’s Middle Passages (Newcastle: Bloodaxe, 1992), a brilliant collection of poems that fracture English, the page, and any sense of Black diaspora as a unitary experience of dislocation. For more on the “black atlantic” model, see Paul Gilroy, “Cultural Studies and Ethnic Absolutism” in Lawrence Grossberg, Cary Nelson, and Paula Treichler, eds., Cultural Studies (London: Routledge, 1992): 187-198.

     

    5. Brathwaite: 10.

     

    6. See Benedict Anderson, Imagined Communities (London: Verso, 1983). Anderson’s thesis is linked to a simultaneous temporality called “meanwhile” which gives the form of the nation its assumed integrity. As Bhabha has pointed out, this works very well for realist models of representation, but overlooks (or, for our purposes, stutters) the liminality of cultural identity: the “imperceptible” and the unutterable remains just that. LKJ, for one, has attempted to speak what he calls this “silent space.”

     

    7. See Glissant: 94-95. My point in this diversion is to suggest that without an adequate knowledge of the deformations of the Caribbean nation one cannot begin to understand the voice of dread in the metropolitan “center.”

     

    8. See Henry Louis Gates Jr. The Signifying Monkey (New York: Oxford University Press, 1988); and, Houston Baker Jr., Blues, Ideology, and Afro-American Literature (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1984).

     

    9. See Mervyn Morris, “Interview with Linton Kwesi Johnson” Jamaica Journal, 20:1 (Feb/April 1987): 17-26. Most of this interview was conducted in 1982, but it was subsequently updated in 1986. As such, it provides an important overview of LKJ’s upbringing and intellectual/political development.

     

    10. Hebdige points out that Toots might have had the term, but the rhythm had appeared on earlier recordings, principally, Lee “Scratch” Perry’s production, “People Funny Boy.” Perry would go on to produce a number of groups, including the Wailers and the Upsetters. See Hebdige: 75.

     

    11. Like many other writers (including Baker and Hebdige), Gilroy connects the black diaspora through the strong musical links between Africa and the Caribbean, North America, and Western Europe. Gilroy’s study breaks new ground in several ways, however, particularly in detailing the complex alliances and oppositions that develop in Black Britain. The nexus of race and class is vital in this regard, as is his analysis of the production and institutionalization of racism in and outside government.

     

    12. See Homi Bhabha, “DissemiNation: Time, Narrative, and the Margins of the Nation” in Homi Bhabha, ed., Nation and Narration (London: Routledge, 1990): 291-322. Interestingly, this concept describes a temporality that distances, so to speak, from within, the History of Western national identity. But, for LKJ, I would argue, this principle itself needs to be qualified in light of the double diaspora, in terms of spatiality and tonality (the focus, if not the function, of the Brathwaite/Glissant metacritiques).

     

    13. See Stuart Hall’s perceptive analysis of this phenomenon in his The Hard Road To Renewal (London: Verso, 1988). It is important to maintain the sense that, although Thatcher embodies Thatcherism, its political formation and deformation pre- and post-dates her terms as Prime Minister.

     

    14. See/hear, Linton Kwesi Johnson, “Di Great Insohreckshan” in Linton Kwesi Johnson, Tings an Times (Newcastle: Bloodaxe, 1991): 43-44; and “Di Great Insohreckshan” on Linton Kwesi Johnson, Making History (Mango: MLPS9770, 1984).

     

    15. See Joseph Owens, Dread: The Rastafarians of Jamaica (London: Heinemann Educational Books, 1982): 3.

     

    16. See/hear “It Dread Inna Inglan,” in Linton Kwesi Johnson, Inglan is a Bitch (London: Race Today, 1980): 14-15; and “It Dread Inna Inglan” on Linton Kwesi Johnson, Dread Beat An’ Blood (Virgin: FLC9009 [tape], 1990). The latter is a reissue of the 1977 album of the same name.

     

    17. See the Morris interview: 19.

     

    18. See hear “Reality Poem” in LKJ, Tings An Times (Newcastle: Bloodaxe Books, 1991): 30-31; and LKJ, Forces of Victory (Mango: MLPS9566, 1979).

     

    19. Linton Kwesi Johnson, Tings An Times: 18.

     

    20. The earliest reference in his work I can find is an essay from 1976. See “Jamaican Rebel Music,” Race and Class, 17:4 (1976): 397-412. Even so, this still contradicts Stewart Brown’s contention that the term was first used by Oku Onuora in 1979. See “Dub Poetry: Selling Out” Poetry Wales, 22:2 (1987): 51-54. There are references in the music press as early as 1974 but these are usually tied to “talk-over” rather than LKJ’s sense of dub as poetry.

     

    21. For more on talk-over and toasting see Hebdige, especially Chapters 10 and 11. Given LKJ’s distinction, it would seem rap is closer to dub-lyricism than dub-poetry because the latter can function as its own instrumentation.

     

    22. See Linton Kwesi Johnson, “Roots and Rock” Race Today, 7:10 (October 1975)): 237-238.

     

    23. Paul Gilroy provides a pertinent analysis of the Massacre and its aftermath in his “There Ain’t No Black in the Union Jack” (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1987), Chapter Three. See also, the Special Issue of Race and Class, “Rebellion and Repression,” 23:2/3 (Autumn/Winter 1981/82).

     

    24. The implications of Bakhtin’s theory of the utterance for subaltern studies are discussed in my Dialogics of the Oppressed (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1993), especially the preface and chapter one. The relevant Bakhtinian texts are: V.N.Volosinov, Marxism and the Philosophy of Language, trans. Ladislav Matejka and I.R.Titunik (New York: Seminar Press, 1973); Mikhail Bakhtin, Problems in Dostoevsky’s Poetics, trans. Caryl Emerson (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press); The Dialogic Imagination, ed. Michael Holquist, trans. Caryl Emerson and Michael Holquist (Austin: University of Texas Press, 1981); Speech Genres, trans. Vern McGee, (Austin: University of Texas Press, 1986); and Art and Answerability, ed. Michael Holquist and Vadim Liapunov, trans. Vadim Liapunov (Austin: University of Texas Press, 1990). In many ways, dub is a “version” of Bakhtin’s discourse of the streets which he reads in the organized heteroglossia of the novel.

     

    25. See/hear “Fite Dem Back” in Inglan is a Bitch (London: Race Today, 1980): 20; and on Forces of Victory (Mango: MLPS 9566, 1979). The transliteration of the sound, on this occasion, does not do justice to the effect in the song: “nofink” is actually “nuffink” on the album and is far more evocative of an East End accent. As an Eastender, I appreciate this verisimilitude.

     

    26. See Peter Hitchcock, Working-Class Fiction in Theory and Practice (Ann Arbor: UMI, 1989).

     

    27. This is a constituent feature of what Brathwaite calls “sound poetry.” Legendary among these are Mighty Sparrow, Miss Lou, and Bongo Jerry. The latter’s poem, “Mabrak,” with its invocation of a “black electric storm” and its plea to “recall and recollect black speech” does not go unnoticed in LKJ’s poetry. See Brathwaite: 25-48.

     

    28. LKJ describes this function thus: The kind of thing that I write and the way I say it is as a result of the tension between Jamaican Creole and Jamaican English and between those and English English. And all that, really, is the consequence of having been brought up in a colonial society, and then coming over here to live and go to school in England, soon afterwards. The tension builds up. You can see it in the writing. You can hear it. And something else: my poems may look sort of flat on the page. Well, that is because they’re actually oral poems, as such. They were definitely written to be read aloud, in the community. [Quoted in Andrew Salkey’s introduction to Linton Kwesi Johnson, Dread Beat and Blood (London: Bogle-L’Ouverture, 1975): 8].

     

    29. See Mikhail Bakhtin, Art and Answerability, ed. Michael Holquist and Vadim Liapunov, trans. Vadim Liapunov (Austin: University of Texas Press, 1990): 189. See also, the discussion of eventness in Bakhtin’s work by Gary Saul Morson and Caryl Emerson in their introduction to Gary Saul Morson and Caryl Emerson, eds., Rethinking Bakhtin (Evanston: Northwestern University Press, 1989).

     

    30. See Kobena Mercer, “Diaspora Culture and the Dialogic Imagination: The Aesthetics of Black Independent Film” in Mbye B.Cham and Claire Andrade-Watkins, eds., Blackframes: Critical Perspectives on Black Independent Cinema (Cambridge: MIT Press, 1988): 59. Mercer’s approach to Black British film, particularly in its creative use of the Volosinov/Bakhtin text on the “ideological sign,” complements my interest here in the dialogic voice of dub poetry. For an excellent analysis of contemporary British cultural politics see also, Kobena Mercer, “Welcome to the Jungle: Identity and Diversity in Postmodern Politics” in Jonathan Rutherford, ed., Identity (London: Lawrence and Wishart, 1990): 43-71.

     

    31. See Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari, Kafka: Toward a Minor Literature, trans. Dana Polan (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1986). This will be developed in a subsequent “version.” For an application of “minor literature” to postcolonial discourse see Paget Henry and Paul Buhle, “Caliban as Deconstructionist: C.L.R.James and Post-Colonial Discourse” in Paget Henry and Paul Buhle, eds. C.L.R.James’s Caribbean (Durham: Duke University Press, 1992): 111-142.