Jeff Bell

Dept. of History and Government
Southeastern Louisiana University, Hammond
FHG$2395@ALTAIR.SELU.EDU

 

Jonathan Beller has set forth an interesting and provocative account of the relationship between cinema and what he takes to be the condition for the possibility of cinema–i.e., capital. Beller draws upon many resources to support this thesis, from the film Barton Fink to the work of Gilles Deleuze, and generally the arguments are well thought out and thought-provoking. In particular, Beller argues, and rightly I believe, that with cinema capital extends its domain onto and into the conscious attention of individuals, and with this a new form of exploitation is made possible. As Beller puts it, capital cinema can be used to tap “the productive energies of consciousness and the body in order to facilitate the production of surplus value” (par. 7). Or again, “some people make a profit from other people’s looking” (par. 10). The basic argument is Marxist, yet Beller supplements it by stressing the significance of human attention as a form of labor, a labor that is productive of value, and hence productive of surplus value when exploited under capitalism.

 

In support of this basic argument, Beller brings in an enlightening discussion of the transition from aura (following Walter Benjamin) to simulacra. In both cases human attention constitutes value. In looking at a work of art, for example, there is what one actually sees, and there is the fact that many others have seen this same thing. The gap between what one sees and the circulation of this artwork among many other gazes defines, for Beller, the “aura” of this work, an aura which gives value to the work. A simulacrum, on the other hand, results when “visual objects are liquidated of their traditional contents and mean precisely their circulation” (par. 23), and this liquidation is the result of a speeding up of the circulation of these visual objects. Value in this case is nothing more than the circulation of the object among many gazes, and thus value is cut free from anything having to do with the object itself. In the words of a recent television commercial, “image is everything!”

 

I do not have much to add to Beller’s fine discussion of these issues, and for the most part I agree with what he says. What I want to respond to is Beller’s use of Deleuze’s Cinema books to support his arguments and his effort, through a critique of this work, to distance himself from Deleuze. More precisely, I want to respond to Beller’s three chief criticisms of Deleuze’s theory of cinema. The first and most important criticism is that Deleuze, according to Beller, ignores and “refuses simply to think” the fact that cinema is a capitalist industry. A second and related criticism is that Deleuze only discusses the masterpieces of cinema while ignoring everything else. And finally, Beller claims that Deleuze’s “aestheticizing thought” overlooks the cultural logic wherein the time-image leads to extinction, schizophrenia, and the pathological severing of senory-motor links. By responding to these charges on behalf of Deleuze, I hope to clarify some of the central issues that are at stake in Beller’s work and contribute to the important discussion which this work has begun.

 

Although Deleuze, according to Beller, refuses “to think political economy,” he does flirt with it. Such flirtation becomes clear when Deleuze cites Fellini: “When there is no money left, the film will be finished.” Beller finds in Fellini’s remark, and in Deleuze’s treatment of it, evidence for the claim that cinema is always “in one way or another a film about the film’s economic conditions of possibility” (par. 38). This is only a flirtation, however, for Beller believes Deleuze says “disappointingly little” about cinema’s own conditions of possibility–i.e., capital. Deleuze may not say much about the economic conditions of possibility in his Cinema books, and perhaps he is to be faulted for this, but much is said on these matters in Deleuze and Guattari’s book Anti-Oedipus. Central among their claims in this book is that capitalism is a functioning assemblage of processes, interactions, codings and overcodings; however, the raison d’etre of capitalism is the decoding of flows. In other words, the pursuit of surplus value hinges upon creating new markets, new values, needs, etc. (i.e., the “new and improved” syndrome of capitalism); and yet to do this requires decoding or deterritorializing existing markets, existing values, needs, etc. To return to Beller’s example discussed above, the transition from aura to simulacra entails the decoding of value, a value which is tied to the “traditional contents” of art (i.e., qualities of the visual art object itself), so that new values and needs can be created–i.e., value as tied only to the circulation of the object among many observers. This example betrays the very process of capitalism for Deleuze and Guattari, and for that reason they would agree with Beller’s analysis. But capitalism, and this is the crucial point, must continually avoid complete deterritorialization, complete decoding; in short, it must avoid schizophrenia. Consequently, every process of decoding and deterritorialization entails a simultaneous recoding and reterritorialization. Without this capitalism could not function. On this point, Deleuze and Guattari are quite explicit: “one can say that schizophrenia is the exterior limit of capitalism itself or the conclusion of its deepest tendency, but that capitalism only functions on condition that it inhibit this tendency, or that it push back or displace this limit, by substituting for it its own immanent relative limits, which it continually reproduces on a widened scale.”¹ Thus, although simulacra result from a decoding of aura, simulacra are nevertheless set forth as new values, as new standards and codes.

 

With this in mind we can see that yes, for Deleuze and Guattari that capitalism as decoding and deterritorializing process (or what Deleuze refers to in the Cinema books and elsewhere as the “genetic,” “differentiating” element) is the condition of possibility for cinema. However, this unthought and unthinkable differentiating condition is also the exterior limit of capitalism and cinema, the limit which must be pushed back. Consequently, capitalism and cinema find themselves recoded and reterritorialized upon existing values, existing standards, existing relative limits. On this basis we can understand Deleuze’s treatment of Fellini’s statement. Just as capitalism itself requires the reterritorialization of its deterritorializaing tendencies, so too does cinema’s deterritorializing process require reterritorialization, and it is precisely money which fulfills this role and which Fellini laments. The deterritorialization of a Fellini film does not go unchecked, but is reterritorialized by the financial backers of the film with their budgetary constraints. There is thus a double role of money which needs to be stressed here, for although Deleuze and Guattari emphasize the deterritorializing aspects of money and capital, they also point out the reterritorializing and stratifying processes associated with money, and it is the latter process which Deleuze is referring to when he claims that “cinema as art lives in a direct relation with a permanent plot, an international conspiracy which conditions it from within, as the most intimate and most indispensable enemy. This conspiracy is that of money . . . .”² Put more simply, cinema as art, as a process which creates new values, new ways of looking at the world, etc.; this cinema confronts the demands of financial backers who want to see a profit from a film, who don’t want something new so much as something that sells. And we need not look far in the history of film to find a successful film that is widely imitated with the hopes of “cashing in” on its success. This is the reterritorializing conspiracy of money, a conspiracy filmmakers who are not in the “mainstream” constantly confront (such as Fellini, Orson Welles, Antonioni, etc.)

 

This brings me to the second of Beller’s criticisms–i.e., Deleuze’s emphasis upon the masterpieces of cinema at the expense of everything else. For Beller, recognizing that human attention is productive of value leaves open the possibility that “all of the non-masterpieces of cinema could then be brought back” (par. 58). They could be brought back because human attention, even of the non-masterpiece variety, is assumed to be capable of creating new ways of seeing, valuing, etc. Deleuze’s point is not that new values are produced only within the work of a few “recognized” masters; rather, his point is very Nietzschean in that he claims that all new values have been produced and created away from the marketplace. From what we have said above, we can see that this does not mean that new values, in particular new values associated with cinema, must be produced in isolation from capital and capitalism, but only that these values always entail a process of deterritorialization, and this occurs apart from, and at odds with, the reterritorializing conspiracy of capital and capitalism. When something new is said, or when a film shows us a different way of looking and feeling, this happens, for Deleuze, because of a deterritorialization of existing values and codes; but these films are always exceptional for Deleuze, because for the most part films are made on the basis of the security of what is already known to sell (i.e., money as reterritorializing). That this tendency is especially so with respect to cinema as art, in contrast to the many other arts (e.g., painting, sculpture, poetry, etc.), should be obvious: i.e., it takes a large capital investment simply to make a film. Investors are subsequently more apt to back the film which has the greater chance of returning their initial investment with a profit. To capitalize on cinema, therefore, takes roughly one of two tracks: either the financial backers act on the basis of what is already known about public taste, etc., in order to decide which project will be profitable; or they risk losing their investment by supporting a project that is novel and yet risks not being accepted. It should be clear that the first track is the more common, and yet, and this is Deleuze’s point, masterpieces always result from the second approach. This is not to say that all films made from this second approach are masterpieces; to the contrary, and again Deleuze is explicit on this point, if a masterpiece truly says something new it will be at odds with the reterritorializing tendencies of capital, but it does not follow from this that every film that is at odds with these tendencies does say something new.

 

In reference to literature, though we could apply this to cinema just as easily, Deleuze makes some comments which get to the heart of Beller’s concerns as well as his difficulties with some of what Deleuze is arguing. In an article titled “Mediators” in his book Pourparlers, and in a section of this article titled “The Conspiracy of Imitators” (which should recall the conspiracy with which cinema as art is confronted, the conspiracy Beller claims is discussed “disappointingly little”), Deleuze claims that “Fast turnover [of books, but equally films] necessarily means selling people what they expect: even what’s “daring,” “scandalous,” strange and so on falls into the market’s predictable forms. The conditions for literary creation, which emerge only unpredictably, with a slow turnover and progressive recognition, are fragile.”³ What the market is interested in, or what capital as reterritorializing is interested in, is what is predictable; and it is precisely this conspiracy of imitators which authors and filmmakers, if they are interested in creating something new (i.e., in deterritorializing predictable forms and codes), run up against.

 

This brings us finally to Beller’s final criticism that Deleuze’s “aestheticizing thought” overlooks the cultural logic wherein the time-image leads to extinction, schizophrenia, and the pathological severing of senory-motor links. On the one hand, Beller is certainly correct to make this claim. The time-image does indeed entail the possibility of leading to extinction. Deleuze often recognized this possibility, however, and in Thousand Plateaus for example he pointed out the dangers of making one’s self a body without organs. The danger is that to make one’s self a body without organs one must deterritorialize themselves, but if this deterritorialization goes too far this could lead to our self-destruction and extinction. In a reference to Carlos Castaneda’s distinction between the nagual and tonal, which corresponds roughly with the distinction between deterritorialization and reterritorialization, they claim that “the important thing is not to dismantle the tonal by destroying it all of a sudden. . . . You have to keep it in order to survive, to ward off the assault of the nagual.”⁴ In other words, to deterritorialize, and this is just what Deleuze believes the time-image does, is also to risk deterritorializing too much, with the result being the extinction and destruction of self with which Beller was concerned.

 

The time-image, or deterritorialization, if it can avoid the black hole of self-annhilation by holding on to some reterritorialization, can then create something new, can produce new values. To create a new way of seeing the world with cinema is therefore a very risky affair. One risks either succumbing to the conspiracy of imitators who will only financially back a film which imitates a given formula for success; or one risks deterritorializing given values and standards too much with the result that the film, and consciousness which was Beller’s concern, collapses into the black hole of self-destruction and extinction. Deleuze was quite aware of both dangers and yet argues that if we are going to change the way things are we must face these dangers nonetheless. Deleuze would agree wholeheartedly with Beller’s following claim: “The labor of revolution is, after all, always an effort to reorganize the production and distribution of value. It is an attack on the presiding regimes of value in order that we might create something else” (par. 56). Deleuze’s thought and work is motivated by just this type of revolutionary concern; however, Deleuze cites the dangers inherent in revolutionary activity. Every revolution, whether in politics, economics, or cinema, risks collapsing into the stratifying stranglehold of tyranny and fascism, the conspiracy of imitators; or it risks exploding into the chaos of anarchy and self-destruction. Deleuze would agree with Beller’s call for revolutionary change, but would caution us to beware of its dangers.

 

Notes

 

1. Anti-Oedipus. Translated by Robert Hurley, Mark Seem, and Helen R. Lane (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1983), 246.

 

2. Cinema 2. Translated by Hugh Tomlinson and Robert Galeta (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1989), 77.

 

3. Pourparlers (Paris: Les Editions de Minuit, 1990), 175. Translation mine.

 

4. Thousand Plateaus. Translated by Brian Massumi (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1987), 162.

 

Christian L. Pyle

Department of English
University of Kentucky
uk00028@ukpr.uky.edu

 

Reynolds, Richard. Super Heroes: A Modern Mythology. Studies in Popular Culture. Jackson: University of Mississippi Press, 1994.

 

Although the “superhero” has been a staple of American mass media since the emergence of Superman in 1938, a definitive study of the genre has not appeared. Therefore, I greeted the American edition of Reynolds’s book (first published in London by B. T. Batsford in 1992) with enthusiasm. Its potential seemed substantial, as suggested by the back cover copy:

 

The popular figure known as the superhero has exerted such a strong and mushrooming influence upon society, morality, and politics that a mythology now pervades our culture. . . . Here is a study of this superhuman creation, revealed as a proliferating symbol whose dimensions over sixty years of comic book history have been rendered to satisfy the demands and expectations of the popular audience. This fascinating book shows how the superhero has become a vivid figure in the mainstream of modern culture.

 

This is a description of the book that popular culture scholars and postmodernists have needed: a wide-ranging yet detailed study of the proliferation of the superhero myth. Regrettably, Reynolds’s Super Heroes, while it has several merits, is not that book.

 

Reynolds begins with “a first-stage working definition of the superhero genre” expressed in seven criteria:

 

1. The hero is marked out from society. He often reaches maturity without having a relationship with his parents. 2. At least some of the superheroes will be like earthbound gods in their level of powers. Other superheroes of lesser powers will consort easily with these earthbound dieties. 3. The hero's devotion to justice overrides even his devotion to the law. 4. The extraordinary nature of the superhero will be contrasted with the ordinariness of his surroundings. 5. Likewise, the extraordinary nature of the hero will be contrasted with the mundane nature of his alter-ego. Certain taboos will govern the actions of these alter-egos. [By taboos, Reynolds will explain further on, he refers to myths in which the hero gains strength through abstinence.] 6. Although ultimately above the law, superheroes can be capable of considerable patriotism and moral loyalty to the state, though not necessarily to the letter of its laws. 7. The stories are mythical and use science and magic indiscriminately to create a sense of wonder. (16)

 

Rules 1 and 3 are accepted facets of the American hero, as true of Natty Bumppo and Huck Finn as they are of Superman and Batman. Rules 4 and 5 are also familiar and straight-forward (although rule 4 could use a footnote regarding heroes who alternate between mundane surroundings and fantastic realms, such as outer space, Asgard, or astral planes). Rule 2, however, is flawed in a way that points to a major weakness of Reynolds’s book: its forshortened historical perspective.

 

Parallel to the “earthbound god” tradition of costumed heroes stemming from Superman is the “masked man” tradition of heroes with no real “superpowers.” The best-known comic book example is Batman, but he was preceded by other comic book heroes (the Crimson Avenger), pulp fiction heroes (the Spider, the Black Bat), and radio heroes (the Lone Ranger, the Green Hornet). Batman, the subject of three sections within Super Heroes, is obviously in Reynolds’s mind when he refers to “superheroes of lesser powers.” One could argue that Batman’s above-average intelligence, athletic ability, weaponry, or fear-instilling costume are “powers,” but Reynolds does not go into that. Instead he defines the super-ness of such heroes in terms of their interaction with the Superman crowd. This idea, as well as Reynolds’s lengthy discussion of continuity later in the book, depends upon the existence of a “universe” in which all the characters owned by a particular company inhabit the same fictional world. However, the idea of a fictional universe is more recent than Reynolds seems to realize. He links it to superhero teams (37-38), but, prior to the emergence of Marvel in the 1960s, the adventures of superteams were isolated from the solo adventures of the teams’ heroes. (I don’t mean to be overly pedantic, but one could ask if the Green Lantern appearing in All-American Comics is the same character as the Justice Society member appearing in All-Star Comics, just as we ask if the Quentin of The Sound and the Fury is the same character as the Quentin of Absalom, Absalom!). The formation of a universe in which casual allusions are made between titles really only began with Marvel and was integrated into DC only recently.

 

The failure to consider how the genre has changed over time is the central flaw of Reynolds’s study. A perusal of the dates of texts he selects for close readings (1938, 1940, 1977, 1979, 1981, 1986, 1986-87, 1987) shows that his real interest/background is in the comics of the 1980s. However, Reynolds does not qualify his generalizations as to which parts of comics history they apply. Also, he makes no attempt at delineating critical periods of the genre except for references to the “Golden Age”/ “Silver Age” distinction used by fans, a distinction which is useful for separating, say, the “Golden Age Flash” from the “Silver Age Flash,” but which lacks a scholarly foundation.

 

Reynolds’s best points tease us because, though fascinating, they remain always underdeveloped. For example, in his chapter on costumes, Reynolds discusses how costumes function differently depending on the hero’s gender:

 

The costumed heroine may be frankly the object of sexual attraction, and therefore (for many male readers) will constitute the object of their gaze, as well as the subject or protagonist through which they engage with the action of the text. So, whilst for the superhero the transformation into costume can best be achieved with something as instantaneous as Billy Batson's "Shazam," which calls forth the invincible Captain Marvel, for the superheroine the process can (at least potentially) be viewed as the performance of an uncompleted striptease. And thus the (male) reader is called upon to 'read' both heroines and villainesses as objects of desire--'good girls' and 'bad girls' maybe, but objects of the same rhetorical logic. (37)

 

Before we can accept this point as valid, we need a detailed comparison of typical transformation scenes of heroes and heroines. The issue is further complicated by the use of an atypical strip tease (from The Sensational She-Hulk) as an illustration for the section. If the gender discussion were expanded, Reynolds would also have to deal with the homoeroticism question, especially since superwomen in skintight outfits are considerably less popular with the primarily male readership than supermen in skintight outfits. Anyone familiar with the critical literature will know that the question has been a major issue since Frederic Wertham asked it in Seduction of the Innocentin 1954. By asserting that the gaze is exclusively heterosexual, Reynolds evades the homoeroticism issue altogether.

 

Another major issue of the Wertham era was the implied fascism of the superhero, who (coincidence?) was born just as the Nazi “supermen” were marching across Europe. In his sixth criterion for the genre, Reynolds refers to the potential “patriotism” of the hero. Here he may be thinking of all the early 1940s covers with heroes toting flags, fighting alongside troops, or selling war bonds. While he doesn’t really deal with the fascism question, he discusses the conservativism of the genre:

 

A key ideological myth of the superhero comic is that the normal and everyday enshrines positive values that must be defended through heroic action --and defended over and over again almost without respite against an endless battery of menaces determined to remake the world for the benefit of aliens, mutants, criminals, or sub-aqua beings from Atlantis. The normal is valuable and is constantly under attack, which means that almost by definition the superhero is battling on behalf of the status quo. Into this heroic matrix one can insert representatives of any race or creed imaginable, but in order to be functioning superheroes they will need to conform to the ideological rules of the game. The superhero has a mission to preserve society, not to re-invent it. (77)

 

Having made this relatively straightforward point, Reynolds then teases us once again with a more provocative argument that he never fully elaborates. In a somewhat tentative fashion, and using what seem to be nonrepresentative (and mostly quite recent) texts, he suggests that “nuances and subtleties which function as irony and satire” can undercut the superhero’s tendency toward political conservatism (79). One would have liked Reynolds to go further here, but he chooses rather to evade what perhaps seems to him too complex and highly-charged a topic.

 

A third evasion in Super Heroes is that of the role of corporate mass production and commodity culture in the genre. Superheroes are not just fictional characters, they are registered trademarks. Reynolds considers how continuity constrains the creativity of writers and artists in the superhero industry, but he does not deal with the role of the editor whose concerns include sustaining sales and maintaining a corporate image.

 

A final flaw of Reynolds’s book is that it does not reference or discuss previous works which make similar points. Reynolds’s discussion of continuity, for example, would be enriched by a consideration of Umberto Eco’s well-known 1972 essay “The Myth of Superman.” Reynolds argues that “intertextual and metatextual continuity create a subsidiary world in which the process of time can be kept under control. While this process does not exactly abolish history from superhero comics, it does divorce the superheroes [sic] lives from their historical context” (44). But Eco had already announced this divorce twenty years ago. He explained that if Superman stories were true narratives, placing their events in real time, Superman would be, like the rest of us, “consumed” by events until he would eventually grow old and die, a fate which cannot befall a mythic figure (333-334). To avoid this, observed Eco, Superman stories “develop in a kind of oneiric climate–of which the reader is not aware at all–where what has happened before and what has happened after appears extremely hazy” (336). This is by no means the only instance where Reynolds fails to make the obvious reference. Another example is his discussion of the superhero costume as a fetish, which runs along lines very similar to those of Gillian Freeman’s argument in her study of pornography (the last chapter of which is devoted to superhero comics).

 

The strength of Reynolds’s study is its emphasis on close readings of specific texts–often, indeed, of specific pages and panels. Most of the previous studies of superheroes have prefered to analyze the basic premise of a series rather than a specific story. Reynolds’s “key texts” chapter is especially strong in this regard. Its detailed readings of The Uncanny X-Men, Batman: The Dark Knight Returns, and Watchmen draw attention to the distinctive skills of particular writers and artists. In reference to reprinted X-Men pages, for example, Reynolds describes how penciller John Byrne “employed a style of sequential art that was ‘cinematic’ in the sense that it constantly interpreted each panel and each segment of the narrative from an implied and subjective point of view” (86). The detail of Reynolds’s analyses makes up in depth for what they lack in breadth.

 

In the last few years, the University Press of Mississippi’s Studies in Popular Culture series, under the general editorship of M. Thomas Inge, has placed several worthy volumes on the bookshelves of comics scholars, including Joseph Witek’s Comic Books and History, Inge’s own Comics and Culture, and a reprint of Coulton Waugh’s The Comics. Reynolds’s contribution does not measure up to the tradition those predecessors established, but it does offer a promising starting point for the scholar who wants to write a more thorough and definitive study.

 

Works Cited

 

• Eco, Umberto. “The Myth of Superman.” Diacritics 2 (1972): 14-22. Rpt. in Contemporary Literary Criticism: Modernism Through Poststructuralism. Ed. Robert Con Davis. New York: Longman, 1986. 330-344.
• Freeman, Gillian. The Undergrowth of Literature. The Natural History of Society series. London: Nelson, 1967.

 

Kevin J.H. Dettmar

Department of English
Clemson University
dkevin@clemson.edu

 

Barbara Kruger. Remote Control: Power, Cultures, and the World of Appearances. Cambridge: MIT Press, 1993. 251 pp. $19.95 (cloth), $10.95 (paper).

 

In some ways, Barbara Kruger’s photomontage texts–red-blocked captions slapped across black & white photographs which they ironically reinscribe, like ransom notes, holding those images and their ideology hostage–make an ideal starting point for an examination of the postmodern impulse in the contemporary arts. The desire for such a point of entry has been on my mind a lot lately as I prepare again to teach an interdisciplinary humanities course on postmodernism this fall, to a classroom of majors from all across campus. There’s nothing especially subtle or coy about Kruger’s verbo-visual texts, but their power is never in question, even for students majoring in Packaging Science, Ceramic Engineering, and Parks, Recreation, and Tourism Management. I can always count on at least half of my students to vent undisguised hostility at Andy Warhol’s postmodern chameleon pose, or Kathy Acker’s post-feminist pornography with a (teensy-weensy but oh-so significant) difference; but Kruger is an artist with something urgent to say, and students have no problem figuring out where she stands vis-a-vis her texts. No cool memories here, no undecidable postmodern irony, no death of the author, no Sir: here’s art that speaks to the complexity of life in contemporary America in a powerful, and relatively straightforward, way. Call it sincerity; in the eyes of my students Kruger has rediscovered the importance of being earnest in an age of “anything goes,” and in the wake of Marcel Duchamp’s ready-mades, John Cage’s chance operations, and Brian Eno’s oblique strategies, they’re mighty grateful for it.

 

Of course Kruger is a postmodern artist, being, along with Jenny Holzer, a major supplier of those po-mo slogans that grace so many t-shirts and trendy greeting cards: “Your gaze hits the side of my face,” “Your body is a battleground,” “I shop therefore I am.”¹ In fact, when Dag in Douglas Coupland’s novel Generation X complains that “the world has gotten too big–way beyond our capacity to tell stories about it, and so all we’re stuck with are these blips and chunks and snippets on bumpers,” he would seem to have Kruger squarely in mind.² But Kruger’s postmodern slogans have always been anti-sloganist, if not indeed anti- postmodernist, in tendency. She would agree with another Generation X character, Claire, who says that “it’s not healthy to live life as a succession of isolated little cool moments,” and that “either our lives become stories, or there’s just no way to get through them.”³

 

Remote Control, Kruger’s latest text, collects her occasional writings over the past fifteen years, the largest group having previously been published in Artforum; there are no visual images here, outside the rather striking one that graces the cover. Here we have Kruger the teller, rather than Kruger the show-and-teller; and if Kruger the show-and-teller sometimes inclines toward the didactic, Remote Control for long stretches is almost unbearably preachy. Kruger too much enjoys what Sacvan Berkovitch has called the American Jeremiad; and while her work in photo-montage almost of necessity strikes a balance between mimesis and diegesis, the essays in Remote Control never err on the side of giving the reader too much credit. Hence the paradox that one of our most scriptible visual artists turns out to be a resolutely lisible writer, and these turn out to be fundamentally modernist texts about postmodernism. Quelle drag.

 

At its worst, Kruger’s prose sounds like a ditto prepared for Postmodernism 101: “History has been the text of the dead dictated to the living, through a voice which cannot speak for itself. The ventriloquist that balances corpses on its knee, that gives speech to silence, and transforms bones and blood into reminiscences, is none other than the historian. The keeper of the text. The teller of the story. The worker of mute mouths.”⁴ This text, published with Philomena Mariani in 1989, sounds as if Hayden White and Michel Foucault had never written: Kruger seems to think she has suddenly stumbled upon the notion that history is a narrative, and is as such subject to narrative laws. Few would today dispute such a claim; but that’s exactly why the strident tone of the essay rings slightly false. For whom does Kruger write? On the other hand, the enigmatic photomontage of the legs of standing and seated businessmen, in their suit pants and loafers, sprawled against the backdrop of a livingroom carpet (high-ball glass just visible in the foreground), which Kruger captions “You make history when you do business,” gets at the same idea, the same “truth,” much more elliptically and provocatively.⁵

 

If much, perhaps too much, of Remote Control consists of somewhat tendentious postmodern propaganda (and I’ll leave aside the question of whether postmodern propaganda is really possible), it is not without many shrewd and amusing moments. Kruger is at her best, I think, when talking about television (the section called “TV Guides”) and when theorizing about the postmodern, even if she rejects the term (“that vaporous buzzword, that zany genre with legs: post-modernism” [3]). Her analysis of the Jerry Lewis telethon, for instance, is absolutely, savagely on-target: “Perhaps Jerry Lewis is about a kind of abjection; a glistening knot of anger and petulance marinated in a soup of vindictive disingenuousness. (Write him for the recipe)” (66). When Kruger takes TV seriously, her observations are fascinating; like Cultural Studies avant la lettre, Kruger deigns to take low culture (The Care Bears, The Price is Right, The Home Shopping Club) on its own terms, and uses these texts to read the culture that both produces and consumes them. Perhaps this is the contemporary version of Colonel Kurtz’s Horror: looking into the heart of darkness and seeing Jerry Lewis there, the embodiment of “outrageous schticksterism, oozing with every show-biz cliche, every bad dream of what it might mean to be an ‘entertainer’” (67).

 

But unlike most proponents of the new Cultural Studies, Kruger doesn’t seem to “love to hate” Jerry, or Maddie Hayes and David Addison (Moonlighting), or Robin Leach (Life-styles of the Rich and Famous)–she just hates them. One begins to suspect that with Kruger, the game’s been fixed: low culture is allowed to play, but it’s never allowed to win. I’m tempted to say that Kruger’s a cultural critic in the way Allan Bloom was a cultural critic, but that’s not quite fair; after all, Kruger at least reads the texts of our culture, and reads them with great care and prodigious intelligence, before pronouncing them banal. But she is no more amused by these texts than Bloom was.

 

The reason for Kruger’s dyspepsia, it seems to me, is splashed across the cover: for though we (viewers) may think we wield the remote control, in fact, says Kruger, we are the ones controlled: “To those who understand how pictures and words shape consensus, we are unmoving targets waiting to be turned on and off by the relentless seductions of remote control” (5). Sound familiar? At the heart of Kruger’s collection is the unvoiced assertion that television is the root of all contemporary American evil; TV is, to paraphrase Baudrillard, the evil demon of images. “We don’t have to think about anything once television lulls us to sleep,” Kruger drones, “and begins its dictations. Like a mad scientist of global proportions, it elects presidents, conducts diplomacy, and creates consensus: a consensus of demi-alert nappers caught halfway between the vigilance of consciousness and the fascinated numbness of stupor” (49).

 

Is it just me? I had thought the discourse about the American media, and about the reciprocal flow of ideology into and out of the TV tube, had progressed somewhat beyond this. Foucault, to take just the most prominent example, has rendered such a simplistic theory of power and hegemony entirely untenable for the contemporary culture critic. But Kruger’s hostility to popular culture is more than just a matter of an out-of-date or vulgar-Marxist theoretical apparatus. Her refusal of pop pleasures seems as willed and unrelenting, as theoretically unnecessary, as Theodor Adorno’s. In fact, I’ll bet even Adorno would have enjoyed Three’s Company more than Barbara Kruger does.

 

If there’s a thread that connects the writings collected in Remote Control, it’s the philosophy of social constructionism: the notion that our individual experiences are hemmed-in by the ubiquitous, often understated or implicit, narratives of our culture(s). This is a familiar theme in postmodern texts; one thinks, for instance, of Jack Gladney, in Don DeLillo’s White Noise, who (believing he is about to die) wanders into his kids’ bedroom in the middle of the night to say his final goodbyes: “I moved quietly through the rooms on bare white feet. I looked for a blanket to adjust, a toy to remove from a child’s warm grasp, feeling I’d wandered into a TV moment.”⁶ You think you’re feeling something, but suddenly realize that Vicks, or AT&T, or Coke, or the Carpenters have been there before you. You’re not saying your goodbyes, you’re quoting someone else’s. Quelle drag encore. In “Talk Normal,” Laurie Anderson meditates on the inconvenience of being robbed of her own identity by her media persona: “I turned the corner in Soho today and someone / Looked right at me and said: Oh No! / Another Laurie Anderson clone!”⁷ Laurie Anderson is accused of being a Laurie Anderson wannabe; DeLillo’s Jack Gladney confesses that he is “the false character that follows the name around.”⁸

 

What distinguishes DeLillo’s and Anderson’s treatment of this theme from Kruger’s, however–and, I would argue, renders if far more supple and subtle–is their realization that the simple recognition of the socially constructed nature of reality doesn’t automatically produce its transcendence. In Kruger, too often, it appears to; that we are thrall to images, to narratives, is for Kruger a sign of our postmodern, almost post-Reagan/Bush, condition, and she suggests that through consciousness raising we might attain to an illusion-free Reality. “Seeing is no longer believing,” Kruger writes in the collection’s opening essay. “The very notion of truth has been put into crisis. In a world bloated with images, we are finally learning that photographs do indeed lie. In a society rife with purported information, we know that words have power, but usually when they don’t mean anything (as Peggy Noonan and Co. have so ably demonstrated)” (5). Though she was certainly good at it, Peggy Noonan hardly invented political rhetoric; “Seeing is no longer believing,” Kruger complains–but when was it? What are the good old days to which Kruger harks back? Plato didn’t believe that seeing was believing, and certainly put the notion of truth into crisis long before Nietzsche. “To put it bluntly,” Kruger continues, “no one’s home. We are literally absent from our own present. We are elsewhere, not in the real but in the represented” (5). Here Kruger sounds eerily like Habermas: everything was hunky dory before postmodernism, or the cultural logic of late capitalism, descended upon us–the storm cloud of the late twentieth century; Kruger’s perverse twist on this all-too-well-known story is that, paradoxically, only postmodern art and theory can rescue us from the postmodern condition.

 

All of which begs the question, for Kruger as well as for any politically engaged postmodern artist: If we’re all patsies of the simulacrum, how can we choose a political program? How does one slip out from under “remote control” in order to make decisions with any but false consciousness? In U2’s recent Zoo TV Live From Sydney video, for instance, we see the song “The Fly,” from the Achtung Baby CD, staged against a backdrop of video monitors flashing words, phrases, and slogans at almost subliminal speed, à la Jenny Holzer’s truisms: “DEATH IS A CAREER MOVE,” “EVERY THING YOU KNOW IS WRONG” (Firesign Theater?), “AMBITION BITES THE NAILS OF SUCCESS,” “ENJOY THE SURFACE.” But the song’s “punchline” is twenty seconds worth of one phrase, repeated on the video monitors dozens and dozens and dozens of times: “IT’S YOUR WORLD YOU CAN CHANGE IT.” Jeepers, guys. How? The sentiment of this closing “truism” seems to come from the U2 of The Joshua Tree who still hadn’t found what they were looking for; but according to the logic of the new, postmodernized U2, such an unproblematic, positivistic assertion of the individual subject’s ability to shape her world seems unsupported by the visual and verbal rhetoric of the song’s performance. Equally problematic, for similar reasons, is the video monitors’ warning that “SILENCE=DEATH,” or the band’s use of live satellite video from war-torn Bosnia during other concert dates, or their trademark blurb to “Join Amnesty International” that appears in the liner notes of even the Zooropa CD.

 

How can we steer a middle path between the naive voluntarism suggested by U2’s “IT’S YOUR WORLD YOU CAN CHANGE IT” and a kind of philosophical quietism acceptable to almost no one? Kruger’s piece called “Repeat After Me”–a sort of twelve-step program for the treatment of modernist nostalgia–insists that we wrap our voices around a number of propaganda bites: “That ‘we’ are not right and ‘the enemy’ wrong. . . . That God is not on our side. . . . That TV and print journalists should begin to acknowledge and understand their ability to create consensus and make history” (223). (This must be at least the sixth time in the collection we’ve been reminded that TV makes history.) But then the symptomatic punchline, the culminating slogan: “empathy can change the world” (223). I hate to be so damn cynical, but doesn’t that sound a litle like “Visualize World Peace”? Shouldn’t it go on a bumper sticker somewhere? Kruger’s work, like that of U2, can display all the trappings of postmodernist thought and then blithely ask us to place our hope in the most stale and familiar of liberal causes.

 

Kruger may have rebounded off the wall of postmodernity and ended up–like U2, like Baudrillard–a kind of neo-modernist, but at least she, has not settled into the comforts of cynicism. (Recall that our word “cynicism” is derived from the Greek word for dog; philosophy, taken in a certain direction, results in a despair which leads one to give up all hope and ambition and to lie in the street like a dog.) Indeed, to overcome cynicism Kruger seems prepared to credit the notion of postmodern voluntarism. And why not? Like Jean-Francois Lyotard, she believes that when the Great Narratives of enlightenment can no longer be believed, it is time for us to write smaller narratives of our own.⁹ That at least is how I would want to read the passage from Kruger’s essay “Quality” where she calls for “an esthetic of qualities rather than the singularity of quality. I think I could go for that esthetic. I think I could second that emotion” (9). Even the allusion to Smokey Robinson seems promising: popular culture employed lovingly for once rather than dismissively. “Shredded totalities,” Kruger writes toward the end of the volume, “go the way of highly classified documents which disappear and take their secrets with them. Maybe” (231). But nature abhors a vacuum, and an unnarrated cultural space cannot stay uninscribed for long. Power doesn’t lie simply in the hands of the evil Wizards of Madison Avenue, or the Rockefeller Center; we can’t but live in the realm of the represented, rather than the real, and we’re never at a loss for representations to whose magic we might become enthralled. Razing the totalizing, repressive grands recits clears a space upon which we must rebuild quickly; we can build on it ourselves, or let someone else do it, but it won’t stay vacant for long, for someone’s sure to pave paradise and put up a parking lot. “Either our lives become stories, or there’s just no way to get through them.” Perhaps enough of the demolition is now accomplished that we might think about what we’d like to put up here.

 

Notes

 

1. A great many of Kruger’s images are conveniently reproduced in Kate Linker’s Love For Sale: The Words and Pictures of Barbara Kruger (New York: Harry N. Abrams, 1990).

 

2. Douglas Coupland, Generation X: Tales for an Accelerated Culture (New York: St. Martin’s, 1991), 5.

 

3. Generation X, 8.

 

4. Barbara Kruger, Remote Control: Power, Cultures, and the World of Appearances (Cambridge: MIT Press, 1993), 12. Subsequent references cited parenthetically in the text.

 

5. Linker, Love For Sale, 68.

 

6. Don DeLillo, White Noise. (New York: Penguin, 1985), 244.

 

7. Laurie Anderson, “Talk Normal,” Home of the Brave (Warner Bros. 9 25400-2, 1986).

 

8. DeLillo, White Noise, 17.

 

9. See Jean-Francois Lyotard, The Postmodern Condition: A Report on Knowledge, trans. Geoff Bennington and Brian Massumi (Minneapolis: Univ. of Minnesota Press), 1984.

 

Thomas Benson

Edwin Erle Sparks Professor of Rhetoric
Pennsylvania State University
t3b@psuvm.psu.edu

 

Garry, Patrick M. Scrambling for Protection: The New Media and the First Amendment. Pittsburgh: University of Pittsburgh Press, 1994.

 

The economy, the technology, and the regulatory infrastructure of communications are undergoing rapid change, with unpredictable but probably important social consequences. In his brief and readable book, Scrambling for Protection, Patrick Garry proposes that policy and law guiding the developments in new media industries should be governed by a reconstructed understanding of the press clause of the First Amendment of the United States Constitution. The First Amendment of the Bill of Rights addresses issues of freedom of religion, speech, press, assembly, and petition:

 

Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof; or abridging the freedom of speech, or of the press; or the right of the people peaceably to assemble, and to petition the government for a redress of grievances.

 

Garry argues that changes in media technology, as well as changes in the press and its public reception, render outmoded an existing patchwork of doctrines that have evolved through a historical process of case law and ad hoc regulation. Newspapers have increasingly become monopolistic creatures driven by large conglomerates remote from the local communities they serve. Journalism has changed from an organ of community information and opinion formation into a scandal-mongering, adversarial, investigative enterprise open to only a few professional journalists and a small band of experts. As a result of these changes in the press, the public, disenfranchised by journalism, is increasingly hostile and apathetic towards both the press and the political system. Meanwhile, information delivery systems have blurred the distinctions among the largest media industries–press, phone, broadcast television, radio, cable–and there is every indication that further blurring is on its way.

 

Garry proposes a way to solve the problems of the press and the public by guiding the coming changes in information technology from the perspective of the press clause of the First Amendment. But this requires, as well, a re-definition of the press clause. According to Garry, the most attractive feature of the new information technologies is that, with their vastly increased bandwidth and the new social practices they are tentatively exercising on the internet, media consumers have now become active–and interactive–media participants. If we could restore participation as a feature of journalism, argues Garry, we could restore a sense of community, giving American media and government back to the people. How would such a change be brought about in a consistent way? Here is where Garry attempts his reconstruction of the press clause, arguing that the best features of the new media are precisely consonant with what the authors of the Bill of Rights meant to protect with the press clause.

 

Garry argues that the Bill of Rights was not meant to protect the press, as such, and certainly not journalism as it has evolved over the past two hundred years, but rather that it was meant to protect certain practices and principles that were embodied in the American press of the late 18th century. Garry distinguishes between freedom of speech and freedom of the press by arguing that “while the speech clause protects individuals in their act of speaking, the press clause protects the dissemination of those views and assures an open forum for communication in society and for democratic political dialogue” (115). The framers meant to protect three primary values: (1) the attainment of truth through the open clash of antagonistic views; (2) the promotion of democratic government by rendering the government more rational in its decision making and the public more energetic in the formation of political coalitions; (3) the promotion of democratic society through the development of social bonds that help to “create a common social world” (113). These values, writes Garry, and not the press itself, were the objects of protection.

 

What follows from Garry’s redefinition of the press clause is that in developing law and policy for the changing media infrastructure, the courts and agencies should be guided not by any attempt to prefer the press as it now exists, and not by outmoded attempts to preserve distinctions among major media and media industries, but to regard all the agencies of dissemination as, essentially, “the press,” and to enact policies that favor participation, democracy, community, and the open clash of political views.

 

There is much to admire in Garry’s argument, which I have attempted to summarize in a manner sympathetic to his views. But since so much is at stake, it might also be well to entertain some misgivings.

 

In redefining the press clause of the First Amendment, Garry resorts to a peculiar mixture of historically rooted original-intentionism and transcendental essentialism. On the one hand, Garry appeals to a description of “the press” as it existed in late 18th-century America, where entry to the arena was relatively cheap for a printer-publisher, making for a crowded and diverse marketplace of ideas; where most of the content of a newspaper was partisan political argument submitted by readers; and where local interests played a strong role in defining press content. Pressing the historical analogy between the 18th-century press and contemporary computer systems, Garry claims that “essentially, colonial newspapers were bulletin boards for their communities; they were both subject to and responsive to the wishes of colonial society” (98). But Garry wants to go beyond historical comparison–he wants us to accept as fixed and transcendent a set of values he abstracts from his description of the colonial press.

 

Garry’s distinction between “speech” and “press” is also troublesome, creating a neat and tidy dichotomy that overly limits what is called “speech” and that appears to leave out of the circle of protection a variety of communicative enactments that appear to be neither “speech” nor “press” as he defines them. When he assigns to “press” the whole range of institutions and activities having to do with dissemination, Garry reduces “speech” to the act of individual utterance (or analogous symbolic action). But this reduction of speech to individual behavior fails the very historical test to which Garry puts “press,” since in the late 18th century “speech,” including public speaking in churches, courts, legislatures, and public assemblies, was a major institutional formation that (with the press) enabled the creation of resistance, the fomenting of revolution, and the building of a constitutional democracy. Freedom of speech protects not merely individual utterance but shared social communication. Further, to reduce speech to individual utterance and to confine the protected zone of the press to that which promotes political community would seem to endanger the expanding range of freedom to disseminate communication of all sorts, including the arts, without having to justify their freedom on the basis of their right to communicate political ideas. Speech and press are not so easily dichotomized on historical, theoretical, or constitutional grounds, nor would they remain, if reduced to Garry’s formulation, a sound basis upon which to protect communicative freedoms generally.

 

At many points, Garry seems overconfident of his ability to penetrate matters of causation in the empirical realm. For example, though there are legitimate grounds to argue that the Fourth-Estate model of the press, in which professional journalists of the post-Watergate era specialize in adversarial and investigative attacks on the political realm, contributes to political alienation, it seems unlikely that such changes can be attributed to a simple cause-effect model, and it seems even more unlikely that we could predict the results of adopting social policies designed to destroy the Fourth Estate. The complexity of the interactions of press, politics, and public, within the context of society as a whole groping its way through history, makes it very difficult to assign the sorts of cause and effect upon which Garry’s argument depends. Garry’s book abounds with such extravagant claims about causation, with abbreviated and facile historical analogies, and with extraordinarily optimistic projections of the ability of computer bulletin boards to salvage democracy.

 

Despite these misgivings, Garry’s book is a brisk, optimistic, confident, and provocative work that deserves broad discussion and debate. Garry is unwavering in his search for an open, democratic society; he does a skillful job of condensing a broad argument, sketching his evidence, and outlining the consequences of accepting his view. Readers interested in the interaction of media and democracy will be prompted by Scrambling for Protection to consider the challenges it poses to the construction of the media of the next century.The clarity, brevity (only 195 pages), and force of Garry’s bookmake it suitable for adoption as a text (though its $29.95 price tag will discourage some); the book seems well designed to stimulate spirited discussion.

 

Jonathan Markovitz

Department of Sociology
University of California, San Diego
jmarkovi@weber.ucsd.edu

 

La Frontera/The Border: Art About the Mexico/United States Border Experience. Organized by the Centro Cultural de la Raza and the Museum of Contemporary Art, San Diego. The exhibit will be on display at the San Jose Museum of Art from October through December 1994. This review is based on the showing in San Diego in May of 1993.

 

The first thing to note about La Frontera/The Border: Art About the Mexico/United States Border Experience is that the exhibit’s title is a bit misleading. The various pieces of work in the exhibit make it perfectly clear that there is no such thing as “the . . . Border Experience.” Instead, while it is possible to draw out some common themes, the exhibit represents an extremely diverse multiplicity of “border experiences.” But even this phrasing would make for a somewhat misleading title, because one of the central concerns of the project is to problematize the notion of “border” in a variety of ways. Borders between Mexico and the United States are only one set of oppositions which are interrogated, and to some extent (I’ll conclude this review by questioning to what degree), broken down. The various art works in this exhibit also challenge the borders that divide: art and criticism; production and reception; public and private; religion and entertainment; communication and imperialism.

 

One of the outstanding works in the show, Yolanda Lopez’s “Things I Never Told My Son About Being A Mexican,” is a collage made up of various items from popular culture. Newspaper articles are interspersed with a bag of “Batman tortilla chips” and a Wonder Woman comic book the cover of which shows Wonder Woman eating cafeteria-style rice and beans. According to the accompanying blurb, the work “highlights the otherwise subtle and persistent means by which the mass media defines Mexican American Identity. . . . [It] exposes racist subtexts in seemingly neutral expressions of contemporary popular culture.” This description is worth examining, since the collage itself presents the various items to us without any accompanying commentary, and it is not clear how we would know that the work “exposes” racism if the blurb did not tell us so. The blurb in fact is part of the larger apparatus by means of which the exhibit attempts to construct its audience.

 

The first thing to note in this connection is that while the collage as a whole is clearly about Mexican-American identity, many of the individual artifacts are not. Many people looking at the Wonder Woman comic would not, for example, pay any attention to the food’s cultural history. Identity is “highlighted,” therefore, only by juxtaposition of the various elements. Seen together, the different items yield a common theme. But this theme is racism only to the extent that a prior agreement or orientation toward Lopez’s collage has been established among the audience–only to the extent that racism has already somehow been designated the object of attention.

 

One of the ways this prior orientation is established is through reviews of the exhibit, nearly all of which have focused on racism, imperialism, or border-zone policing practices. Then, for those few who manage to come in to the exhibit without having seen any of the reviews, there are plaques on display at the museum’s entrances which mention the same constellation of concerns. And finally, in addition to placing a descriptive/prescriptive blurb beside Lopez’s piece, the exhibitors have surrounded it with other pieces which depend on similar aesthetic strategies and are described in similar terms. My point here is that the piece only “works” as a statement on the racism of popular culture if (and because) the viewer has absorbed certain lessons in how to view it. This is as it should be: an exhibition of emergent artistic practices must fulfill the pedagogical function of training a suitable audience. But in this case the organizers’ desire to establish “racism” as the audience’s primary term of reference may have the effect of prematurely foreclosing some alternate readings.

 

These questions aside, there is much to applaud in the Frontera exhibition. Lopez’s collage in particular succeeds in challenging some deeply entrenched oppositions, or conceptual borders. To begin with, the artifacts she has collected will tend to disrupt any presumed border between high culture and low, art and trash. Moreover, while individually the items might be examples of “naturalized” racism, collectively they can represent a syncretic appropriation of racist notions. In this sense, the piece is simultaneously an indictment of domination, and a gesture toward something different. There are other examples of “border crossings” within this piece, but I want to stop here, because I think that the notion of artistic syncretism is particularly useful for an understanding of the work adjacent to Lopez’s, Cesar Augusto Martinez’s “Amor a la Tierra en el Sur de Tejas,” or “Love of the Land of South Texas.”

 

Martinez’s piece appears to be a simple landscape–pretty, but not terribly interesting. On second glance, however, the work takes on an entirely new dimension. It turns out that the piece is painted on a “No Trespassing” sign, an the accompanying text tells us that the sign is from the border. The text goes further to say that “by painting over a No Trespassing sign, Martinez presents the despair of immigrants who come with hope to an unwelcoming land.” While this may be true, Martinez is surely representing something other than, and beyond, despair. The land is clearly unwelcoming, but Martinez seems to be saying that it makes its appeal to him anyway. Moreover, by transforming a hostile border sign into an artwork (an object that has already furthered his professional reputation), Martinez has managed to turn the very symbol of his unwelcome and alien status to his advantage on this side of the border. I do not want to trivialize the despair that the blurb refers to, and I’ll note that many of the other works in the exhibit make it perfectly clear that lots of people are not able to cross the border at all, and that many of those who do are forced to suffer extreme hardships. But it is precisely for this reason that Martinez’s work most clearly marks a moment of artistic syncretism. If it is only because of the problems of domination that Martinez needs to appropriate a border sign, then the work is syncretic in that it moves beyond appropriation and into creation of new forms and possibilities for cultural transformation. In the process of appropriation, Martinez has posed a serious challenge to the notion of borders.¹ The work makes it possible to see the border not as a line marking containment, but as just one more piece of canvas. Repressive politics or transformative art? Martinez poses the possibility that the border might be both at once.

 

David Avalos deals with a similar set of issues in his “San Diego Donkey Cart.” This piece focuses on tourism in border towns as a way of putting into question the prevailing norms of U.S./Mexican relations. The work is, in Avalos’s words “a simulacrum of a Tiajuanan Donkey Cart.” These hand-drawn carts with photos of “friendly Mexicans” are popular border attractions. Avalos’s sculpture substitutes a drawing of a “border patrol agent arresting an undocumented worker” for the traditional photo. The result is that “Tiajuana and San Diego’s tourist trade is thus juxtaposed with the socioeconomic reality that underlies it and upon which it depends for its survival.” This is perhaps the one work in the exhibit best suited for a discussion of syncretism as a process.

 

The “original” border town donkey carts were already simulacra, appropriations of Mexican culture for the purposes of a U.S.-dominated tourist industry. (Donkey carts were used for transportation before they were used for tourism). Moreover, construction of the tourist cart relied on a previous Northern appropriation and construction of Mexican identity, in the form of the stock figure of the “friendly Mexican.” Avalos’s work is merely the next step in the process–a further re-construction. But the exhibit is quick to note that the process did not end here.

 

Avalos’s original donkey cart was a life-sized sculpture commissioned as a public work, and placed in front of a San Diegan federal court house in 1986–a site from which it was quickly removed. A judge ordered it confiscated (a further act of “appropriation?”) because of the “threat that it posed to public safety.” The work that’s in the exhibit is, therefore, a reproduction of Avalos’s original simulacrum. Avalos, however, refused to allow the judge’s actions to go uncontested, and enlisted the aid of the ACLU to fight for the cart’s release and reinstatement. The case was ultimately dismissed, but Avalos has now gathered the judge’s statements along with magazine articles and various court documents into a booklet that has become an intrinsic part of the current exhibit. Appropriation and transformation are unending. The “original” donkey cart now provides the occasion for a whole series of discussions that problematize U.S./Mexican borders, public/private distinctions, and individual/government relations.

 

This last of these oppositions is important because it is bound up with the categories of “tourist” and “friend.” Avalos’s work clearly links both of these generalized individuals to their respective governments. “Tourist” becomes “U.S. tourist,” and “friend” becomes “Mexican friend.” This was of course, always the case, but forced recognition of the nationality of both categories (even in Mexico, tourists can see “U.S.” as an invisible norm) denies the presumed innocence of the former. Moreover, “friendship” is high ighted as an economic, rather than as an emotional relation, one which Mexicans must take up as a strategy of survival.

 

Though the exhibit includes far too many works for me to discuss or even describe, the three I’ve mentioned exemplify the kinds of border-crossing gestures that comprise it. Virtually everthing in the exhibit is concerned to transgress or transform boundaries and to resist all efforts at containment. The question I’d like to end with, however, is this: What does it mean to group all of these works together, and contain them within the “borders” of museum walls?² What is the relationship between the exhibit’s various critiques of socio-cultural borders, and the borders of the institution in and through which the exhibit has its existence? There is an effort here to produce what bell hooks calls a space of “radical openness;” but is it not the case that this openness is brought to a kind of closure after all by the physical and social limitations of the museum’s space? These are not trivial questions, yet nor are they easily decidable. We must bear in mind that cultural syncretism is an ongoing process whose effects, or lack thereof, cannot reliably be extrapolated from current arrangements. Whatever its institutional position, the cultural work on and of the border represented by the La Frontera exhibition warrants our closest attention.

 

Notes

 

1.I don’t want to go too far here. Undocumented workers provide cheap labor which is essential for many United States industries. Despite political posturing and an ever increasingly abusive immigration system, employers rely upon, and are secure in their ability to maintain access to, this labor pool. In a very real sense then, border crossings (and appropriations of border markings) challenge very little.

 

2.One piece of art that is referred to in the exhibition’s catalog was, in fact, never contained by museum walls. “Arte Reembolso/Art Rebate” by Elizabeth Sisco, Louis Hock and David Avalos was more explicitly interactive and public than a museum would allow. The artists applied for an NEA grant, and used the money to print up certificates for undocumented workers to sign. Attached to these certificates were $10 bills (which were also NEA money). When workers signed the certificates, they received the money. The idea I think, was to give back some of what was due, and to point out that, rather than an economic drain, these workers were actually vital parts of the U.S. economy. Needless to say, the NEA was not very pleased with this use of their funds. The resulting debates (in the mass media and within government circles) are ongoing. This piece, however, was commissioned to appear in conjunction with, and not as part of, the exhibition.

 

Jeffrey Nealon

Department of English
Pennsylvania State University
jxn8@psuvm.psu.edu

 

Butler, Judith. Bodies That Matter: On the Discursive Limits of “Sex”. New York & London: Routledge, 1993.

 

Editor’s note: readers may also be interested in the PMC-MOO discussion of this book, archived here .

 

— JU

 

Judith Butler has certainly produced a body of work that matters. It matters not only because it takes “theory” into the realm of difficult socio-political analysis, but also because it does so without sacrificing the complexities, hesitations and difficulties that necessarily surround such a project. For Butler, theory matters precisely as practice, as material response to specific (and often horrific) political situations: it is an analysis of how these situations have come to be structured as they are, and how they can be changed without simply reinstituting the very same normative interpellating discourses that gave rise to such situations in the first place. In Bodies That Matter, Butler takes up “the notion of matter, not as site or surface, but as a process of materialization that stabilizes over time to produce the effect of boundary, fixity, and surface” (9, italics removed). And it is precisely in accounting for identity as the product of still-conflicted exclusionary normative practices that Butler asks us to consider the possibility of reinscribing “our” heterogeneous present and future. While categories of identity certainly cannot and should not be abandoned in such a project, Butler nonetheless argues for the theoretical and political necessity “to learn a double movement: to invoke the category, and, hence, provisionally to institute an identity and at the same time to open the category as a site of permanent political contest” (222). It is because her work has this relentlessly dual focus–calling for concrete responsive action in the present while preserving the possibility, indeed necessity, of a reinscribed future–that Butler’s work matters so singularly and crucially. Bodies That Matter is a book very much written in the margins of 1990’s Gender Trouble, itself a kind of feminist rewriting of Butler’s vastly underrated (or at least underquoted) book on Hegel and contemporary French thought, Subjects of Desire (1987). There is, in other words, a great deal of Bodies That Matter devoted to correcting or complicating certain (mis)readings of Gender Trouble, especially those readings that took it to be arguing for an understanding of gender as a performance. As Butler writes, if she were arguing that gender was a performance, “that could mean that I thought that one woke in the morning, perused the closet or some more open space for the gender of choice, donned that gender for the day, and then restored the garment to its place at night” (Bodies, x).¹ But as Butler makes clear time and again in Bodies That Matter, her notion of gender as performative is not simply equatable with understanding gender as a performance; “The reduction of performativity to performance,” she writes, “would be a mistake” (234).

 

But how, then, are we to understand this crucial distinction? Drawing from Foucault’s work on discursive formation, Derrida on speech act theory and iterability, and Eve Sedgwick’s work on queer performativity, Butler fashions a notion of performative identity that “must be understood not as a singular or deliberate ‘act,’ but, rather, as the reiterative and citational practice by which discourse produces the effects that it names” (2).² According to Butler, because the subject is the product of specific constraining normative frames, it cannot simply choose its gender as actors pick parts in plays; but, at the same time, because these compulsory normative frames never merely determine a subject without simultaneously opening spaces of resistance (in other words, because interpellation sometimes fails), agency is made possible and efficacious precisely because of and within these frames. “And if there is agency,” Butler writes, “it is to be found, paradoxically, in the possibilities opened up in and by that constrained appropriation of the regulatory law, by the materialization of that law, the compulsory appropriation and identification with those normative demands . . . Moreover, this act is not primarily theatrical” (12).³ The subject, in other words, is itself a product of interpellating codes, and therefore it cannot simply enforce a critical distance between itself and these codes. If there is to be subversion of identities, it must be subversion from within, a reinscription rather than a supposed remaking ex nihilo.

 

As the book’s subtitle might suggest, Butler’s theoretical apparatus is quite specifically constructed out of a consideration of the category “sex” within the normative frames of compulsory heterosexuality. As Butler argues, “sex” is itself such a performative or citational practice:

 

“Sex” is always produced as a reiteration of hegemonic norms. This productive reiteration can be read as a kind of performativity. Discursive performativity appears to produce that which it names, to enact its own referent, to name and to do, to name and to make. Paradoxically, however, this productive capacity of discourse is derivative, a form of cultural iterability or rearticulation, a practice of resignification, not creation ex nihilo. . . . [W]hat is invoked by the one who speaks or inscribes the law is the fiction of a speaker who wields the authority to make his [sic] words binding, the legal incarnation of the divine utterance. (107)

 

As speech-act theory argues, performatives seem to found a situation that they merely cite: the judge’s “I now pronounce you man and wife” or the midwife’s “It’s a girl” pretend to be the “legal incarnation of the divine utterance,” when on further examination either speech act is actually “a form of cultural iterability”: such performatives iterate interpellating codes; they do not somehow found a wholly new state. A subject is, then, always cited into an identity, but, in what is only a seeming paradox, it is precisely the necessity of repeating these interpellating citational codes–of constantly identifying oneself before the law–that offers possibilities for subverting or rearticulating identity. The necessity of repetition opens the possibility of repeating these codes with a difference: “I now pronounce you man aswife” or “It’s a lesbian.” As Butler writes, “Since the law must be repeated to remain an authoritative law, the law perpetually reinstitutes the possibility of its own failure” (108).

 

If this were as far as Butler’s work went, it would certainly be a valuable enough contribution to feminist theory–which remains, on Butler’s reading, mired in an unproductive and divisive essentialism/constructionism debate. Certainly a notion of citational performativity allows us to see past the limiting binarisms of this debate to explore the ways in which particular historical and social interpellations give rise to specific subjectivities; likewise, and perhaps more importantly, it allows us to see the ways in which those interpellations contain the very terms of their own reinscription. If Butler’s work were to stop here, however, it would leave open the question of how one gets from a notion of the citational construction of identity to the subversion or reinscription of that identity; it would leave unanswered the question of how one gets from interpellation to resistance–or, more accurately and pressingly, how one gets from the possibility of resistance to its actual activation or articulation.

 

And it is precisely her intricate and nuanced consideration of this question that makes Butler’s Bodies That Matter not merely timely, incisive, and challenging reading, but essential reading. Bodies That Matter certainly clarifies Gender Trouble‘s arguments about an identificatory citational interpellation that carries the possibility of its own subversion; however, in Bodies That Matter Butler goes a step further, taking up the

 

critical question of how constraints not only produce the domain of intelligible bodies, but produce as well a domain of unthinkable, abject, unlivable bodies. The latter domain is not the opposite of the former. . . ; the latter is the excluded and illegible domain that haunts the former domain as the spectre of its own impossibility, the very limit to intelligibility, its constitutive outside. . . . To claim that sex is already gendered, already constructed, is not yet to explain in which way the ‘materiality’ of sex is forcibly produced. (xi, italics removed)

 

Butler here asks us to take a step past the platitudinous understanding that “everything is socially constructed,” and move toward an examination of the specificexclusions by which social construction secures identities. As she writes, “thinking the body as constructed demands a rethinking of the meaning of construction itself” (xi), and such a rethinking entails accounting not only for the production of normative identities, but the simultaneous production of unlivable, abject identities–though such sites may turn out, in a painful paradox, to be primary among the potential sites for normative identity’s subversion.

 

In other words, while it is certainly important and productive to point out that “‘sex’ is a regulatory ideal … that will produce its remainder, its outside” (22), it is another matter altogether to account for the ways in which such “remainder” subjectivities are produced in specific historico-cultural situations as abjected, produced as by-products of the violent exclusions that secure normative identities. As Butler writes in the service of that project:

 

there is an ‘outside’ to what is constructed by discourse, but this is not an absolute ‘outside,’ an ontological thereness that exceeds or counters the boundaries of discourse; as a constitutive ‘outside,’ it is that which can only be thought–when it can–in relation to that discourse, at and as its most tenuous borders. The debate between constructivism and essentialism thus misses the point of deconstruction altogether, for the point has never been that ‘everything is discursively constructed’; that point . . . refuses the constitutive force of exclusion, erasure, violent foreclosure, abjection, and its disruptive return within the very terms of discursive legitimacy. (8)

 

The upshot of Butler’s notion of performativity, in other words, is not that everything is structured, but rather that everything is dependent on structures–linguistic, institutional, political–that are cited and recited in any specific case; and, she argues, it is precisely an attention to the material specificity of the “constitutive ‘outside’” in any particular case that would allow us to respond to and reinscribe the multiple exclusions that make an identity possible or livable, while making other identities impossible or unlivable. The constructionism debate, in other words, needs to pay attention to the specificity of the restrictions that make possible the social construction of a particular normative ideal; as Butler insists, for example, an analysis of the workings of contemporary homophobia is notequal to or simply metaphorizable as an analysis of contemporary racism (18).

 

In fact, Butler argues that feminism itself is necessarily founded on similar exclusions, and loses much critical force if it does not engage its own grounding restrictions (29). For example, Butler takes up bell hooks’s thematization of the drag balls portrayed in Jennie Livingston’s Paris is Burning as misogynist. Butler points out that with this charge hooks “makes male homosexuality about women.” In turn, this reduction of the specificity of drag offers a troubling “way for feminist women to make themselves into the center of male homosexual activity” (127). In other words, such feminist readings of Paris is Burning misfire when they read it solely in terms of a supposed male-identified femininity, rather than as a multiple, conflicted renegotiation or “site of the phantasmatic promise of a rescue from poverty, homophobia, and racist delegitimation” (130).⁴ Similarly, Butler argues that Irigaray’s work runs a parallel risk when it reads the exclusion of the feminine as the master or paradigmatic exclusion in philosophical, cultural or political life. While Butler affirms the importance of Irigaray’s feminist reading of Plato, she nevertheless hesitates, asking after the multiple exclusions that secure normative identity in Plato’s texts:

 

There are good reasons, however, to reject the notion that the feminine monopolizes the sphere of the excluded. . . . This xenophobic exclusion operates through the production of racialized Others, and those whose ‘natures’ are considered less rational by virtue of their appointed task in the process of laboring to reproduce the conditions of private life. . . . Irigaray does not always help matters here, for she fails to follow through the metonymic link between women and these other Others, idealizing and appropriating the ‘elsewhere’ as the feminine. But what is the ‘elsewhere’ of Irigaray’s ‘elsewhere’? (48-49)

 

It is this “metonymic link between women and these Others” that Butler’s text helps us to form. While it would seem that feminism loses critical force and focus if it concerns itself with exploring exclusions other than the exclusion of the feminine, Butler persuasively argues that the opposite is the case–that feminism is doomed to inefficacy unless it takes up the multiplicity of exclusions that actually form the seemingly totalized category “feminine.”

 

While such collective identifications under common-cause signifiers (“woman,” “queer,” “African American”) are indispensible for the project of recognition within a conflicted democracy, Butler argues that

 

the persistence of disidentification is equally crucial to the rearticulation of democratic contestation. Indeed, it may be precisely through practices which underscore disidentification with those regulatory norms by which sexual difference is materialized that both feminist and queer politics are mobilized. Such collective disidentifications can facilitate a reconceptualization of which bodies matter, and which bodies are yet to emerge as critical matters of concern. (4)

 

Again, Butler here reemphasizes the importance of a kind of double movement: the necessity of identification coupled with the necessity that this identificatory movement be open to reinscription. As she insists throughout Bodies That Matter, there is no stable identificatory site of “femininity” or “queerness,” and, in fact, ensuring the multiplicity of such identificatory sites is critical to feminist and queer body politics. I take the upshot of Butler’s discussion here to be that feminism, for example, cannot protect its identificatory sites from being inhabited by drag queens, Phyllis Schlafly, James Joyce or whomever. In fact, to turn a Foucaultian phrase, Butler asks us to consider what it costs us to protect such seemingly stable sites of contestation from contestation itself? In other words, what normativizing practices are reified and extended in protecting a site of stable identificatory femininity? This is perhaps Butler’s most poignant question to identity politics; as she writes, “it seems important, then, to question whether a political insistence on coherent identities can ever be the basis on which a crossing over into political alliance with other subordinated groups can take place, especially when such a conception of alliance fails to understand that the very subject-positions in question are themselves a kind of ‘crossing,’ are themselves the lived scene of a coalition’s difficulty” (115).

 

However, and just as importantly, Butler’s is not merely an empty celebratory gesture toward a contentless “postmodern” multiplicity.⁵ As she writes, “one might be tempted to say that identity categories are insufficient because every subject position is the site of converging relations of power that are not univocal. But such a formulation underestimates the radical challenge to the subject that such converging relations imply” (229-30). How is it, we might ask, that simply recognizing the multiplicity of possible identificatory sites (or is that cites?) “underestimates the radical challenge to the subject” that Butler wants to pose? To answer this question, perhaps we need to turn to Butler’s continuing engagement with Lacan. Butler takes very seriously Lacan’s Freudian vocabulary of “foreclosure” as the suturing constitution of the subject. Such foreclosure, of course, creates both the subject and the exclusions that she calls us to attend to throughout Bodies That Matter. For example, Butler points out that within the constraints of Lacan’s compulsory heterosexuality, the “feminized fag and phallicized dyke” become the uninhabitable positions which are foreclosed in the taking up of compulsory heterosexuality, “a move that excludes and abjects gay and lesbian possibilities” (96). But what happens, Butler asks, when those abjected sites, by and through their very exclusion or foreclosure, become sites of subversive desire and identification? What happens, in other words, “if the taboo becomes eroticized precisely for the transgressive sites that it produces” (97)? Certainly, Lacan would have taught us that this is just how desire works (98ff), but what happens when we subject the Lacanian analysis of sexual difference to a kind of symptomatic Lacanian reading?

 

What happens (if I can try to extrapolate from an intensely nuanced, sustained and careful reading) is that the monologizing Lacanian Oedipal law of signification–expropriation from the real into the symbolic under the threat of castration–loses its absolute privilege. Certainly, as Butler notes, Lacan’s version of resistance to interpellating norms–desire necessarily cathecting onto forbidden objects, the power of the imaginary to resist the law of the symbolic–has proven productive for his feminist readers. In fact, the imaginary has proven to be the productive hinge by which to read Lacan against Lacan’s own foreclosure of other economies. As Butler writes:

 

this version of resistance has constituted the promise of psychoanalysis to contest strictly opposed and hierarchical sexual positions for some feminist readers of Lacan. But does this view of resistance fail to consider the status of the symbolic as immutable law? And would the mutation of that law call into question not only the compulsory heterosexuality attributed to the symbolic, but also the stability and discreteness of the distinction between symbolic and imaginary registers within the Lacanian scheme? It seems crucial to question whether resistance to an immutable law is sufficient as a political contestation of compulsory heterosexuality, where this resistance is safely restricted to the imaginary and thereby restrained from entering into the structure of the symbolic itself. (106)

 

Here, Butler argues that we must pay attention to the specificity of the subject’s foreclosures and the resistances that they enable; in other words, resistance to the law of the father is to be found in inhabiting and reinscribing specific abjected subjectivities rather than simply lamenting the necessity of such foreclosures–reading them as necessary if regrettable symptoms of the law of the father–or concentrating on the imaginary spaces of freedom that such foreclosures seem to allow. Finally, Butler suggests that this resistance of and to foreclosure breaks down the wall between the Lacanian symbolic and imaginary: “if the figures of homosexualized abjection mustbe repudiated for sexed positions to be assumed,” she argues, “then the return of those figures as sites of erotic cathexis will refigure the domain of contested positionalities within the symbolic” (109).

 

The key concept that Butler wants to rescue from Lacan is that of resistance, or more precisely, of the resistance to foreclosure through desire. While Foucault and Derrida are helpful in the project of enabling resistance–showing how it is possible if not inevitable–it seems that for Butler, Lacan allows us to demonstrate how resistance happens, how it is engendered and made concrete through foreclosure itself. Butler departs from Lacan, however, by questioning his reduction of all such response or subversion to the very terms of the originary loss or foreclosure of the real: in other words, Butler questions the monologizing reduction in Lacan of all laws to the symbolic law of failure, lack, and expropriation from the real. For Butler, Lacan (and, for that matter, Slavoj Zizek) reduces all resistance to a symptom of Oedipal expropriation–reduces all laws to the law of lack–and thereby reduces the complexity of specific historical and cultural power relations that foreclose specific identities at specific times to pave the way for normativity. In Lacan and Zizek, the consistent failures or misrecognitions of the subject all point to the same monologizing drama of Oedipal expropriation. For Butler, such subjective misrecognition calls to be read otherwise, not as a symptom of the Law of the Father but as the condition of its subversion. As she writes, “the resignification of norms is thus a function of their inefficacy, and so the question of subversion, of working the weakness in the norm, becomes a matter of inhabiting the practices of its rearticulation” (237, originial emphasis removed). If there is a notion of Lacanian failure or “lack” running through Butler’s work, it is, perhaps, “failure” as that which enables and calls for another reading, another response, another movement. Misrecognition is the moment or movement of critique in Butler’s work–the exposure of the weakness or inefficacy of the negative or normative; but it is this other or second move–working that weakness by reinscribing it–that makes Butler’s work so decisive and important. It is this movement that takes Bodies That Matter a step beyond Gender Trouble.⁶

 

Based on this theoretical ground, which I have only rather idiosyncratically begun to sketch here, Butler goes on to supply a series of painstakingly careful analyses of identity, race and gender in a wide range of discourses and texts–Lacan, Paris is Burning, ACT UP, Willa Cather, Nella Larsen, Slavoj Zizek, queer theory. It is here, with these specific analyses, that Butler makes a decisive intervention: a critical, insightful, necessary intervention. An intervention that matters.

 

Notes

 

1. See, for example, Seyla Benhabib’s critique of Gender Trouble in Situating the Self (New York & London: Routledge, 1992): “Along with the dissolution of the subject into yet ‘another position in language’ disappear of course concepts of intentionality, accountability, self-reflexivity, and autonomy. The subject that is but another position in language can no longer master and create that distance between itself and the chain of significations in which it is immersed such that it can reflect upon them and creatively alter them. The strong version of the Death of the Subject thesis is not compatible with the goals of feminism. . . . If we are no more than the sum total of the gendered expressions we perform, is there ever any chance to stop the performance for a while, to pull the curtain down, and only let it rise if one can have a say in the production of the play itself?” (214-15).

 

2. The linchpin figure here is Derrida, specifically his reading of performativity and speech act theory in “Signature Event Context” (in Margins of Philosophy. Tr. Alan Bass. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1982, 307-30). As Derrida writes, “Every sign . . . can be cited, put between quotation marks; thereby it can break with every given context, and engender infinitely new contexts in an absolutely nonsaturable fashion. This does not suppose that the mark is valid outside its context, but on the contrary that there are only contexts without any center of absolute anchoring” (321). For Derrida, one can’t play substantives against performatives precisely because citational performatives make the supposed plenitude of substantives possible in the first place: “the condition of possibility for these effects is simultaneously, once again, the condition of their impossibility, of the impossibility of their rigorous purity” (328).

 

3. Compare Butler’s Gender Trouble (New York & London: Routledge, 1990): “The subject is not determined by the rules through which it is generated because signification is not a founding act, but rather a regulated process of repetition that both conceals itself and enforces its rules precisely through the production of substantializing effects. In a sense, all signification takes place within the orbit of the compulsion to repeat; ‘agency,’ then, is to be located within the possibility of a variation on that repetition” (145).

 

4. Butler’s point, we should note, is certainly not that drag is unproblematically subversive: as she writes, there is “no necessary relation between drag and subversion” (125). See also 231 on this question.

 

5. As Butler writes about this kind of postmodern pragmatist constructionism, “it is important to resist that theoretical gesture of pathos in which exclusions are simply affirmed as sad necessities of signification” (53). Butler likewise remains suspicious of the “liberal” multiculturalist position which would ask us to walk a mile in the other’s shoes: “sympathy involves a substitution of oneself for another that may well be a colonization of the other’s position as one’s own” (118).

 

6. Certainly, Gender Trouble formulates the questions before us in Bodies: “theories of feminist identity that elaborate predicates of color, sexuality, ethnicity, class, and able-bodiedness invariably close with an embarrassed ‘etc.’ at the end of the list. Through this horizontal trajectory of adjectives, these positions strive to encompass a situated subject, but invariably fail to be complete. This failure, however, is instructive: what political impetus is to be derived from the exasperated ‘etc.’ that so often occurs at the end of such lines?” (Gender Trouble 143). Gender Trouble, it seems to me, gestures toward such readings, but does not actually supply them. Bodies That Matter goes on to demonstrate precisely the “political impetus” of a certain “failure.” This would, however, also be the point at which one could open a dialogue with Butler concerning the problematic Hegelian legacy of this notion of lack or misrecognition. In pursuing this question, which there is no time to do here, we could perhaps turn to Blanchot’s work on the weakening of the negative in Hegel (see, e.g., “Literature and the Right to Death” in Blanchot’s The Gaze of Orpheus. Tr. Lydia Davis. Barrytown, NY: Station Hill, 1981, 21-62; and Le pas au-dela. Paris: Gallimard, 1973).

 

Russell A. Potter

English Department
Colby College
rapotter@colby.edu

 

Tricia Rose, Black Noise: Rap Music and Black Culture in Contemporary America (Wesleyan UP/ UP of New England)

 

Paul Gilroy, The Black Atlantic: Modernity and Double-Consciousness (Harvard UP)

 

The mid-nineties are unquestionably a signal point in the development of the cluster of intellectual and political movements that move variously under the banners of Postmodernism, Cultural Studies, Black Studies, Women’s Studies, Gay and Lesbian Studies, and American Studies. In one sense, they have been almost too successful in gaining academic currency–some academics, it seems, have embraced them before they even quite knew what they were, happily tacking these new rubrics over the departmental doorframe in hopes that they would work the magic of keeping up with the theoretical Joneses. And yet, at the same moment, these new fields have been attacked with unusual virulence by such veterans of the academy-bashing circuit as Roger Kimball and Shelby Steele. Black Studies, both in the U.K. and the U.S., has in particular felt this crisis, continuing to serve as a favorite target for the self-declared traditionalists even while it comes under pressure from newer “Studies” competing for the same academic niches. Earlier debates, such as those over the questions of canon and curriculum, are now overshadowed by far deeper and more ominous rumblings, as internal divisions have erupted in an academic left that was perhaps never as unified as its conservative critics liked to believe. And, just to turn up the flame a little higher, college and university budgets have begun to shrink, forcing many of the new generation of academic mavericks and activists into arguments over who will get how big a slice of the dwindling pie–or who will get no slice at all. The distant laughter of the conservative critics of the academy adds a sense of lurking despair to this morose game of musical chairs.

 

Meanwhile, back in the “cultures” that these fields ostensibly study, the wheel of new subcultural formations and their commodified doppelgangers has been spinning with increasing speed. While this acceleration has been marked in rapid changes in video, film, multimedia, and hypertext, one of the most visible sites of change has been music; yesterday’s rhythms of revolution are today’s pricey national concert tours, and tomorrow’s instant retrocompilation CD’s. Under such circumstances, academics who cast their hats into the ring of “popular culture” or “cultural studies” had best be prepared for a fast-forward free-for-all; if they emerge with something more than a handful of someone else’s hair, they probably ought to get some sort of medal. The battered academic Volvo suddenly finds itself caught between sound-system-loaded Jeeps blaring Ice Cube on the one side and air-conditioned Lexuses with the radio tuned to Rush Limbaugh on the other. It’s culture wars with a vengeance, and yet it’s also a time when there is an opportunity, however fleeting, for voices from within the academy to perform potent acts of cultural translation, acts which, even if they can’t resolve the cacophony, can at least articulate what’s at stake, and perhaps finally break through the strained dichotomies between “intellectual” and “popular” culture, and perhaps even take account of the interpenetration of such categories. That, after all, was supposed to be one of the benefits of the post-structuralist critiques that pried open this door in the first place; it seems strange that, a generation after Barthes, people should still be discovering the mythologics of culture as though this were something never heard of before.

 

A large part of the problem lies, ironically, in the very discourses post-structuralism has deployed to describe itself. As bell hooks put it back in the first issue of Postmodern Culture:

 

The contemporary discourse which talks the most about heterogeneity, the decentered subject, declaring breakthroughs that allow recognition of otherness, still directs its critical voice primarily to a specialized audience, one that shares a common language rooted in the very master narratives it claims to challenge. If radical postmodernist thinking is to have a transformative impact then a critical break with the notion of "authority" as "mastery over" must not simply be a rhetorical device, it must be reflected in habits of being, including styles of writing as well as chosen subject matter.¹

 

Hooks’s rejoinder reflects not only the tendency of postmodern critiques to ignore or tokenize black expressive artforms, but also the long-standing–and oftentimes justified–suspicion on the part of black writers and philosophers over what (if anything) postmodernism could possibly offer for the kinds of critical histories they were engaged with constructing. As recently as 1989, it was possible for Cornel West to allow, in his essay “Black Culture and Postmodernism,” that “the current ‘postmodernism’ debate is first and foremost a product of significant First World reflections upon the decentering of Europe.”² West, as one of the leading black philosophers of our time, saw both the parochial and ludic elements of postmodernism as signs of its insufficient engagement with black culture, even as he gestured toward “a potentially enabling yet resisting postmodernism.”³ Yet in the light of critiques and analyses by scholars such as Henry Louis Gates Jr., Eric Lott, and Paul Gilroy, it has become increasingly evident that what had earlier been articulated primarily as the subcultural resistance of black artforms has in fact had a long and intimate relation with the founding dialectics of “Western” modernism, and consequently of “postmodernism” as well. Now, at last, it seems possible to begin to acknowledge the manifold ways in which black studies, and the histories and arts that it has engaged, have been and continue to be absolutely central to the questions raised by contemporary theory, and consequently to the numerous appropriations and figurations of blackness that have (in)formed modernist and postmodernist thought (as well as of the black artists and writers who have claimed and reclaimed a place in the genealogy of avant gardes).

 

Still, both Gilroy and Rose, though for somewhat different reasons, tend to eschew the term “postmodern”: Gilroy prefers “anti-modern” or “counterculture of modernity”; Rose uses the more materialist-inflected “post-industrial.” Gilroy has a healthy suspicion of the simplistic relativism of some avatars of postmodernism, and prefers to see these black cultural formations as oppositional modernities, rather than postmodernities. Interested primarily in reclaiming the territory of the modern as a movement instigated by the historical experiences and philosophical implications of black slavery and diaspora, he looks dimly on the kind of glib postmodernism of writers such as Jameson, whose academic “we” never feels the need to account for its own racial, sexual, and gender presuppositions. Rose, for her part, never directly addresses the implications of postmodern theory, though she makes ready use of many of its strands. Her commitment to a thoroughly materialist account of the roots of black expressivities makes her suspicious of some of these strands, but she confines her critique to one or two writers who exemplify its worst qualities. Both Gilroy and Rose are right, I think, to be wary, but at the same time their work raises questions which are absolutely fundamental to postmodernist theory and practice, and indeed draw forcefully on some of the same decentering discourses as some of the more political postmoderist texts.

 

I will discuss Rose’s book first since, despite the fact that it does not explicitly engage with the questions of (post)modernity, it works within a certain characteristic bind of one genre of academic postmodernism. For, both with “high” cultural formations (such as the writings of Derrida or the post-Haraway theorists of cyberspace) and with so-called “popular” formations (hip-hop, grunge, rock videos), the most common tone taken up by public intellectuals is that of the “bluffer’s guide.” What should we know about hypertext? What’s the latest word on street culture? To audiences for whom such questions elicit a potent mixture of curiosity and anxiety, there is an endless hunger for articles or books that will give them a ready grip on the latest cultural movement. Academic writers, especially those who like to work as activist public intellectuals, implicitly address this broader audience, and yet in their desire to fulfill its wishes for a synoptic overview of a critical issue, they often serve reductive ends. This is partly the doing of reviewers and readers, who are looking for ready-made rhetorical handles, but it is also part of academic writers’ desire to enjoy a spotlight broader than the private accolades of students or colleagues.

 

The crucial question is that posed by Michel de Certeau in Heterologies: “From what position do the historians of popular culture speak? And what object do they constitute as a result of that position?”⁴ For it is rarely in the interests of “insurrectionary knowledges” (such as hip-hop) that the historians or chroniclers of “culture,” as constituted by the knowledges of semiotics, anthropology, or literary theory, have spoken. Those on the right, informed by an (at times unarticulated) subtext of “the decline and fall” from a Norman Rockwell past into a Piss Christ present, explicitly oppose all insurrectionary arts; intellectuals on the left, unfortunately, have seemed more interested in making academic capital of the popular than in articulating to a broader audience just what the value of such insurrections might be. When it comes to books whose explicit subject matter, rap music, is among the chief targets of the moral panicists of the right, as well as a phenomenon frequently held up by those on the left as a sign that artistic political resistance is alive and well, the exemplary questions of the public intellectuals of the left and right go toe-to-toe, each trying to claim hip-hop as a centerpiece of their social agenda. It’s a fight to the finish, as one critic’s nihilistic gat-toting hoodlum is another’s organic intellectual. As rappers say, “It’s on.”

 

And Tricia Rose, for one, is ready for the battle. Black Noise is the kind of book you would like to send in a plain brown wrapper to everyone who dismisses rap music as a long-lived fad, mindless posturing, or minstrelsy for the ’90s. She provides ample evidence for skeptics of the development of rap music, its place within hip-hop culture and black American culture in general, and its efflourescence in the face of all kinds of direct and indirect attacks. Her opening chapter, “Voices from the Margins,” effectively summarizes rap music’s cultural imbrication at the level both of its production (she uses rap video as an example here) and of its consumption, with the associated questions of performance, audience, and technology. This segues nicely into the second chapter, “All Aboard the Night Train: Flow, Layering, and Rupture in Postindustrial New York,” where she provides a detailed social history of the South Bronx as the primary site of the emergence of hip-hop culture. The history is crucial, and ought to be required reading for critics such as David Samuels or C. Delores Tucker, clarion-callers of the “rap is a white plot” conspiracy theory. And, while writers such as David Toop or Stephen Hagar have given more detailed accounts of the musical developments in the years leading up to hip-hop’s ascendancy, Rose offers an account that clearly demonstrates the links of all the musical and artistic dimensions of hip-hop culture to the material situation of young black and Latino Americans in New York City in the late 1970’s and early ’80’s.

 

The latter part of this chapter extends Rose’s arguments, attempting to link certain productive hip-hop tropes, such as “flow” and “breaking,” to the cultural histories she details. Here, however, she seems to founder a bit, as she comes up against the age-old musicologist’s conundrum of how to link form and content in a structure that is, to a large extent, not representational (or, on the verbal level, never simply representational). And, as attractive as it is to categorize rap music’s formal features, unless such accounts explicitly address the material histories at stake, they quickly dissipate into hazy generalities (just what is “flow,” anyway?). Rose seems to sense this, as she quickly moves into a discussion of hip-hop culture’s holy trinity of writing, breaking, and rapping, for each of which she offers succinct and suggestive accounting. As in other parts of the book, one has the sense that Rose is more at home supplying cultural contexts than she is in producing close analyses of particular rap lyrics or hip-hop creations.

 

Rose’s next chapter, “Soul Sonic Forces,” takes a second drive by the same territory, and is considerably more successful. Rose performs a difficult balancing act between those who would link hip-hop to pre-modern African-American or African traditions, and others who would rather see it as a wholly new innovation dependent on technology. For the most part, she is able to delineate the ways in which rap music partakes of both orality and technology, without being limited by the paradigms of either. Unfortunately, as I alluded to earlier, she tends to see those who read rap as a “postmodern” artform as necessarily moving away from the materialist grounding of black studies, and does not allow for the possibility of a materialist postmodernism. Nonetheless, she acutely cuts down to size those who disembody hip-hop, taking it as a postmodern machine without a driver, and thus forgetting the actual black communities who have produced and consume it.

 

At the same time, she is concerned to connect hip-hop’s aesthetic with the questions of originality, production, and commodification that have long been points of contention among critics of African-American music. At least since Adorno’s attempt to trash jazz as mindless musical repetition–up there with religion as an opiate of the masses–critics have argued over the social implications of music and other artforms “in the age of mechanical reproduction.” Rose neatly sidesteps Adorno, quite accurately observing that he assumes that “mass production sets the terms for repetition and that any other cultural forms of repetition, once practiced inside systems of mass production, are subsumed by the larger logic of industrialization” (72). On the contrary, Rose asserts, repetition, precisely because it antedates and post-dates industrial capitalism, is an ideal mode of resistance, both because it can re-appropriate and hijack technological machinery, and because it in fact makes a very potent agent for denaturalizing dominant cultural assumptions about what constitutes art.

 

This offers Rose another smooth segue into the question of sampling, which she quite accurately identifies as central to hip-hop’s technological practices and aesthetic values. I wish that she would have taken up the critical ways in which, as she richly suggests, sampling challenges notions about originality and intellectual property, but she chooses instead to focus on the specific techniques which some of rap’s best-known producers–such as Eric “Vietnam” Sadler–use to “bring the noise.” Her interview with and analysis of Sadler is fascinating, but at the end the theoretical issues raised by such practices are only touched on in passing. Rose does, however, offer a salient critique of some of the past scholarship on sampling, again moving to complicate the all-too-easy dichotomies of technology versus community, or fragmented versus whole, that tend to underpin many analyses.

 

The central chapter, “Prophets of Rage: Rap Music and the Politics of Black Cultural Expression,” finally enables Rose to free herself from the work–necessary, but to some extent deadening–of sketching in the sociological and musical contexts of hip-hop; having made her points about the material situation of the music, she is free to assess its larger cultural engagements. And, at the beginning, she is forceful in articulating the intense, inevitably contradictory power of rap music in society. She offers a model–of “public” and “private” transcripts–which suggests the doubleness, the coded nature of rap lyrics. And as far as this analysis goes, she’s right on the money. Yet it’s odd, given the substantial work done on the black tradition of Signifying, that Rose seems to eschew this model, choosing instead a rather generalized model that does not resonate as strongly as it might with other critical work in the larger field of Black Studies. Nonetheless, the point is substantially the same, which is that rap lyrics play with what its listeners know (or don’t), drawing them in even as it shape-shifts through tropological sequences that let out a long line of ambiguity, only to yank it back to ‘hook’ its listeners like an angler snagging a trout.

 

Rose here offers critical readings of four hip-hop lyrics–Paris’s “The Devil Made Me Do It,” KRS-One’s “Who Protects Us from You?,” L.L. Cool J.’s “Illegal Search,” and Public Enemy’s “Night of the Living Baseheads.” Her readings, while uneven in places, certainly demonstrate the potency of these lyrics, as well as their rhetorical fluidity. Yet just at this point, where there is the greatest opportunity to analyze how rap lyrics work on the tropological level, Rose instead reads all four lyrics in a basically narrative sense, comparing them with anecdotes from her own life, hypothetical reflections on the class dimensions of L.L. Cool J.’s status as a wealthy entertainer, and a scene-by-scene analysis of the video for PE’s “Baseheads.” There are salient social points in every reading, but only scattered observations on exactly how these raps managed to bum rush the mass-media stage, or on the promised “politics” of black expression. There is also, for the most part, no close reading of the tropological moves that structure these raps: it’s rather like reading an account of a boxing match that talks only about strategy without offering any blow-by-blow details.

 

Again, de Certeau’s question comes to mind: in presenting analyses of larger cultural movements, what is at stake? However much academic writers would like to eschew the role of talking heads, their commentary spliced in between footage of current or past events, is there another, more fully engaged role open to them? Rose is clearly struggling with these questions, as anyone who writes such a book must, and expectations perhaps run too high. Hip-hop is too vast to lend itself to ready analysis in any one book, as Rose herself notes frankly in her preface, and however detailed or full her readings, they can’t stand in for hip-hop culture as a whole. Still, the modality of object and analysis, of the critic as commentator, suffuses much of this book, and gives it at times a frustrating distance from what it tries to bring most closely into view. Rose is at times, it seems, uncertain just where to set the dial between the rhetorical distance of conventional criticism and the ready familiarity and engagement of a fan of the artform. Having to explain every reference at every point can be deadening, and yet dropping allusions left and right risks leaving many readers scratching their heads.

 

Rose, however, is aware of all these difficulties, and is at her best when she can use specific material histories or social trends. Her analysis of the politics of the decline in large-arena rap venues, which makes up the balance of her “Prophets of Rage” chapter, is compelling, and brings together numerous sources to make evident the repressive but often behind-the-scenes politics of large concert venues. Yet this analysis, as acute as it is, does not quite fulfill the chapter’s promise of an accounting of the politics of black musical expression, since it does not address studio recordings, magazine and newspaper attacks on rap, show-trials such as those of Biz Markie or 2 Live Crew, or the problem with rap’s lack of radio exposure, all of which are at least as significant as the politics of live concerts–perhaps more, given that rap music today is primarily produced and consumed via recordings, despite its reliance on dialogic structures which remain fundamentally linked to acts of reception, call-and-response, and interlocution.

 

Rose’s final chapter, “Bad Sistas,” is in fact her strongest, bringing together as it does her ability to read social structures–such as sexism and homophobia–not simply alongside but within the discourses of rap lyrics and media hype. She rightly rejects the sort of identity politics that thinks it solely the job of women rappers to answer male rappers’ misogyny, or for that matter assumes that a woman rapper is necessarily a feminist rapper. She denounces the implicit heterosexism of many champions of hip-hop (in particular Houston A. Baker, Jr. and Nelson George). Yet she does more than simply call such bias out on the carpet, but goes further, situating critical discourses over rap in relationship to the uneasy alliances between bourgeois, predominantly white feminism and black women whose struggles, while allied in a general sense with those of this feminism, have had to be contested within very different social and economic structures. She moves astutely from this analysis to a series of examples drawn from the raps and videos of artists such as Salt-n-Pepa, Roxanne Shante, and MC Lyte, demonstrating the ongoing and complex verbal play via which women rappers dramatize their own multiple and at times contradictory positions in relation to their lovers, their rivals, and their homegirls. Finally, she offers a refreshingly candid account of the ways in which black women’s sexuality manages to be both openly expressive and resistant to objectification, a kind of feminism that, though reluctant to name itself as such, clearly has a potent and complex contribution to make to feminist theory and practice. Ultimately, Rose implies, the vernacular ethos of black women struggling against sexism and racism is the root and ground which feminism–particularly academic feminist theory–tends to overlook, even as it continually invokes its name. There are valuable grounds here for analysis of the larger relations between academic discourses and vernacular artforms and social structures: though there is no space in the book to develop them, I hope that Rose (and others) will continue to do so.

 

Black Noise, despite its shortcomings–and some are inevitable in any book that tries to tackle a vibrantly living and changing artform–is without question the best book on rap music and hip-hop culture yet to appear. Even though much of its time is spent detailing the backgrounds of the music, such backgrounding is an inescapable necessity when writing about a cultural formation so often attacked, distorted, and hyped within both the academic and the popular press, and about which there is so much misinformation and sheer ignorance. Rose, admirably, does not try to over-simplify her topic, and at its best her book offers a snapshot of hip-hop with all its urgent and yet at times contradictory messages and tactics intact. With the appearance of Rose’s book, it is to be hoped that hip-hop critics inside and outside the academy will be able to move on toward a more detailed engagement with the numerous political, social, and aesthetic issues it raises, without having at every turn to stop and explain the basic issues and histories at stake.

 

One aspect of this work, inevitably, will be to situate hip-hop within the larger histories of black expressive arts, and still more broadly, within the critical debates over culture, identity, and (post)modernity that have helped define the terms for the social and intellectual struggles of the ’90’s. Rose, concerned primarily with defending hip-hop as a cultural movement, only gestures toward these broader issues, and while identifying hip-hop as a “postindustrial art,” she does not address exactly what that might mean from the point of the historical development of black arts. Here the work of Paul Gilroy offers an apposite yet wholly supportive counterpoint; working with what seems at the outset an impossibly broad brush, Gilroy sets out to demarcate the histories of what he calls “the black Atlantic,” in the process sketching out the fundamentals of a new, trans-national, yet non-reductive model of the interrelations between black diasporic cultures. And, while it is hard to compete with the dust-jacket accolades showered upon Gilroy’s book by critics such as Anthony Appiah or Hazel Carby, it is impossible to overstate the importance of his work to black studies, or to cultural studies as a whole. A radical scholar who nonetheless has a passion for carefully balanced observations, Gilroy’s book is forty theses on the door of cultural studies, and if the folks inside neglect to read them, they do so at their peril. Few writers–maybe none–can combine as Gilroy does a series of potent, historically articulated textual epiphanies with the broad yet meticulous brush of synthesis. Precisely because the book is so thoroughly grounded in the particularities of black histories and artforms, there is no way to review it without attending to each of Gilroy’s specific investigations in turn–and yet to do this is to be reminded (as I suspect Gilroy would want us to be) of the complexity as well as the continuity of black diasporic artforms.

 

Central to Gilroy’s thesis is the claim that modernism(s) cannot be conceived of as European, that in fact the genealogy of modernism is from the outset bound up with black histories, cultural forms, and the historical experience of slavery. Gilroy bases this claim not on a sweeping monumental survey, but on an incisive tropological tour through the tutor-texts of modernism, among which he includes not only Hegel, Nietzsche, and Benjamin, but Douglass, DuBois, and C.L.R. James. But before making these specific cases, Gilroy wants first to sketch in the problematics of contemporary cultural studies, within which blackness and modernity orbit in circles both of contest and exchange. Gilroy’s chronotope here is that of a ship, undertaking multiple transatlantic crossings, carrying slaves through the immeasurable horror of the Middle Passage, and in later times carrying the speech, song, and spirit of what Gilroy sees as a fundamentally transnational black Atlantic culture. As a sort of shot over the bow, Gilroy fires the first of many broadsides at those whom he calls black “particularists” and “exceptionalists,” and, rebel without a pause, directs an equal volley at the ostensibly allied fleet of the anti-essentialist position. Black culture, he argues, need not answer the call to (mis)represent itself as wholly unified and ethnically absolute, nor need it disperse to the four winds of assimilation, appropriation, commodification, and reification. It can, in fact, very well claim for itself both roots and routes (Gilroy’s favorite trope, and one that resonates throughout this book)

 

Yet in order to make such claims, Gilroy must first do what very few in his position have done, and that is to critique the very field of cultural studies within which he stands. For, while in the U.S. black studies came up through the academy within a fairly consistent humanistic paradigm, in the U.K., black studies has been shaped by a long alliance with left intellectuals in the field of cultural studies. Now that cultural studies itself has become such a popular U.K. export, Gilroy has something to say about the nature of its cargo. He notes the conspicuous absence in the histories narrated by British Marxists of the anti-colonial struggles of previous centuries, which plays into the pernicious and yet rarely explicit assumption that to be “British” was (and is) to be “white.” As Gilroy tells it, it’s striking how the ostensibly revolutionary sentiments of British cultural studies at times partake as intensely of a kind of nostalgic nationalism as the far more reactionary ideologies of the most stodgy conservatives. This same nationalism underpins the logic of “American Studies” in the U.S., and Black Studies as well; African-American culture is held forth as the paradigm and fons sacrae of blackness, against which what Gilroy calls “U.K. Blak” or the polymorphous Black cultures of the Caribbean are all too often marginalized. Like Marxists before them, critics within cultural studies seem blind to their own reliance on precisely the sort of nationalistic frames which erode their claims to larger mass formations. In the case of black diasporic cultures, this tunnel vision is particularly costly, as Gilroy demonstrates forcefully in the chapters that follow.

 

Much of the balance of the first chapter–“The Black Atlantic as a Counterculture of Modernity”–are devoted to an analysis of the writings of Martin Delany which, while valuable, seems peripheral to Gilroy’s project. Gilroy’s analysis of Delany as a foundational force in the linkage of black masculinity and patriarchy to black national identity is forceful, but represents only one aspect of the ethos Gilroy seeks to define. His threefold model of black consciousness is only sketched here, but it is highly pertinent: black modernisms have been edged on either side by a kind of longing for the “anti-modern” past and an anticipatory yearning for a postmodern yet-to-come” (37). Delany works well as an exemplary thinker of the “past” element in this triad, but to lay out the other end of the spectrum Gilroy turns to black music. For as he pointedly observes, music both forces an accounting with the extra-textual world and takes account of the performative vernacular dimensions of black culture, for which heavily literary accounts of black culture have so often failed to account, and yet which are so central. Music, furthermore, serves as a force of continuum, reaching back to draw from African melodic and rhythmic roots, even as it is shaped by its own transatlantic routes of transmission, as when American R&B traveled to Jamaica and was reborn as Ska, which in turn gave rise to rock steady, Reggae, and dancehall (each of which in turn has traveled both to and from the UK and US). Whatever the textual and literary arguments Gilroy makes–and they are compelling in and of themselves–music is his trump card, as it offers the clearest framework within which his thesis of the black Atlantic as the “counterculture of modernity” can be materially demonstrated.

 

Gilroy follows this provocative opening with a sudden (and at first, rather obscure) movement back to a discussion of Hegel, and the central role of the master-slave dialectic in his philosophy and those of his peers and followers. It’s a different tack (to maintain the nautical tropology), and yet a strategic one. All too often, the deep-seated racialism of Hegel and those who wrote in his wake is glossed over, or (perhaps worse) admitted as though it were an incidental blot on an otherwise unblemished cloth. On the contrary, as Gilroy insists, it is fundamental to the philosophical turns which led directly to modernism. Slavery, he notes, was for a great period of time considered as a problem internal to the European “West”: it was only after the moral campaign against it that it was jettisoned as if it were some sort of awful accident. The relation of slave and master changes and fundamentally shapes the subjectivities of slave and master–on this, both slavery’s defenders and the first generation of its critics could agree: if it became at times an abstraction, its material presence was never far away. Gilroy embodies this potent material corollary in stunning readings both of the narrative and life of Frederick Douglass and the case of Margaret Garner (which Toni Morrison used as the basis for Beloved); the experience of escape–failed or successful–from the psychological bonds of slavery emerges as a kind of limit-experience which tests the very foundations of subjectivity. And more: Douglass, for one, emerges as a signal modernist figure, not simply a self-made man, but a self made via a particular kind of struggle, foreshadowing all modernist smithies of the soul.

 

Gilroy’s next chapter finally addresses the central question of black music, and in many ways it’s the most free-ranging and compelling reading in the whole book. It’s refreshing to read a critic who knows the music thoroughly, whether he’s writing about the Fisk Jubilee Singers, Miles Davis, or Eric B. and Rakim. There is none of the usual critical hand-wringing over 2 Live Crew et. al.–Gilroy knows enough to know that’s not where it’s at–nor is there the kind of list-of-names vertigo of a critic who’s trying to link everything with everything. Gilroy treats musicians as artists on their own terms, and finds linkages in their thought and performance that are the mortar of his larger claims. The Fisk Jubilee Singers form one trope, with their extensive European tours making a signal moment for the European dimensions of black arts, even as they return later in the book to represent blackness to a young and still very northeasterly W.E.B. DuBois. Their modern counterparts have far more compact means of transportation, as the chronotope of the turntable replaces that of the ship, and the triangulation between UK Blak, US soul and R&B, and Caribbean musics is traced with attention to the ways in which it refutes any simplistic notion of Africa (or the U.S., or anyplace) as the point of origin, even as it structures and propagates truly synthetic and recognizable black styles. By examining instances of transatlantic fusion such as those of Soul II Soul, Ronnie Laws, and Apache Indian, Gilroy articulates what he sees as a cultural formation that is both “constructed” and yet has (a) “soul,” an essence if you will, a musical spectrum both whole and heteroglot, connected and fragmented.

 

It’s a shame that Gilroy doesn’t develop this particular thesis further, and it is a potent corrective to the kind of reductive musical nationalism practiced by many black critics, even as it squarely claims for black music a “counterculture of modernity” which must be met on its own terms. Still, while music is vital to his argument–forming, as he notes, a crucial mode beyond textuality and simple representation–Gilroy has far broader ambitions, specifically the (re)clamation of black Atlantic formations in literature, sociology, anthropology, and philosophy. To this project, his re-examinations of DuBois and Wright are of the utmost importance, and not simply because of their travels and exiles (DuBois to Germany as a young man, and to Africa as “The Old Man,” and Wright’s move to France), but because they enable Gilroy to rewrite the genealogy of blackness itself.

 

Gilroy’s analysis of DuBois takes a twofold focus: a detailed re-examination of The Souls of Black Folk, and a reading of some of DuBois’s long-neglected polemical novels (which, though fascinating, there is not room to discuss here). In the background of both, Gilroy posits a surprising–even scandalous–connection: the thought that DuBois’s nationalism owed something to the German nationalism he encountered while studying in Germany. Yet at the same time as the power of national identity impressed itself on DuBois, he could not fully follow the kind of black particularism espoused by precursors such as Martin Delany or Alexander Crummel, for the simple reason that he was particularly aware of the ways in which national and racial identities were formed and informed by a complex and often conflicting set of historical urges. Gilroy sorts these out into three stages, which he associates with the three sections of The Souls of Black Folk: the struggle against the institution of slavery, the struggle to win bourgeois rights and liberties, and the pursuit of spaces of black community and autonomy. He notes that the battle against racism is necessarily different in each of these phases, and also that the ways in which these stages overlapped each other led to the coexistence and conflict of what were, on a tactical level, very different struggles. The falling out between DuBois and Washington, for instance, is newly intelligible in this light, as education had a radically different role to play in the first two of these phases. The third stage–with all its attendant anxieties of assimilation and particularism–is, Gilroy argues, the moment for the emergence of oppositional black modernisms:

 

The third stage characteristically involves a deliberate and self-conscious move beyond language in ways that are informed by the social memory of the earlier experiences of enforced separation from the world of written communication. A countercultural sense of the inability of mere words to convey certain truths inaugurates a special indictment of modernity's enforced separation of art and life as well as a distinct aesthetic (or anti-aesthetic) standpoint. Music is the best way of examining this final aspect. (123-124).

 

The special significance of black spiritual songs for DuBois, as well as the ongoing refiguration of black musics as the representative cultural productions of the black Atlantic, emerges at once in this passage, and suggests a still more potent claim. Perhaps it is not, in fact, at the level of intellectual vanguards that the final phase of black struggle needs to take place, but precisely at the vernacular level. Gilroy, however, leaves this possibility hanging as he offers a strong reading of The Souls of Black Folk: while there is no space to reiterate his argument in the detail it deserves in the scope of this brief review, suffice it to say that it reveals strong and all-too-often neglected undercurrents, which militate toward a skeptical rejection of the broadconcept of “progress” or “progressivism” with which DuBois is conventionally associated. The DuBois who emerges in these readings has a richer and more complicated engagement with all three phases of black struggle, and his model of “double consciousness” marks not a flaw but a prophetic pointer toward a different kind of vision, a “second sight” which looks far beyond the fuzzy humanism of most modernist thinkers and toward the postmodern possibility of seeing split subjectivity as a critical asset.

 

Gilroy follows up on this reading with a compelling look at Wright’s career, focusing on his years in France. Wright was faulted by many for his move to European turf, and to this day the books he wrote in France have been disparaged and neglected for failing to represent the kind of realist, experiential models of race that were central to the positive reception accorded his earlier novels. Again, Gilroy discovers an unexpected Wright, a person engaged with European modernity not via the margin, but from the very questions that formed its center. Wright’s interest in Nietzschean affirmation via negation (as one example of which Wright offered the “Dozens,” the verbal ancestor of today’s hip-hop disses), his engagement with existentialism, and his deliberate refusal of the simplistic representational terms which critics and publishers held forth as the condition for their renewed interest in his work, all become newly meaningful in Gilroy’s reading. For Wright, to claim modernism as his own was a serious task, and grew as strongly and deeply from the same experiences as earlier had led him to write Native Son. In a compelling passage, Gilroy quotes Wright’s comments on the subject, which might well be addressed to all of the detractors of his later work. Wright claimed, in fact, that double consciousness–which he called “split subjectivity”–gave him a particular and potent slant on the crisis of modernity:

 

I've tried to lead you back to the angle of my vision slowly . . . My point of view is a Western one, but a Western one that conflicts at several vital points with the present, dominant outlook of the West. Am I ahead of or behind the West? My personal judgment is that I'm ahead. And I do not say this boastfully; such a judgment is implied by the very nature of those Western values I hold dear. (qtd. 172)

 

It’s a shame that Wright’s angle of vision has not received the kind of critical attention it deserves, and Gilroy offers a number of compelling readings of Wright’s later work which will, hopefully, renew interest in his later writings.

 

The final chapter, “Not a Story to Pass On: Living Memory and the Slave Sublime,” offers a fitting culmination of the book’s syntheses, though Gilroy is quite clear that his book only sketches the barest outline of black Atlantic roots ‘n’ routes. The title epigraph, drawn from Morrison’s Beloved, underlines the double valence of tradition in black cultures; it is the bearer both of “jewels brought from bondage” and of the unspeakable imprint of slavery. The bitter intertwining of pain and pleasure, so graphically evoked by Morrison in the scene where Paul D traces out the “chokecherry tree” of scar tissue of Sethe’s back, is brought into critical focus as Gilroy traces the debates between fragmented and whole racial selves, between constructivist and essentialist polarities, and again brings forth a new possibility. Gilroy shuns the “spurious security” of melaninism, and is critical of some of the more historically oversimplified versions of Afrocentricity. And yet, nonetheless, he historically situates the appeal of these discourses, and in fact demonstrates compellingly the role of the yearning for such stability in the production of the heteroglot yet synaptically linked expressions of black diasporic experiences. The “catastrophic rupture” of the middle passage finds its compensation in acts of creation from materials at hand, from vernacular syntheses of speech and music, and in the deliberate engagement of these discourses with the European modernities whose ideology and aesthetics make for unexpected points of resonance. Music, in particular, has the capacity both to “tell the history” (as Jamaican DJ Prince Buster puts it) and to bear the unbearable, extra-linguistic dimensions of what Gilroy comes to call the “slave sublime.” Music, furthermore, is a profoundly temporal art, and in its rhythmic unfolding builds a time for community. The trope of time, as instanced in the Nation of Islam’s question “What Time Is It?,” and its multiple diasporic answers (Sun Ra: “It’s after the end of the world”; The Last Poets: “Time is running out”; Flavor-Flav’s gargantuan timepieces), both embody and transcend historical time by, as Gilroy puts it, “asserting the irreducible priority of the present” (202). Because of this ability, music is capable of bearing the historical pain that is the legacy of black diasporic cultures, and Gilroy offers a suggestive reading of Percy Mayfield (“Hit the Road, Jack”; “Please Send Me Someone to Love”) as a synecdoche of this transvaluative engagement with melancholia and pain.

 

This gives Gilroy the segue for his final and bold movement, an accounting of the historical borrowings and transformations that have linked black cultures in all corners of the Atlantic to Jewish beliefs, traditions, and intellectual syntheses. The most obvious vernacular link is of course the landscape of black Spirituals, whose talk of bondage in “Pharaoh’s Land” and dreams of “Crossin’ the River of Jordan” draw from the Old Testament histories which slaves encountered in the Caribbean and the Americas. Their previous systems of belief fragmented and eroded by the violence of the middle passage and the experience of slavery, black slaves’ appropriation and use of the Jewish experiences of slavery constitutes, without a doubt, one of the most profound “transvaluations of all value” ever accomplished. This early legacy formed the ground for later returns to Jewish religious and political thought, in the process of which aspects of Jewish nationalism, and the idea of black culture as “diasporic,” grew readily. Black Atlantic religious practices such as those loosely coalescing about Rastifarian religion are a testament to the vernacular potency of these connections; all the mythology of a return to Ethiopia, the figure of Sellasie as Messiah, the myth of the Black Star Liners which would carry Desmond Dekker’s “Israelites” back to the Promised Land, can be traced to this potent conjunction. Gilroy gives a succinct and suggestive account of one person, Edward Wilmot Blyden, an influential black Caribbean writer and historian, and one of the founding fathers of Pan-Africanism. Yet despite some of the patriarchal and parochial qualities of his work, Blyden’s engagement with Jewish thought was, as Gilroy shows, full and complex: Blyden learned Hebrew and studied Jewish history with David Cardoze, a rabbi on the island of St. Thomas. It was Blyden who made the historical connections between Jewish and black experiences of slavery and dispersal, which were revived with the start of the Negritude movement in France in the 1930’s.

 

All this, of course, brings Gilroy face to face with the claims of both black and Jewish particularists, each of whom asserts that their collective experience is untranslatable, and that (for some) even to compare the two does violence to the sanctity and integrity of memory. Gilroy does not offer a detailed critique of these claims, but makes a passionate and very compelling argument for renewed and continuing dialogue, a dialogue which might begin to theorize more fully the “redemptive power produced through suffering” as it works in a variety of very different historical circumstances. Finally, Gilroy, reflecting once more on Morrison’s Beloved, looks outward and onward to the ethical and artistic power of history recovered and told via a process of “imaginative appropriation.” It is at this level, indeed, that the questions Gilroy raises become especially pertinent, since he clearly values some appropriations more than others. Having voluntarily deprived himself of both the cudgel of anti-essentialism and the mystic unifying power of black particularism, Gilroy cannot offer any ultimate criterion by which we might know which appropriations we ought to value. In any case, as he readily acknowledges, the complex hybridities and recurrent transits of the black Atlantic render any such judgments temporary at best; what counts is an engagement with the questions they raise, and a refusal to trade the richness of uncertainty and heterogeneity for what Gilroy sees as the poverty of dogmatic certainties. It’s a difficult struggle, but one to which Gilroy’s own work makes an immeasurable contribution. Cultural studies, it is to be hoped, will never be the same in the wake of the passage of Gilroy’s revolutionary work.

 

Notes

 

1.bell hooks, “Postmodern Blackness,” Postmodern Culture 1.1

 

2.Cornel West, “Black Culture and Postmodernism,” in Barbara Kruger and Phil Mariani, eds., Remaking History (Seattle: Bay Press, 1989): 87-98.

 

3.West, 96.

 

4.Michel de Certeau, Heterologies: Discourse on the Other (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1986): 129

 

Andrew Levy

Department of English
Butler University
Levy@Butler.edu

 

Labor Day Weekend, 1984. Erik Huber signs a “drive-away” contract with a man from Queens to drive his car to Reseda in the San Fernando Valley in two weeks time. Erik then lets nine days lapse, packs his college belongings in the back of the car, and offers to show me Los Angeles, the Pacific Coast Highway, and the “eating tour” of San Francisco, Oakland and Berkeley. Across the country, there was a record heat wave that week. We drove during the days, drinking six packs of warm diet coke to keep us nervous. At night, we slipped into campgrounds with our headlights off, spread sleeping bags under the stars and between the Winnebago campers, sipped from a bottle of Jack Daniels, and whispered conjectures about what invisible landscape would materialize around us in the morning light: strawberry fields in Missouri, a giant red rock in New Mexico.

 

On the third or fourth day, driving a high mountain highway in Arizona, we saw a tall, slender pole rising in the horizon. Amid the aged pines and desert landscape that neither of us had ever seen before, we assumed that the pole was an Indian totem. As we approached, we made out a vaguely human icon atop the pole. As we approached nearer, we recognized the figure: it was Fred Flintstone. We drove through twenty more miles of pristine desert, and found Bedrock: a campground, tourist shop, and restaurant modelled after the cartoon, a place to sit in a Flintstone car, sleep in a Flintstone home, eat a Brontoburger, shake hands with one of the two unlucky individuals dressed in bulky Fred and Barney costumes in the Arizona heat, and buy postcards or t-shirts.

 

We bought postcards. They flew out the car window on a long downhill several miles out of “town”; we stopped the car in the middle of the road, ran back to where the cards lay unmoving in the road, and looked up, horrified, to see a gasoline truck mount the top of the hill above us and begin its hurtling descent toward our parked, purring, borrowed car. We raced back, pulled the car onto the shoulder, and listened to the peeved whistle of the skidding truck, its driver too stunned to curse as he passed.

 

We drove on to Barstow and Los Angeles. Erik had so laden the back of the car that the exhaust pipe had been skipping against the highway for three thousand miles, sending out sparks in our absurd trail. In Reseda, we saw that we had worn the exhaust pipe down to a sliver. We listened to the car’s owner complain about the pipe, all of us confused about what might constitute adequate compensation, and then drove our rental car back into Los Angeles.

 

There we got drunk, relieved and giddy about being in California, about not having started a conflagration in Arizona over a couple of Flintstone postcards, and about not having to drive anymore. Late at night, we wandered through downtown, and came across the La Brea tar pits, a dark hole behind a chain-link fence amid the skyscrapers of central Los Angeles. Erik explained how fossils would periodically rise to the surface, where paleontologists would retrieve them, and set to work determining how the new find altered our modern vision of prehistory. I looked through the chain link fence, and saw a sculpture of a saber-toothed tiger being pulled down into the pit with a graphic look of displeasure on its face.

 

Nobody should ever be too proud of their practical joke ideas, but I can’t seem to forget the one that Erik and I devised that night in Los Angeles. We would return to Bedrock, get those Fred and Barney costumes, stuff them with medical school skeletons, and toss them at night over the chain link fence into the tar pit, just so, for a few moments at least, the researchers at the La Brea site would have to say to themselves, and to the world: the Flintstones are not fiction; prehistoric man wore a tie and punched a time card.

 

Meanwhile, six thousand miles away in Paris (picture a camera panning at great speed over desert, heartland, ocean, and stopping in an oaken office with ostentatiously Parisian monuments prominently displayed outside its windowsill), the philosopher Jean Baudrillard was composing his own kind of practical jokes, in the manner of postmodern French philosophers. Throughout the 1980s, Baudrillard released a series of slim volumes of playful, iconoclastic philosophy, published in the Semiotext(e) Foreign Agents Series and bearing titles like Simulations or The Ectasy Of Communication. In these works, which by the end of the decade would become a philosophy of choice for many American academics, graduate students, cyberpunks, and consciously hip adolescents, Baudrillard wrote of the shifting relationship between what has previously been called “the real,” and its many reproductions in mass media. For Baudrillard, the postmodern age was marked by the rise of the “hyperreal,” mediated experience that is more ‘real’ than the authentic experience from which it is generated, and which is, in turn, used as the model for the production of further authentic experience. The map, to use Borges’ and Baudrillard’s famous metaphor, does not mimic the territory anymore; the territory mimics the map.

 

In an era where a Presidential candidate overtly emulates the glamorous media image of a previous President, and becomes President himself, the presence of the “hyperreal” in our daily lives surprises nobody. It is useful, perhaps, that Americans look to France for intellectual authority, that Derrida and Foucault and Lyotard and Baudrillard find larger, more spirited audiences in our country, just as Jerry Lewis, Clint Eastwood, and Edgar Allan Poe have found smaller, more respectful audiences in theirs. It might be more useful, however, not to wait for foreign recognition of our more unlikely sources of genius, a tedious process that leaves a persistent gap between what we choose to teach in schools, and what our students, still untutored in the ways of professional education, psychology, and literature, might choose to understand.

 

I have wanted to write this essay for a long time, frustrated for nine years by the nagging fact that Erik Huber and I never tossed those faux Flintstones into the La Brea tar pits, that we never forced the official guardians of the distant past, those sun-bronzed Californian paleontologists, to admit even momentarily what we, in our hyperreal way, already knew: that we really were descended from the Flintstones. I have not written this essay because the channels of intellectual authority in America leave little room to maunever: one can attempt to write about a cartoon, and face derision for choosing such low brow subject matter; or one can choose an scholarly pedestal from which to discourse, Popular Culture or Child Psychology for example, and then write an aggressively jargoned and analytical essay that anyone who ever enjoyed an episode of the show would recognize as bizarre and even hostile to the program’s intent. This is an especially awkward situation, given the fact that most of the teachers, academics, psychologists, and other professional assessors of culture under forty in America today received much of their early intellectual development in front of a TV screen. I learned about the hyperreal from Fred and Barney, not from Jean. We are Flintstone intellectuals; we should act like Flintstone intellectuals.

 

As with most inexpensively made cartoons, the Flintstones seem like a child’s primer to Cubism. Wilma and Betty, the two wives, each wears her hair parted, and the part faces the audience no matter whether the character is facing left or right profile. They are, of course, impossibly slim: Wilma wears a three-pearl necklace beneath which her neck disappears, and their legs, rarely apart except when running or walking, taper down into tiny feline feet. The men are several times wider than the women: they wear cylindrical animal skins, although they have no shoulders that might support the garments. Their heads, which seem to float above their animal skins, remain perfectly level as they walk, although their bodies move up and down. Height seems irrelevant: although Barney is several times wider than Betty, he is also several times shorter, anatomical details that probably explain why the couple had to adopt.

 

They live in a place called Bedrock, which takes on the characteristics of either a large city (a stone-age Los Angeles, it seems) or a small town, depending on the dramatic demands of the episode. In Bedrock, every proper name contains at least one reference to some mineral object: Rock, Slate, Stone (it would be as though every name in our own era, the Atomic Age, bore some reference to nuclear technology). When modern celebrities appear, their names are altered appropriately: Ann-Margaret becomes Ann-Margrock, Tony Curtis becomes Stony Curtis, Rock Hudson (who in theory could have made the transition to Bedrock life with his name intact) becomes Rock Hudstone. The Bedrock code of dress is strangely formal, and unutilitarian: the women wear stones on their wrists and necks that are larger than their hands and heads. The men wear ties but no shoes. On formal occasions, they wear spats, but still no shoes.

 

There are two reasons to watch an episode of the Flintstones as an adult. The first is the show’s amiable spirit; it is among the least dour works of art ever produced in this country. Like its progenitor, The Honeymooners, the Flintstones is noisy, and full of motion. Musical themes and sound effects shift constantly on the soundtrack; on the screen, brightly colored characters move through a visually memorable rock-laden world, sliding down dinosaurs’ backs, bumping into stone impediments, racing into each other’s arms. The characters themselves are cartoon-sized, energetic and elemental. Fred, a loudmouth and a buffoon, possesses a broad capacity for kindness and self-realization; he loves to shout with joy (Yabba Dabba Doo, of course), and dance on his oversized toes. His body, which is sketched just slightly convex of a perfect cylinder to suggest overweight, is surprisingly fluid in movement. Barney, his best friend and neighbor, is a simpleton, but he is also instinctively inclined toward pleasure: his head bounds rapidly up and down inside the cylinder of his animal skin when he laughs. Wilma and Betty, frustrated and wise in the manner of early 60s television housewives, still sing, laugh freely, and live with the consanguinity of women who know they are unconditionally loved. Flintstone episodes do not conclude as ordinary situation comedies do, with difficult situations resolved by the introduction of moral principles; they end when an effusion of good humor rises to the surface and usurps the dilemma. They end in song, in laughter, with babies cackling happily, or with Fred and Wilma “smooching.” In some mythical anthology of American culture, the Flintstones would be winking on the page opposite Ben Franklin and Horatio Alger, telling children not to perfect themselves, but to enjoy themselves.

 

The second reason to watch the Flintstones is the pleasant buzz of anachronism. It is perhaps only as an adult that one can recognize the clumsy but gentle affection with which the Flintstones’ writers constructed their Bedrockian era. In this stone age, for instance, unlike the one that paleontologists record, dinosaurs and humans roam the earth together. Interestingly, only the docile dinosaurs seem to remain: uncomplaining brontosauruses function as cranes and earth movers, pterodactyls substitute as planes, but there are no tyrannosauruses in sight, no meat eaters except for Fred and Barney, who wolf down giant platters of oversized dinosaur ribs. Similarly, while some Bedrock technology is unquestionably modern–their radios, televisions, and telephones all function normally–most of their machines have been configured to accomodate a world before electricity. Fred starts his car, a redwood and granite sedan, by lowering his feet to the ground, and running for a few yards; the car then glides effortlessly up and down cartoon hills for miles. The Flintstones camera is a box that contains a bird that pecks out a picture on a 3 X 5 square of stone. Their vacuum cleaner is a small, somber wooly mammoth who sucks up dirt while Wilma and Betty converse; like the bird in the camera, or the weary animals that function as sprinklers, lawnmowers, or brooms, he also provides ironic commentary on the actions of the human characters, or shrugs at the camera and tells us something like, “It’s a living.”

 

Watching the Flintstones, one often suspects that the stone- age technology is the real star. The Flintstones re-invents all the technologies upon which we are most dependent, and makes them at once ludicrous and comprehensible. One wants to say that the show provides childrens’ explanations for complex machinery, but these Flintstone appliances are not purely children-sized: it is likely that more adult Americans are more familiar with the bird inside the Flintstone’s camera than they are familiar with the actual contents of their Kodaks. It is possible that the Flintstones reminds us how technology makes us infants or aborigines amidst our sophistication, dependent upon large, mysterious forces with almost supernatural powers: ATM networks, telecommunications highways in the sky. That is the part of us that watches the television in an entranced and docile spirit. But the Flintstones also startles us back into a sense of wonder about these machines we have created and so easily take for granted. It reminds us instead what we have suspected all along, that our machines have animal hearts and human feet. That is the part of us that refuses to be alienated from, or intimidated by, our technology.

 

As these machines roil and putter in the background of every Flintstones episode, however, the characters in the foreground are acting out an ancient national drama. The Flintstones seems to have been created by people in a state of infatuation about the success of the American dream: not the big American dream, where we become idealized versions of ourselves living in a City On A Hill, but the little American dream, where the land is rich and forgiving enough that persistent good humor, if nothing else, can save us. As I wrote this essay, friends with children reminded me how impossible it was to get their children to not watch the Flintstones. But friends without children shared with me images they have retained of watching the show: how Fred and Barney snapped their fingers without actually touching forefinger to thumb; the way Wilma’s jewelry seemed to float without touching her body; or the rock group “The Way-Outs,” four Beatlesque mopheads with abdomens that detached into separate tire-shaped pieces during performance epiphanies. All of these images, and the pristineness and affection with which they have been preserved in memory, suggest that the Flintstones was also a kind of primer for living in a world slouching toward Bethlehem: a lesson that there were real pleasures living in a world that was just barely falling apart, or just barely not coming together. Watching the Flintstones, we were ending our careers as modernists, beginning our careers as postmodernists, and we were barely five years old.

 

We were Flintstone intellectuals; we could have done worse. Entire schools of thought could be founded upon the Flintstones. Traditional archaeology, the archaeology in vogue during the period of the Flintstones production, maintained that primitive man had primitive social structures, was id-driven and animal-like, and was technologically naive. More recent discoveries have suggested that mankind developed at irregular paces in different geographic locations, and developed complex, mannered, and self-conscious social structures while remaining in a state of comparative technological innocence. This is Flintstones archaeology. The Austrian Iceman, frozen suddenly in his everyday dress 5000 years ago and discovered in the Tyrolean Alps in 1991, has given modern researchers an unprecedented opportunity to study Neolithic Man: they found that he wore well-tailored leather clothes, kept his fingernails trimmed, and, just like Betty Rubble, wore a single white stone on a strap around his neck.

 

There is also Flintstones Child Psychology. According to the US Census, American children rank drugs, pollution, and the environment as the three largest problems facing America today. 62% of all ten year olds worry that a friend might get AIDS, while 84% have used a remote control device. Nearly half of all American boys polled by the Gesell Institute of Human Development believed that they had adequate information about sex, while studies published by Nintendo report that American boys now consider “game prowess” a “fundamental male social marker.” If sentimental (and sometimes academic) Child Psychology holds that childhood is essentially an innocent state, these statistics suggest that contemporary children are growing up wizened and self-conscious, while maintaining aspects of the childlike innocence that most adults still expect. The Flintstones, pumping out of TV screens across the country, is like CNN for five year olds: it gives them an emotional roadmap of innocence and experience, and tells them that the seemingly anachronistic state where those two traits exist in the same person is a natural one. It confirms their image of the world as a place full of absurd but wonderful machines and adults full of unanticipated motion and desire.

 

It also provides an early lesson in what it means to have free access to the global media village. In Don DeLillo’s novel, Americana (1971), one character remarks that television came over on the Mayflower. What DeLillo’s Pilgrims carried on the Mayflower was not a real television, of course, but the idea of television, or what television, a neutral and faceless device, would become when yoked to the visions of fresh lands and new selves that the settlers brought with them, and which have never left. The Puritans, weaned on infant capitalism and a media revolution of their own, the printing press, took the Bible and, for better or worse, beat back the forest with it; they taught us that the distance between our literature and our landscape was slight by any measure, providing that we had the resolve and the technology.

 

It should come as no surprise that someone has built a version of Bedrock in the desert in Arizona; Americans have been building visionary communities in the desert from the very start, a fact that suggests that the idea of the hyperreal is not so postmodern after all, or that postmodernism is older than we think. But now we build communities on television as well as land. It is as though we have two countries: the shared space from sea to shining sea, and the cable-equipped television. Both are vague, inchoate, diverse: but, to paraphrase Fitzgerald, only one anymore is commensurate to our ability to wonder. The child perched daily in front of a television screen is face-to- face with something older than television, something older than America, the primal core of all our ingenuity: the sheer beauty of awakening self-consciousness, the epic moment of inventing a new country or the tiny thrill of finding the bird who takes the picture. Watching TV is like watching someone else’s dreams.

 

Bedrock in Arizona is not a radical utopia, like Plymouth or New Harmony; it is a tourist stop. But Bedrock on television, Bedrock in our homes, in our memories, is something different. Bedrock in Arizona is a parable for the turn of the twentieth- first century. It is a reminder that, for those Americans who have come of age in the last thirty years, the icons of popular culture are not artificial attachments to our conception of what constitutes our real life and our land, but are now integral to those things. Fred Flintstone on a totem pole is exactly right: television is aboriginal and mythic, and its icons flit through our REM sleep (that is, after all, where they came from). Bedrock in the Arizona desert is striking not because it is anomalous, but because it resolves. Television came over on the Mayflower, but it was invented in the Stone Age. And it was invented by children.

 

Say their names: Rock Derrida, Michel Foucaultstone.

 

Lidia Yuknavitch

nubin@gladstone.uoregon.edu

 

Women and slaves belonged to the same category and were hidden away not only because they were somebody else’s property but because their life was “laborious,” devoted to bodily functions.

 

–Hannah Arendt

 

I talk to myself. When you are out of the room of the world, things speak to one another. Probably they leave you out of the talk altogether when you leave the room. There is truth in that, or something like it, something too small to know. There is a species of logic resting in the space between molecules of air, between white and white, little extraordinary happenings, little meanings between words. There is something obscene about our boxing it all in–conversations, the page, the frame, the caught expression. That is why pictures make you ashamed, that is why movies swallow you up. I know I am babbling. I am only telling you this because I had a premonition about this story. I saw, not unlike a nightmare, what would happen so clearly, so perfectly, I could have touched the facts of it with my tongue. So I guess this is all really like talking to oneself.

 

What I am talking about now is an image, a single, cannibalized image. I say cannibalized because that is what we did. One image, three writers, three texts, three mouths, three murders committed among species of intellect. We saw something and we did what writers do, we wrote. The problem is that I am stuck and they are not; that is, the two men I know have moved on all right. The air has again filled their lungs, their words are their words, their groins quiver as before, their hands are recognizable to them, they move as if motion were not a series of stilted, jerky, pornographic moves.

 

It is me that is paralyzed.

 

I am an intelligent woman. I look for things between seeing and saying, I try to catch them, write them down. But something happened between what I saw and what I wrote. I mean, usually I can take an image right to paper, give or take a day or two, I can bend whatever it is I am feeling toward metaphor and flight. But something different happened to me with this one. There is no other way to do this. I will put you at the scene:

 

it was from our car driving along a freeway that we saw it. Me and my lover. Two dead horses on the road's shoulder, precisely paralleled in all respects--their brown horse bodies at the same angle, their horse heads and noses pointing at some invisible object long gone and unimaginable, the last thing they saw, sky maybe, because that's all you can see in their too-open dead eyes, their paired gray entrails winding like twin slithers out of the slit and gashed bellies, insides ripped out or spilled on the road, saliva, and again their eyes, unbearably open.

 

And then the car was past them, our eyes rolling back toward the past and the brain, our breath sucked back into our lungs through our mouths in a gasp, our mouths, unguarded, animal-like, open, tongues lolling, our minds pressed back and in as if by wind. It was not the same as slowing for an accident. With that you know, as all the other cars slowing know, that you are hoping to see carnage, you are hoping to see signs of wrecked bodies. But when you get there it is almost always just smashed-up cars, isn’t it. And don’t our hearts sink a little as we speed back up, weren’t we wishing for something overwhelming?

 

We could have seen a dead dog, a dismembered deer, a flattened raccoon or mangled cat, anonymous guts even; any one of these would have passed as normal. But not these, looking to us as if they had been deposited from the horse trailer by some expert psychopathic movie director: in scene one they are two beautiful brown velvet asses and black silken tails exposed from within the vehicle meant to transport animals on the move. In the second scene they have spilled carefully out onto the pavement with little to no change, a brilliant shot, cut to the star’s face recording a disfigured horror in the rear-view. No one could have arranged it more perfectly, I mean it was stunning, truly, dead horses.

 

It wasn’t like sympathy, and I suppose it could not have been empathy, but something closer to the shock of the too-beautiful. What care had been taken! So gently placed. The round curves and swells unmatched on any human, unmatched of course because these were what we call beautiful animals. Bridled or free, dead seems wrong for these. You know what I mean, too much. Think of the movie The Black Stallion, or back to your first viewing of National Velvet. Or how many times have we winced when, in the western, the horses are seen falling down a hillside when the rider is shot?

 

You have to understand, we were in a car, traveling at perhaps seventy or so. At seventy there is no stopping, no slowing down to question. Like the time we passed two neon horse-sculptures on highway five and spent the next week trying to figure out what in the world we had seen. It wasn’t until the newspaper verified our sighting–an artist had planted them in a farmer’s field–that we knew. Strange comparison. Their open eyes, their necks alongside one another, the soft warmth and fuzz between the nostrils, the memory of them running head to head, manes whipping, snorts, or grazing docile and mighty, all this from movies and television. Images that stick in your brain like they happened, ripping up through the thing itself with flashes of color, sound, light, shape and particle over what can be said was seen. Dead horses.

 

In the film version of Equus, Richard Burton loses his mind to the desire of a boy. There is a horse, a magnificent heat and flesh quiver, there is writing and god too close to the drama. Anyone who has seen the movie has been convinced by the scene: the boy naked legs splayed on the bare back of the sweating dip of muscle the ritual chanting the perversion of speech the movement of words into body his body its body the roaring sweat the bleeding grown the bit at the mouth the foam the release . . . who among us can bear it away? It is easy to picture a man losing his mind to the desire of a boy. It is easy to see action killed, the sheer temperature and senseless beauty of desire.

 

He, the man I love, was only giving me a lift to meet another man. It was a ride from one man to another, no one meant any harm, the man I lived with transporting me to the man I worked with, and me between them, me the journey between them. My lover and I, the other man, writing, three writers. Both men carried weight. Can I say they were like words? Yes, words have convulsed me before. When a woman has a mind, she is compelled to ask, from where and why? This passion, ideas, what orbit have I chanced to cross which drives me to think and spins me into this world? A woman has to ask, which me is it today, this year? And in relation to what? Only then can she dress as before and move around as always. And so it was that in our driving our talk froze in our throats and ears, because the horses stopped all conversation in the cab of the blue pick-up truck, the dash instruments filled the dead air with the silence of their functioning, stupid. I think we commented or said oh. Up against the slobber of excess one often comments. I don’t remember what he was saying before the horses. I can almost say he was telling me about performance art, the visceral, the raw materiality, about the way Arnold Swartzkogler’s dismembering his own member or some other man’s crawling naked on his belly over broken glass or some woman pulling a scroll from her vagina put you inescapably at the site of your own body. It preceded the horses in effect anyway. His mouth, my mouth, the words out of the mouth.

 

I am certain that I was listening before we were struck with the blow of two sentences in both our minds: that cannot be what it looks like, and, that is exactly two perfectly paired dead horses on the side of the road. And then we were gone. In the nothing of that image whatever our words were were stolen, escaped me now. What I remember is that we said nothing.

 

So it was that he drove me, me dizzy but of course carrying on like anyone would, to a meeting with the other man. As if this were every day. He drove me up to the door of a cafe so familiar I didn’t recognize it. I opened the blue metal car door, I saw the metal arms and shapes of the car door innards, I gave him an intimate glance, he blew me a kiss, I slammed the door, the sound, harsh and horribly familiar, I raised my hand to wave, familiar, he drove away, I was through the cafe door and into the room and over to a table and down in a chair and the other man across the table from me greeted me, as you would expect, everything was as expected. A series of prepositions directed me entirely, the background music in the cafe could be either classical, minor notes with decrescendo, or perhaps modern, disconnected and dissonant jazz.

 

You must be aware that this was a necessary meeting, for some reason, some particular reason one could definitely articulate, one knows one’s work after all. It had to do with my writing, some place where we, me and the other man I mean, intersected. He was my teacher. I learned what steps to take a little clearer every time we met. The thing is, on a literal level, I really had learned to despise this man, his too-groomed black hair slick as a record album, his sculpted, lightly browned skin, his black eyes, his unbelievably dough-like mouth, almost pliable. His hands waving around, his words filling the air. Me breathing all this in, regurgitating most of it back, so as to metaphorize into brilliance like his.

 

Occasionally I stole words, used what he said when I wrote. This seemed pleasing to him. I am certain that I have used some of his words here, or else they were mine but in the cycle of his producing and consuming and my reproducing them they were sucked into this. That’s what an intelligent woman understands.

 

We ordered cappuccino, or maybe it was some other coffee drink which has been designed cleverly away from labor and heat and broken backs. Disfigured beauty. Maybe it was cafe au lait. We were talking about some topic as if a cellular division had occurred, we carried the trace of a shared thing in our voices, or, we were simply copying each other. This doubling is quite ordinary, really, and also quite necessary for the growth of a woman’s intellect, but not her body, ironically. For example, when my lover speaks to me about performance I feel the urge to strike him, but instead I stroke some part of his flesh, touch him, skin on what appears to be kin, or more, mouth on the image of mouth, maybe we even make love eventually. My legs up against his shoulders, his hands kneading the swells of my body, the thrusting, the yielding, the necks straining, all the curves in flux and pulsing as in a race or contest. At any rate, he speaks and I am touched by our inability to be one another, a moment of pure violence which is what I take to be love. I would never say the things he is saying to me and I am glad, I am full and spilt over with our samelessness. I live for it. I run home to it at night, I ache to feel it inside me, I am sorry to slam the car door and hear the truncated difference severed by metal.

 

So I’m missing my lover even in the cafe because the echo of the car door slamming has worked like a palimpsest, I am making love after conversation and I am seeing the horror-vision, pulses pounding against thin epidermis, sweat producing itself, saliva collecting in the pockets of the mouth, heart begging amplification over voice, or blood surging inside veins and ears as if to say forget words all together–we said, of course, nothing of this. So it was that all I could feel in my mind as this ridiculously brilliant man spoke to me was the urge to fuck my lover, or worse, the urge to write it all down.

 

As has always been like truth to me, sex follows violent images words sounds scenes rather consistently. But within this clearest of desires, I mean, the fatal image of the horses and the unfiltered wanting, this repulsive, beautiful man was filling the space between us with duplications of his own persistent face, hands, eyes, thoughts. He was saying something about writing and mirrors, and I heard the word mirror, I swear to god I heard it, and I saw like the face in front of me what I saw in the moment after the horses: I saw the words, objects in mirror are closer than they appear, because of course my rear-view mirror was my only access to the past. The words, dead horses, shrinking and blurring into distance and light.

 

I don’t know what he said but I am certain that I was listening, that I nodded my head as he did, that I raised my hand toward my chin and rested my head there, which he followed, that I creased my brow either as his or preceding his brow creasing, that I responded with a pre-arranged face and body made up of all the writing he had told me to read and all the writing I was, and he repeated me, or I him, and then again the same whatever he said, I said. The word, conversation was an indivisible movement between us, the words, a series of cafe gestures endlessly repeated over the course of an hour. None of this noticed in the moment. But you would have, had you been there, you would have been struck by the two mimes. Two too sculpted heads, two pairs of shoes or watches or colognes which carried prices over and above the salaries of those serving, those subjects of literature and art and what to do about them. His white shirt and his black echoed in my black blazer and white chemise, in my cornea, in the typed words on the menus, in the condiments, everything following everything else as if one thing were the other. We were talking about writing and writing made us in its own image. Poor black and white copies mimicking every word they’d ever felt in their lives. Somewhere in the very back of my mind I was thinking of something I wanted to write down when I got home.

 

Once in an argument my lover asked me why I always wrote about sex, was I a fucking whore or something. He had unwritten permission to speak to me this way because of love. Anyway, in the instant before I answered I saw a ticker-tape answer jerking in front of my eyes like a waking dream that said, yeah, I am, and all the language I had been learning for the last twenty-eight years flew out of my brain and a new language blew out: Sex is death. Sex is life. Sex is oxygen. Sex is poison. Sex is prison. Sex is gism on your lip. Sex is in someone's ass, cunt, mouth, any hole you can get into and come. Sex is a silver blade slicing open your worst fear you paranoid fuck like maybe a deep gash across your cock or scrotum or from your balls to your rectum which is the same as your dumb little need to be in control, to be on top of things. Sex is you hitting me with your stupid little question and me getting a black eye and telling all your friends. What would you say it is? I'll try not to laugh. After you have answered, why don't you explain it to me because I can be a very good listener what you think sex should be for me too. Then everything will be clear and hunky-dorey like spam. O.K.? And then of course I snapped out of it and realized that all that was a little excessive an answer to the small innocence of a question asked out of jealousy and anger. So all I said was, actually, I have yet to write about real sex and yes, I was once a prostitute as an effect of my first marriage. By the way, I love you out of my mind.

 

Beautiful–we say that word over and over again between us in the cafe over the white tablecloth stretched like a stage between us, sometimes for or to literature and art, or to ourselves, or to the deserts we have ordered which are red and oozing some thick sweet liquid and also in flames, set on fire and brought to our table as the impossible delicious combination of life and death that they are. The beautiful desert, we salivate and anticipation drips our faces. The unexpected, the tortured but silent red and swollen forms being burned alive, just plain old strawberry flambe. The beautiful desert, the beautiful poem, the beautiful lover, his beautiful hands or skin, your own beauty, even the waiter’s blue black skin and the way he slides across the black and white checkered floor, effortlessly (having been trained and paid in small medium wage increments to do so), and most of all the way the waiter says cahn ah get you anythin ils, trinidadian or something like that, the white and the black in a decade where everyone is supposed to be enlightened, all are beautiful. Everything and one and word is reflected in every other thing and one and word. The cacophony of words too loud, and I am able to think to myself, most likely because of the tear the dead horses have made, I am able to articulate in my mind’s eye that this is work. Work is making the unbearable beautiful. Work is the repetition of this man’s words and clothes and hair and eyes and smell and writing exactly on top of me, and I am up and through everything he is, whether or not my hating him enters the picture or not, and all this makes perfect sense to me.

 

If I have not learned how to become this man fully it is only because the dead horses and moments like that have always interrupted the Xeroxing. Strange saviors. If I become him, I will be in his image, I will be the black words on the white page, I will be the black skin of the waiter and the white tiles and napkins, the teeth, the tablecloth, I will be reflexive with anything I see. Beautiful.

 

The meeting thus far begins to seem successful to me because I have realized quite by chance even in the midst of the transfusion that what I want is power, the power of work, of writing, of him. I was the star all along and only pretending to be the underdog. But what I want to do when I get there is attack from the inside out, be the maggot eating the dead thing, turning rot into alive. I also realize that the reason I hate him is that I am not actually him yet and this comforts me. He keeps trying to convince me that he has desire for me but I don’t want him I want to be him and then kill him and let all the waiters and horses and women talking to themselves into the tower for a big party. I look into the waiter’s eyes longingly, I know I could love him.

 

And then I’m looking down into my dark brown liquid and of course it’s the horses again, that is the way an intelligent woman’s mind works, did they suffer, was the death instantaneous, what speed were they traveling at, perhaps seventy, like us, what shock does a horse feel, does it, as a very brilliant man once explained to me, lose its horse soul and what if there exists no shaman, no magic to retrieve it? Is horse shock the convulsion that it is to us, do their minds spasm as their bodies realize impossibility, what are “dead horses?” I am immediately sad and tragic inside and I want my lover inside this cavity, this literal chasm where verisimilitude masquerades. I want his man echo. I am writing a journal entry.

 

I want to hear him reciting to me opposite and unknowable populations of painful difference and people who will remain separate no matter what I do not want to write stories right over their bodies or learn their languages or interpret their art I will not, cannot be them, have them, never ever. I want resistance to win so we can have love. I want my lover to read raw poems to me and not talk about them so that I can know what I am not, so that I can know what I’ve made too much like me, what we’ve made of and into ourselves. And he will, too. He is trustworthy that way. And we will be sucked up in each other’s eyes with the ecstasy of two people who cannot be one another, and our bodies will lunge and devour one another, the words of our love will happen in bursts of semen and wet sticky and spilt estrangement. We will have arrived out of time. I want my lover to read poems to me about the dead and the native and the animal and the criminal and the insane and the violent and the unjust so I can feel.

 

I swirl my espresso around in the too fragile cup and the man who is teaching me asks me a question. Did I forget he was there for a moment? It is quite possible, though he would not believe it, the dead horse flashbacks are indistinguishable in time. Can I give you a lift somewhere I think is what he said. I can’t be certain that he said this, but I am certain that we left money behind and that I rode in his car. I must have asked for a ride to the library because that is where he began to take me. You must see it, magnified to cinematic proportions, being in a car again with a man, the shape of the windshield shaping vision, or the square frame of the window sectioning off sections of what I could see, one of us driving, one of us a passenger, our moving, our dumb static presence contained inside motion and time, 25 MPH, 30 MPH, 45 MPH until I finally came out with it, said the words which turned the wheels in the direction of the carnage even though I had described very little of what I had actually seen. He followed my words with his hands on the steering wheel and his foot on the pedal and his eyes on the road. He followed me because he too is a writer and he remembers that one cannot look away from an accident. Or perhaps it remembers him. We are all helpless that way.

 

As that movement, that illogical car movement toward something as if something would be there when you arrive, as that movement carried us the whole cafe conversation finally dawned on me. The further the car mindlessly traveled, like a recording or like vomiting up the previous night the sentences came:

 

death is the beautiful site or scene of beauty's most powerful moment, death marks its passing, beauty is death and death beautiful, death is the sublime, a paradigm case for the experience of the sublime, the ground itself undoing itself, we are both before and after death always, his love is so powerful it kills her, her death, beauty, even the angles are envious, the poem, his love, his life are produced by death, after all, could this love or beauty happen without death?

 

Who was speaking?

 

What happens in returning? What desires drive us and what place do we expect to arrive at? And who are these characters in our minds, A and B, interchangeable, and how is it that A says to B we have no time like the present? Why do we ever bother to write about irony?

 

For minutes or hours we drove up and down a one mile stretch of road. At some point what we could see was nothing, darkness or night. The more we could not find the horses the more anxious I became, my body again murmured the same utterances, writing itself, pulse, adrenaline. I knew where they had been but because the place was empty, or because sameness and difference were bleeding in my ears, I believed that I had forgotten. We drove back and forth so that I became hysterical, and he kept suggesting his apartment, how he wanted to see me naked, and I was even more hysterical, and he suddenly said you are becoming hysterical.

 

Each time I looked over at him I was nauseated by his sheer brilliance, his black pant legs on his seat and my black pant legs on mine, his two eyes looking into my two eyes and mine into his, his window and door parodying the window and door on my side. I felt I could strike him. I demanded that he pull the car over at the place where I knew dead horse had wounded the world. We were pulling over. He was asking how I knew this was the place. I got out of the car and slammed the door. He got out of the car like an echo. See the gravel I said, don’t you see where the gravel reveals two bodies were here? I don’t see he said. It just looks like gravel he said. We said the word gravel between us three times. We didn’t have raincoats. It was quite dark. I dropped to my knees. He was very frustrated, he dropped down beside me and said this is ridiculous, there is nothing here. Obviously they have removed them he said. I spread my hands out across the gravel and now mud and moved them around. Oh Jesus he said. Finally some words heaved up from my belly, up from my hands on the gravel and through my palms against the grain of the road, against rocks and cement, after awhile of course the flesh tore, my hands becoming raw and my blood mixing with jagged edged real road made by men. So too my knees came conscious because of the faint pain coming through the weight of me bearing down on them, the gravel puncturing flesh as gravel does. There is a difference between being thrown down onto gravel and the will of slamming and scraping one’s hands again and again on the road for no reason except that reasonability doesn’t make any sense to a crouched figure on the side of the road, bleeding, wiping her face with her sliced hands, crying, the cuts, the red, the dark, the moans. The throwing one’s body out onto the road in front of speeding cars. The man grabbing at you and pressing himself down on top of you through his own uncontained excitement. The vomit. The urine. The come, the blood, the shit. Performance.

 

I can hear them hear the mutating whinnies of two surprised beasts thrown for an instant into air hear the extraordinary thud of their bulk falling from their man-made trailer to gravel and asphalt can't you hear them can't you smell the shit and piss and spilt blood and heat I can see them each of them as well as both of them together can't you see them ripped open can't you let go of me can't you see them see me is this what it takes how far into my flesh until the anger is in focus not fictionally justafiable just in focus and why can't we just leave it at that that I am a reproduction I am reproducing I am anger and repetition and I am learning to live with it

 

Cars passing would have seen this in the path of their headlights: two crouched over black and white figures on the road’s shoulder, very much the same, making little if any sense, as if searching for something together, wreckage upon wreckage. Although, you might not make that last observation, having only seen a flash of the two huddled black shapes in your white headlights. I had no choice. People are dying all over the world and we are writing their stories. I clawed at his face until I was blind and unconscious. I have dreams of a bloody face, of the impossibility of human expression.

 

I am in the hammock on the back porch. It has been unseasonably warm. I have a deep tan, I am brown all over except for where the bandages were. My hands hold tiny white scars. For a time I couldn’t make love: the scabs on my knees reopened every time I bent them, as if the joint itself had changed somehow, as if I was meant to stand. My lover has been reading poems to me. Soon my hands will be healed. The other man has written an essay on memory and pain. My lover is writing a Performance piece concerning the mutilation of flesh. As I remember this, there is massacre in Eastern Europe. As I picture these phrases, the Gaza Strip is bleeding between peoples. My hands are white and smally textured. They repeat themselves uselessly.

 

The Lover’s Poem

 

Some bodies stay put
others 
release themselves
like air
like light
over the incomprehensible world
over the 
small human cities
over the dumb world.

Some bodies leak radiance,
letting you 
think love will wash over you,
letting you think the night will not penetrate
the 
room of thick sweet.

But some bodies are just dead,
deadening silences dead of 
the dead
Deathly afraid of the beauty of death
Beautiful as a death laid bare 
like a body before you.

These are love,
these are what we long for.

 

Michael Evans

mrevans@delphi.com

 

The Behavior of Bodies, the Motion of Clocks

 

An orbit is a way of keeping time--
                                        not a metaphor
for life
         together with another life--a body and a body
at odds with the room's linear constraints.

(The room itself is not a metaphor
                                                   for how we live.)

The bed does not unfold like two hands
--one circling
                         the other
and transparent--
as if loneliness (the beating silence of these days
         he lives without speaking) were enough

to suggest that time and distance are measured
with the same equation.
                            At night, he sets the clock
to an hour
             that already exists
                                      (thinly, as light)

beyond the orbits he understands--
                               the comings and goings
of doctors, this routine of pills.
He listens
to the elliptical path
                                     of his breathing
and he knows the universe will not collapse
in time to save his youth

(for yourself, sir, shall grow old as I am,

if like a crab you could go backward).

He dreams himself a young man,
                                       but wakes to nothing
less than he is.
He is not allowed a mirror and does not look

at his hands. Breathing, he counts
himself to sleep.
    Were he a crab, he would give up this shell.

 

The Love Songs of Leonardo da Vinci

 

1 Between the Eye and the Object Seen There is another kind of perspective which, by the atmosphere, in a single line of the same size, is able to distinguish the remotest (as a couple) and represent them in a picture –between my eye and them– more than another and a somewhat equal– them and the same density of them and in a single line make them appear and almost of the same as the atmosphere. There is a perspective which the atmosphere attracts to them– their images exist– and not their forms merely. There is a kindness between them able to make the nearest above and of its same color, the more distant bluer. Between the single line of them, between the eye and moon of them– without suffering– they are the same. Among them, a rose does the same and other perfumes. 2 Spechio In the mirror of the room, these two (their bodies) stand among the others, apart– in the light from a single window, they are the same (equal and almost) –if each should notice the other (their shadows opposite the window) in the mirror above the sofa– should see (as if distance is abbreviation) the other at an angle that is the angle of the body– if each should touch the glass to touch the other, isn’t it the other who will understand this distance between them?– (the other reaching out to touch) the eye of the other (in the mirror) will see him (his finger on the glass) touching his own. 3 On the Cause of Generation No part of the body is always the same. The shadow of the other and of the self like two hands in front of a candle– which one is twice as dark? Which one moved across the body moves more slowly? I will not breathe within the light leaking through the curtain and the reflection of the moon. There is proportion to the breadth of shadow–the nearer, the deeper it appears (as light, only opposite). But if direct, how long before the eye sees at a distance another shadow move the body such that light is of an equal size? At that moment, stars take on the shape of stars and the angle of the skin is impossible to compass. It’s the calculus of living that we need. Touch me. Touch the surface of these bodies placed next to each other– the same and nearly opposite. Come in and mingle with them.

 

James Boros

jboros@ravenpress.com

 

In memory of Kurdt Cobain

 

(1) Apocalypse Then

 
It ended in an open shaftway, following LBJ’s example. By designating cauldron 19 as their sauce, mirages (against no odds) vented mighty grams of plenty, and cast visceral tracking smoke in henceforth unforeseen celebrations of danger. Without too much grinding, her inappropriate spasm posed as a lofty cur: negation would only disprove gaiety in instances not involving firecrackers declared insipid by consensual bigotry. Having agonized under lack of stress, the rambunctious turnip sought deadeni ng solids as a means of obtaining “gaslight marginality” amidst dining vocations of porn. Besides, where in Charlie’s hell is there room for another afghan recorder?

 

They didn’t intend to exclude any (or all) whirlpools, yet commuted out toward superior concomitance as stipulated by the father-in-law-to-be. After choking on phosphorescence, everything seemed easy! But, tagging along in front of her, Olive Branch swor e enmity . . . before being drugged by collared stoolies in layered Indonesian target gear. It took all our strength, and less, to meditate on daisies with their plasma turned inside out until ecumenical cowards could line the streets with surgery.

 

Plasticity was not one of his least appealing codices; despite eternity, certain amounts of clout swam through, only to find a shortage of beckoning gas bags at their perfectly tuned birthright calamity function. Nodal ‘tater within reach (and gravit y well below norm), it sprung out of action at a pace which would certainly not make a vagrant tough wince twice. Automotive vengeance, at least!

 

“I am no longer a fatality.” However, as common scents voraciously take dictation, enzyme plagiarism casts the entire apparatus in an elderly light, at least, that is, if “that damned beveller” cheats us out of native opportunities. Eagles did not count: Friday’s children sped toward fate’s waiting mint as if watchmakers were only milling around by the dozen. Caulk? Aggravate us, and find your true butler.

 

This grieving advertisement put ’em in a vault with lather and resin, and prayed for the delivery of wounds. Would non-systematic complaining prove fruity (or does vinegar bury its weeds)? She tried for the fourth level, but failed to chasten elabo rate pins and needless violence . . . or so they did not think. With a spoke-like jerk, truculent adjectives bogged down in a grimey land war with outlandish paper goods, and delivered kitties’ pauses to the breeze. We sang–and read comfortable pylons- -before drifting off with choice albino zebras, nameless olympic runts with heads like extinguished candle wax.

 

. . . On and on, reeling in daft plaque via assorted remora directionality . . . . Semblances, forked like brazen espresso wallflowers, logged furiously against the wishes of “kelp,” delegating crap to wealthy bunglers whose pouches struck Mickey as naked. Without releasing her grasp, she slept like a doll, and edited flatware stalks in glowing rapture as fishermen slapped sewage with crazy apoplexy. It was as if . . .

 

(2) Spokane Joe

 

Traditions upheld with a pang, we jogged into sunbeams laden with molten beef, and skimmed the celebrants’ Tuscany while dimming flaps destined to be lamp-lit in a superficial vein. Prognoses adhered to rougher points (like sawteeth) despite their h aving been abused in deep water. Without the benefit of “coffee nerves,” switchboards lit up for dour grapplings betwixt elegant sphincters of prostration; when they reached the podium, Bess collapsed with our famous “mmmmmmm” sound. The first and final straw is that old donkey’s reluctance, enough to make any child cry out for shears.

 

Upon crossing the lumbar nerve, it noted several uranium holster supplements making faces at crossfire emitted from one of the New England states. Her dance resembled that of a thumbprint, water-logged janitors aside. (But couldn’t this money welde r deliver electricity outside of the allotted time?) It was Pele’s turn: without so much as a spitting tundra file, massive media churned bread into wafer-thin rafters, leaving us holding the balloon (and its constituency).

 

Television sags waywardly as tugboats get a grip on varnished chalices: this much we know. Requests for itty-bitty steam lowered the issue of unwritten swordplay within cloaked banjo sex abbreviations, and the phalanx swung (mercifully) in another d irection. One more planet: will the contest begin?

 

. . . Had somehow managed to lose its jugular! Like fine wine, scalloped fabric-suckers wagged motorcyclical dumbfoundedness in suggestive napkin agendas christened at the time of Lou’s passing. (Believe it!) A cordial was passed from lip to breast–an d back again–throughout the following daytime, all of which didn’t lead him to wring: “Could gore, bladder bug that it is, send ripples across a translucency hound composed of elemental pragmatics, bracing epidermal survivors?” And on the cross, that ca ve-dweller, in a sort of gin-rummy trance, lit the first cracker of the session. It’s comin’ out of the hovel, fast!

 

Sassy and brained, she elbowed her wagon train into a fulcrum fire left behind by verticality gone wayward, and saw to it that end table #88 registered at the previous nebula. “Goodness!” Without bravura, and with a bold, medical wavering, our awni ng killed off the worm handler, seeing asylum (for the umpteenth time) as a jiggling puff of glandular boasting. Because of chutzpah . . .

 

Their elliptical sense of ignorance proved fatal to straw women (for example, NUDGE CEREMONY SCHEDULER PAN). Simplicity’s argonaut selected six of the most bruised erasures, forcing limbo to pulsate with embraceable ruddiness in spite of applause di rected at the Nepalese border. Shunting in a display of granular body-building, and bringing out a budgie with eyes like leptons, expositional tracking patellas sounded the heights of razor, primed elegance with jocular binges, and dragged polarity about by its sweaty atmosphere. Things had never been so good.

 

(3) Long And Dusty Blow-hole

 

There was a glob of nymphomania attached to version 0! We wrought ironic fat cells around context-bent westerlies begrudged to one poor, hollow actuarial knight (after jazz depicted Bozo clocking molecular drips with a jigsaw). The picayune inertia so often associated with wobbly plowshares stood between middle-wing smilers and their raving shorelines; ask not what time cannot do for you, but then again, why?

 

“Kind of false hairline”: connotes temporal gist apparatuses capable of withholding dregs as they blossom forth and back within a minute crevice perturbed by nautilus recession. A cheesy enterprise, fraught with rogue wattage (henceforth “marmot whi z hullabaloo”), and probed willingly by tensile demeanor, landed flat on its batch of troubling documentaries (after we glimpsed thirty-eight softies propping up unborn winches with, of all things, messages from Saint Hoofbeat). If re-routing formerly gr eeted cylinders evoked glistening alarm, they would simply extract wiggly einsteinium after counting aqua vitae as one o’ the boyz.

 

Phenomenal! Blathering pastiness was responsible for only 27% of xylem lossage, seeing as how everybody clapped like beetle sycophants while the remaining ingot lost gravity in a wilderness to the left of etiolated plane musculature. Cleft in stogi es (bottomed-out speed demonstrators), or parted down the middle (exasperating la-la-land butt), the very fabric of space and/or tiger ankle came forth to be massaged by trench coats laundered in photon brine by dry-mouthed Caucasians. Choices: (945) “Op aqueness delivers”; (11) “Lubricant repletion without sandy booklet”; (2006c) “Memorial explosion truss.”

 

After a quick seizure, we drilled for newsprint, and attached a wire to symbols of age-old hemorrhage leaps. One should not, however, assume that her Christ-like scissor hold pored over both the cape and intricate powder rhythms quacked out h alf-assedly by tours through attic fan wavelengths.

 

Without his ukulele, he was like a god, roaming the width of major network tummy-prose, glaring at polar strip joints with nauseating relief. . . . But, despite baseline twitch-amplifier deaths by the dozens of hundreds, it was not enough to knock th e wind into vegetation. Finally, with a warning, they converted to larger sizes, none of which looked like rotund/chalky mammoth residue. (See illustrations in all three telephony starch smolderings, esp. “neglected suitor: magneto.”) OPTIONS STILL AVA ILABLE.

 

July’s wallpaper left no doubt as to the melody of buried cynicism. Hadn’t there been a choco-lobbyist in that corner? It wasn’t uncouth, but there were brimstones placed metaphorically along the garden airbus . . . what comes up must . . . goes around and down!

 

“Her majesty” was unable to comply without backing into a hedge, all the while shining well-endowed ash quarters pocked with fashion. Acid reindeer grovelled naughtily regardless of asteroids from Pope, the binging hypochondriac, and his half-witted cardiac mime. Our strength lies deep below this manifold juggler: chowder, regaining stolid spark-nipples as it directed a fierce tai-chi emergency, bowled a 2 and bowed out shrugging.

 

Charles Bernstein

Dept. of English
S.U.N.Y. Buffalo
bernstei@ubvms.cc.buffalo.edu

 

• Soapy Water

• Claire-in-the-Building

• Mao Tse Tung Wore Khakis

 

Audio clips here are in the .au format and were originally recorded at a reading by the author in Charlottesville, Virginia (September, 1994). Thanks to Pete Yadlowsky and HACK for conversion from analog to digital form. More digital audio poetry is available here. A sound-player for AIX 3.25 is available here. For Mac users, an .aiff version is available here; for PC-Windows users, a .wav version is available here

 

Soapy Water

 

From The Absent Father in Dumbo(Tenerife: Zasterle Press, 1991 — out of print).

audio clip [.95 MB]

 

 

You’ve got to be patient sometimes–sounds like an
anaesthetic, I’ll be the doctor–but jump up
into the next available hoop–Nick calling
“Where are my galleys” they can’t be lost
in the mail because they went Federal Express.
But something is always not there & if it’s
not apparent ingenuity (the mind’s perennial
ingenue) will think of it, rest enskewered.
These are the saltine days–salty & soggy. The
struts are finished, the shocks are leaking, &
like the man says, there’s always a simple solution–
simple & stupid. With the rug pulled out turns
out there was no floor. & float, flutteringly
behind or in bed with what salience has no
surety. The thing expressed–sounds like some sort of
pizza franchise, especially with the choices
now offered–broccoli, zucchini, Belgian sausage,
seven variety mushroom. No grade like the grade
that blew the gasket. Turns out to be
slop corridor, 7 days to shapelier nail filings,
was there sex before Catholicism?
It’s not as if an economy of loss is not in–
you can’t say circulation because it is kind
of anticirculation: all this nervous
energy dissipates production & erodes accumulation–
so you don’t have to get so dramatic, talk
about death & sex, or so moral, talk about idled
hours–all that you ever need to lose is wasting away in
anxiety’s natural spring geysers. So let’s
bury that knife, & in the morning we can
eat meat again.

 

Claire-in-the-Building

audio clip [2 MB]

 

There is not a man alive who does not
admire soup. I felt that way myself
sometimes, in a manner that greatly
resembles a plug. Swerving when
there were no curbs, vying
nonchalantly against the slot-machine
logic of my temporary guardians,
dressed always in damp
patterns with inadequate pixelation
to allow for the elan she
protested she provoked on such
sleep-induced outings in partial
compliance with the work-release program
offered as an principled advance on
my prostate subjection to
tales altogether too astonishing to
submit to the usual mumbo
jumbo, you know, over easy,
eat and run, not too loud, no
bright floral patterns if
you expect to get a job in such
an incendiary application of
denouement. My word! Ellen,
did you understand one thing
Frank just said, I mean, the
nerve of these Protestants, or
whatever they call themselves
or I ain’t your mother’s
macaroni and cheese, please, no
ice. Is sand biodegradable?
Do you serve saws with your steak,
or are you too scared to claim
anything? No can’t do. “I
learned to read by watching
Wheel of Fortune when I was
a baby.” By the time I was 5
you couldn’t tell the slippers
from the geese. That’s right,
go another half mile up the cliff
and take a sharp left immediately
after where the ABSOLUTELY NO
TRESPASSING sign used to be,
you know, before the war.
Like the one about the chicken
crossed the street because he
wanted to see time fly or because
he missed the road or he didn’t
want to wake up the sleeping caplets.
A very mixed-up hen. “No, I can’t,
I never learned.” By the time
you get up it’s time to
go to sleep. Like the one about
the leaky boat and the sea’s
false bottoms. Veils that part to
darker veils. So that the fissure
twisted in the vortex. Certain she was
lurking just behind the facade,
ready to explain that the joke had been
misapplied or was it, forfeited?
Never again; & again, & again.
“Maybe he’s not a real person.”
Maybe it’s not a real purpose.
Maybe my slips are too much
like pratfalls (fat falls).
Maybe the lever is detached from the
mainspring. The billiard ball
burned against the slide
of the toaster (holster). That’s no
puzzle it’s my knife (slice, life,
pipe). The Rip that Ricochets around
the Rumor. As in two’s two too
many. “I thought you said haphazard–
but if you did you’re wrong.”
If you’ve got your concentration you’ve got
just about everything worth writing home
that tomorrow came sooner than expected
or put those keys away
unless you intend to use me and
then toss me aside like so much worn
out root beer, root for someone,
Bill, take a chance, give till it
stops hurtling through the fog or
fog substitute.

Save me

So that I can exist 

Lose me

So that I may find you

“That’s an extremely unripe plum.”
“There’s no plum like the plum
of concatenation.” Plunge & drift,
drift & plunge. The streets are
icy with incipience.

 

Mao Tse Tung Wore Khakis

audio clip [.4 MB]

 

Who would have thought Paul McCartney would be
the Perry Como of the 1990s?
The Thunderbirds gleam end-to-end-to-end
in the studio backlot. The lions
have left their lair and are roaming just by
the subconscious. PP-warning: Illegal
received field on preceding line.
Bethel/’94: I just don’t want any
hippies come in here and steal
my computer. In my experience
I often misspell words. Evidently
Bob Dylan missed the exit and ended
up in Saugerties. You can sell some of
the people most of the time, but you can’t

 

John Walker

University of Toronto
jwalker@epas.toronto.ca

From the idea that the self is not given to us, I think that there is only one practical consequence–we have to create ourselves as a work of art.

 

-Michel Foucault

Introduction/Apologia

 

The 1990s have to this point occasioned a new space, a new opportunity for those who are still interested to (re)read the works of French critic/philosopher Michel Foucault. James Miller’s The Passion of Michel Foucault, for instance, a meticulously researched and well considered book, calls into question North American “Foucauldian” scholarship, which he feels

 

enshrined Foucault as a . . . canonic figure whose authority (the authors) routinely invoked in order to legitimate their own brand of "progressive" politics. Most of these latter-day American Foucauldians . . . are committed to forging a more diverse society in which whites and people of colour, straights and gays, men and women . . . can . . . all live together in compassionate harmony--an appealing if difficult goal, with deep roots in the Judeo-Christian tradition. (384)

 

Miller finds Foucault’s “progressive” followers to be victims of their own misreadings, willful or otherwise, of a thinker whose transfigurative radicality stretches far beyond “accepted” limits. “Unless I am badly mistaken” Miller writes, “Foucault issued a brave and basic challenge to nearly everything that passes for “right” in Western culture–including everything that passes for “right” among a great many of America’s left-wing academics” (384).

 

Even more controversial on this issue than Miller is Camille Paglia, whose Sexual Personae has of late caused such a stir in academic circles. In her earlier provocative essay, “Junk Bonds and Corporate Raiders: Academe in the Hour of the Wolf,” a lengthy and often hilarious skewering of postmodern scholarship’s excesses, David Halperin becomes the unlucky symbol of all that has gone wrong (in Paglia’s view) with North American academia. Halperin’s One Hundred Years of Homosexuality is here lampooned as the soppiest sort of politically correct, liberal-humanist scholarship, with actual knowledge and research taking a back seat to the recitation of currently fashionable dogma concerning the fate of the marginalized and disempowered in Western society.

 

Who is ulimately culpable, in Paglia’s eyes, for the sloppy scholarship of Halperin and others like him? None other than Michel Foucault.

 

Paglia dismisses Halperin as a mere Foucault acolyte, one of those “well-meaning but foggy humanists who virtually never have the intellectual and scholarly preparation to critique Foucault competently,” but who instead merely rehash the “Big Daddy’s” own shaky (in her opinion) arguments in a quest for personal legitimacy (“Junk” 174). Supporting Paglia’s depiction of Halperin as a self-appointed defender of the Foucauldian faith is his own somewhat petulant criticism of Miller’s book recently published in Salmagundi.¹

 

At first glance, then, it appears that nothing could be more diametrically opposed than the views of Paglia and Foucault: Paglia goes to great lengths to legitimate such a notion, and her most vocal critics often fit snugly (smugly?) into the “American Foucauldian” category delineated by Miller, creating the impression of a sort of binary split between the two camps.

 

What I have found, however, upon a close reading of key texts by both authors, is the reversal of this idea, a collapsing of the supposed space between the two. My “positive” Paglian reading of Foucault will suggest that, contrary to what Paglia herself has said, Michel Foucault’s work and life are the epitome of the aesthetic propounded in Sexual Personae, an aesthetic which finds its culmination in dandyism: rather than opponents, they are actually comrades in transgression and decadence, fighting what is forever fated to be a losing battle “against nature.”

 

The Problem with Power

 

“The soul is the prison of the body” (Discipline 29). It was with this famous line from his critically lauded 1975 opus Discipline and Punish that Michel Foucault solidified his fame among post-Woodstock Rousseauian academics in North America. Rousseau’s theory, as enunciated in The Social Contract and other works, that the human subject was basically an innocent victim of corrupt societal forces, seemed, at least, to dovetail neatly with Foucault’s expressed view that, contrary to Christian theology, what was thought of as the human soul was not something “born in sin and subject to punishment” but was rather a phantom imposed from without by “methods of punishment, supervision, and constraint” and thus a key factor “in the mastery that power exercises over the body,” or “bio-power” (29).

 

In the Rousseauian/hippie slang of post-1960s radicals, “getting back to the garden” meant isolating and removing these power operations so that the human subject could live in a democratic, mutually caring, “natural” state of equanimity and bliss. “Power” thus became a catch-all phrase for converted Foucauldians, begetting seemingly endless studies isolating the fate of its “victims” within the patriarchal confines of WASP history and literature. Or as Paglia puts it, for Foucault and his supposed coterie of social constructionists, “power becomes a ‘squishy pink-marshmallow word’ which ‘caroms around picking up lint and dog hair’ but ultimately leads nowhere” (“Junk” 225). Paglia’s expression of disdain for utopian liberal theories (she calls Sexual Personae “a book written against humanism” [“Cancelled” 106]) is hardly surprising, coming from an unabashed fan of Nietzsche and Sade. Yet the alignment of Foucault, who claims the same influences, with such theories is quite problematic.

 

Take, for instance, Foucault’s derisory comments on humanism during an interview in 1971: “In short, humanism is everything in Western civilization that restricts the desire for power: it prohibits the desire for power and excludes the possibility of power being seized” (“Revolutionary” 221-2). Humanism is for Foucault “antiquated,” an “insipid psychology” whose emphasis on the benign goodness of the originary subject constitutes a trap, fixing the individual within a binary good/evil framework which guarantees nothing but continued subjection (Miller 172). In the interview, he goes on to advocate the liberation of the subject’s will-to-power through “desubjectification,” or limit-experience brought about through both political and cultural means, including:

 

the suppression of taboos and the limitations and divisions imposed upon the sexes . . . the loosening of inhibitions with regard to drugs; the breaking of all the prohibitions which form and guide the development of a normal individual. I am referring to all those experiences which have been rejected by our civilization or which it only accepts in literature. ("Revolutionary" 222; emphasis mine).

 

This is Foucault’s invocation of the realm identified by Nietzsche as the “Dionysian,” which for humanists may conjure up visions of a pastoral utopia, but, for both Foucault and Paglia, evokes something far more dangerous indeed. “The Dionysian,” as Paglia says, “is no picnic” (“Sexual” 7).

 

Nietzsche, Apollo, Dionysus

 

Any “positive” co-reading of Foucault and Paglia must consider Nietzsche, a seminal figure in the (remarkably similar) formative genealogies of both critics. Nietzsche’s reformulation of the Greek myths of the gods Apollo and Dionysus is central to the thought of each. Beginning with The Birth of Tragedy, he organizes existence around two binary drives, the Apollonian and the Dionysian, “formative forces arising directly from nature” which are later depicted by the “human artist” (24). Apollo is for Nietzsche “the god of all plastic powers,” the “principium individuationis” who fixes the limits of self and culture through the illusion of form, an artificer (21-2). Dionysus, on the other hand, represents the entire chaotic realm of eternal motion and flux which form strives to control, obscure, and deny. Transgression into the Dionysian realm risks the disintegration of the individual subject (a state of “madness”) and its subsequent reintegration into the whole: “The mystical jubilation of Dionysus” states Nietzsche, “breaks the spell of individuation and opens a path to the maternal womb of being” (97).

 

The dichotomy which emerges from Greek culture and continues through the history of the West, then, is a nature/culture opposition: the Apollonian Socrates introduces the “illusion that thought . . . might plumb the farthest abysses of being and even correct it. . . . strong in the belief that nature can be fathomed” (93-4). Western art, as a mirror of the human psyche, becomes in part a record of this basic struggle and the differing responses to it in various epochs. In The Birth of Tragedy, at least, Nietzsche implies that both drives should unfold in a sort of perpetual cycle or spiral: “Only so much of the Dionysian substratum of the universe” he says, “may . . . be dealt with by that Apollonian transfiguration; so that these two prime agencies must develop in strict proportion, conformable to the laws of eternal justice” (145). Later, in response to what he perceives as an imbalance in Apollo’s favour originating with the Age of Reason, Nietzsche places greater emphasis on the Dionysian, equating it with the all-important will-to-power (Hollingdale 198-9).

 

Both Foucault and Paglia subscribe, with slight differences in emphasis, to this Nietzschean formula. Miller notes Foucault’s basic concurrence with Nietzsche’s binary thesis that “every human embodies a compound of nature and culture, chaos and order, instinct and reason . . . symbolized . . . by Dionysus and Apollo” (69). Almost all of Foucault’s work is concerned on some level with variations on this theme, the Apollonian drive variously taking the names “limit” (i.e., “Preface To Transgression”) and “power” (Discipline and Punish). The Apollonian, in contrast to the timeless, immanent realm of the Dionysian, is a historical force, embedded within our culture in a tangled network of conflicting paths “crisscrossed by intrinsic dangers” (“Space” 249). Characterized by the use of “reason” in the post-Enlightenment era, it actively de-limits the chaotic flux of the Dionysian and produces both society, on the macrocosmic level, and personality, or “the subject,” on the level of the individual. “I think,” says Foucault

 

that the central issue of philosophy and critical thought since the eighteenth century has always been, still is, and will, I hope remain the question: What is this Reason that we use? What are its historical effects? What are its limits, and its dangers?. . . . If it is extremely dangerous to say that Reason is the enemy that should be eliminated, it is just as dangerous to say that any critical questioning of this rationality risks sending us into irrationality. . . . if critical thought itself has a has a function . . . it is precisely to accept this sort of spiral, this sort of revolving door of rationality that refers us to its necessity . . . and at the same time, to its intrinsic dangers. ("Space" 249)

 

Within our current Western episteme (or historical period), one characterized by a post-Enlightenment faith in reason and concomitant loss of belief in God, Foucault locates sexual experience as the final borderline lying between Apollonian rationality and the Dionysian realm of the unknown. As we shall see, he valorizes those writers and philosophers whose lives and works reside at the “limit of madness–astride the line separating reason from unreason, balanced between the Dionysian and the Apollonian,” where it is possible to glean information beyond this binary split and then transmit its dissonant content to others (Miller 107). Miller goes so far as to state: “I take all of Foucault’s work to be an effort to issue a license for exploring . . . and also as a vehicle for expressing . . . this harrowing vision of a gnosis beyond good and evil, glimpsed at the limits of experience” (459). As we will see, however, Foucault, unlike Nietzsche, does not end in a full embrace of Dionysus, but instead comes to regard the manipulation of Apollo by the subject as key concept.

 

Camille Paglia devotes an entire chapter of Sexual Personae to the struggle between Apollo and Dionysus, and explicitly adds an archetypal sexual element to the equation which remains implicit in Nietzsche’s analysis (his comparison of the Dionysian to the “maternal womb” of nature being one example). For Paglia, on the symbolic level, the Apollonian is a masculine swerve away from “mother nature” (no idle cliche for her): the Western construction of identity, of culture, of artifice, emanates from man’s desire to repel the murky, “daemonic” liquidity from which he sprang and to which he must finally return. Paglia’s sexualization of Apollo and Dionysus provides an interesting angle from which to approach Foucault’s own theory and praxis of aesthetic transgression, or “Apollo Daemonized,” as she calls it (Sexual 489-511). This is an Apollonianism at the furthest threshold of extremity, one which runs the risk of a complete implosion back into the Dionysian–nature’s final revenge.

 

Breaking Down The Subject: The “Experience Book”

 

Foucault’s path to decadent enlightenment entails a double movement: first, the realization of what I will (somewhat ironically) call “true nature”–the chaos of Dionysus–and the resulting “desubjectification” or dissolution of the subject; secondly comes what Paglia calls the “daemonization of Apollo,” in which the subject seizes control of what Foucault calls the “author-function” and (re)creates itself as pure exteriority–an objet d’art.

 

For Foucault, “writing,” be it historical, philosophical or literary, in our modern era finds its value in radicality, in contesting the underlying assumptions of Western culture. The momentary dissociation of those lines which constitute and enclose the Western subject or personality is the aim of the “experience-book,” which attempts “through experience to reach that point of life which lies as close as possible to the impossibility of living, which lies at the limit or extreme” (Marx 31). Some of its key agents appear frequently throughout Foucault’s work: Nietzsche, Sade, Bataille. “It is this de-subjectifying undertaking, the idea of a ‘limit-experience’ that tears the subject from itself, which is the fundamental lesson I’ve learned from these authors” states Foucault, underscoring the centrality of this concept for his own work. (31-2).

 

In early essays such as “Preface to Transgression” and “Language To Infinity,” Foucault, like the poststructuralist version of Roland Barthes, luxuriates in the notion of a textual space composed of a self-referential language liberated from any grounds, exulting the primacy of the signifier, its groundless and irreducible plurality. Such texts, defined in The Order of Things as “heterotopias,” “dessicate speech, stop words in their tracks, contest the very possibility of grammar at its source” (xviii). The heterotopic text, then, is a text at the limits which consistently threatens to violate its ordered Apollonian boundaries. This happens, for instance, at the extremes of Bataille’s erotic prose where language “arrives at its confines, overleaps itself, explodes and radically challenges itself in laughter . . . at the limit of its void, speaking of itself in a second language in which the absence of a sovereign subject outlines its essential emptiness and incessantly fractures the unity of its discourse” (“Preface” 48).

 

Foucault’s heterotopic “experience-book” is an active agent, a work of “direct personal experience” (including the experience of writing) rather than a dry theoretical exercise (Marx 38). The end result of this experiential process is the knowledge that the “truth” of language and the life it represents is one of pure fictionality, exterior and irreducible to any singular, definable, and immanent reality (which is not the same thing as saying that this “reality” [nature–the Dionysian] doesn’t exist–a key point). Skittering across the surface of the world, the empty bodies of both language and humans create meaning through collision, through the persuasiveness of impact. The ‘experience-book’ thus works simultaneously as both theory and praxis: the author/subject becomes dissociated through the act of creating this heterotopic labyrinth, the result being subsequently transmitted to others as an “invitation . . . to slip into this kind of experience” (Marx 33, 36, 40; see also The Discourse On Language 215).

 

What we find, I believe, upon examination of some of Foucault’s key works, is that this “de-subjectifying” experience mirrors the processes of mystical schools such as Buddhism which pursue the breakdown of the ego through direct means such as meditation, resulting in the recognition that the material world and the ‘meanings’ we assume inhere within it (including the meaning of the “I,” the ego-self that operates within that world) are maya, or illusion. Foucault remarks in a 1978 interview that the whole problem of de-subjectification is directly related to the operations of “mysticism,” which he feels are analogous to his task of liberating a “kind of glimmering,” an “essence,” through the workings of the experience-book (Miller 305). Miller notes that, when confronted by an audience of bewildered American post-structuralists regarding this realm of “occult”–or literally, “unknown”–essence (surely a sin of the greatest magnitude in their eyes!), Foucault “had trouble specifying” just what he meant, but also refused to back down (305). Yet those so troubled by the philosopher’s stance here only betray their ignorance of his work. Gilles Deleuze, who as Paul Bove points out, “associates Foucault with some prophetic visionary capacity” (“Foreword” xxxii), points out that the nature/culture, rational/irrational, Apollo/Dionysus spiral “from the beginning (was) one of Foucault’s fundamental theses.” For Foucault, he says, there exists a binary split between the ultimately indecipherable forms of “visible” content (nature) and forms of articulable expression (language), “although they continually overlap and spill into one another in order to form each new stratum of form of knowledge” (Deleuze 61, 70).

 

The strategic avoidance of certain key terms or organizing concepts (such as Apollo and Dionysus, or the language of Eastern mysticism) is, it seems, a central feature of French post-structuralism, obscuring any underlying notions of system and totalization, concepts which the school as a (very loose) whole ostensibly rejects. It also reveals an anxiety of influence, a burning desire to appear wholly original and “difficult” at all times. This in part explains the supposed “gulf” dividing Foucault and Paglia.

 

Paglia prides herself on verbal directness. Far less obliquely than Foucault, for instance, she places the aforementioned binaries within a mystical framework, correctly pointing out that much of the deconstructive method has previously been “massively and coherently presented . . . in Hinduism and Buddhism” (“Junk” 214). In the religions of the East, she says, “the unenlightened mind sees things in terms of form, but the enlightened mind sees the Void . . . cf. the Apollonian versus Dionysian dichotomy in the West” (“East” 151). Paglia makes connections; Foucault, whose entire premise, as Hayden White points out, is rhetorical (114), obscures them: “Who ever thought he was writing anything but fiction?” Foucault asks (Marx 33). This is why some liberal humanist academics are able to embrace Foucault: they are misled by his deliberate evasiveness. His distaste for the term “nature” (human or otherwise), especially, leads them to believe that he sees life shaped only by an external power which (de)forms pristine, innocent subjects into tattered, deformed victims of power, a totalized Apollonian universe. Paglia, accepting this misreading as accurate, ends up mistakenly pummeling a potential ally.

 

De-Structuralism: Discovering “True Nature”

 

In reading Foucault, it is central to differentiate between concept of the unified subject, the self as an Apollonian construct, and a human nature which, in contrast, is revealed to be part of that limitless realm of form-less essence (or “void”) which precedes and follows the material world of bodies (in Eastern mysticism, this essence is called Atman, and the larger realm, Brahman). As he points out in his touchstone essay “Nietzsche, Genealogy, History,” it is the task of the “genealogical historian” to scramble received notions of a “true” self at the base, of a “nature” or “soul” which “pretends unification or . . . fabricates a coherent identity” (81). Through the movements of the experience-book, this “natural self” is revealed not to be a unified, coherent whole, but instead a Dionysian conundrum, a tangled subjectivity; not “a possession that grows and solidifies, (but) . . . an unstable assemblage of faults, fissures, and heterogeneous layers that threaten the fragile inheritor from within and underneath” (82). The body, as “the locus of this dissociated self” and thus inseparable from it, is thus revealed to be “a volume in perpetual disintegration” (83).

 

Paglia’s view of nature basically coincides with Foucault’s. True nature, or the “chthonian,” is at base is nothing benign, but rather a “grueling erosion of natural force, flecking, dilapidating, grinding down, reducing all matter to fluid, the thick primal soup from which new forces bob, gasping for life” (Sexual 30). This residue from which humanity springs poses a constant threat for a people who confuse societally constructed identities, or personae, constructed in defence, with Dionysian human “nature”: “We speak of falling apart, having a breakdown . . . getting it all together” Paglia says. “Only in the West is there such conviction of the Apollonian unity of personality. . . . But I say that there is neither person, thought, thing, nor art in the brutal chthonian” (104, 73)

 

Foucault agrees: this search for “the image of a primordial truth fully adequate to its nature” is burst asunder by the genealogist’s revelation that nature contains not “a timeless and essential secret, but the secret that (things) have no essence, or that their essence was fabricated . . . from alien forms” (78). For both Foucault and Paglia, it is this act of fabrication (the “ordering” process which becomes a Foucauldian buzzword: The Order of Things; “The Order of Discourse”) issuing forth not in an isomorphic relation, but in the line of defense and control versus the unknowable, which informs our problematic Western rationalism.

 

True nature, or Dionysian reality, is thus identified as the “non-place” of mutation, where rules are formed, transgressed, and re-formed. Embracing the language of Eastern mysticism, Paglia notes that ultimate reality is “the space that holds all that happens. . . . sunyata, voidness” (“East” 151). This “void” then, ultimately has no discernible connection to events occurring within it, and its eruptions into the Apollonian sphere are always revolutionary: “Suddenly, things are no longer perceived or propositions articulated in the same way” (Deleuze 85). As a result, “only a single drama is ever staged in this ‘non-place’: the endlessly repeated play of dominations” which strive to arrest its flux, becoming “fixed, throughout its history, in rituals, in meticulous procedures that impose rights and obligations . . . and gives rise to the universe of rules” (“Genealogy” 85).

 

It is, then, not a question of metaphysics, of uncovering something eternal and true underlying any given set of rules, for true nature can never be deciphered. The philosophy of Nietzsche, the writings of Sade and Bataille, and Foucault’s own genealogical histories thus expose the structures of “civilized” life (including language) as fictions whose successive “interpretations” fix its limits in “the violent or surreptitious appropriation of a system of rules, which . . . (have) no essential meaning” (“Nietzsche” 86). As Paglia explains, this Apollonian power-play is paradoxical: rules and order have proven to be humanity’s greatest defense against the void, serving as the basis for religion, ritual, and art; however, contrary to current politically correct, liberal-humanist thinking, all of these modes, including art, are in no way exempt from the amorality and cruelty inherent in the application of the arbitrary and empty “rules” which are its basis. “Art,” she says,

 

is a ritualistic binding of the perpetual motion machine that is nature. . . . Art is order. But order is not necessarily just, kind or beautiful. Order may be arbitrary, harsh, and cruel. Art has nothing to do with morality. . . . Before the Enlightenment, religious art was hieratic and ceremonial. After the Enlightenment, art had to create its own world, in which a new ritual of artistic formalism replaced religious universals. . . . The artist makes art not to save humankind, but to save himself. (Sexual 29)

 

The artist, as a creator of worlds whose laws are self-contained, is thus necessarily engaged in transgression: freeing the subject(ed) through the dispersal of inherited, stultifying rules, s/he must formulate the world anew, impose a new interpretation, a counter-discourse. Rather than deconstruction, I would label this spiral de-structuralism, a movement encompassing both structure and its antithesis.

 

Astride The Line: Sade

 

For both Foucault and Paglia, the Marquis De Sade’s work initiates the de-structuralist spiral: his libertines not only realize true nature, but also sow the seeds of the movement “against nature,” resulting in a denaturalized art-world wherein, according to Foucault, “every language that has been effectively pronounced” has been consumed and then “repeated, combined, dissociated, reversed, and reversed once again, not toward a dialectical reward . . . but a radical exhaustion” (“Language” 61-2). For Sade, limits are not defined by religion, as God has been decentered by the emergence of Enlightenment “man,” who now becomes the raison d’etre of the universe. It is thus “man’s” most profound, and ultimately inexplicable, Dionysian experience–sex–which marks the borderline of rationality, where thought and language break down into white noise on the threshold of life and death.

 

Foucault locates the initial stage of the transgressive movement in Sade’s total affirmation of nature as a state of chaotic flux, a forever dissonant madness which affirms everything (and therefore nothing) at the same time. This is Sade’s “ironic justification” of the “inanity” of Rousseau’s philosophy, with its “verbiage about man and nature” (Madness 283). “Within the chateau where Sade’s hero confines himself” writes Foucault,

 

it seems at first glance as if nature can act with utter freedom. There man rediscovers a truth he had forgotten, though it was manifest. What desire can be contrary to nature, since it was given to man by nature itself? . . . The madness of desire, insane murders, the most unreasonable passions--all are wisdom and reason, since they are part of the order of nature. (282)

 

Foucault points out that the Sadean subject’s transgression is not a simple movement of black into white (which would mean its annihilation), but rather a straddling or puncturing of the binary wall. The subject’s outer, societal “self” is momentarily broken down and reintegrated with the Dionysian continuum, finding “itself in what it excludes … perhaps recognizes itself for the first time” (“Preface” 34-6), a move analogous to the nirvanic (re)union of Atman and Brahmanin Eastern mysticism.

 

“Enlightenment,” then, for the Sadean subject, is this realization of a true nature from which it is nevertheless alien. This essence-less-ness, revealed through Dionysian limit-experience as an “affirmation that affirms nothing” (36), leads to a paradox central to the Foucauldian spiral: for a living subject on the material plane of existence, Dionysus always leads back to Apollo. Every “total” affirmation of nature is thus an anti-affirmation which in turns affirms the exteriority of man; consequently, Sadean “bodies of self and other become objects (rather than sensitive beings) on the threshold between life and death” (During 82), as seen in the following passage from Sade’s Justine:

 

'This torture is sweeter than any you may imagine, Therese,' says Roland; 'you will only approach death by way of unspeakably pleasurable sensations; the pressure this noose will bring to bear upon your nervous system will set fire to the organs of voluptuousness; the effect is certain; were all the people who are condemned to this torture to know in what an intoxication of joy it makes one die, less terrified by this retribution for their crimes, they would commit them more often. . . . . (443)

 

This second phase of Sadean transgression thus establishes the subject’s (re)embrace of the Apollonian, this time with the self-conscious realization that the structural “rules” binding it are, at base, empty: the subject realizes its status as an object. Henceforth, “the relation established by Rousseau is precisely reversed; sovereignty no longer transposes the natural existence; the latter is only an object for the sovereign, which permits him to measure his total liberty,” his distance from the void (Madness 283). Having expelled the binary virus, bodies, be they human or textual, take on the appearance of rhetorical tropes, the articulable creating meaning through freeplay on the surface of the visible. Metaphysics becomes phantasmaphysics:

 

The event . . . is always an effect produced entirely by bodies colliding, mingling, or separating. . . . they create events on their surfaces, events that are without thickness, mixture, or passion. . . . We should not restrict meaning to the cognitive core that lies at the heart of a knowable object . . . we should allow it to reestablish its flux at the limit of words and things, as what is said of a thing . . . as something that happens. ("Theatrum" 172-4)

 

Paglia calls Sade “the most unread major writer in Western literature,” and analyses his work from a vantage point which sheds light on Foucault’s later move towards dandyism. Sade liberates our true nature from the shackles of a Rousseau-inspired liberal humanism which “still permeates our culture from sex counseling to cereal commercials” (Sexual 2). Especially resonant for Paglia in Sade’s Juliette is the protagonist’s remark that “man is in no wise Nature’s dependent,” but “her froth, her precipitated residue” (237). “Sadean nature, the dark hero of Sexual Personae,” says Paglia, “is the Dionysian or, the cthnonian . . . raw, brute earth-power” (“Cancelled” 105). In nature’s realm, humanity enjoys no favoured status, indeed is no more or less important than a plant.

 

Acts are thus without any essential meaning or value–within nature’s operations, “marital sex is no different from rape” (Sexual 237). The result of this realization, Paglia explains, is that Sade, as a male steeped in Enlightenment reason, swerves away from this unpalatable truth of ‘mother’ nature, seen in the intricate sexual configurations of his libertines, with their emphasis on sodomy as a “rational protest against . . . procreative nature” (246). Foucault’s subtle remark regarding the “great, sparkling, mobile, and infinitely extendible configurations” in Sade (“Language” 61) finds its humourous echo in the very unsubtle Paglia: Sade’s libertines, she says

 

swarm together in mutually exploitative units, then break apart into hostile atomies. Multiplication, addition, division: Sade perverts the Enlightenment's Apollonian mathematic. A schoolmaster's voice: if six valets discharge eight times each, how many valets does it take to . . .? (Sexual241)

 

For Paglia, then, Sade’s perversion of the Apollonian structures–the organizing of “Dionysian experience into Apollonian patterns”–is of critical importance in the evolution of the fin de siecle decadence of the 1890’s which she champions (241). Sade’s characters, after being “plunged into Dionysian sewage” at the point of limit-experience, re-emerge as orgiastic “meat puppets” ² in which “no mysteries or ambiguities” reside, these having been “emptied into the cold light of consciousness” (237). If sexual activity mirrors the chaos of true nature, Sade’s libertines proceed to render the act distinctly un-natural, each Dionysian transgression generating more Apollonian verbalizing (the de-structuralist spiral): “Learned disquisitions go on amid orgies” says Paglia, “as in Philosophy in the Bedroom, with its rapid seesaw between theory and praxis. . . . words generally sail on through ejaculation (239). Sadean sex and identity are not finally realized in the expression of the libertines’ internal, Dionysian “natural” urges, but in the Apollonian artifice of their own self-theatre or sexual personae, the “‘tableaux’ and ‘dramatic spectacles’ of interlaced bodies” of which both sadomasochism and aestheticism become a logical extension (242-3, 246-7). And it is Michel Foucault, writer of fictive histories, proponent of the experience-book, who takes enacts this Sadean imperative, turning theory into praxis and finally losing his life in the battle against nature.

 

Decadence As Enlightenment: The Shiny, Empty Subject

 

What is enlightenment? Aldous Huxley: “To be enlightened is to be aware, at all times, of total reality in its immanent otherness . . . and yet be in a condition to survive as an animal . . . to resort whenever expedient to systematic reasoning” (63). One foot in; one foot out, embodying a state of constant self creation/critique–what the Buddha called paranirvana–is the essence of de-structuralism. To know true nature and be able to live with this knowledge. Foucault, like the Buddha, finally determines that such a state cannot be reached through formulaic means; each person has to find his or her path to “enlightenment” (Miller 283). This does not mean, however, that he is against offering some general ideas re: ways to get there.

 

In the latter stages of his career, Foucault becomes increasingly concerned with the second, reconstructive movement of transgression, moving beyond the final Nietzschean embrace of the Dionysian and its states of madness and dissolution, back toward a place where a transfigured form of living is possible. In “What Is An Author?,” published in 1969 ³, Foucault concurs with the poststructuralist, Barthesian notion that heterotopic fiction, which dissociates and deconstructs the subject-self, has occasioned the death of the author. However, he points out, as with all acts of Dionysian transgression, the Apollonian ordering process quickly seals the gap left by the author’s disappearance: the empirical author may have died, but other control mechanisms fill the void. The author’s name, for instance, functions not like a proper name, but a “name-brand,” indicating not only ownership of the “branded” material, but a certain kind of discourse or product tied to it. And literary critics, aping the methods of Christian exegesis, also act as agents of control by subsuming contradictions, expelling “alien” texts, and generally ordering the disorderly body of the author’s works (105-13).

 

In the 1979 revised text ⁴, Foucault adds some subtle closing remarks which hint at his blossoming interest in dandyism. “I seem to call for a form of culture in which fiction would not be limited by the figure of the author” he says. Such a notion is now seen as naive, however, as it discounts the second phase of the transgressive spiral: a pure state of unfettered Dionysiac bliss for textual and/or human bodies is now deemed “pure romanticism” (119) ⁵. The key, instead, is a transformation of the author-function:

 

I think that, as our society changes . . . the author-function will disappear, and . . . that fiction . . . will once again function according to another mode, but still with a system of constraint--one which will no longer be the author, but which will have to be determined or, perhaps, experienced (my emphasis 119).

 

This last statement is typical of the cagey Foucault, an easily glossed-over hint at his developing interest in an Apollonian praxis. What could he mean by this “experience” of the author-function?

 

If we follow the thought-line of Camille Paglia, the answer gradually comes into focus. The subtitle of Sexual Personae is Art and Decadence from Nefertiti to Emily Dickinson, and to be sure, decadence for her represents the apex of modernity, the culmination of the Apollonian impulse underlying Western culture. For Paglia, decadent art, the logical extension of the total immersion in and subsequent swerve away from nature seen in Sade (ignored by early Romantics such as Wordsworth, with his benign Rousseauism), is embodied in the person of the dandy, who seeks to encompass both movements of the spiral by turning life into art, thereby de-forming and arresting its insidious, deleterious power:

 

Romantic imagination broke through all limits. Decadence, burdened by freedom, invents harsh new limits, psychosexual and artistic. . . . Its nature theory follows Sade and Coleridge, who see nature's cruelty and excess. Art supplants nature. The objet d'art becomes the center of fetishistic connoisseurship. Person is transformed into beautiful thing, beyond the law. Decadence takes western sexual personae to their ultimate point of hardness and artificiality. It is. . . . an Apollonian raid on the Dionysian, the aggressive eye pinning and freezing nature's roiling objects. (389)

 

Mark Edmundson points out that, for Paglia, the decadent sensibility is important because of its recognition that “giving up to nature means unconditionally surrendering to the erotic and destructive drives”–ritual and artifice frustrate nature’s grinding powers of decomposition (310). Paglia rightly locates French culture as the spawning ground for literary decadence, beginning with Balzac’s Sarrasine and then flowering in the works of Baudelaire and Huysmans, whose Against Nature is a virtual guide to decadent/aesthetic practice, and finally spreading to Britain in the person and writings of Oscar Wilde.

 

Logically enough, considering how closely his work follows the Paglian genealogy toward decadence, Foucault finally makes a great effort to place himself within such a lineage, embracing the theories of Baudelaire via Greek ethics in the effort to seize control of the author-function and create a “beautiful life.” In 1983, for example, Foucault explains to Paul Rabinow, editor of The Foucault Reader, his interest in a Greek-influenced personal ethics “beyond the law,” marked by the Apollonian manipulation of the raw Dionysian matter of the self, divorced from the coercions of any external power. “The idea of the bios as a material for an aesthetic piece of art . . . fascinates me” he says. “The idea also that ethics can be a very strong structure of existence, without any relation with . . . an authoritarian system, with a disciplinary structure” (“Ethics” 348). The rules of the game called Art–or artifice–Foucault goes on to explain, must be rescued from the hands of the “experts” he vilifies in Discipline and Punish: “Why should the lamp or the house be an art object, but not our life?” he asks (350).

 

It should come as no surprise that Camille Paglia propounds the decadent theories of Charles Baudelaire in Sexual Personae; it may, however, discomfit some Foucauldians to see their man doing exactly the same thing in one of his final published essays, “What is Enlightenment?,” which he requested occupy a central position in The Foucault Reader (Miller 332). For, as Paglia points out, Baudelaire is no humanist, no lover of his fellow man or (especially) woman–he equally rejects reformers and do-gooders” and “condemned Rousseauism in all its forms,” a stance enthusiastically shared by Paglia (Sexual 429). Baudelaire’s program of dandysme, especially as outlined in The Painter of Modern Life, is elitist and hierarchical, stressing the need for the artist/dandy to withdraw from society in order to begin the work of self-authorship. Nature is not even granted the status given it by Sade; for Baudelaire it is a virus which threatens the stability of the self-artifact. The Baudelairean dandy thus fulfills Paglia’s “first principle of decadent art”: the (re)creation of the self as a “manufactured object” (391). This use of civilizing power against civilization is deemed a “daemonization of the Apollonian” (489-511).

 

Baudelaire’s theories find artistic praxis in Joris-Karl Huysmans’ novel Against Nature, whose protagonist, Des Esseintes, remarks that “Nature . . . has had her day. . . . the old crone has by now exhausted the good-humoured admiration of all true artists, and the time has surely come for artifice to take her place whenever possible” (37). Des Esseintes’ rejects the “visible” world of nature for an “articulable,” aesthetic environment: he idolizes Sade and Baudelaire. Huysmans’s depiction here of Baudelaire’s journey through the Dionysiac and (re)emergence as an emptied Apollonian exteriority is acute:

 

Literature, in fact, had been concerned with virtues and vices of a perfectly healthy sort, the regular functioning of brains of a normal conformation, the practical reality of current ideas, with never a thought for morbid depravities and other-worldly aspirations. . . . Baudelaire had gone further; he had descended to the bottom of the inexhaustible mine. . . . There, near the breeding ground of intellectual aberrations and diseases of the mind--the mystical tetanus, the burning fever of lust, the typhoids and yellow fevers of crime--he had found . . . ennui, the frightening climacteric of thoughts and emotions. He had laid bare the morbid psychology of the mind that had reached the October of its sensations . . . he had shown how blight affects the emotions at a time when the enthusiasms and beliefs of youth have drained away, and nothing remains but the barren memory of hardships, tyranny and slights, suffered at the behest of a despotic and freakish fate. (146)

 

Past the petty concerns of a stultifying humanism, Baudelaire had plunged headlong into the Dionysian, exhausting its seemingly limitless excitations, emerging purged of all that might have previously been considered “essential” or “natural”: he “had succeeded in expressing the inexpressible,” knowledge gleaned from the limits of experience (Huysmans 148). And it should be pointed out that this knowledge, leading to the rejection of nature, leads also to the rejection of the female gender. “Woman is the opposite of the dandy. Therefore she must inspire horror” writes Baudelaire. “Woman is natural, that is to say abominable” (qtd in Sexual430). Likewise, Des Esseintes suffers a nightmarish vision of woman as mother-nature trying to devour him (105-6) and indulges in affairs with a “mannish” woman and a schoolboy (110-117).

 

As Foucault points out in “The Right of Death and Power Over Life,” if Sade had shown “man” to nothing more than a meat puppet which had mutated out of the ‘non-place’ of nature, “subject to . . . no other law but its own,” he, as well as Bataille, had failed to complete the spiral back into the Apollonian, a movement crucial for the critique of our present episteme. They, as well as Nietzsche, with his cry “I, the last disciple of Dionysus” at the conclusion of Twilight Of The Idols (110), remain semi-immersed in deadly Dionysian nature, the “society of blood” characteristic of the pre-Enlightenment age (148-50). As a result, though “subversive,” they provide no definitive answers for the problem of an ultra-Apollonian, post-Enlightenment power which seeks to produce subjects so to “normalize” and control them: “a power bent on generating forces, making them grow, and ordering them, rather than . . . destroying them” (136). In “What Is Enlightenment?” (in part a strong reading of Kant’s essay of the same name), Foucault credits Baudelaire and his disciples for bringing the line of thinking begun by Sade to fruition, addressing this contemporary problematic by using “man” as the raw material for an artistic elaboration, for the production of personae, remaking the meat puppet as manufactured object. Typically, Foucault skirts the nature-female issue even as he embraces it, though he does briefly cite Baudelaire’s abhorrence of “vulgar, earthy, vile nature” as a touchstone ⁶ (41).

 

For Foucault, Baudelaire’s modern ethos, or “limit-attitude,” encompasses both movements of the transgressive spiral, “beyond the inside-outside alternative” (“Enlightenment” 45). As we saw in Huxley, enlightenment entails a constant awareness of the Dionysian whilst mastering the Apollonian. Just as the dissociated flux of the visible is continually transfigured, framed, and articulated by the decadent artist (as in the experience-book), the body’s ‘perpetual disintegration’ is transfigured through this same ritual application of Apollonian lines, an “ascetic elaboration of the self” which again connects the Foucauldian quest to the operations of mysticism (42). Deleuze identifies this action as a “folding” of outside power relations “to create a doubling, allow a relation to oneself to emerge, and constitute an inside which is hollowed out and develops its unique dimension” (100). This seizure of power “is what the Greeks did: they folded force [and] made it relate back to itself. Far from ignoring interiority, individuality, or subjectivity they invented the subject [and] discovered the ‘aesthetic existence’.” Deleuze cannot overstress the importance of this “fundamental idea” underlying Foucault’s work, that of a “dimension of subjectivity derived from power and knowledge without being dependent on them” (101).

 

This “seizing of bio-power” over one’s self, then, is the “experience of the author-function” Foucault hints at in the revised “What Is An Author?,” and represents his departure from the thought of his oft-quoted mentors, Sade, Nietzsche, and Bataille. It also goes very much against the grain of the thinking which characterizes present-day North American society: the cult of confession and the clamouring of “victims” of various kinds for equality on Donahue and Oprah (which Foucault sneeringly alludes to as “the Californian cult of the self”) are “diametrically opposed” to dandyism, which stresses creation, not confession (“Ethics” 362). Foucauldian enlightenment thus stands “in a state of tension” with humanism” (“Enlightenment” 44). The Apollonian dandy actually seeks to marginalize him or her self, and rejects any attempts to uncover the soul, which is already known to contain the void. “Modern man,” says Foucault, “is not the man who goes off to discover himself, his secrets and his hidden truth; he is the man who tries to invent himself”. And, he adds ominously, this endeavour has no “place in society itself, or in the body politic,” but can only be “produced in another, a different place, which Baudelaire calls art” (42).

 

For both Paglia and Foucault, decadence/dandyism constitutes an ironic reversal: it deploys the ultra-Apollonianism of the modern epoch against itself, substituting art-worlds for “real” worlds. The ordering process that subjects bodies is instead used to liberate them through self-creation and containment. Bodies produce not more malleable bodies measured by their use-value in the service of power, but impenetrable, beautifully “useless” art objects–a sterile productivity. Paglia on Sarrasine:

 

Balzac frustrates sex by deforming nature. Sarrasine reviles Zambinella: "Monster! You who can give birth to nothing!". . . . [but] Zambinella is the first decadent art object. The transsexual castrato is an artificial sex, product of biology manipulated for art. Zambinella does give birth--to other art objects. First is Sarrasine's statue of him/her; then a marble copy commissioned by the cardinal. . . . The sterile castrato, propagating itself through other art works, is an example of my technological androgyne, the manufactured object [who] teems with inorganic seed. (Sexual 391)

 

Dandyism And Beyond: The Order Of Death

 

Through the seizure of power on a microcosmic level, dandyism points the way toward new and different modes of being. Here in our own postmodern fin de siecle, in opposition to both humanism and the thriving “Californian Cult of the self,” the decadent impulse has mutated into new and interesting forms. For novelist Kathy Acker (herself a Foucauldian), this has entailed inhabiting the traditionally “male” realms of bodybuilding and tattoo art in the attempt to de-naturalize and “textualize” the body, thereby “seiz(ing) control over the sign-systems through which people ‘read’ her”–the self as counter-discourse. (McCaffery 72). Likewise, the currently flourishing “cyberpunk” movement finds its basis in “the impulse to invent a hyperreality and then live there” (Porush 331). For Foucault, the decadent impulse leads to the “theatre” of gay sadomasochism, which he sees as “a kind of creation, a creative enterprise” in which the body’s biological sexuality can be subverted or “desexualized.” Playing his role against nature to the hilt, Foucault denies that these practices disclose “S/M tendencies deep within the unconscious” but are the “invention” of “new possibilities of pleasure” (Miller 263).

 

It is doubtful that Foucault really believed this. When Deleuze speaks of dandyism as a state where “one becomes, relatively speaking, a master of one’s molecules” (123), he makes an important qualification. As an advocate of the doctrines of Decadence, Foucault must have surely been aware of another theme inextricably tied to it: the inevitable victory of nature. In the work of Baudelaire, of Huysmans, and in Wilde’s The Picture of Dorian Gray, the scenario is the same: “the self as an artificial enclave. . . which nature secretly enters and disorders” (Sexual 421). The fate of the dandy is most brilliantly critiqued in Huysmans’s novel in the grotesque episode where Des Esseintes acquires a large tortoise and attempts to turn into an objet d’art, painting it gold and encrusting it with jewels. To his consternation, the turtle dies, “unable to bear the dazzling luxury imposed upon it” (62). Later, while sampling his many perfumes, Des Esseintes is overcome by nausea: “discrimination collapses back into nondifferentiation” Paglia notes, and “all the aesthete’s exotic fragrances begin to smell disgustingly alike,” this being the scent of death (Sexual 435). Residing astride the line between Apollo and Dionysus, the enclosed or folded subject risks implosion back into the immanent realm. “It all comes down to syphilis in the end” says Des Esseintes (Huysmans 101), who is finally forced to leave his artificial paradise and return to the world to quite literally save his life.

 

It was, of course, not syphilis, but AIDS, the postmodern plague, which facilitated nature’s revenge upon Foucault. And when Paglia, in her anti-poststructuralist mode, derisorily remarks that “Foucault was struck down by the elemental force he repressed and edited out of his system” she is absolutely correct (“Junk” 241). But her criticism of him for this implies that, unlike those Decadents she praises in Sexual Personae, Foucault somehow had no idea what he was doing, or what the stakes were. Paglia is being duplicitous if she seriously intends to make such an argument. Her valorization of the gay male, the Sadean sadomasochist, and all those Decadents whose swerve from procreative, liquid nature results in the “world of glittering art objects” found in Western culture should include the embrace of the life and work of Foucault, who, as the evidence shows, knew exactly what he was doing. As Deleuze says, “few men more than Foucault died in a way commensurate with their conception of death” (95). In her zeal to tar all post-structuralists with the same brush, Paglia, so commendable in many other ways and the recipient of a great deal of unfair criticism herself, does a great disservice to Foucault.

 

Notes

 

1. See “Bringing Out Michel Foucault” by David Halperin in Salmagundi 97, Winter 1993.

 

2. The term “meat puppets” is cyberpunk jargon, and is borrowed here from Larry McCaffery’s interview with Kathy Acker, where McCaffery comments that Sade is “using the tools of rationality to reveal what we really are–meat puppets governed by the reality of bodily functions” (76).

 

3. In Language, Counter-Memory, Practice, 113-138.

 

4. In The Foucault Reader, 101-120, and in Textual Strategies: Perspectives in Post-Structuralist Criticism, 141-160. Josue V. Harari sees this second version of the essay as marking a shift in emphasis “crucial to an understanding of Foucault’s work” (43); James Miller notes that Foucault’s increasing emphasis on Apollonian power/order occasioned a split with the more Dionysian-oriented Deleuze (287-298).

 

5. Paglia’s contention that Foucault’s obsession with power was occasioned by the failure of May, 1968, student and worker revolt in Paris is partially correct (“Junk” 216), but as seen in earlier essays such as “Preface To Transgression” Foucault had always been aware of the inevitable nature of the Apollonian: the nature of the transgressive spiral is such that “no simple infraction” can exhaust it; incursions into the Dionysian are always quickly bound in again by order (35).

 

6. In his otherwise unremarkable new biography of Foucault, David Macey makes two observations crucial for this paper: (1) Foucault, Macey explains, was known for “vehement declarations of his loathing of ‘nature’,” going so far as to turn his back on sunsets to make his point! (60); (2) Foucault also is characterized by some (though not all) of his friends as a misogynist, a side he apparently showed rather selectively (xiv, 55, 455). Both of these points make sense when Foucault is placed in the line of the Baudelairean dandy so admired by Paglia.

 

Works Cited

 

• Acker, Kathy. “Reading The Body.” Mondo 2000. By Larry McCaffery. Issue No.4, 1991. 72-77.
• Bove, Paul. Foreword. “The Foucault Phenomenon: the Problematics of Style.” Foucault. By Gilles Deleuze. Trans. and Ed. Sean Hand. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1986. vii-xl.
• Deleuze, Gilles. Foucault. Trans. and Ed. Sean Hand. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1986.
• During, Simon. Foucault And Literature: Towards A Genealogy of Writing. New York: Routledge, 1992.
• Edmundson, Mark. “Art and Eros.” The Nation, New York, Vol 250, No. 25, June 25, 1990. 897-99. Rpt. in Contemporary Literary CriticismVol. 68. Ed. Roger Matuz. 309-311.
• Foucault, Michel. The Archaeology of Knowledge & The Discourse On Language. Trans. A. M. Sheridan Smith. New York: Pantheon Books, 1972.
• —. Discipline & Punish: The Birth of the Prison. Trans. Alan Sheridan. New York: Vintage Books, 1979.
• —. “Language to Infinity.” Language, Counter-Memory, Practice. Trans. Donald F. Bouchard and Sherry Simon. Ed. Donald F. Bouchard. New York: Cornell UP, 1977. 53-67.
• —. Madness and Civilization: A History of Insanity in the Age of Reason. Trans. Richard Howard. New York: Vintage Books, 1988
• —. “Nietzsche, Genealogy, History.” The Foucault Reader. Ed. Paul Rabinow. New York: Pantheon Books, 1984. 76-100.
• —. The Order Of Things. Ed. R. D. Laing. New York: Tavistock/Routledge, 1989.
• —. “On the Genealogy of Ethics.” The Foucault Reader. By Paul Rabinow. 340-372.
• —. “A Preface to Transgression.” Language, Counter-Memory, Practice. 29-52.
• —. Remarks On Marx. Trans. R. James Goldstein and James Cascaito. New York: Semiotext(e), 1991.
• —. “Revolutionary Action: Until Now.” Language, Counter-Memory, Practice. 218-234.
• —. “Right of Death and Power over Life.” The History of Sexuality, Vol. 1. New York: Vintage Books, 1980.
• —. “Space, Knowledge, and Power.” The Foucault Reader. Trans. Christian Hubert. 239-256.
• —. “Theatrum Philosophicum.” Language, Counter-Memory, Practice. 165-198.
• —. “What Is An Author? (1)” Language, Counter-Memory,Practice. 113-138.
• —. “What Is An Author? (2)” The Foucault Reader. 101-120. Also in Textual Strategies: Perspectives in Post-Structuralist Criticism. Ed. Josue V. Harari. Ithaca: Cornell UP, 1979. 141-160.
• —. “What is Enlightenment?” The Foucault Reader Trans. Catherine Porter. 32-50.
• Harari, Josue V. “Critical Factions/Critical Fictions.” Textual Strategies: Perspectives in Post-Structuralist Criticism. Ithaca: Cornell UP, 1979. 17-72.
• Hollingdale, R.J. Appendices H. Twilight of the Idols and The Anti-Christ. By Friedrich Nietzsche. New York: Penguin, 1978.
• Huxley, Aldous. The Doors of Perception and Heaven and Hell. Toronto: Granada Publishing, 1984.
• Huysmans, Joris-Karl. Against Nature. Trans. Robert Baldick. New York: Penguin, 1959.
• Macey, David. The Many Lives of Michel Foucault. London: Random House, 1993.
• Miller, James. The Passion of Michel Foucault. New York: Simon & Schuster, 1993.
• Nietzsche, Friedrich. The Birth of Tragedy and The Genealogy of Morals. Trans Francis Golffing. New York: Doubleday, 1956.
• Nietzsche, Friedrich. Twilight of the Idols and The Anti-Christ. Trans. R.J. Hollingdale. New York: Penguin, 1978.
• Paglia, Camille. Sexual Personae: Art and Decadence from Nefertiti to Emily Dickinson. New York: Vintage Books, 1991.
• —. “East and West: An Experiment In Multiculturalism.” Sex, Art, and American Culture. New York: Vintage Books, 1992. 136-169.
• —. “Junk Bonds and Corporate Raiders: Academe in the Hour of the Wolf.” Sex, Art, and American Culture. 170-248.
• —. “Sexual Personae: The Cancelled Preface.” Sex, Art and American Culture. 101-124.
• Porush, David. “Frothing the Synaptic Bath.” Storming the Reality Studio: A Casebook of Cyberpunk and Postmodern Fiction. Ed. Larry McCaffery. Durham: Duke UP, 1991. 331-333.
• Sade, Marquis De. Justine. The Olympia Reader. Ed. Maurice Girodias. New York: Quality Paperbacks/Grove Press, 1965. 407-448.
• White, Hayden. “Michel Foucault.” Structuralism and Since. Ed. John Sturrock. New York: Oxford UP, 1979.

 

Allan Stoekl

Departments of French
and Comparative Literature
Pennsylvania State University

 

The postmodern moment has been characterized as one of the loss of legitimacy of the master narratives–social, historical, political; Hegelian, Marxist, Fascist–by which lives were ordered and sacrificed throughout the nineteenth and twentieth centuries.¹

 

The demise of the great story, which gave direction and purpose to struggle and violence, has opened a space for a proliferation of conflicting modes of interpreting and speaking. Of course those modes can only be partial: they can never aspire to the horrifying totalization promoted by overarching certainties. And they will likely interfere with each other, cross over, meld and (self) contradict, because the possibility of their autonomy has been given up; at best we can say that they are “language games” now, rules for representation, argument, and analysis; no longer are they the ground of teleology, satisfaction, and self-certainty.

 

But there is a problem with this kind of argument, as I see it. It’s not that I do not find it “true,” because of some kind of empirical counter-evidence, such as: the old nationalist narratives still hold sway; history is still slouching toward a goal; history isn’t slouching toward a goal, but it is nevertheless still slouching, etc. One can probably develop all sorts of arguments based on empirical observation concerning the postmodern. Or one can just as easily “deconstruct” the master stories from within, by taking them apart while still, necessarily, acting in full complicity with them (for what “space” could be said to open beyond their margins?). The problem, as I see it, is that this kind of argument is closely tied to the “end of history” arguments that were current in the immediate postwar period, and that have recently had a renewed but highly contested efflorescence.² This is of course immensely ironic, because philosophers such as Lyotard–spokespersons of the postmodern–have informed us that the possibility of a larger teleology is lost for good, along with the knowledge that flowed from it. But there still is a larger knowledge, after all–the one that proclaims the death of the possibility of a larger knowledge. Whether arrived at empirically or logically, this awareness comes at the end of a series of historical actions and tragedies, and the certainty associated with it is no doubt due to lessons derived from those failures. This history will still have the form of a narrative, albeit one that lacks, perhaps, the power of retrospective justification that characterized the Hegelian model. Its lessons might be purely practical, or they might be derived from a study of the incoherences or contradictions of the earlier paradigms. The net result, whatever the means of their determination, development and (self) cancelling, will be a generally valid knowledge that mandates the end of generally valid knowledges. The language games that proliferate, then, in a postmodern epoch will be allowed and encouraged to do so only because the way has been opened by yet another master narrative: the narrative of the end of narratives. The freedom to be enjoyed by the games is the result of the master story’s knowledge–but, to be sure, the games’ actions, their orientations, will not be determined by it. They will be independent of it–but the preservation of their semi-autonomous functioning is nevertheless the goal of a postmodern theoretical project (such as one that affirms adjudication between different, conflicting, games). Further, it is their guarantee that they will participate in a stable postmodern order: without the postmodern narrative and its powers of harmonization, they would risk falling into particularist discourses into which “nationalist” ideologies are prone.

 

Is this postmodern version of things that different from a theory of the “end of history” that envisages a State founded on the mutual recognition of free subjects? On the surface, yes: the postmodern view concerns itself not with subjectivity, consciousness as productive labor, and the like, but on the recognition of difference between partial discourses and “constructed” cultures. The posthistorical model seems almost quaint with its emphasis on codified law and the State as guarantor of a freedom identifiable with labor and construction. But beyond these evident differences there may be a more fundamental similarity.

 

Just as the postmodern presents language games as independent of transcendent social reason, so too the posthistorical imagines the moment of the ultimate end of history as a kind of definitive break, after which life will go on, but in which unidirectional history will be supplanted by “playful” activities that may be enjoyable in themselves, but that will by necessity not be recuperable in any larger social or historical scheme. The State at the end of history will be as unconcerned with these ludic activities–sports, arts, love making, and so on–as the postmodern regime will be with justifying the logic of the language games of what we would call the cultures, subcultures, and micro-cultures whose disputes would be subject to its acts of arbitration.³

 

On the surface of it at least, Alexandre Kojève’s take on Hegel in his Introduction to the Reading of Hegel can be seen as being not an attempt at the ultimate vindication of a “grand” historical and philosophical narrative–the triumph of the end of history and the univocal (self) satisfaction of the entire population of the earth–but instead the surprising mutation of that certainty, that knowledge, into a postmodern generation of discourses and styles.⁴ History as narrative triumphs, but it also ends: its termination is the opening for the proliferation of poses and play that is literally post modern. Rather than contradicting Kojève, then, or demonstrating the extent to which a Hegelian modernism is null and void, a rigorous postmodern might see itself as deriving from a completion and fulfillment of a dialectical project. It might.

 

The postmodern, we could argue, has already come part of the way. It has posited a knowledge–the authority of its own text–that in spite of itself stands as a knowledge at the end of a long history of illusions. It takes itself as a stranger to, and grave digger for, the Hegelian tradition. Kojève, on the other hand, at least recognizes the inescapability, the inevitability, of the univocal truth of his own system. But he is blind to the consequences of the termination of history: the proliferation of signs and acts that, by their very nature as partial constructions, challenge the totalizing power of the Concept.

 

To get any further we will have to look at certain key passages of Kojève’s Introduction. Most often in footnotes and asides, he grapples with the really crucial questions: what does it mean for “Man” to “die”? What will come “after” the end of history? If “Man” is dead, what will remain of human labor? What will be the status of the “Book” in which Knowledge resides? The answers to these questions will enable us to consider in more detail the problem of the relation been posthistory and the postmodern.

 

According to most historians of French philosophy of the twentieth century, it was Kojève who single-handedly popularized Hegel in France, through a brilliant series of lectures in the 1930s. After decades of idealist neo-Kantianism, the Hegel that Kojève preferred was a welcome change: History could now be seen as a dialectical progression in which Man ineluctably moves toward a social satisfaction in which the desire for recognition–and the recognition of the other’s desire for recognition–is fulfilled. The posthistorical State alone is capable of recognizing Man for what he is: beyond all superstition, all theology, Man is the creative/destructive agent whose labor ends in the recognition of all by all through the mediation of the State. The labor of Hegel’s slave, its destructive and formative action, “transforms” “natural given being”: Man is the “Time that annihilates [nature]” (158). But in the end all transformative labor ceases. History comes to an end because, eventually at least, the labor leading to full reciprocal recognition will have been carried out: at the end of history, there will be nothing new to accomplish.

 

Now the end of history for Kojève is the ultimate ideological weapon because it justifies, retrospectively, just about anything that went before that made its arrival possible. Man for Kojève is a type: the Master, the Slave, the Philosopher, and, at the end, the impersonal Hegel (and his reader, Kojève), that is, the Wise Man (le Sage). The negativity that made the arrival of the end possible will, in retrospect, be judged moral, no matter how it seemed at the time. And since Man himself is defined as temporality and negation (IRH 160), even the bloodiest violence or the grossest injustice, if necessary for the eventual completion, will be (or will have been) good.

 

The true moral judgments are those borne by the State (moral=legal); States themselves are judged by universal history. But for these judgments to have a meaning, History must be completed. And Napoleon and Hegel end history. That is why Hegel can judge States and individuals. The “good” is everything that has made possible Hegel, in other words the formation of the universal Napoleonic Empire (it is 1807!) which is “understood” by Hegel (in and through the Phenomenology).

 

What is good is what exists, the extent that it exists. All action, since it negates existing givens, is thus bad: a sin. But sin can be pardoned. How? Through its success. Success absolves crime, because success–is a new reality that exists. But how to judge success? For that, History has to be completed. Then one can see what is maintained in existence: definitive reality. (ILH, 95)

 

This is the “ruse of reason”: reason acting in and through History reaches its end in ways that might seem to have nothing to do with accepted (“Christian”) morality. Certainly anyone attempting to judge the morality or immorality of events before the end of history will be incapable of it; only with Hegel (and Kojève) will the true value and morality of actions be evident. Not only do the ends always justify the means, but they do so retroactively, so that agents (“people”) will never be competent to judge the acceptability of their own behavior. The “Owl of Minerva flies at dusk,” to use a Hegelian formulation: only when the outcome is final and its corresponding overview are grasped can all preceding events be fully known.⁵

 

But in a way all this is irrelevant: since history for Kojève is already ended, everything that takes place now is a purely technical “catching up” process. The end of History was achieved at the battle of Jena: Napoleon’s conquering forces brought the egalitarian ideals of the French revolution, codified and implemented by the State, to others. From now on History will only be a series of lesser battles of Jena, leading to the implementation throughout the world, by bureaucratic governments, of rights and liberties. What at first might seem to be the ultimate 1930s justification of ruthlessness at any cost (indeed Stalin comes to replace Napoleon for Kojève in the pre-World War II period) leads inevitably, in the late 40s and 50s, to a recognition that the difference between ideologies is largely irrelevant. How one arrives at the “classless” society, the society of the mutual recognition of the desire for recognition, is of no interest to the “Wise Man”: it is a purely technical question. The seemingly great postwar problem of the conflict of ideologies, or the question of the defense of Soviet ideology in the face of American pressure (Merleau-Ponty, Humanisme et terreur, Sartre, Les Communistes et la paix) simply does not exist for Kojève. The end of history is the end of ideology. In a “Note to the Second Edition” of the Introduction to the Reading of Hegel, inserted in 1959, Kojève states: “One can even say that, from a certain point of view, the United States has already attained the final stage of Marxist “communism,” seeing that, practically, all the members of the “classless society” can from now on appropriate for themselves everything that seems good to them, without thereby working any more than their heart dictates” (IRH, 161, note).

 

Ideology, in the end, is thus utterly unimportant: it too fades away once history is at an end. If it contributes or has contributed to that end it is good, if not bad. Like all means it is justified by the end, but at the end it has no specificity other than its “success.” From the perspective of the end, all bloody action is over: it can be judged, but it no longer is effective. In time and as time Man is free to act, but he does not know; at the end of Time, History is known, but Man can no longer act (he has nothing more to do)–hence he no longer even exists. At the end, there are no longer even any means to be justified. History and its ideologies are a matter of utter indifference.

 

This leaves an enormous question, one typical of the 1950s. The completion of history is perfectly ahistorical, but ahistory itself is a function of history. True, we are now delivered from history, action, and all the hard–and ambiguous–moral questions. The machine of history has functioned so well that it has erased itself: its mechanism was the unfolding of Truth, but now that we are in the definitive era of Truth, History has ceased to exist, and its moral conundrums are irrelevant. At the end of history, ideology is finished, and so ceases to exist: but “Man” therefore no longer exists either.

 

The Selbst–that is, Man properly so-called or the free Individual, is Time and Time is History, and only History. . . . And Man is essentially Negativity, for Time is Becoming–that is, the annihilation of Being or Space. Therefore Man is a Nothingness that nihilates and that preserves itself in (spatial) Being only by negating being, this Negation being Action Now, if Man is Negativity,–that is, Time–he is not eternal. He is born and he dies as Man. He is ‘das Negativ seiner selbst,’ Hegel says. And we know what that means: Man overcomes himself as Action (or Selbst) by ceasing to oppose himself to the World, after creating in it the universal and homogeneous State; or to put it otherwise, on the cognitive level: Man overcomes himself as Error (or “Subject” opposed to the Object) after creating the Truth of “Science” (IRH, 160; emphasis in original).

 

Man dies at this strange juncture point between History and the End (in both senses of the word) of History. In the future, after the end, Kojève tells us that “life is purely biological” (ILH, 387). But this is a, and perhaps the, crucial question for Kojève: if history stops, if Man and Time and negating labor is dead, how then is Man any different from the animals? He had originally constituted himself against Nature (“But Man, once constituted in his human specificity, opposes himself to Nature”); nature for Kojève is timeless and can in no way be incorporated in the dialectic. No “dialectics of nature” can therefore be conceived within the Kojèvian reading of Hegel. ⁶ But if man is an animal, History itself is not so much completed as dead. It will be–or is now, since History is already ended, in principle at least–as if History had never existed.

 

Kojève presents two approaches to this problem in the long footnote to his interpretation of Chapter VIII of the Phenomenology (IRH, 158-62), a passage of which I have already cited. First he states that Man indeed is an animal, but a happy one, “in harmony with Nature or given Being.” True, he no longer can engage in productive Historical activity, “Action negating the given, . . . the Subject opposed to the Object.” But he has plenty of other consolations: “art, love, play, etc. etc.–in short, everything that makes man happy” (IRH, 159). This is a “world of freedom” in which men “no longer fight, and work as little as possible.”

 

It sounds almost too good to be true: the world itself is transformed into a vast, postmodern Southern California, its inhabitants concerned above all with training their bodies and trading their automobiles and art objects. It is here that one recognizes with a start the perfect transformation of a Hegelian modernism into an anti-Hegelian, but soft, postmodernism: at the End of History History is replaced with a heterogeneous collection of lifestyle choices. Indeed we learn, in the footnote added to the second edition of 1959, that Kojève had earlier (in the immediate postwar period, “1948-58”) seen the “American way of life” as the true posthistorical regime–although he also saw the Soviet Union and the Chinese Communists as nothing other than “still poor Americans” (IRH, 161). The only larger coherence is a general lack of coherence: one is free to cultivate one’s own interests and ignore the larger movement by which all personal activities are justified. The new human animals will “recognize one another without reservation,” but this recognition will be of the right of each one to be completely different, in what promise to be mainly physical pursuits.

 

In a second footnote added in 1959 (the first dates from 1946), Kojève objects to his own theory. Reading his earlier note quite literally, he argues that if all Action is eliminated from Human life, Man will actually be not an American, but an animal:

 

“If Man becomes an animal again, his acts, his loves, and his play must also become purely ‘natural’ again. Hence it would have to be admitted that after the end of History, men would construct their edifices and works of art as birds build their nests and spiders spin their webs. . . . ‘The definitive annihilation of Man properly so-called‘ also means the definitive disappearance of human Discourse (Logos) in the strict sense. Animals of the species Homo sapiens would react by conditioned reflexes to vocal signals or sign ‘language,’ and thus their so-called ‘discourses’ would be like what is supposed to be the ‘language’ of bees. What would disappear, then, is not only Philosophy or the search for discursive Wisdom, but also that Wisdom itself.” (IRH, 159-60; emphasis in original)

 

The posthistorical, in other words, must be saved from any threat of animality–that is, of purely unreflected-upon behavior. Kojève does not really consider the consequences of “art, love, play, etc. etc.” because, fortunately, he has another example of activity “after the end of History.” This is, surprisingly enough, Japan: the “American way of life” is now replaced by a model of Japanese culture that has been “at the End of History” “for almost three centuries.” While “American” posthistory is associated with sheer animality, Japanese culture is seen by Kojève as a pure formalism. Unlike the animal, Man continues to be a “Subject opposed to the Object,” although “action” and “Time” have ceased. Forms are opposed to one another, and values themselves come to be “totally formalized“–the Japanese tea ceremony, Noh theatre, even the suicide of the Kamikaze pilot represent an opposition to the Object that, while empty, nevertheless continues to be an opposition: Man is now a snob. It is as if the armature of labor, negation and Historical activity continues to function, but in a void, since there can no longer be any negating or any History.

 

In this model, “Opposition” continues, and so Man does too. The difference between the two versions (that of ’46 and that of ’59) lies in the fact that while the first proposes an activity that can be purely individual, so long as it is in accord with nature, the second, “Japanese,” entails a struggle for recognition, and therefore derives its power from the earlier, and decisive, Master-Slave dialectic. After all, the purpose of snobbery, of dandyism, is to be recognized by the Other, even if that recognition is totally meaningless. Thus a society is implied, and a culture; this was not the case, finally, for the “animals,” no matter what their “way of life” might have been.

 

But the larger posthistorical culture–if such a thing can even be written of–will be unthinkable because Absolute Knowing will play no part in it. Kojève inadvertently indicates the irrelevance of the Wise Man–of reflexive consciousness at the end of History–by choosing the example of the Japanese: if they were carrying out posthistorical acts one hundred years before the birth of Hegel, Hegel and his book, and Kojève in their wake, need never have existed. History culminates in perfect indifference to Wisdom. From the other side of the end of History, it now appears clear that the Phenomenology is perfectly pointless. Purely formal activities therefore will take place, and will have meanings, perhaps, within certain posthistorical cultures; those cultures, however, will exist in perfect isolation, without a larger Wisdom to unify them and give them meaning. Here, then, is yet another Kojèvian postmodernism, this time one based not on the particularity of desires but on the multiplicity and radical non-congruence of separate cultures. Absolute knowing finds its completion in a series of social practices or lifestyles which are united only in the fact that as formal activities each one is precisely a lack of knowledge of the whole. The snob’s gesture is a forgetting, willful or not, of the larger significance–or insignificance–of his or her act. Its success can be judged only by its immediate impact: the dandy walking his lobster on a leash can bask only in the recognition given here and now. The act excludes any larger “meaning.”

 

How then, under these circumstances, can one say that History is ended? It does not seem that, if the Japanese (as represented by Kojève) are to be our models, there can be any history or historical consciousness at all. Elsewhere–in passages and footnotes dating from the original (1947) publication of Introduction la lecture de Hegel–it seems that Kojève himself recognized the necessity of historical memory and historical text–and thus of the writing of the Phenomenology itself–for the ultimate completion of History. A few pages after the footnote that I have discussed, Kojève writes: “It is first necessary that real History be completed; next, it must be narrated to Man; and only then can the Philosopher, becoming a Wise Man, understand it by reconstructing it a priori in the Phenomenology” (IRH, 166). Kojève adds in a footnote appended to this passage (more precisely, to the phrase that ends “narrated to Man”): “Moreover, there is no real history without historical memory–that is, without oral or written Memoirs.”

 

Here we are back at our earlier problem: if the Japanese constitute an ahistorical end of history, a posthistorical moment that has nothing to do with history, how can they be said to be Human? If Man is determined in and through history, then it would seem that the Japanese, in their sophisticated and useless labor, are no more Human than are the bee-like posthistorical animals that Kojève in 1959 saw as implicit in his earlier footnote (of 1946), and rejected. The Natural–the realm of the inhuman that, for Kojève at least, simply had nothing to do with Human activity, Time, or History–seems to triumph once again. In the case of the simple human-animals we might say that the Owl of Minerva flew, but that its flight seen from a posthistorical perspective was the equivalent of the movement of any other animal, the Owl of Minerva being no different from any owl–no matter how endangered–in the forest. For the Kojèvian Japanese, however, and for all the rest of us who will necessarily emulate them, the Owl of Minerva need never have flown in the first place. Perhaps it did, perhaps it didn’t; in any case it is now stuffed and resides in a European museum, where it is routinely photographed by hurried groups of Japanese tourists.

 

What, finally, is the status of the Book–the Phenomenology itself as a summation of History and embodiment of Wisdom–at the end of History? This is perhaps the most important question in Kojève’s Hegelianism, and, characteristically, he never poses it explicitly; instead, we must try to formulate an answer on the basis of two elliptic and ironic footnotes. Yet, as we will see, the status of “Self-Consciousness” at and after the end of History will remain very much in question.

 

The first question, which arises in Kojève’s discussion of the third part of Chapter VIII of the Phenomenology, is the role of the Wise Man, the post-philosopher (or Sage), in the establishment of the posthistorical regime. At one point Kojève writes: “One can say . . . that, in and by the Wise Man (who produces absolute Science, the Science that entirely reveals the totality of Being), Spirit ‘attains or wins the Concept’” (ILH, 413). He soon modifies this, though, in a footnote (ILH, 414). If the Wise Man–Hegel, Kojève, the “authors” of the Phenomenology–are those who “produce” Science, the true end of History and reign of Self-Consciousness will be possible only when mediated by the State. The State, in effect, will guarantee the recognition of the freedom of all by all; the satisfaction it provides will do away with all opposition between Subject and Object, for-itself and in-itself. This clearly implies more than the personal teaching of a single person: rather what is at stake now is the universalization of a definitive doctrine contained in a book. Kojève writes:

 

To turn out to be true, philosophy must be universally recognized, in other words recognized finally by the universal and homogeneous State. The empirical-existence (Dasein) of Science–is thus not the private thought of the Wise Man, but his words [sa parole], universally recognized. And it is obvious that this “recognition” can only be obtained through the publication of a book. And by existing in the form of a book, Science is effectively detached from its author, in other words from the Wise Man or from Man [du Sage ou de l’Homme]. (ILH, 414)

 

This is a passage fraught with difficulties, but one that is well worth considering. It is recognition, first of all, that determines truth; the truth of the book is determined by its recognition by the State. The book consists of the words–or literally, the word–of the author, but the book itself, on publication, is detached not only from the Wise Man, but from Man himself. The detachment and recognition of the book is the determination of its truth–which in turn guarantees the universality and homogeneity of the State. The book is detached from Man himself; presumably at this point Man has nothing more to do, and passes from the scene (as we will see in yet another footnote, discussed below).

 

But note that the “private thought” of the Wise Man is not at stake here. Rather his words are recognized, and this makes them “true”; the same gesture by the State–recognition–makes it a State. Truth and Statehood are generated reciprocally, at the same instant, by the same act.

 

Now if they are the result of the immediacy of what seems to be a purely formal act, Truth and Statehood cannot be generated out of reading. Kojève never explicitly poses the question, but it is in any case an obvious one: does anybody read this book? Who? Are recognition and reading the same thing? It does not seem likely: reading here does not appear as a social or even physical/psychological phenomenon: it is not a question of the appropriation of the Wise Man’s teaching, the reading of the book on the highest levels of government, its dissemination through the schools, etc. For that is an interminable process: reading necessarily implies interpretation, misinterpretation, questioning, rephrasing, codification. There is none of that here: in a single gesture, in one movement, the book and the State are “recognized.” Recognition, then, has nothing to do with reading–and by reading I mean, on the simplest level, a bare acquaintance with the contents of the book. The word will be “recognized,” it seems, without having to be deciphered.

 

My interpretation is borne out in another footnote that comes some twenty-five pages before the one I have just discussed. It explicitly links the death of Man to the book as inanimate, and presumably unread, object. Once again this note attempts to face the ultimate problem: the fate of Man “after” the closing of History:

 

The fact that at the end of Time the Word-concept (Logos) is detached from Man and exists–empirically no longer in the form of a human-reality, but as a Book–this fact reveals the essential finitude of Man. It’s not only a given man who dies: Man dies as such. The end of History is the death of Man properly speaking. There remains after this death: 1) living bodies with a human form, but deprived of Spirit, in other words of Time or creative power; 2) a Spirit which exists-empirically, but in the form of an inorganic reality, not living: as a Book which, not even having an animal life, no longer has anything to do with Time. The relation between the Wise Man and his Book is thus rigorously analogous to that of Man and his death. My death is certainly mine; it is not the death of an other. But it is mine only in the future; for one can say: “I am going to die,” but not: “I am dead.” It is the same for the Book. It is my work [mon oeuvre], and not that of an other; and in it it is a question of me and not of anything else. But I am only in the Book, I am only this Book to the extent that I write and publish it, in other words to the extent that it is still a future (or a project). Once the Book is published it is detached from me. It ceases to be me, just as my body ceases to be mine after my death. Death is just as impersonal and eternal, in other words inhuman, as Spirit is impersonal, eternal and inhuman when realized in and by the Book. (ILH, 387-88, footnote; Kojève’s emphasis)

 

We see now posthistorical Man as an “animal,” no longer carrying out a task or striving toward self-Consciousness. But “he” is not just an animal–a bee or beaver–because he has the word, the Logos, which guarantees his movement from the Human to a kind of higher-order animality. (This difference is something that Kojève seems to have forgotten when he wrote the 1959 addendum to his long footnote on “animality,” discussed above.) But clearly the Book is not something to be read: there can be no labor of interpretation or inculcation. For that reason the book is explicitly presented as dead, as “inorganic” (i.e., lifeless) material.

 

The death of Man is not, strictly speaking, the death of self-Consciousness. The latter is externalized, frozen on the pages of a book. The message is absolute: as Kojève states, “The Wise Man who reveals what is through the Word [Parole] or Concept reveals it definitively: for what is thus remains eternally identical to itself, no longer modified by uneasiness [inquietude] (Unruhe)” (ILH, 413). The dead message, moreover, is a dead me (or a dead Man), because it is the highest Wisdom of me (the Wise Man, Hegel, Kojève), preserved intact forever, apparently well beyond the labor of interpretation. The connection between the Book and “my death” is, then, not merely a metaphor: it is both “me” in the sense that it consists of my remains, and at the same time it is not me, or my living project. It is my dead body. And the dead bodies of trees.

 

If we can understand the role played by the Book in Kojève, we will be able to grasp both the status, and the radical limitation, of Absolute Knowledge as it is both the Book and the Book’s reading.

 

Time is circular, but it is not cyclical. Hegelian time, according to Kojève, can only be run through (parcouru) once (ILH, 391). This is because the end is a return to the state before which the Human commences: the one in which an opposition between Man and his World does not exist. That opposition, in and through which Man exists (and creates himself) in Time and Action, is History. At the end, the opposition between Man and World is overcome, and ceases to exist: History ends and Man dies. The difference between beginning and end is that at the end, and after it, “Identity is revealed by the Concept. . . . It is only at the end of History that the identity of Man and World exists for Man, as revealed by human Discourse” (ILH, 392).

 

There is a certain irony in all this, upon which Kojève does not dwell. The end is the “discursive revelation of its beginning”–yet the higher knowledge that is the end, the “comprehension of anthropogenic Desire, as it is revealed in the Phenomenology” (ILH, 392), is a human comprehension (“for Man”) that nevertheless marks the end of Man. In an impossible moment Man both understands and ceases to exist. His understanding and death would seem to have to be simultaneous, as well as definitive. After the end, there is no Man left to whom Discourse can reveal the unity of Man and World.

 

Hence the strange status of the Book. The Book, we are told, is the “empirical existence of Science” (ILH, 394). Its return is also its definitive termination, because then the “totality of Discourse is exhausted [épuisee]” (ILH, 393). There can only be one book, then, that contains the defunct but definitive Science. As we’ve already seen, Kojève compares this book to a dead body, separated for ever from its consciousness/author.

 

Discourse as well then returns to Nature; Man is dead, Action is over, and the “empirical existence of Science is not historical Man, but a Book made of paper, in other words a natural entity” (ILH, 394).

 

But if all this is the case, why would anyone read the Book? If Historical Action is at an end, and if Man is dead, there would be no point in doing so. Yet not to do so would consign all of human History–and Absolute Knowledge–to a kind of Absolute Forgetting. In that case there would be a return to the origin not on the higher level of comprehension, but on the lower level of simple repetition.

 

That clearly is not an option either, so the Book must be read. The crucial question then is: what is reading? Whatever it is, it will be the task of the posthistorical animal/dandy. Reading is not Action or historically significant labor of any sort–all that is over, ended. And since the cycle only returns to its origin once, it cannot be a reading that entails any individual interpretation or thought: it can only be a sheer repetition of the one, definitive, return of Science and Knowledge. Kojève writes:

 

Certainly, the Book must be read and understood by men, in order to be a Book, in other words something other than paper. But the man who reads it no longer creates anything and he no longer changes himself: he is therefore no longer Time with the primacy of the Future or History; in other words he is not Man in the strong sense of the word. This man is, himself, a quasi-natural or cyclical being: he is a reasonable animal, who changes and reproduces himself while remaining eternally identical to himself. And it is this “reasonable animal” who is the “absoluter Geist,” become Spirit or completed-and-perfect [achevé-et-parfait]; in other words, dead. (ILH, 394)

 

The end of history, which had promised so much, with its State as a kind of institutionalized utopia, mediating through law the mutual recognition of the “anthropogenic” Desire of all men, becomes a kind of necrotopia of reading. The Book cannot not be read.⁷ But what is commonly understood by “reading”–a personal understanding and a perhaps wayward interpretation that can, and does, discover new things in the text–is out of the question here. The Book cannot therefore be read, either–or we must totally redefine reading. Reading in the Kojèvian sense will become an animalistic or dead repetition of Discourse, its exact repetition by the dead. This is the strange end of the Kojèvian mock theology that would replace heaven with the State,⁸ and of a mock existentialism that would resituate the recognition and reign of death definitively as satisfaction and stasis.⁹

 

Reading, then, becomes as “natural” as the Book–it is not an Action in Time; it is not, on other words, a human activity. The Book is an “objective reality,” the only possible realization of philosophy, which must be recognized by all persons–i.e., by the State–in order to be true: mere intention is not enough (ILH, 414, note). It is when Kojève considers the “objective” existence of the Work that we see the problem in his conception of reading, for he can only see publication as subjecting the Work, the Book, to the “danger [that it will be] changed and perverted” (ILH, 414, note). Kojève sees this risk of “perversion”–of interpretation, in other words–as a regrettable consequence of the necessity of the Work to be “the objectively-real that maintains itself”–i.e., to be a Work that is published and circulated as a real, solid object–rather than a “pure intention” that “fades away [s’evanouit]”–i.e., that is an idea beyond appropriation by all of society, or by the State (ILH, 414, note). Kojève, in other words, can only see reading as a function of the passive reproduction of what is “objectively-real”; all deviation from an imagined definitive meaning (or Absolute Knowledge) can only be “perversion.”

 

In light of this it is hard to see why Kojève makes a strong distinction between the book as mere paper and the act of reading. Reading as the pure repetition of a dead, frozen state will be as “material” as the thudding pileup in a warehouse of the unread copies of a book. Hermeneutics becomes hermetics: the act of reading now is the automatic reproduction of a hermetically sealed text, and of a “Knowledge” so remote that there is no place in it, or around it, for human action: thinking, rethinking, questioning. Cultural reproduction made possible by this reading will be the mere repetition ad infinitum of the assent of the dead, of animals. So much for the paradise on earth that Kojève saw as replacing the bad-faith paradise of all organized religion.

 

We see here a complete reversal from the position at the outset of history, when man confronted nature and transformed it through his labor. That view presented a radical duality between a dialectical Man and inert nature. ¹⁰ Now it is Nature–as the material Book, and as the dead reading of the Book–that has become dialectical, or at least post-dialectical, whereas Man is simply dead. Nature has triumphed, but its triumph is of no concern to the “human animals”–the Americans or Japanese, bees or dandys, it hardly matters–who engage in their fragmentary and formal activities which are of no relevance whatever to the genesis, triumph, or demise of Man.

 

It is here that we can draw some conclusions about the radical–and significant–difference between the posthistorical and the postmodern. The posthistorical, as we’ve just seen, posits a radical break, an unbridgeable gap, between definitive Knowledge and the freeplay of posthistorical action. The Book can contain nothing of interest to say about the residual uses to which leftover negativity, in the form of human action, will be put “after” the end of History. In other words it has nothing at all to say about the present or the future. Indeed the few pronouncements Kojève makes on this subject are all in footnotes, as if they were tangential to the main body of the text. The postmodern, on the other hand, puts forward a “knowledge” that arrives at its end by recognizing the necessity of the proliferation of what we might call “unbound” discourses and language games. It recognizes its death as definitive knowledge in and of the proliferation of partial knowledges, activities, and languages. Rather than being essentially closed to them, as indifferent as mere paper or rote reading, it is open to and dependent on them: it is the very knowledge of their incompletion that makes its completion–a provisional completion, to be sure, but a completion–possible.

 

Posthistorical Knowledge always comes too soon–the Owl of Minerva always takes off well before dusk–because it closes off the possibility of, and is blind to, human activity, even though activity will obviously continue, albeit without benefit of Wise Man or Book. Postmodern knowledge, on the other hand, comes too soon as well, but for the opposite reason: because its larger truth must be ignored by the very activities that justify it. If posthistorical Knowledge knows too little, postmodern knowledge knows too much. The postmodern is always already in advance of the partial activities it defines: if those activities were themselves to recognize fully the postmodern, they would simply fall under its aegis: they would be coherent parts of a larger narrative, and thus fully modern, and ultimately posthistorical. And yet these activities, these games, are thoroughly dependent on a postmodern knowledge which they must not know: without the overarching knowledge of the postmodern, they would be indistinguishable from any other human narratives, “primitive” or “modern,” which have nothing whatsoever to do with the postmodern. And without their definitive blindness, at the end of modernity which is the postmodern, they would only be components of a higher Knowledge, fully recuperated by it. They, in other words, in order to be postmodern, must in some sense be as blind to postmodern knowledge as posthistorical Knowledge would be to them.

 

And yet the Kojèvian posthistorical might be more postmodern than the postmodern. It, after all, is ignorant, locked in its perfect, one-time circularity. It does not, and must not, concern itself with, or know, that which comes after it, in an inevitable but supplementary relation. It is the sheer performance, in other words, of the blindness of partial knowledges and practices that the postmodern can only know. The posthistorical is therefore the enactment of the postmodern in and through its absolutely necessary lack of awareness of itself as postmodern; this lack is nothing more than the a priori failure and completion of postmodern knowledge. The posthistorical will always again come after the postmodern, supplementing it with its radical not-knowing. The posthistorical Owl also always flies too late–well after dusk.

 

Notes

 

1. See section 9, entitled “Narratives of the Legitimation of Knowledge,” of Jean-Francois Lyotard’s The Postmodern Condition: A Report on Knowledge, trans. Geoff Bennington and Brian Massumi (Minneapolis: The University of Minnesota Press, 1984), pp. 31-37.

 

2. See, in this context, Francis Fukuyama’s neo-Kojèvian celebration of the New World Order, The End of History and the Last Man (New York: The Free Press, 1992). Jacques Derrida has recently criticized Fukuyama for the incoherence of his approach: either the end of history is a kind of eschatology, a pure logical necessity beyond empirical proof, or it is empirically verifiable, in which case it loses the attributes that give it its necessity, and also its attractiveness. One cannot, however, demonstrate the logically necessary (or the “messianic”) by invoking empirical observations. See Derrida, Spectres de Marx (Paris: Galilée, 1993), pp. 112-20. Derrida, at the end of the same chapter (“Conjurer–le marxisme,” pp. 120-27) also considers some of the Kojèvian footnotes that I discuss in this article. I would argue that one could extend Derrida’s critique of Fukuyama to Kojève himself: for Kojève too history is ended because it is a logical necessity that it end: therefore he is largely indifferent to what comes next. Yet at the same time Kojève points to empirical evidence–America, the Soviet Union, Japan, the defeat of the Nazis–to back up his thesis.

 

3. On the postmodern and adjudication between language games in conflict, see Lyotard’s The Differend: Phrases in Dispute, trans. Georges Van Den Abbeele (Minneapolis: The University of Minnesota Press, 1988).

 

4. The Introduction to the Reading of Hegel (New York: Basic Books, 1969) is an English translation (by James H. Nichols, Jr.) of certain sections of Kojève’s Introduction la lecture de Hegel (Paris: Gallimard, Collection “Tel,” 1980). The editor of the English edition, Allan Bloom, has omitted much of the material of the 1938-39 lectures. When possible, then, I quote from the official English translation, giving page numbers from it, following the letters “IRH.” When a citation is not found in the English edition, I provide my own translation and cite the page number of the French edition, following the letters “ILH.” The reader will note that the pagination of the now widely available French edition from which I quote is different from that of the original French edition (Paris: Gallimard, 1947).

 

5.”One more word about teaching what the world ought to be: philosophy always arrives too late to do any such teaching . . . the Owl of Minerva takes flight only as the dusk begins to fall” (Hegel, Preface to the Philosophy of Right).

 

6.Kojève could never admit that a dialectics of nature was conceivable. Prior to human desire, there is simple identity. Judith Butler writes: “Kojève views nature as a set of brutally given facts, governed by the principle of simple identity, displaying no dialectical possibilities, and, hence, in stark contrast to the life of consciousness” (Subjects of Desire: Hegelian Reflections in Twentieth Century France [New York: Columbia University Press, 1987], p. 67). Maurice Blanchot rewrites this unreadability in his 1948 novel, Le Tres-Haut. In this fiction the Book becomes the journal of a perfect civil servant of a posthistorical State, a civil servant who is at the same time a subversive challenging the State through the very act of writing. The Book for Blanchot becomes an allegory of the collapse of political allegory, since all writing on the State is both fully recuperable by it, and is also its death, its extinction. Meaning itself is in a twilight zone of perfect representation of the State–so perfect it’s inhuman, or posthuman–but is also, by the very fact that it is a written representation, the death of that State, but a never dying death. (The curse of death is that it cannot die.) Such a text is perfectly circular, but also unreadable: nothing can ever happen in this State, and there is nothing more to be said, and certainly nothing more to read–but this nothing, this self-cancelling law, will be repeated endlessly, in exactly the same form. See my preface to the translation I have done of this novel, entitled The Most High, forthcoming from the University of Nebraska Press.

 

7.This is a gambit that comes out quite clearly in Kojève’s article “Hegel, Marx, et le Christianisme” (Critique, 1, 3-4 (1946): 339-66. See, for example, p. 358: “Thus–a supremely curious thing [chose curieuse entre toutes]–man is completed and perfected, in other words he attains supreme satisfaction, by becoming conscious, in the person of the Wise Man, of his essential finitude.” Kojève thus links the most profound desire of religion (as he sees it)–to guarantee man perfection and satisfaction–to that which religion most abhors: mortality.

 

8.As Mikkel Dufrenne notes (p. 397), Kojève’s stress on finitude and mortality establishes his Hegelianism as a revisionary Heideggerianism. See “Actualit de Hegel”–a review of Kojève’s Introduction and Jean Hyppolite’s “Genese et structure de la Phenomenologie de l’esprit chez Hegel”–in Esprit, 16, 9 (1948): 396-408.

 

9.See note 5, above. Dufrenne for his part sees this duality between a nondialectical nature (the “en-soi“) and dialectical Man the “pour-soi“) as a key inheritance from existentialism–one which poses plenty of problems for philosophers such as Sartre, in Being and Nothingness. How indeed does the “pour-soi” arise if the “en-soi” is closed? How can the two be reconciled beyond a mere “as if”? For Dufrenne, this is the origin of the thematics of failure (échec), anguish and despair in Sartre: “A linear series of failures cannot be taken for a dialectic” (Dufrenne, 401-03).

 

10.This statement should not be taken as a “criticism” of the postmodern, or an attempt to condemn it by “associating” it with the posthistorical. As is made clear in Blanchot’s novel (see footnote 7, above) there is no logical space outside of the postmodern–or the posthistorical, for that matter–from which such a “criticism” could be carried out.

 

Marie-Laure Ryan

Dept. of English
Colorado State University
mmryan@vines.colostate.edu

 

Few of us have actually donned an HMD (head-mounted display) and DGs (data-gloves), and entered a computer-generated, three-dimensional landscape in which all of our wishes can be fulfilled: wishes such as experiencing an expansion of our physical and sensory powers; getting out of the body and seeing ourselves from the outside; adopting a new identity; apprehending immaterial objects with most of our senses, including touch; being able to modify the environment through either verbal commands or physical gestures; seeing creative thoughts instantly realized without going through the process of having them physically materialized. Yet despite the fact that virtual reality as described above is still largely science-fiction, still largely what it is called –a virtual reality–there is hardly anybody who does not have a passionate opinion about the technology: some day VR will replace reality; VR will never replace reality; VR challenges the concept of reality; VR will enable us to rediscover and explore reality; VR is a safe substitute to drugs and sex; VR is pleasure without risk and therefore immoral; VR will enhance the mind, leading mankind to new powers; VR is addictive and will enslave us; VR is a radically new experience; VR is as old as Paleolithic art.

 

This flowering of opinions is fanned by the rhetoric of the gurus of the technology:

 

Worldwide, VR is happening in protected pockets of technology; inside giants corporations, universities, and small entrepreneurial start-ups; in Berlin and North Carolina; covering Japan and especially in the San Francisco Bay Area. . . . A rare excitement is in the air, an excitement that comes from breaking through to something new. Computers are about to take the next big step–out of the lab and into the street–and the street can’t wait. (Pimentel and Texeira, 7)

 

This sense of anticipation permeates all books about virtual reality. They are less concerned with what has been achieved so far than with what will be available in the (we hope or fear) very near future. We may have to wait until the year 2000 to see VR become an important part of our lives, but since it is depicted so realistically by its prophets, and since it exists very much in the popular imagination, we don’t have to wait that long to submit the claims of its developers to a critical investigation. In this paper I propose to analyze VR as a semiotic phenomenon, to place it within the context of contemporary culture and to explore its theoretical implications.

 

My point of departure is this definition by Pimentel and Texeira:

 

In general, the term virtual reality refers to an immersive, interactive experience generated by a computer. (11)

 

While “computer generated” accounts for the virtual character of the data, “immersive” and “interactive” explain what makes the computer-assisted experience an experience of reality. To apprehend a world as real is to feel surrounded by it, to be able to interact physically with it, and to have the power to modify this environment. The conjunction of immersion and interactivity leads to an effect known as telepresence:

 

Telepresence is the extent to which one feels present in the mediated environment, rather than in the immediate physical environment. . . . This [mediated environment] can be either a temporally or spatially distant real environment . . . or an animated but nonexistent virtual world synthesized by a computer. (Steuer 76)

 

Far from being restricted to VR, the features of immersion and interactivity can be regarded as the cornerstones of a general theory of representation and communication. The purpose of this paper is to explore the problematics of their textual implementation and to assess their significance for contemporary literary theory.

 

Immersion

 

Since immersion depends on the vividness of the display, its factors are closely related to the devices that lead to realism in representation. A factor that comes immediately to mind is the projection of a three-dimensional picture. The introduction of perspective in painting took a first step toward immersion by creating a sense of depth that integrated the spectator into the pictorial space. But because the medium of painting simulates depth on a flat surface the spectator cannot break through the can vas and walk into the pictorial space. In the visual displays of VR the barrier disappears–there is no material plane of projection–and the user feels surrounded by a virtual world which can be freely “navigated” (as a standard metaphor of networking describes movement in cyberspace).

 

The creation of a 3D effect falls under a more general category that Steuer (81) calls “depth of information.” This depth is a function of the resolution of the display, i.e. of the amount of data encoded in the transmission channel. As the other main source of immersion Steuer mentions the “breadth of information,” a category defined as “the number of sensory dimensions simultaneously presented.” Breadth of information is achieved through the collaboration of multiple media: image, sound, olfactory sign als, as well as though the use of technical devices allowing tactile sensations. VR is not so much a medium in itself, as a technology for the synthesis of all media.

 

Sheridan (58) proposes another factor of telepresence which stands halfway between immersion and interactivity: control of the relation of sensors to the environment. In order to feel immersed the user must be able to move around the virtual space and to apprehend it under various points of view. The computer tracks his movements and generates the sensory data corresponding to his position in a continuously shifting display. The control of sensors can go as far as a leaving the body, relocating the center of consciousness into foreign objects and exploring in this way places and objects normally inaccessible to humans, such as the inside of a molecule, or the geography of a distant planet.

 

Insofar as immersion is “the blocking out of the physical world” (Biocca 25), it cannot be experienced if the user remains aware of the physical generator of the data, namely the computer. The “virtual reality effect” is the denial of the role of signs (bits, pixels, and binary codes) in the production of what the user experiences as unmediated presence. It is significant that Pimentel and Texeira title their first chapter “the disappearing computer”: as in the trompe-l’oeil of illusionist art, the medium must become transparent for the represented world to emerge as real. VR represents in this respect the refutation of a popular myth: the personification of the computer as an autonomous mind (a myth fostered by artificial intelligence and its attempt to endow machines with creative thinking). As Brenda Laurel declares in a book stressing the need for aesthetic concerns in the design of software: “Throughout this book I have not argued for the personification of the computer but for its invisibility” (143). Jaron Lanier, a leading developer of VR systems, echoes: “With a VR system you don’t see the computer anymore–it’s gone. All that’s there is you” (Lanier and Biocca 166). The disappearance of the computer–which constitutes the culmination of the trend toward increasing user-friendliness in computer design–requires the replacement of arbitrary codes with natural modes of communication. Binary coded machine instruction once gave way to the mnemonic letter-codes of assembly languages; assembly languages were in turn translated into high-level languages with a syntax resembling that of natural languages. Then arbitrary words were supplanted by the motivated signs of icons on the screen. When machines are enabled to respond to spoken commands, the keyboard will become superfluous. Next to go will be the screen and the sight of the machine: visual displays should occupy the entire field of the user’s vision, rather than forming a world-within-the world, separated from reality by the frame of the monitor. Last but not least, language itself must disappear, at least in those areas where it can be more efficiently replaced by physical actions. In the ideal VR system the user will be able to grab and move objects, to mold them through the touch of the hand, or to change their colors with the stroke of a virtual paintbrush. In this mode of communication there will be no need for the user to translate her vision into sets of precise instructions. Purely visual thinking will be implemented by means of practical, non-symbolic gestures. As Pimentel and Texeira put it:

 

Simply, virtual reality, like writing and mathematics, is a way to represent and communicate what you can imagine with your mind. But it can be more powerful because it doesn’t require you to convert your ideas into abstract symbols with restrictive semantic and syntactic rules, and it can be shared by other people. (17)

 

The mystics of ages past (such as Swedenborg, an esoteric philosopher of the XVIIIth century) had a term for this radically anti-semiotic mode of communication. They called it “the language of the angels.”

 

Immersion and Literary Theory

 

Through its immersive dimension, VR inaugurates a new relation between computers and art. Computers have always been interactive; but until now the power to create a sense of immersion was a prerogative of art. It is significant that when attempting to describe the immersive quality of the VR experience, the advocates of the technology repeatedly turn toward a metaphor borrowed from the literary domain:

 

For centuries, books have been the cutting edge of artificial reality. Think about it: you read words on a page, and your mind fills in the pictures and emotions–even physical reactions can result. (Wodaski 79)

 

The question isn’t whether the created world is as real as the physical world, but whether the created world is real enough for you to suspend your disbelief for a period of time. This is the same mental shift that happens when you get wrapped up in a good novel or become absorbed in playing a computer game. (Pimentel and Texeira, 15)

 

The concept of immersion promoted by virtual reality bears thought-provoking affinities to recent theories of fiction based on the notions of possible worlds and of game make-believe. The possible-world theories of fiction come in many varieties (i.e. David Lewis, Umberto Eco, Lubomir Dolezel, Thomas Pavel) and I cannot account for all of them; the following discussion is mainly a synopsis of my own approach. Common to all theories, however, is a reliance on the semantic model of a set of possible worlds in which a privileged member is opposed to all others as the one and only actual world. The distinction actual/non-actual can be characterized absolutely, in terms of origin, or relatively, in terms of point of view. In the absolute characterization, the actual world is the only one that exists independently of the human mind; merely possible worlds are products of mental activities such as dreaming, wishing, forming hypotheses, imagining, and writing down the products of the imagination in the form of fictions. VR adds to this catalog of “accessibility relations” a mode of apprehension that involves not only the mind, but also the body. For the first time in history, the possible worlds created by the mind become palpable entities, despite their lack of materiality. The relative characterization of the concept of actuality–advocated by David Lewis–regards “actual” as an indexical predicate: the actual world is the world from which I speak and in which I am immersed, while the non-actual possible world s are those that I look at from the outside. These worlds are actual from the point of view of their inhabitants. Among the modes of apprehension that enable us to contemplate non-actual possible worlds, some function as space-travel vehicles while others function as telescopes. In the telescope mode–represented by expressing wishes or forming conjectures about what might have been–consciousness remains anchored in its native reality, and possible worlds are contemplated from the outside. In the space-travel mode, represented by fiction and now by virtual reality technology, consciousness relocates itself to another world, and recenters the universe around this virtual reality. This gesture of recentering involves no illusion, no forgetting of what constitutes the reader’s native reality. Non-actual possible worlds can only be regarded as actual through Coleridge’s much quoted “willing suspension of disbelief.” The reader of a fiction knows that the world displayed by the text is virtual, a product of the author’s imagination, but he pretends that there is an independently existing reality serving as referent to the narrator’s declarations.

 

The notion of pretense and the related concept of game of make-believe forms the core of Kendall Walton’s theory of fiction. According to Walton, a fictional text–as well as any type of visual representation–is a “prop in a game of make-believe” (11). The game consists of selecting an object and of regarding it as something else, usually in agreement with other players (author/reader, in the case of fiction.) Just as a stump may stand for a bear in a children’s game of make-believe, the picture of a ship is taken for a ship, and the text of a novel is taken for an account of real facts (an account which may or may not be regarded as accurate, as the case of unreliable narration demonstrates). Players project themselves as members of the world in which the prop is a bear, a ship or a text of nonfiction, and they play the game by “generating fictional truths.” This activity consists of imagining the fictional world according to the directives encoded in the prop. Some of the fictional truths concern the players themselves, or rather their fictional alter ego. The reader of a fiction does not simply generate truths of the type “p is fictional” but also “it is fictional that I believe p.” And if p relates the pitiful fate of a character, it will be fiction al that the reader’s alter ego pities the character. The emotions experienced in make-believe in the fictional world may carry over to the real world, causing physical reactions such as crying for the heroine. The affinity of Walton’s theory of fiction with virtual reality and its concept of immersion thus resides in his insistence on the participation of the appreciator in the fictional world. It is truly a theory of “being caught up in a story.”

 

Like computer-generated VR, possible-world and make-believe theories of fiction presupposes a relative transparency of the medium. The reader or spectator looks through the work toward the reference world. If the picture of a ship is experienced as the presence of a ship located in the same space as the viewer, it is not apprehended as “the sign of a ship.” If readers are caught up in a story, they turn the pages without paying too much attention to the letter of the text: what they want is to find out what happened next in the fictional world. This reading for the plot focuses on the least language-dependent dimension of narrative communication. And if readers experience genuine emotions for the characters, they do not relate to these characters as literary creations nor as “semiotic constructs,” but as human beings.

 

The literary devices which create a sense of participation in fictional worlds present many parallelisms with the factors leading to telepresence. One of the factors mentioned above was the projection of a three-dimensional environment. The literary equivalent of three-dimensionality is a narrative universe possessing some hidden depth, and populated by characters perceived as round rather than flat. By hidden depth I mean that the sum of fictional truths largely exceeds the sum of the propositions directly stated in the text. In a virtual world experienced as three-dimensional, the user knows that reality is not limited to what what can be seen from a given position: the outside conceals the inside, the front conceals the back, and small objects in the foreground conceal large objects in the background. Similarly, in a narrative world presenting some hidden depth (let us call it a “realistic world”) there is something behind the narrated: the characters have minds, intents, desires, and emotions, and the reader is encouraged to reconstruct the content of their mind–either for its own sake, or in order to evaluate their behavior. The procedures of inference relating to inner life would be inhibited in the case of the referents of human names in lyric poetry or in some postmodern novels where characters are reduced to stereotypes, actantial roles or allegories. When the reader feels that there is nothing beyond language, inference procedures become largely pointless.

 

As is the case in VR systems, the reader’s sense of immersion and empathy is a function of the depth of information. It is obvious that detailed descriptions lead to a greater sense of belonging than sketchy narration. This explains why it is easier be be caught up in a fictional story than in a newspaper report. But in purely verbal communication–in contrast with the visual or auditory domains–depth of information may reach the point of saturation and create an alienating effect: the length and minute precision of the descriptions of a Robbe-Grillet, as well as their restriction to purely visual information, constitute a greater deterrent to immersion than the most laconic prose.

 

Breadth of information is not literally possible in fiction, since we are talking about writing and not about multi-media communication. But insofar as it relays sensations through the imagination, literary language can represent the entire spectrum of human experience. This ability of language to substitute for all channels of sensation is what justifies the comparison of literature with a multi-media mode of communication such as VR.

 

Another factor of immersion that seems at first glance impossible in textual communication is the control of the sensors. The reader only sees (hears, smells, etc.) what the narrator shows. But to the extent that the narrator’s sensations become the reader’s, fiction offers a mobility of point of view at least as extensive as that of VR systems. The development of a type of narrator specific to fiction—the omniscient, impersonal narrator–has freed fictional discourse from the constraints of real world and pragmatically credible human communication. The disembodied consciousness of the impersonal narrator can apprehend the fictional world from any perspective (external observer point of view or character point of view), adopt any member of the fictional world as focalizer, select any spatial location as post of observation, narrate in every temporal direction (retrospectively, simultaneously, even prospectively), and switch back and forth between these various points of view. Fiction, like VR, allows an experience of its reference world that would be impossible if this reference world were an objectively existing, material reality.

 

The ultimate freedom in the movement of the sensors is the adoption of a foreign identity. As Lasko-Harvill observes, “in virtual reality we can, with disconcerting ease, exchange eyes with another person and see ourselves and the world from their vantage point” (277). This “exchanging eyes with another person” is paralleled in fiction by the possibility of speaking about oneself in the third person, or of switching between first and third when speaking about the same referent. (Cf. Max Frisch, Montauk.) But there is an even more fundamental similarity between the role-playing of VR and the nature of narrative fiction. As authors strip themselves of their real world identity to enter the fictional world, they have at their disposal the entire range of conceivable roles, from the strongly individuated first person narrator (who can be any member of the fictional world) to the pure consciousness of the third person narrator.

 

Both VR and fiction present the ability to transcend the boundaries of human perception. Just as VR systems enable the user to penetrate into places normally inaccessible to humans, fiction legitimates the representation of what cannot be known: a story can be told even when “nobody lived to tell the tale.” Of all the domain represented in fiction, no one transcends more blatantly the limits of the knowable than foreign consciousness. As Dorrit Cohn observes: “But this means that the special life-likeness of narrative fiction–as compared to dramatic and cinematic fiction–depends on what writers and readers know least in life: how another mind works, how another body feels” (5-6).

 

The effacement of the impersonal narrator and his freedom to relocate his consciousness anywhere, at any time and in whatever body or mind conveys the impression of unmediated presence: minds become transparent, and events seem to be telling themselves. The mobility of the sensors that apprehend fictional worlds allow a degree of intimacy between the reader and the textual world that remain unparalleled in nonfiction. Paradoxically, the reality of which we are native is the least amenable to immersive narration, and reports of real events are the least likely to induce participation. New Journalism, to the scandal of many, tried to overcome this textual alienation from nonvirtual reality by describing real-world events through fictional techniques. In the television domain, the proliferation of “docu-drama” bears testimony to the voyeuristic need to “be there” and to enjoy fiction-like participation, not only in imaginary worlds, but also in historical events.

 

Against Immersion

 

Theories of fiction emphasizing participation in fictional worlds represent a somewhat reactionary trend on the contemporary cultural scene. Immersion in a virtual world is viewed by most theorists of postmodernism as a passive subjection to the authority of the world-designer–a subjection exemplified by the entrapment of tourists in the self-enclosed virtual realities of theme parks or vacation resorts (where the visitor’s only freedom is the freedom to use his credit card). According to Jay Bolter, immersion is a trademark of popular culture: “Losing oneself in a fictional world is the goal of the naive reader or one who reads as entertainment. Its is particularly a feature of genre fiction, such as romance or science fiction” (155).

 

As we have seen above, the precondition for immersion is the transparency of the medium. But we live in a semiotic age, in an age that worships signs. Contemporary theories such as deconstruction teach us that the freedom of the mind must originate in a freedom from signs. So does virtual reality, in some respect, but while VR seeks this freedom in the disappearance of signs, contemporary cultural theories regard signs as the substance of all realities and as the prerequisite of thought. Freedom from signs cannot be achieved through their disappearance but only through the awareness of their omnipresence, as well as through the recognition of their conventional or arbitrary character. The aesthetics of immersion is currently being replaced–primarily in “high culture” but the tendency is now stretching toward popular culture–by an aesthetics of textuality. Signs must be made visible for their role in the construction of reality to be recognized. A mode of communication that strives toward transparency of the medium bereaves the user of his critical faculties. The semiotic blindness caused by immersion is illustrated by an anecdote involving the XVIIIth century French philosopher Diderot. According to William Martin, “he tells us how he began reading Clarissa several times in order to learn something about Richardson’s techniques, but never succeeded in doing so because he became personally involved in the work, thus losing his critical consciousness” (Martin 58). According to Bolter, this l oss of critical consciousness is the trademark of the VR experience: “But is it obvious that virtual reality cannot in itself sustain intellectual or cultural development. . . . The problem is that virtual reality, at least as it is now envisioned, is a medium of percepts rather than signs. It is virtual television” (230). “What is not appropriate is the absence of semiosis” (231).

 

In reducing VR to passive immersion, however, Bolter ignores the second component of the VR experience. If contemporary art and literature are to achieve an enhancement of the reader’s creativity, it should be through the emulation of the interactive aspect of VR, and not through the summary condemnation of its immersive power.

 

Interactivity

 

Interactivity is not merely the ability to navigate the virtual world, it is the power of the user to modify this environment. Moving the sensors and enjoying freedom of movement do not in themselves ensure an interactive relation between a user and an environment: the user could derive his entire satisfaction from the exploration of the surrounding domain. He would be actively involved in the virtual world, but his actions would bear no lasting consequences. In a truly interactive system, the virtual world must respond to to the user’s actions.

 

While the standard comparison for immersion derives from narrative fiction, the most frequently used metaphor of interactivity invokes theatrical performance. The simile captures a largely utopian dream of dramatic art: putting spectators on stage and turning them into characters:

 

As researchers grapple with the notion of interaction in the world of computing, they sometimes compare computer users to theatrical audiences. “Users,” the argument goes, are like audience members who are able to have a greater influence on the unfolding of the action than simply the fine-tuning provided by conventional audience response. . . . The users of such a system are like audience members who can march up onto the stage and become various characters, altering the action by what they say and do in their roles. (Laurel 16)

 

Whereas immersion may be a response to a basically static form of representation, interactivity requires a dynamic simulation. A simulative system does not simply respond to the user’s actions by displaying ready-made elements, it creates its data “in real time” according to the user’s directions. Like movies and narratives, a simulative system projects a world immersed in time and subjected to change, but while these media represent history retrospectively, fashioning a plot when all events are in the book, simulation generates events prospectively, without knowledge of the outcome. Taken as a whole, a simulative system does not reproduce a specific course of events, but like a “Garden of Forking Paths”–to parody the title of a short story by Borges–it is open to all the histories that could develop out of a given situation. Every use of the system actualizes another potential segment of history. The simulative system is like an alphabet containing all the books on a given subject, while the simulation itself is the writing of a potential book (except that there is no book left when the writing in completed). In a flight simulator, for instance, the user enacts the story of one particular flight out of a large set of possibilities by operating the keys that represent the control panel of the airplane.

 

The degree of interactivity of a VR system is a function of a variety of factors. Steuer enumerates three of them, without claiming that the list is exhaustive:

 

speed, which refers to the rate at which input can be assimilated into the mediated environment; range, which refers to the number of possibilities for action at any given time; and mapping, which refers to the ability of a system to map its controls to changes in the mediated environment in a natural and predictable manner. (86)

 

The first of these factors requires little explanation. The speed of a system is what enables it to respond in real time to the user’s actions. Faster response means more actions, and more actions mean more changes. The second factor is equally obvious: the choice of actions is like a set of tools; the larger the set, the more malleable the environment. A VR system allowing an infinite range of actions would be like real life, except that in real life our choice of actions in a concrete situation is limit ed by pragmatic considerations. The factor of mapping imposes constraints on the behavior of the system. Insofar as “mapping” is defined in terms of natural response, it advocates the disappearance of arbitrary codes. Far from being associated with passive immersion, semiotic transparency is conceived by VR developers as a way to facilitate interactivity. The predictability of the response demonstrates the intelligence of the system. The user must be able to foresee to some extent the result of his gestures, otherwise they would be pure movements and not intent-driven actions. If the user of a virtual golf system hits a golf ball he wants it to land on the ground, and not to turn into a bird and disappear in the sky. On the other hand, the predictability of moves should be relative, otherwise there would be no challenge nor point in using the system. Even in real life, we cannot calculate all the consequences of our actions. Moreover, predictability conflicts with the range requirement: if the user could choose from a repertory of actions as vast as that of real life, the system would be unable to respond intelligently to most forms of input. The coherence of flight-simulation programs stems for instance from the fact that they exclude any choice of activity unrelated to flying. Meaningful interactivity requires a compromise between range and mapping and between discovery and predictability. Like a good narrative plot, VR systems should instill an element of surprise in the fulfillment of expectations.

 

Interactivity and Literary Theory

 

Increasing the reader’s participation in the creative process, and thereby questioning such distinctions as author/reader, actor/spectator, producer/consumer, has been a major concern of postmodern art. This does not mean that without these efforts reading would be a purely passive experience: theorists such as Iser or Ingarden have convincingly demonstrated that a world cannot emerge from a text without an active process of construction, a process through which the reader provides as much material as sh e derives from the text. But the inherently interactive nature of the reading experience has been obscured by the reader’s proficiency in performing the necessary world-building operations. We are so used to playing the fictional game that it has become a second nature: as quasi native readers of fiction we take it for granted that worlds should emerge from texts. This explains why postmodernist attempts to promote active reader involvement in the construction of meaning usually take the form of self-referential demystification. As Linda Hutcheon writes: “The reader of fiction is always an actively mediating presence; the text’s reality is established by his response and reconstituted by his active participation. The writer of narcissistic fiction merely makes the reader conscious of this fact of his experience” (141). The price of this consciousness is a loss of membership in the fictional world. In the narcissistic work, the reader contemplates the fictional world from the outside. This world no longer functions for the imagination as an actual world–this is to say, as an ontological center–but is expelled toward the periphery of the modal system, where it acquires the status of a non-actual possible world. The metafictional gesture of de-centering thus inverts a paradox inherent to fiction. Insofar as it claims the reality of its reference world, fiction implies its own denial as fiction. By overtly recognizing the constructed, imaginary nature of the textual world, metafiction reclaims our “native reality” as ontological center and reverts to the status of nonfictional discourse about non-actual possible worlds. In order to enhance participation in, or at least awareness of the creative process, the metafictional gesture thus blocks participation in the fictional world.

 

But the reader’s interest is difficult to maintain in the absence of make-believe. The most efficient strategy for promoting an awareness of the mechanisms of fictionality is not to block access to the fictional world, but to engage the reader in a game of in and out: now the text captures the reader in the narrative suspense; now it bares the artificiality of plots; now the text builds up the illusion of an extratextual referent; now it claims “this world is mere fiction.” Shuttled back and forth between ontological levels, the reader comes to appreciate the layered structure of fictional communication, a layered structure through which he is both (in make-believe) narratorial audience in the fictional world, and authorial audience in the real world. One of the most successful examples of this game of in-and-out is John Fowles’ The French Lieutenant’s Woman. The fictional world may be eventually demystified as a textual construct, yet the text succeeds in creating an immersive experience. At times the reader regards the characters as human beings and invests an emotional interest in their fate; at other times he is made to acknowledge their status as literary creations. It is the memory of the immersive power of the text that engages his critical faculties during the self-reflexive moments. The object the reflexive activity is as much the phenomenon of immersion as the artificiality of fictional worlds. But if immersion alternates with an “interactive” stance toward the fictional world and the plural ontological levels embedded in the textual universe, the two experiences cannot occur at the same time. They imply mutually exclusive perspectives on the reference world.

 

When applied to traditional forms of text–that is, preserved and transmitted in book form–“interactivity” remains a largely metaphorical concept. It stands more for the reader’s awareness of his collaboration with the text in the production of meaning than for personal initiative and decision making. Not surprisingly, the textual mode in which the ideal of interactivity comes closest to literal fulfillment is hypertext, a form of writing made possible by the electronic medium. The idea of hypertext is well-known and I will do no more than summarize it. Organized as a network of paragraphs connected by electronic links, hypertext offers at given points a choice of directions to follow. Each choice brings on the screen a different chunk of text, to which are attached new branching possibilities. Rather than consuming the text in a prescribed sequential order, the reader determines her own path of traversal through the textual network.

 

Through the initiative given to the reader, hypertext realizes a very basic form of interactivity. As Bolter observes: “The reader participates in the making of the text as a sequence of words” (158). If we equate “text” to one particular traversal of the network, then indeed every reading session generates a new text, and the reader takes an active part in this writing. In this view, “text” is not a static collection of signs but the product of a dynamic encounter between a mind and a set of signs. If the concept of text is indissoluble from the act of reading, the physical interactivity of hypertext is a concrete metaphor for the mental activity required by all texts. While every particular path of navigation through a hypertextual network brings to th e screen different chunks of text, every particular reading of a non-electronic text highlights different episodes, links different images, and creates a different web of meaning. The difference between the experiences of hypertext and of traditional text s is mostly a matter of intensity, of awareness and of having no other source of pleasure than what Nabokov calls “combinational delight” (69). In the absence of the distraction created by a dominating storyline, it is hoped that the reader will devote all of his attention to the tracking of links.

 

Alternatively, the concept of “text” could be equated to the sum of possible readings, or rather to the written signs forming the common source of these readings. In the case of hypertext, this would mean that the text is the entire network of links and of textual nodes. According to this view, the interactivity of hypertext is not a power to change the environment, as is the case in VR systems, but merely a freedom to move the sensors for a personalized exploration. The reader may choose in which order she visits the nodes, but her choices do not affect the configuration of the network. No matter how the reader runs the maze, the maze remains the same. Far from relinquishing authority (as Bolter has claimed), the author remains the hidden master of the maze. The reader’s actions could only modify the environment if the hypertextual system generated text in real time, as an intelligent response to the reader’s decisions.”¹ As I have argued above, this is what happens in simulative systems. The computer calculates the position of the plane according to the user’s input, rather than displaying a pre-calculated position. This will not happen in hypertext until it joins forces with AI–and until AI sharpens its story-generating capabilities. In the meantime, the closest to a hypertextual system operating in real time will be for the user to get on line with the author herself.

 

The fullest form of interactivity occurs when the reader is invited to contribute text to the network. “² This invitation may take one of two forms. The first possibility is the user adding text and links which become permanent parts of the system. When this input concerns a specific character, the user is less playing the role of the character in question than taking over authorial responsibilities for the writing of his fate. In other words, the user manipulates the strings of a puppet, playing its role from the outside. The other conceivable form of interactivity is more like playing a game of make-believe such as cops and robbers. The system defines a cast of characters by specifying their attributes. The user selects an identity from this repertory, and plays the role from the inside. She encounters other users playing other characters, and they engage in a dialogue in real time. This dialogue does not count as description of the actions of the character b ut as performance of these actions: the character’s freedom to act is a freedom to select speech acts. Of these two modes of contribution, only the second constitutes an immersive experience. The first may be addictive–as any game, any activity might be–but it maintains a foreign perspective on the fictional world.

 

Immersion or Interactivty: The Dilemma of Textual Representation

 

Whether textual interactivity takes the weak form of a deliberate play with signs leading to a production of meaning, or the strong form of producing these signs, one consequence appears unavoidable: in literary matters, interactivity conflicts either with immersion or with aesthetic design, and usually with both. The strong forms of interactivity run most blatantly into the design problem: how can the contributions of the reader-turned-author be monitored by the system, so that the text as a whole will maintain narrative coherence and aesthetic value? An interactive system may be an alphabet for writing books, but the user should be prevented from producing nonsense. As Laurel argues: “The well designed [virtual world] is, in a sense, the antithesis of realism–the antithesis of the chaos of everyday life” (quoted by Pimentel and Texeira 157). Howard Rheingold stresses the need for “scenario control”: “They [VR developers] want a world that you can walk around in, that will react to you appropriately, and that presents a narrative structure for you to experience” (307). The control of a pre-determined narrative script imposes severe limits on the user’s freedom of moves (think of the narrow range of choices in the children’s books “Choose Your Own Adven tures,” where all the branches constitute a coherent story); but without this control the hypertextual network would turn into a multi-user word processor. In the worst case scenario, interactive fiction will be reduced to a bunch of would-be authors e-mailing to each other the fruits of their inspiration.

 

In the weaker forms of interactivity, design is easier to control, but immersion remains problematic. The reader of a classical interactive fiction–like Michael Joyce’s Afternoon–may be fascinated by his power to control the display, but this fascination is a matter of reflecting on the medium, not of participating in the fictional worlds represented by this medium. Rather than experiencing exhilaration at the freedom of “co-creating” the text, however, the reader may feel like a rat trapped in a maze, blindly trying choices that lead to dead-ends, take him back to previously visited points, or abandon a storyline that was slowly beginning to create interest. The best way to prevent this feeling of entrapment, it seems to me, would be to m ake the results of choices reasonably predictable, as they should be in simulative VR, so that the reader would learn the laws of the maze and become an expert at finding his way even in new territory. But if the reader becomes an expert at running the maze, he may become immersed in a specific story-line and forget–or deliberately avoid–all other possibilities. He would then revert to a linear mode of reading and sacrifice the freedom of interactivity.

 

It would be preposterous to pass a global judgment on the intrinsic merit of hypertext: whether the maze is experienced as a prison or as the key to freedom depends on the individual quality of the text and on the disposition of the reader. But I would like to advance one general pronouncement concerning the immersive power–or lack thereof–of the genre: a genuine appreciation of a hypertextual network requires an awareness of the plurality of possible worlds contained in the system; but this plurality can only be contemplated from a point of view external to any of these worlds.

 

The various attempts by contemporary literature to emulate the interactivity of VR thus involve a sacrifice of the special pleasure derived from immersion. The more interactive, the less immersive the text. The texts that come the closest to combining both types of pleasure are those that orchestrate them in round-robin fashion through a game of in-and-out. The textual incompatibility of immersion and interactivity can be traced back to several factors. While immersion depends on the forward movement of a linear plot, interactivity involves (and creates) a spatial organization. While immersion presupposes pretended belief in an solid extratextual reference world, interactivity thrives in a fluid environment undergoing constant reconfiguration. While immersion looks through the signs toward the reference world, interactivity exploits the materiality of the medium. Textual representation behaves in one respect like holographic pictures: you cannot see the worlds and the signs at the same time. Readers and spectators must focus beyond the signs to witness the emergence of a three-dimensional life-like reality.

 

In computer-generated VR, immersion and interactivity do not stand in conflict–or at least not necessarily. Immersion may offer an occasional threat to interactivity”³, but the converse does not hold. The more interactive a virtual world, the more immersive the experience. There is nothing intrinsically incompatible between immersion and interactivity: in real life also, the greater our freedom to act, the deeper our bond to the environment.

 

An obvious reason for this difference in behavior is the above-mentioned difficulty for texts to integrate the reader’s input into a coherent narrative macro-structure. VR also experiences this type of problem when it attempts to turn users into the characters of a multi-media dramatic production. It is in very restricted domains regulated by narrowly defined “narrative” scripts–flight simulators, golf, paddle-ball, etc.–or in areas not subjected to the requirements of narrative logic–visual displays, or systems combining visual data with sound and dance–that VR systems achieve the most complete fusion of immersion and interactivity.

 

But there is a more fundamental reason for VR’s ability to combine the two types of experience. In a textual environment, the tools of interactivity are signs. But signs are not the only mean of action. In the real world we can act with the body by pointing at things, manipulating them, and working on them with tools. We can also use the body as an instrument of exploration by walking around the world and moving the sensors. Virtual reality, as its developers conceive it, reconciles immersion and interac tivity through the mediation of the body. “Our body is our interface,” claims William Brickemp in a VR manifesto (quoted in Pimentel and Texeira, 160). When the reader of a postmodern work is invited to participate in the construction of the fictional world she is aware that this world does not exist independently of the semiotic activity; hence the loss in immersive power. But the user of a VR system interacts with a world that is experienced as existing autonomously because this world is accessible to m any senses, particularly to the sense of touch. As the story of Saint Thomas demonstrates, tactile sensations are second to none in establishing a sense of reality. The bodily participation of the user in virtual reality can be termed world-creative in the same sense that performing actions in the real world can be said to create reality. As a purely mental event, textual creation is a creation ex nihilo that excludes the creator from the creation: authors do not belong to the world of their fictions. But if a mind may conceive a world from the outside, a body always experiences it from the inside. As a relation involving the body, the interactivity of VR immerses the user in an world already in place; as a process involving the mind, it turns the user’s relation to this world into a creative membership. The most immersive forms of textual interactivity are therefore those in which the user’s contributions, rather than performing a creation through a diegetic (i.e. descriptive) use of language, count as a dialogic and live interaction with other members of the fictional world. I am thinking here of children’s games of make-believe, and of those interactive hypertextual systems where users are invited to play the role of characters. These modes of interactivity have yet to solve the problem of design, but they point the way toward a solution of the conflict between immersion and interactivity: turn language into a dramatic performance, into the expression of a bodily mode of being in the world.

 

Notes

 

1. Some hypertexts erase certain pathways after the reader has taken them. This seems to be the closest so far to a self-modifying network responding to the user’s input. But the pruning of links is pre-programmed into the text, so it does not constitute a response in real time.

 

2. This invitation is extended in “HotelMOO, the Hypertext Hotel” (originator and “proprietor”: Tom Meyer of Brown university), a hypertextual network placed in the public space and accessible through the Internet. Users may either visit the hotel as anonymous guests, in which case their limited (inter)activity resides in the freedom to choose a path through the network, or they can enter the system under the identity of a specific character. In this case they are allowed to contribute to the expansion of the network.

 

3. Following McLuhan, Steuer suggests that the vividness of a virtual world may “decrease a subject’s ability to mindfully interact with it in real time” (90). If a computer-generated environment is so rich in “fictional truths” that its exploration offers great rewards, why would the user bother to work on it?

 

Works Cited

 

• Biocca, Frank. “Virtual Reality Technology: A Tutorial.” Journal of Communication 42.4 (1992): 23-72.
• Bolter, Jay David. Writing Space. The Computer, Hypertext, and the History of Writing. Hillsdale, N.J.: Lawrence Erlbaum, 1991.
• Cohn, Dorrit. Transparent Minds: Narrative Modes for Presenting Consciousness in Fiction. Princeton: Princeton UP, 1978.
• Hutcheon, Linda. Narcissistic Narrative. The Metafictional Paradox. Waterloo, Ontario: Wilfried Laurier UP, 1980.
• Joyce, Michael. Afternoon, a story. Cambridge, MA: Eastgate Press, 1987. [Computer program].
• Landow, George P. Hypertext. The Convergence of Contemporary Critical Theory and Technology. Baltimore and London: The Johns Hopkins UP, 1992.
• Lanier, Jaron, and Frank Biocca. “An Insider’s View of the Future of Virtual Reality.” Journal of Communications 42.4 (1992): 150-172.
• Laurel, Brenda. Computers as Theater. Menlo Park, Ca: Addison Wesley, 1991.
• Lasko-Harvill, Ann. “Identity and Mask in Virtual Reality.” Discourse 14.2 (1992): 222-234.
• Lewis, David. “Truth in Fiction.” American Philosophical Quarterly 15 (1978):37-46.
• Martin, William. Recent Theories of Narrative. Ithaca and London: Cornell UP, 1986.
• Nabokov, Vladimir. Pale Fire. New York: Random House (Vintage Books), 1989 [1962].
• Pimentel, Ken, and Kevin Texeira. Virtual Reality: Through the New Looking-Glass. Intel/Windcrest McGraw Hill, 1993.
• Rheingold, Howard. Virtual Reality. New York: Simon & Schuster, 1991.
• Ryan, Marie-Laure. Possible Worlds, Artificial Intelligence, and Narrative Theory. Bloomington: Indiana UP, 1991.
• Sheridan, Thomas B. “Musings on Telepresence and Virtual Presence.” In Papers from SRI’s 1991 Conference on Virtual Reality. Ed. Teresa Middleton. Westport and London: Meckler, 1992.
• Steuer, Jonathan. “Defining Virtual Reality: Dimensions Determining Telepresence.” Journal of Communications 42.4 (1992): 73-93.
• Walton, Kendall. Mimesis as Make-Believe. On the Foundations of the Representational Arts. Cambridge and London: Harvard UP, 1990.
• Wodaski, Ron. Virtual Reality Madness. SAMS publishing, 1993. [User manual for a computer game package]

 

Robert Kolker

Department of English
University of Maryland
Robert_P_KOLKER@umail.umd.edu

 

Preface: “The Moving Image Reclaimed” is a twofold experiment. On the level of textuality, it is an attempt to write about films with moving-image examples present and available to be viewed, the way a paragraph from a novel or lines from a poem are available to the reader of literary criticism. But to make this experiment possible, much technical experimentation was necessary. Moving images are packed with detailed information. They are analogue events. Digitizing them is a prodigious task and transmitting them over the Internet is even more prodigious. They are big, ungainly, and consume a lot of computer resources, so you will need to have patience as they come across the network. If you are receiving the clips over a dialup (SLIP) connection, you will need more than patience–you will need something to occupy your time (maybe a good book?). The clips in this essay are in MPEG format, but a Quicktime version is also available (on average, the color QuickTime clips will be at least 50% larger than their MPEG equivalents; black-and-white QuickTime clips may be as much as ten times the size of the MPEG clips). Whatever format you choose, you will need appropriate viewing software installed on your system. If you find that you don’t have such software, you can find some unsupported programs, for various platforms, here. Please note that, in viewing these clips, you may occasionally experience problems with color or frame-rate (if you are using the default MPEG viewer for Windows, you might try choosing “ordered (256)” or “hybrid” under the “dither” menu; you will also find that some clips exceed the size allowed under the free version of the Windows MPEG viewer. We recommend that you support shareware by paying for the full version of that software). All the images will look best on a video-display capable of 16 thousand or more colors: on 256 SVGA and VGA displays there may be a phenomenon called palette flash, where colors look less than attractive. Please also note that, although the QuickTime clips do have a soundtrack, the MPEG clips are without sound (“MOS” they called it in Hollywood, mimicking German filmmakers just gaining a hold of the language: “Mit Out Sound”).

 

Textual access has been a major problem in the work of cinema studies. Unlike our colleagues in literary and art criticism, film scholars’ access to the text has been absolutely limited to still images, which are often enough not taken directly from the film under discussion. Computer imaging is changing that. With relatively inexpensive video-capture hardware and software, it’s now possible to digitize film images from a videocassette or laserdisc and put them to critical use, making the film as quotable as a novel or poem. Published on-line, with image text and written text wrapped around one another, the work of film and television criticism becomes linked to its source, gives up a certain innocence, and claims a heightened authority (even responsibility). In fact, sources become reversed. The critical act becomes the source for the imagery and its meaning: the imagery is reclaimed, meaning becomes a result of the reclamation process in ways that correct and advance older methodologies of the field.

 

I recently wrote an essay on Martin Scorsese’s debt to Alfred Hitchcock. Its purpose was to discover a viable structure in Scorsese’s Cape Fear, a film that is part of that other reclamation process I spoke about: a work that calls to itself images from many other films as it plays and teases its audience with them. Cape Fear is many things: a popular film Scorsese made to help pay back a debt to Universal Pictures, the company that supported his earlier work, The Last Temptation of Christ; and a remake of a 1962 film of the same name, which itself owes a debt to Hitchcock’s Psycho. Scorsese has always been interested in reclaiming Hitchcock, and in fact made his own version of Psycho in 1976, called Taxi Driver. But the calls Scorsese makes on Hitchcock in Cape Fear are nested very deeply. Unlike the film’s references to more recent mad killer movies, which audiences readily recognize, the Hitchcockian quotations are coveted. This is celebration as ceremony, allusion as test as well as play. More modernist than postmodern. Cape Fear cites three of Hitchcock’s lesser early fifties films, Stagefright, I Confess, and Strangers on A Train. It cites them and quotes from them, and takes an almost arcane pleasure in secreting them within its own structure.

 

To talk about them is one thing, and the essay that emerged from my research into the sources of Cape Fear needs, like almost any conventional essay in film studies, a great deal of faith from the reader. Even frame enlargements from the films in question will not adequately prove my assertions or my theorizing about allusion, citation, and quotation in modernist and postmodern practice. Such a discussion needs visual proof, which only the moving images can provide.

 

To set the scene for Scorsese’s Hitchcockian reclamations, I needed first to address larger notions of cinematic form. Many filmmakers have attempted to absorb elements of Hitchcockian structure in their films–basically because Hitchcock did various formal tropes so well and with commercial success. In Vertigo, to give one instance, Hitchcock solves the problem of how to communicate his main character’s response to heights by creating an elaborate visual effect, which is achieved by simultaneously zooming the camera’s lens in one direction while tracking the camera in the other. Difficult to imagine or even recall from the film. Here is what it looks like:

 

(VIDEO)
Vertigo, Alfred Hitchcock, Paramount, 1958 [.6 MB]

 

Still more difficult to imagine is the that fact that this bit of technique has fascinated a variety of filmmakers, who have tried to improve upon it over and over again. Spielberg does it often. This what it looks like in Jaws, where he attempts to communicate Police Chief Brody’s surprise and anxiety at spotting the shark.

 

(VIDEO)
Jaws, Steven Spielberg, Universal, 1975 [.19 MB]

 

In its most complex version yet, Scorsese recomposes it for a climactic moment in Goodfellas, where the main character is about to betray his friends.

 

(VIDEO)
Goodfellas, Martin Scorsese, Warner Bros., 1990 [2 MB]

 

This interaction of visual and explanatory texts not only proves a scholarly point, but explains intertextuality in an intertextual way. This becomes clearer in my main argument, which is, after all, about an intertextuality so essential to a filmmaker’s style that one film haunts another through the very structure of its images. Strangers on A Train and Cape Fear are films about doubles: evil twins, subjectivities split in two, each one attempting to destroy the other. There is a sequence in Strangers on A Train, in which the mad Bruno, who has committed a murder for his “other,” the tennis player, Guy. Bruno emerges from the shadows, calling to Guy. It is one of the most unnerving things Hitchcock has done, for it presents a character seeing his shadow take on form before his eyes.

 

(VIDEO)
Strangers on a Train, Alfred Hitchcock, Warner Bros., 1951 [2.2 MB]

 

The structural base of this sequence is the shot/reaction shot–a look at the character and a cut to what the character is looking at–the basic way Hitchcock builds a viewer’s comprehension of his character’s situation (a construction basic to all cinema, that Hitchcock used with particular finesse). In Cape Fear, Scorsese keeps returning to the Hitchcockian version of that structure and to the central episode of Guy and Bruno in the dark. Here’s a version of it. Sam Boden, the lawyer suddenly haunted by his past, sees his nemesis, his evil other, Max Cady, as if in a dream.

 

(VIDEO)
Cape Fear, Martin Scorsese, Universal, 1991 [.26 MB]

 

Perhaps the most famous sequence in Strangers on a Train occurs when Guy spots Bruno staring menacingly from the audience at a tennis match. Secret terrors in public places is a favorite Hitchcockian gambit, a way to everyone’s anxiety.

 

(VIDEO)
Strangers on a Train, Alfred Hitchcock, Warner Bros., 1951 [2.4 MB]

 

Scorsese quotes the passage quite directly, using a Fourth of July parade instead of a tennis match.

 

(VIDEO)
Cape Fear, Martin Scorsese, Universal, 1991 [1.6 MB]

 

Scorsese also inverts the Hitchcockian gambit. He takes another sequence from Strangers on a Train, in which Bruno appears to Guy, once again stiff and menacing as his is in the tennis match, but this time in front of the Jefferson Memorial.

 

(VIDEO)
Strangers on a Train, Alfred Hitchcock, Warner Bros., 1951 [.95 MB]

 

Scorsese turns it into another nightmare vision. Sam Boden’s wife, Leigh, emerges from sleep to see Max Cady in a shower of fireworks (yet another Hitchcock quotation, this one from To Catch a Thief) in the dead of night.

 

(VIDEO)
Cape Fear, Martin Scorsese, Universal, 1991 [1.2 MB]

 

There’s a terrific sense of play in Scorsese’s work of reclamation that is now transferred into the critical process. Images created and recalled become images recreated and compared. The imagination of the critic and the filmmaker become commingled. Even enhanced. We now see what the critic is talking about and, hopefully, understand how deeply films grow out of other films.

 

And it’s quite possible to go beyond quoting images and actually intervene in their structure, inscribing the critical act within the images themselves. This is particularly useful in explaining how a filmmaker articulates narrative structure by framing and moving within a shot. A famous sequence from Welles’s Citizen Kane becomes an animated expression of the complex shiftings of narrative point of view as figures change position and dominate or become recessive in the frame.

 

(VIDEO) (VIDEO)
Citizen Kane, Orson Welles, RKO, 1941 [1.3 MB each]

 

More than critical inquiry, this computer-assisted methodology becomes a kind of performance. The image is shared between filmmaker, critic, and reader, and its former inviolability is replaced by active intervention and presentation. The aura of the inviolable and inevitable text is diminished and the authority of the critic heightened by access.

 

Deepika Bahri

School of Literature, Communication, and Culture
Georgia Institute of Technology
deepika.bahri@modlangs.gatech.edu

 

Directing his “attention to the importance of two problems raised by Marxism and by anthropology concerning the moral and social significance of biological and physical ‘things,’” Michael Taussig argues in The Nervous System that “things such as the signs and symptoms of disease, as much as the technology of healing, are not ‘things-in-themselves,’ are not only biological and physical, but are also signs of social relations disguised as natural things, concealing their roots in human reciprocity” (83). If Taussig’s observation with regard to the cultural analysis of an illness and its treatment in the USA in 1978 is extrapolated to a very different scene but not so distant time, the machinations of illness in a fictional case study reveal the usually syncopated socio-personal reciprocity Taussig suggests. The scene is Rhodesia on the brink of its evolution into the nation now named after a ruined city in its southern part. The “subject” under analysis is Nyasha, the anorexic, teenage deuteragonist of Tsitsi Dangarembga’s 1988 novel Nervous Conditions (a title inspired by Sartre’s observation in the preface to The Wretched of the Earth, that the native’s is a nervous condition¹). The novel, narrated in the first person by Nyasha’s cousin Tambu, catalogues the struggles of the latter to escape the impoverished and stifling atmosphere of the “homestead” in search of education and a better life, as well the efforts of other women in her family to negotiate their circumstances, offering the while a scathing critique of the confused and corrupt social structure they are a part of. Tambu’s movement from her homestead, which symbolizes rural decay, to the prosperous, urban mission of her uncle introduces us to a cast of characters scarred by encounters with the savagery of colonialism in the context of an indigenously oppressive socius. One of many characters in the novel suffering from a nervous condition, young Nyasha demonstrates in dramatic pathological form what appears to ail an entire socio-economic construct. If “the manifestations of disease are like symbols, and the diagnostician sees them and interprets them with an eye trained by the social determinants of perception” (Taussig 87), and if, as Susan Bordo argues in “The Body and Reproduction of Femininity,” “the bodies of disordered women . . . offer themselves as aggressively graphic text for the interpreter–a text that insists, actually demands, it be read as a cultural statement” (16), Nyasha’s diseased self suggests the textualized female body on whose abject person are writ large the imperial inscriptions of colonization, the intimate branding of patriarchy, and the battle between native culture, Western narrative, and her complex relationship with both. Not surprisingly, Nyasha’s response to this violence on the body is not only somatogenic but it is to manifest specifically that illness which will consume that body.

 

The pathological consequences of colonization, signaled in the heightened synaptic activity which, according to Fanon, produces violence among colonized peoples, take shape in Nyasha in the need to target herself as the site on which to launch a terrorist attack upon the produced self. According to Sartre, the violence of the settlers contaminates the colonized, producing fury; failing to find an outlet, “it turns in a vacuum and devastates the oppressed creatures themselves” (18). The quest for an outlet takes grotesque forms in Nyasha through the physical symptomatology of disorder. But it would be entirely too simple to attribute her disease to the ills of colonization alone: Nyasha responds not only as native and Other, she responds as woman to the ratification of socially en-gendered native categories which conspire with colonial narratives to ensure her subjectivity. The implication of precapital and precolonial socio-economic systems in the postcolonial state, moreover, makes a simplistic oppositionality between colonizer/colonized meaningless. Her response to Western colonial narratives which enthrall as they distress at a time when she is also contending with her burgeoning sexuality in a repressed society, further complicate any efforts to understand and explain her pathology. Living on the edge of a body weakening from anorexia and bulimia, Nyasha’s involuntary reaction to the narratives competing for control over her, I would suggest, appears to be to systematically evacuate the materials ostensibly intended to sustain her, empty the body of signification and content to make “a body without organs” (BwO) in Deleuze and Guattari’s terminology, and thereby to reveal and dismantle (although never completely) the self diseased by both patriarchy and colonization. As Tambu’s narrative unfolds, the female body as text itself is being rewritten as protest, attempting to rid itself of the desires projected on it, even if hybrid subjectivity prevents it from purging them all.² The “body talk” invoked in my reading, informed largely by postmodern (despite the “realist” mode of narration) and feminist concerns, also resonates with postcolonial, social, and psychological ones. Many of these approaches are of unlike ilk, and none of them can be explained fully within the scope of this essay. Rather, the interplay of these positions is used to shed light on a case that defies simple theoretical models. Readers will note the use in this essay of Western and non-Western theorists, often with widely ranging positionings: given the “hybrid” culture being described in the novel and the range of apparata necessary to understand Nyasha’s condition in terms that were medical as well as socio-political, feminist as well as postcolonial, physical as well as psychological, it seemed specious to confine the theoretical apparatus to non-Western theory or a particular feminist or postcolonial perspective. More importantly, it seemed less useful. None of these perspectives, however, preclude the analysis of body as metaphor and illness as symbol.

 

Nyasha’s recourse to a stereotypically Western female pathological condition ³ to empty herself of food, the physical token of her anomie and a significant preoccupation of African life, is ironic and fitting as Dangarembga forces a collocation of native and colonial cultural concerns to complicate our ways of reading the postcolonial. Nyasha’s accusatory delirium, kamikaze behavior and oneiroid symptoms are at once symptomatic of a postcolonial and female disorder whereby the symptom is the cure, both exemplified in her refusal to occupy the honorary space allotted her by colonial and patriarchal narratives in which she is required to be but cannot be a good native and a good girl. This entails her rejection of food (metonymic token of a system that commodifies women’s bodies and labor and sustains male authority), of a socio-sexual code that is designed to prepare her for an unequal marriage market while repressing her sexuality, and of an educational system which has the potential to emancipate women and natives but functions, instead, to keep them in their place and even further exacerbate their ills.

 

In “Killing the Hysteric in the Colonized’s House”, Sue Thomas has argued for a reading of the novel as a narrative of loss of cultural and maternal affiliations, invoking Grosz’s suggestion that hysteria is a tragic self-mutilation that symptomatizes inarticulable resistance (27). Hysterical overcompliance with domination, she suggests, characterizes all the major characters in the novel. While this is well substantiated in her essay, I will argue that the female body is a very particular space that is marked in ways that narrativize elaborate systems of production, cultural and economic. The recoding of these systems in the text, elaborated in the story of Tambu’s introduction into and misgivings about the cycle, the adult women’s struggles within it, and Nyasha’s articulation of structural imparities is a staging of these narratives in performative terms that bears illustrative witness to the violence done to the female body in the successive scenes of pre and postcolonial Zimbabwe. Nyasha’s war with patriarchal and colonial systems is fought on the turf of her own body, both because it is the scene of enactment of these systems and because it is the only site of resistance available. This reading suggests that the performativity of female resistance needs to be at the heart of a feminist postcolonial politics.

 

It would be well to acknowledge the centrality of Dangarembga’s feminist agenda before attempting to transpose a postcolonial reading on the novel. In an interview with Rosemary Marangoly George and Helen Scott, the author claimed that her purpose was “to write things about ourselves in our own voices which other people can pick up to read. And I do think that Nervous Conditions is serving this purpose for young girls in Zimbabwe” (312). Tambudzai, the young female narrator’s missionary education tells only of “Ben and Betty in Town and Country” (27), not of her own people; Nervous Conditions is an attempt at telling Zimbabwean girls stories about themselves to counter the lingering narrative in which Zimbabwe remains a remote control neo-colony administered by toadies like Nyasha’s western educated father, Babamukuru and his ilk who are still “painfully under the evil wizard’s spell,” and will continue the colonial project (50). Women’s stories do not easily see the light of day in Zimbabwe because, according to Dangarembga, “the men are the publishers” and “it seems very difficult for men to accept the things that women write and want to write about” (qtd. in George 311). These stories, however, must be told. Early in the novel, Tambu tells us that the novel is not about death though it begins with the ironic admission “I was not sorry when my brother died” (1); rather it is about “my escape and Lucia’s; about my mother’s and Maiguru’s entrapment; and about Nyasha’s rebellion [which] may not in the end have been successful” (1). The postcolonial critic should be wary that any overarching theory proposed be mediated by Dangarembga’s emphasis on the feminist preoccupations of the story for the novel ends with the reminder: “the story I have told here, is my own story, the story of four women whom I loved, and our men, this story is how it all began” (204). That the novel opens with the prefiguring of her brother Nhamo’s death to make way for Tambu’s tale is a poignant reminder of the symbolic starting point of female narrative. Far from making a postcolonial reading less tenable, however, Dangarembga’s feminist proclivities are useful in explaining the dense nature of power relations in the postcolonial world in a way that colonial discourse (including western feminist discourse) typically fails to do.

 

In Third World Women and the Politics of Feminism, Chandra Talpade Mohanty complains that Western feminists “homogenize and systematize” third world woman, creating a single dimensional picture. They also assume a “singular, monolithic notion of patriarchy” which is reductive. Ultimately, “Western feminisms appropriate and ‘colonize’ the fundamental complexities and conflicts which characterize the lives of women of different classes, religions, cultures, races and castes in these countries” (335). Dangarembga’s representation of women of different ages, classes, educational qualifications, and economic capacities, makes composite and reductive sketches of the third world woman if not impossible, difficult. The women in this novel are neither simply victims, nor inherently more noble than the men; rather, their stories illustrate the difficulty of separating problem and solution, perpetrator and victim, cause and effect. That they are uniquely positioned to bear the brunt of native and colonial oppression, however, is vividly demonstrated: even issues of class and status are ultimately subservient to and informed by a pervasive but complex phallocentric order; this Tambu clarifies when she marvels at “the way all the conflicts came back to this question of femaleness” (116). The patriarchal order is supported by the colonial project, pre and post capitalist economy, and what we may call, for lack of a better phrase, traditional cultural codes. By layering gender politics with the atrophying discourse of colonialism, Dangarembga obliges us to recognize that the power structure is a contradictory amalgam of complicity and helplessness–where colonizer and colonized, men and women collude to produce their psycho-pathological, in a word, “nervous” conditions. What ails Nyasha, then, is not simply an eating problem but a rampant disorder in the socio-cultural complex that determines her fate as woman and native on the eve of the birth of a new nation.

 

The novel dramatizes the intersections of personal and national history on the one hand ⁴ and the feminist and postcolonial on the other through Nyasha’s attempts to escape her own assigned narrative as woman and colonized subject. Colonialism, capitalism, and patriarchal national culture conspire to produce an imperiled Nyasha and a nation in crisis. Symptoms of the latter abound in the repetitive images of rural poverty, female disempowerment, and continuing colonialism in educational and economic institutions while Nyasha’s crisis is evident in her hysteric, nervous condition and endangered body. Given this, one could read Nyasha’s story as yet another vignette of victimage, but, apart from Dangarembga’s own criticism of such a narrative, ⁵ there are other reasons for reading it as a text of possibilities for survival, agency, and re-creation. Several third world feminist critics reject the discourse of victimage in feminist and minority discourse. Mohanty objects in “Under Western Eyes” to the “construction of ‘Third World Women’ as a homogeneous ‘powerless’ group often located as implicit victims of particular socio-economic systems” (338). Spivak complains that “There is a horrible, horrible thing in minority discourse which is a competition for maximum victimization . . . . That is absolutely meretricious.”⁶ This is not to say that Nyasha is not victimized but to acknowledge that it is quite another thing to cast her as victim. Western feminists also recognize this distinction: Naomi Wolf’s recent Fire with Fire, for instance, issues a call to women to eschew the rhetoric of victimage. Nyasha is conscious of victimization but hardly content to remain a victim; regardless of the caliber or effectiveness of her methods of opposition, she/her body are the enunciation of protest against and the story of victimization. A reading of Nyasha as victim fails for another interesting reason: this is because the text reveals the ways in which she is quite complicit with the oppressive order she so abhors. In this sense, too, she emerges less as victim than as the mediated product of a conflicted narrative.

 

Reading female praxis as narrative of relative “agency,” in The Beauty Myth Naomi Wolf tells us that anorexia and bulimia begin “as sane and mentally healthy responses to an insane social reality: that most women can feel good about themselves only in a state of permanent semistarvation” (198), although it is not the myth of female beauty alone that contaminates Nyasha–she is rejecting the very basic processes, the business of living in a colonized world where she shares the dual onus of being colonized and female. Wolf also tells us that “Eating diseases are often interpreted as symptomatic of a neurotic need for control. But surely it is a sign of mental health to try to control something that is trying to control you” (198). Nyasha leaves us in no doubt that she is aware of the oppressive forces that seek to bend her to their will. In one of her many pedagogic moments, she warns Tambu that “when you’ve seen different things you want to be sure you’re adjusting to the right thing. You can’t go on all the time being whatever’s necessary. You’ve got to have some conviction . . . . Once you get used to it, it’s natural to carry on and become trapped” and then it becomes clear that “they control everything you do” (117). Hardly, it would seem, is this the language or sensibility of a passive victim. Nyasha’s potential for agency cannot be acknowledged until one understands that the “[body] still remains the threshold for the transcendence of the subject” (Braidotti 151). Through the diseased female body as text is made visible the violence of history, and through its spontaneous bodily resistance, the possibilities for rupturing and remaking that text. Control over the body is a gesture of denial of representative abject/subject status for Nyasha since “the proliferation of discourses about life, the living organism, and the body is coextensive with the dislocation of the very basis of the human subject’s representation” (151).

 

The teleology of Nyasha’s anorexic and bulimic practices is intimately linked to her revulsion at the mandate to represent herself as good girl and good native in particular instances of infractions against her sense of self in the novel. Tambu speaks of the time Babamukuru confiscates Nyasha’s copy of D.H. Lawrence’s Lady Chatterley’s Lover which is objectionable for its depiction of female sexuality. Appalled at this invasion of her rights, and what might be seen as a persistent barrier to her development into sexual agent rather than sexualized commodity, Nyasha, indicating the etiology of her symptoms, refuses to eat for the first time in the novel (83). Tambu next alerts us to Nyasha’s quiet rejection of her meal when she is scolded by her father for not responding to her primary school headmaster and thereby shaming him; it is Tambu who tells us that her cousin’s behavior stems from her dislike of being spoken in the third person, because “it made her feel like an object” (99). In preparing for her Standard Six exams, too, Nyasha loses her appetite, signaling the much greater apotheosis of internal conflict to follow at her O-levels. Her withdrawal from the family and rejection of food after the confrontation over her late arrival from the school dance, and subsequently on another later arrival from school where she has stayed to study, then, comes as no surprise. Layered in between these specific instances are general references to Nyasha’s disdain of fatty foods in the interest of maintaining a more desirable body shape; this quest for “commodification” as an attractive object is not recognized by her as destructive and, interestingly, is not textually linked directly to starvation or anorexia. Instead, the usually appearance-centered practices of anorexia and bulimia become narrativized as artful, if grotesque, protest that will prevent Nyasha’s maturation into full fledged commodified “womanhood,” even as she embraces the abjection that comes from seeking a “pre-objectal relationship,” becoming separated from her own body “in order to be” (Kristeva 10).⁷

 

The question of control is focal and must be located within the matrix of complex power relations to understand the significance of Nyasha’s rebellion. ⁸ Patriarchal society, colonial imperialism, and capitalist economy function by controlling and commodifying the subject’s body and labor; the female subject in this cultural and social economy, well documented in Nervous Conditions, is assessed by the ability to reproduce (she goes into labor), to provide sexual release (the labors of love), and to work (home, farm, market labor). Prostitution and pimping are extreme representations of the annexation of female labor while the marital institution within oppressive narratives is a quotidian, usually sanctioned, appropriation. Female labor in this novel denotes a woman’s exchange value in the socio-familial and matrimonial economy. It is necessary to understand the role of female labor in the novel and the reason why it is not available as a site of resistance to grasp fully the implications of Nyasha’s default choice of the physical body as the locus for rebellion. Women are not only expected to work and work for men, their value and worth are determined by work, although it does not make them “valuable” in any intrinsic, meaningful sense. In “Re-examining Patriarchy as a Mode of Production: The Case of Zimbabwe,” Cindy Courville explains that “women’s exploitation and oppression were structured in terms of political, economic, and social relations of the Shona and Ndebele societies” (34). Under colonial capitalism, however, women became the “‘proletariat’ of the proletariats, becoming more subordinated in the new socio-economic schemes, and often losing their old and meaningful roles within the older production processes” (Ogundipe-Leslie 108).

 

Tambu reveals that “the needs and sensibilities of the women in my family were not considered a priority, or even legitimate” (12). Women are intended to enable men to attain value through their labor: Netsai and Tambu, therefore, must labor so their brother Nhamo can attend school. They may not enjoy the fruits of their own labor: “under both traditional and colonial law, they [African women] were denied ownership and control of the land and the goods they produced. It was the unpaid labor of women and children which subsidized the colonial wage” (Courville 38). Nhamo, in fact, steals Tambu’s labor–the maize she has been growing in a scant spare time to buy an education–and squanders it in gifts to friends, while her father steals her prospects by keeping the money Babamukuru has sent him for Tambu’s school bills.⁹ Interestingly, while the maize does serve to keep her in school, ¹⁰ and later allows her admission to the mostly White Sacred Heart Convent, we can assume from her aunt Maiguru’s trajectory and her own pursuit of it that she will continue to be schooled in the ways of a societal economy that will use her labor to support and enable the colonial and patriarchal order which will deny her, as it has Maiguru, the fruits of that labor. Maiguru, the most educated woman in the novel, is just as qualified as her husband Babamukuru (a little publicized fact that surprises Tambu when she learns of it) and just as instrumental in helping to maintain the mission lifestyle that Nhamo and Tambu find so dazzling, but her knowledge and her labor are never acknowledged: they have been annexed to serve a societal order which awards the fruits of that knowledge and labor as well as the associated prestige to Babamukuru, lending him authority, as a result, over the entire extended family, including his older brother. Babamukuru, in effect, has “stolen” her labor to enhance his position. To the untrained eye Maiguru appears to be incapable of suffering because she “lived in the best of all possible circumstances, in the best of all possible worlds” as Tambu says, ironically echoing Candide’s unfortunate and misguided philosopher Pangloss. To this Nyasha replies that “such things could only be seen” (142). Education, then, which might free women like Maiguru from service to capitalism and patriarchy becomes yet another token of exchange, further alienating them from the “home” economy of agricultural subsistence in favor of urban wage service.¹¹ When she and her husband return to their uneducated, struggling relatives, it is to further heighten the impoverishment of the homestead, and the need to escape from it. It is Nyasha who points out that the education of solitary family members will not solve the ills of rural poverty: “there’ll always be brothers and mealies and mothers too tired to clean latrines. Whether you go to the convent or not. There’s more to be done than that,” she tells Tambu who believes that education will “lighten” their burdens (179). Near the end of the novel, Tambu herself wonders, “but what use were educated young ladies on the homestead? Or at the mission?” (199). Admittedly comprehension has only begun to dawn on her at that stage, but a fuller realization seems to be clearly indicated.

 

Babamukuru, his young nephew Nhamo, and son Chido, however, embrace colonial capitalism and education because they are usually compatible with and in fact, uphold traditional patriarchy. Courville tells us that “the colonial state sanctioned and institutionalized the political and legal status of African women as minors and/or dependents subject to male control” (37). Educational degrees, in this economy, are fodder for men’s appetites for control. Witness the following scene. On his return from England, Babamukuru is comically greeted by a rousing chorus of admirers who extol his abilities, while ignoring Maiguru’s comparable achievements: “Our father and benefactor has returned appeased, having devoured English letters with a ferocious appetite! Did you think degrees were indigestible? If so, look at my brother. He has digested them” (36). Indeed, men can digest degrees as well as the food prepared by women since both sustain their stature while failing to “nourish” the women. Their lot, educational status notwithstanding, is defined by service to and for men. Courville claims that while “some social aspects of African patriarchy were repugnant to European culture . . . colonial authorities recognized the significance of patriarchal power in mobilizing the labor of women” (38). That none of the women in the novel ever refuse their labor is no oddity since we learn that female labor may not be and is not withheld for fear of punishment; Netsai’s failure to carry her empty-handed brother’s bags at Tambu’s suggestion, for instance, results in a sound thrashing and her conclusion that she should have just done it “in the first place” (10). Nor is Nhamo’s behavior unusual; while Tambu acknowledges that “Nhamo was not interested in being fair,” she insists he was not being obnoxious, merely behaving “in the expected manner” (12). Netsai, needless to say, never refuses to carry his bags again. Even Tambu, who appears to demonstrate a keen sense of outrage at the injustice of a patriarchal order while at the homestead, participates in all the labor intensive tasks on the homestead while the men await service. One of the few instances of her failure to be a “good girl,” evident to her uncle in her refusal to attend the Christian ceremony that is to sanction her parents’ otherwise “sinful” marriage of many years–an embarrassing and humiliating proposition to Tambu, is also, predictably, punished with a beating and a sentence of domestic labor; interestingly, before she issues an outright refusal, Tambu confesses to a muscular inability to leave her bed, prompting her uncle to ask if she is “ill” and then to dismiss Maiguru’s affirmative response with injunctions to get the girl dressed; this event is an adroit linking in the novel of its major themes, revealing the nexus of relations between illness, body, labor, colonialism, patriarchy, and the female subject.

 

Nyasha, too, who is seen laboring on the homestead along with the other women, including Maiguru, at the family’s Christmas gathering, is clearly being prepared for a lifetime of service to the men in her life despite her relatively privileged economic status. Since labor cannot be denied in the phallocratic order–at least not with impunity, the body then becomes the site of conflict for control. I realize that the dichotomy between labor and the body here is problematic since it is the body that labors, but in this instance we need to separate the two to recognize the extent to which Nyasha’s body as text is scripted, and how that text might be reinscribed as protest.

 

In a certain sense, Nyasha’s understanding of bodily dimensions has been shaped, if not determined, by her brief exposure in England to the Western desire for the “svelte, sensuous” womanly frame (197); she is preoccupied with her own figure and urges her unofficial pupil Tambu not to eat too much (192). Her sense of the ideal self, then, has already been appropriated by an aesthetic that does not recognize the wide-hipped, muscle bound female form as beautiful; this same constitutional African female frame is prized for its capacity to produce labor and to signal the subject’s relatively superior status because it suggests that the subject is well-fed, a beautiful thing in societies that experience food shortages. Tambu and Nyasha’s aunt Lucia, for instance, “managed somehow to keep herself plump in spite of her tribulations . . . . And Lucia was strong. She could cultivate a whole acre single-handed without rest”; these twin attributes qualify her as an “inviting prospect” to Takesure, Tambu’s father, and, Dangarembga hints, Babamukuru (127). Nyasha’s attraction to the Western ideal of femininity must be mediated, then, by her understanding of the exploitative usurpation of the healthy African female body. On a visit to the homestead, Tambu’s mother, Mainini, pinches Nyasha’s breast after remarking that “the breasts are already quite large” and then asking when she is to bring them a son-in-law (130). Nyasha’s pathology and her belief that “angles were more attractive than curves” (135), I would insist, is not simply rooted in her desire for slimness (which it might be) but also in a rejection of the rounded contours of the adult female body primed for the Shona matrimonial and social economy.

 

The role of food as a pawn in this struggle for control over the body is a crucial one. Wolf notes that “Food is the primal symbol of social worth. Whom a society values, it feeds well” and “Publicly apportioning food is about determining power relations” (189). She concludes that: “Cross-culturally, men receive hot meals, more protein, and the first helpings of a dish, while women eat the cooling leftovers, often having to use deceit and cunning to get enough to eat” (190-91). This pattern is made amply clear at the Christmas reunion at the homestead where Babamukuru and Maiguru provide the victuals. Maiguru jealously guards the meat, insisting that the rotting meat be cooked and served despite its tell-tale green color, but not to the patriarchy who are served from meat that has been stored in the somewhat small refrigerator. The able women at the homestead must cook and serve the dwindling food, eating last and little, typically without complaint. They, in fact, sleep in the kitchen but their labor produced in their assigned space is not theirs to enjoy, except as scraps.

 

In Babamukuru’s household, women do not eat least although they must wait till he is served. Even here, Maiguru replicates the practices of the homestead, fawning over her husband and eating his leftovers. Babamukuru puts out a token protest at her servility, following it up with a rebuke to Nyasha for helping herself to the rice before he is quite finished. He, nevertheless, prides himself on his table and would have been gratified by wide-eyed and poorly-fed Tambu’s silent observation that “no one who ate from such a table could fail to grow fat and healthy” (69). In this case, however, it is important to note that the ability to provide plentifully gives Babamukuru prestige even though Maiguru’s labor is just as important in accounting for the ample table. Refusal to eat at such a table is tantamount to a direct challenge to his authority. He repeatedly insists that Nyasha “must eat her food, all of it” or he will “stop providing for her–fees, clothes, food, everything” (189). Given this, it may be somewhat easier to understand Nyasha’s inability to stomach the food intended to “develop” her into a valuable commodity for the market, and to serve as a token doled out to enhance her father’s stature and to exercise his control over her, exhibited in multiple other ways as well.

 

Babamukuru is obsessed with control in general, control over women in particular, and control over his girl-becoming-woman daughter, how much she eats, how she dresses and speaks to the elders in the family, how often and how much she talks with boys, and what she reads, all measures designed to fashion her into a “decent” woman. Perhaps it might be more accurate to add that he is “pathetically” obsessed, being himself implicated in a societal system that puts men of means and education in the slot of caretaker and guardian so he must maintain and improve, juggling old and new ways, or find his own position as “good boy” (defined by a different but no less compelling rubric) jeopardized. Nyasha’s body and her mind, then, are pressed into Babamukuru’s strangely distorted project of asserting his control and preserving his status in society lest it be challenged: “I am respected in this mission,” he announces, “I cannot have a daughter who behaves like a whore” (114). Nyasha’s questionable behavior, punished with a merciless beating, consists of coming in ten minutes later than her brother Chido–who is not subject to the same rules anyway–and cousin Tambu–who seldom challenges her uncle’s authority or taxes him with the need to exert it–from a school dance. The survival of patriarchal ideology, of which Babamukuru is torchbearer, depends on its enactment on Nyasha’s very person. This should not be surprising since, in postcolonial terms, the female body has often been the space where “traditional” cultural practices that ensure male control over it, encoded in words like “decency,” must be preserved. Babamukuru chooses which parts of traditional culture and modernity (represented through colonial education and ways) Nyasha is to adopt and exhibit to maximize his status as colonial surrogate and de facto clan elder–a schema analogous to his acceptance of Maiguru’s earnings (the fruit of her Western education), while insisting on her compliance with the traditional requirement of wifely obedience. The claims of traditional society, of colonial and precolonial modes of production, and of western aesthetics on Nyasha’s body, I would argue, together produce her pathological response. Fanon’s contention that “colonialism in its essence was already taking on the aspect of a fertile purveyor for psychiatric disorders” (249) must be complicated by the observation that it is not only the colonial war Nyasha is fighting on the turf of her body but also a battle with the megalomaniacal patriarchal control represented by Babamukuru of whom she says: “Sometimes I feel like I am trapped by that man” (174). Her “anti-colonial” war, moreover, is complicated by her own collusion with the corrupt system she is fighting–her unwillingness to relinquish the accent acquired from her brief stay in England, her criticism of the racist dominion of colonizers while remaining standoffish with her compatriots at school, and the lack of effort at regaining her native language or contact with homestead relatives–visible to Tambu but unacknowledged, or unknown to her except in her sense of herself as “hybrid,” is also a factor in the war of ideas and values being narrativized on her corporeal bodily space. Nyasha, “who thrived on inconsistencies,” according to Tambu, seems to internalize the conflicts posed by her surroundings till her tongue, body, and mind seem together to want to carry the struggle to a dramatic conclusion (116).

 

The body under siege, then, is not surprisingly the space for resistance. Moreover, Nyasha has exhausted the options for legitimate engagement with oppression through official means. Having attempted and failed at reasoning with her father, no “usual” recourse remains. In her view, other adult women in the novel offer no viable alternatives. Nyasha is quite certain that her “mother doesn’t want to be respected. If people did that they’d have nothing to moan about” (78-79). Having witnessed her mother Maiguru’s feeble and feckless flutters for freedom, when she briefly runs away to her brother’s only to return five days later,¹² Nyasha, who elsewhere concedes that her mother is rather “sensible,” must look for other means of resistance. Maiguru’s state of “entrapment,” foretold for the reader in the very beginning of the novel, and reflected in her admission that she chose “security” over “self,” is precisely what Nyasha is seeking to avoid. Aunt Lucia, too, who is supposed to be an unmanageable free spirit and, commendably, rejects her paramour Takesure’s questionable support, ultimately disappoints Nyasha by resorting to propitiate Babamukuru. To Nyasha’s complaint that “she’s been groveling ever since she arrived to get Daddy to help her out. That sort of thing shouldn’t be necessary,” Lucia pragmatically responds, “Babamukuru wanted to be asked, so I asked. And now we both have what we wanted” (160). Nyasha fails to appreciate that Lucia’s strategies are essential to her. In the final tally, Maiguru, “married” to patriarchy, and Tambu’s mother, too tired and too traditional to engage in a sustained struggle with it, her mind never being hers to make up, remain trapped (153) while Tambu–with her “finely tuned survival system” (65), and Lucia are the ones who will “escape,” both having learned the value of survival and relative empowerment over enactments of dramatic protest, but effecting their escape in different ways. But then Nyasha does not have the benefit of hindsight endowed on the reader by Tambu’s prefiguring of the fate of the women in the story. Her critique of women’s ingratiating and subservient ways, however, is instructive.

 

The implication of women in oppressive cultural codes–the craft and guile evident in their quest for survival and advancement–is undeniably an issue here. Women provide the mainstay of patriarchal structures. In her novel, Le Pique-nique sur l’Acropole, Louky Bersianik presents a stunning embodiment of female complicity in the image of women as petrified pillars supporting the temple of Erectheion in Athens. Acropolis, the bastion and symbol of traditional Western patriarchal thought is the site of a long male banquet at which women have served as handmaidens. The homestead and the mission, too, are a picnic for men that women will cater. Maiguru, Lucia, and Tambu’s sporadic gestures of resistance are ultimately “permissible” infractions because they are followed by propitiatory gestures consonant with compliant performances of femininity and so do not seriously challenge the extant order; they “play” the system and attempt to prevail within rather than without it, ultimately gaining some modicum of satisfaction by way of security, a job, or an education–none of which, we are being told through Nyasha’s expostulations and actions, is adequate compensation. A propos of this issue, however, is the observation that Nyasha herself seems to decide to give in to Babamukuru’s authority because “it is restful to have him pleased (196). The strategies adopted by Maiguru and Lucia–and on occasion Nyasha herself–are survivalist in nature in contrast to her ultimate recourse to violent and destructive ones. Her seeming acquiescence toward her father–a survivalist tactic–is followed, however, by a more solipsistic, private regimen of rebellion: she tells Tambu “that she had embarked on a diet, to discipline [her] body and occupy [her] mind” (197). The diet and the disease become for her a holy mission; Rudolph Bell in Holy Anorexia “relates the disease to the religious impulses of medieval nuns, seeing starvation as purification” (qtd. in Wolf 189). To borrow Fanon’s words yet again, “this pathology is considered as a means whereby the organism responds to, in other words adapts itself to, the conflict it is faced with, the disorder being at the same time a symptom and a cure” (290).¹³ Or as Wolf puts it, “The anorexic refuses to let the official cycle master her: By starving, she masters it” (198). Taking recourse to anorexia and bulimia then becomes for Nyasha a pathetic means of both establishing control over her body in the only way possible and relinquishing control by giving in to a learned western pathology.

 

But let us pause. There are two issues of import here: a.) rejection of food has already been read in terms beyond the vocabulary only of anorexia and bulimia; b.) it is not only food that is being rejected by the bodily organism. With regard to the first, let us remember that Tambu’s mother also abjures food to protest her departure for the mission at first, and then Sacred Heart because she thinks education and English-ness will kill Tambu as it has Nhamo (184). Before her departure for the mission, Tambu speculates that “at Babamukuru’s I would have the leisure . . . to consider questions that had to do with survival of the spirit, the creation of consciousness, rather than mere sustenance of the body,” the latter having been a considerable preoccupation for homestead women (59). That Nyasha can afford the luxury of refusing food is certainly relevant, but it becomes less significant in light of Mainini’s gesture. Refusal to eat is a time honored and cross-cultural form of protest. Gandhi’s program of Satyagraha¹⁴ and fasting were pivotal in India’s fight for freedom. It is interesting to pose the case of a teenage girl, hyper-conscious of the territorial offenses against her, along the same spectrum of protest activity that accommodates Gandhi’s lofty project of non-cooperation. The difference is that female lives are usually confined to the private sphere; female protests usually do not find outlet in public ways although one might argue that “the distinction between what is public and what is private is always a subtle one,” especially if one reads the female body as implicated in the economy of male and societal desire (Strachey 66). And lest we overlook the obvious, Nyasha, after all, is only fourteen years old when she begins to stage her gestures of protest.

 

Her rejection of food is linked to a whole set of other associated unpalatable realities: the anorexic herself tells us that the fuss is about something else altogether, “it’s more than that really, more than just food. That’s how it comes out, but really it’s all the things about boys and men and being decent and indecent and good and bad” (190). Nyasha’s commodity status in the sexual economy, for instance, is exposed implicitly through her anorexic behavior intended to erode the body and prevent its blossoming into womanhood; but it is also exposed explicitly in a discussion on “private parts” between the cousins. The suppression of her sexuality at the same time that she is being groomed for an equipoisal matrimonial market, her fear that a tampon is the only thing that will enter her vaginal orifice “at this rate,” and her recommendations, albeit playful, to Tambu about the relative advantages of losing one’s virginity to the sanitary device rather than to an insensitive braggart, suggest the disbalancement of the market system that would ensue, should the girls choose to transform sexual restriction into abstinence or “devalue” themselves by accidentally rupturing their precious membranes (119; 96). The threat is a potent one because virginity is desirable in unmarried women and functions symbolically, with “the powers and dangers credited to social structure reproduced in small on the human body” (Douglas 11). The vulvic crime Nyasha gestures at has the content of a vaginal betrayal of the patrimonial body of the state–it is the denial of heterosexual exchange, of the preservation of expected social narratives. While there is no textual evidence of her having lost her virginity thus, Nyasha’s larger project of making the body itself disappear by denying it nourishment tacitly promises to accomplish something of the same objective.

 

Tested, tried, and unsuccessful as “good girl,” it remains for Nyasha to fail as “good native.” Confronted with her “O” level exams, Nyasha transforms a test situation into a veritable trial of the soul, testing the very mettle of history. Attracted and repelled in almost equal measure by colonial educational and cultural systems, Nyasha reacts in a foreseeably conflicted manner to the variety of concerns weighing on her mind: she becomes obsessed with passing the exams which will test her on the colonizer’s version of knowledge even while she is aware that this education is a “gift” of her father’s status, and the “knowledge” itself is questionable. As her body spurns food, her mind is rejecting what the colonizers have called knowledge, and evincing a hysteric, physical revulsion to “their history. Fucking liars. Their bloody lies” (201). Nyasha’s “body language” is as loud and clear as her words for she is tearing her book to shreds with her teeth as she rages. But what is the substitute? Dangarembga explains that “one of the problems that most Zimbabwean people of my generation have is that we really don t have a tangible history we can relate to” (qtd. in Wilkinson 190-91). Not available to Nyasha are the (his)stories heard in whispers from the margins, in the brief accounts given by Tambu’s grandmother¹⁵ who speaks of the history that “could not be found in the textbooks” (17), about the “wizards” who were avaricious and grasping and annexed Babamukuru’s spirit: “They thought he was a good boy, cultivable, in the way that land is, to yield harvests that sustain the cultivator” (19). The knowledge she has been fed is less easily digested by Nyasha than it is by the good native, Babamukuru, although he too, incidentally, suffers from bad nerves. Nyasha’s protest transpires exponentially: “They’ve trapped us. But I won’t be trapped. I’m not a good girl” (201). The moral content of “goodness,” like the symbolic content of “womanhood,” are recognized by Nyasha as inherently bankrupt. Her acute sensibility scans “goodness” as a managerial tool, rather than a moral imperative, that keeps women and natives in line. Ironically, Nyasha’s dramatic indictment of colonial education, delivered in the language and in an approximation of the accent of the colonizer, speaks eloquently of an embattled and muddled consciousness attempting to regain control. Nyasha fails in multiple ways as “good native”: both in her failure to accept the totality of colonial education and in her failure to renounce it completely.

 

Ultimately, then, food is only the metonymic representation of all that Nyasha cannot accept and understand. Her dwindling body boldly enacts the pervasive and aggregate suffering and bewilderment of colonized women caught between opposing as well as joined forces. Clearly, she also does not have the stomach for the deception and lies of the colonial project or the pathetic mimicry of this project by natives like Babamukuru and his confused and endearment mouthing consort, Maiguru. “It’s bad enough,” she laments, “when . . . a country gets colonised, but when the people do as well!” (147). Having learned the discourse of equality and freedom, young and confused though she might be, Nyasha recognizes that the native has failed to adopt the more salubrious aspects of Western humanism. The truth is that natives could learn different lessons from colonial education. Instead, the overwhelming preoccupation with food and food presentation, the “eyeing and coveting” of dresses outside the mission church, Tambu’s visualization of a convent education in terms of a smart and clean “white blouse and dark-red pleated terylene skirt, with blazer and gloves, and a hat” (183), the ritualized attention to hierarchy at gatherings, unbridled materialism and lust for goods and items of “comfort and ease and rest” evident in the mission as Tambu catalogues Babamukuru and Maiguru’s household effects (70), the incongruous adoption of western diet and the presence and prevalence of a servile, laboring class in the very hearth of the mission, among other symptoms of a community in crisis, testify to endemic class divisions heightened by a total capitulation to commodity fetishism. The embrace of selective items of Westernization by Babamukuru and others, even Nyasha, to the exclusion of its more useful possibilities is exposed throughout the novel. The potential for communicating the principles and values of Western education is clear to Babamukuru who does not approve of Tambu’s desire to go to the mostly white school because association with white people would cause girls “to have too much freedom,” a consequence incompatible with their eminently desirable development into “decent women” appropriate for the marriage market (180).

 

At the same time that the potential for emancipation promised by the colonial encounter is left frustrate by the natives’ refusal to accept the better part of western humanism, the failure of colonizers themselves to exercise those same principles which serve to legitimize their sense of superiority over “less civilized” natives is exposed through Nyasha’s revolt. Nadel and Curtis explain the psychology of colonial dominion in their introduction to Imperialism and Colonialism: “Underlying all forms of imperialism is the belief–at times unshakable–of the imperial agent or nation in an inherent right, based on moral superiority as well as material might, to impose its pre-eminent values and techniques on the ‘inferior’ indigenous nation or society” (1). In The Conquest of America: The Question of the Other, Tzvetan Todorov demonstrates that colonialism exerts its control by extending the principle of equality only when it withholds from its Others the principle of difference. Principles of democracy, freedom, and independence, that fueled the American and French revolutions as well as reforms in much of the Western world did not, for instance, stand in the way of colonialism. Nor did concessions to minorities in the developed world encourage officials to extend the same to colonized subjects. The excesses of African patriarchy, for instance, which repulsed European sensibilities, were tolerated “in the interest of colonial profit” while the condemnation of polygynous marriages resulted not from a concern for women but from a need “for the reproduction of the labor force” (Courville 38). These contradictions are glaringly obvious to young Nyasha. The colonizer’s formula for accommodating the native, as she astutely observes, is to create “an honorary space in which you could join them and they could make sure you behaved yourself” (178); “But, she insisted, one ought not to occupy that space. Really, one ought to refuse” (179).

 

The net impact of Nyasha’s “refusal” seems less important than that in her, Dangarembga has offered not only a textbook example of the havoc wrought by colonial and patriarchal systems, but a narrativization of the body itself in terms of conflict and resistance and its angry longing for a better, less perplexing world. In bodily terms, Nyasha almost succeeds in destroying herself, in achieving, if not the body without organs–which is admittedly unrealizable anyway, at least a grotesquely unhealthy remainder of her original self. The anorexic, after all, is effectively unwomanned and left a shell of herself: “the woman has been killed off in her. She is almost not there” (Wolf 197). But the woman that dies is the abject self that has never enjoyed the luxury of self-determination, that is no real woman but an insubstantial changeling who functions as token and currency in the labor and matrimonial market. Nyasha’s pathological persona enacts a multi-pronged assault on a complex and interwoven system that involves the body and the mind, patriarchy and the female body, colonialism and history, reinscribing the text of history and psycho-social sexuality, of Corpus and Socius (Deleuze and Guattari 150). Nyasha has attempted an attack on the corporeal to annihilate the symbolic. What is left is the BwO which is “what remains when you take everything away. What you take away is precisely the phantasy, and signifiances [sic] and subjectifications as a whole” (151). Whether the violence of her rebellion has left her more “stratified–organized, signified, subjected” must be determined in light of the only choices that remained; for finding out how to make the BwO is “a question of life and death, youth and old age, sadness and joy. It is where everything is played out” (161;151).

 

Nyasha’s offensive against her bodily self reenacts the narrative of violence on woman and native while at the same time gesturing at the possibility of agency: signaling from the bathroom and the bedroom (her favorite retreats) that a more pervasive insurgence, a more public and widespread struggle by women for freedom from the patriarchal and colonial order may be soon to follow. This promise is manifested not only in Tambu and Lucia’s “escape,” but in recent campaigns against female abuse in Zimbabwe and organized assistance for abused and disenfranchised women. These struggles must be recognized no matter what shape they are in; a responsible reading must reinstate female praxis to a central place in feminist and postcolonial politics. Given such a reading, one might say that regardless of the fact that Tambu is mildly disapproving of her cousin’s behavior, the text of Nyasha’s “bodybildungsroman” (in Kathy Acker’s memorable neologism) does tell Zimbabwean girls stories about themselves in terms that expose the crises they are likely to encounter. Nyasha’s condition reveals to her cousin her own impending crisis; when the cornerstone of one’s security begins to “crumble,” she admits that “You start worrying about yourself” (199). The import of Nyasha’s theatrics might be measured in terms of its placement within the larger context of female and postcolonial existence in a society struggling to reconcile competing and conflicted narratives. The promise of something gained is evident in the textual arrangement of the narrative as well, in the parting words of Tambu, who had once said “it did not take long for me to learn that they [Whites] were in fact more beautiful [than Blacks] and then I was able to love them” (104), and who at the end of the novel ominously remarks that “seeds do grow” (203) and “something in my mind began to assert itself” (204). The novel, after all, is a kunstler and bildungsroman which catalogues Tambu’s maturation even as she functions as the amanuensis of Nyasha’s performances. Tambu’s changing consciousness is the stuff of hope; it is no less than the promise of a different text, a whole new corpus, in the future.

 

Notes

 

1. “The status of ‘native’ is a nervous condition introduced and maintained by the settler among colonized people with their consent” (20).

 

2. For this last realization, I am indebted to my friend Ritch Calvin\Koons who collaborated with me on a performance dialogue on the novel at the International Conference on Narrative Literature in Vancouver in 1994.

 

3. Nyasha begins to engage in starvation (anorexic) and purging (bulimic) activities when she is fourteen. Anorexia and bulimia are provisionally being described as Western female pathologies because, according to Naomi Wolf, “Anorexia and bulimia are female maladies: From 90 to 95 percent of anorexics and bulimics are women” and most Western women can be called, twenty years into the backlash, mental anorexics (181; 183). I would suggest that industrialization and development in the ersatz third-world countries and contact with “first world” cultures may be producing a similar profile among women in the developing world although research in this area remains scant. Nyasha’s illness, interestingly enough, is not recognized by a white psychiatrist because “Africans did not suffer in the way we had described” (201). At a conference in November 1993, I heard a graduate student paper on anorexia based on research for her dissertation. The student had been interviewing women anorexics in western countries and was surprised when I suggested that she might investigate instances in the non-western parts of the world. She had never considered the possibility. For the moment, it would appear, anorexia and bulimia remain western preserves.

 

4. This is noted by Sally McWilliams in her analysis of the novel: “Their [Nyasha and Tambu’s] personal histories are undergoing radical repositioning at the same time as their political histories are altering” (111).

 

5. In her interview with George and Scott, the author states, “Western literary analysis always calls Nyasha self-destructive, but I’m not sure whether she is self-destructive” (314).

 

6. Forthcoming interview. See complete reference in “Works Cited.”

 

7. Kristeva suggests that the ultimate abjection occurs at the moment of birth, “in the immemorial violence with which a body becomes separated from another body in order to be” (10).

 

8. This paper does not discuss colonialism and patriarchy as pathologies although this aspect of all projects of domination is an important one to bear in mind nor does it investigate the case of Babamukuru as controlled by colonial education and traditional cultural codes–fruitful subjects for quite another discussion.

 

9. Jeremiah also “steals” his daughter and pregnant sister-in-law, Lucia’s labor when he takes credit for thatching a roof they have been slaving to mend.

 

10. A White woman in town gives her money for the maize entirely because she misconstrues Tambu’s enterprise for “Child labour. Slavery” (28), the only language available for explaining Tambu’s presence in the city as a seller of green maize. She nevertheless takes pity on Tambu and gives her money for the school fees after Mr. Matimba, her headmaster explains (and exaggerates) her predicament.

 

11. In the interest of fairness, one must acknowledge that education does not free Babamukuru either from service to patriarchy and neo-colonialism. It is Nyasha once again who recognizes that “They did it to them too . . . . To both of them [Babamukuru and Maiguru] but especially to him. They put him through it all” (200). His positioning within these systems, however, is so different from Maiguru’s that his story, in some ways the same as that of the women, still tells a different tale that would require a significantly different critical model to explain it.

 

12. Nyasha complains that “she always runs to men . . . . There’s no hope” (175).

 

13. It may be useful to note at this juncture that both Fanon and Dangarembga were trained in medicine and psychology.

 

14. Hindi for passive resistance.

 

15. In her interview with George and Scott, Dangarembga explains her rationale for the grandmother figure:

 

I didn’t have a grandmother or a person in my family who was a historian who could tell me about the recent past. And so I felt the lack of such a history very much more. I’m sure that other Zimbabwean women who perhaps did have that need fulfilled in reality would not have felt such a lack, such a dearth as I did, and would not have felt so strongly compelled to create a figure like the Grandmother’s in Nervous Conditions. (311-12)

 

Works Cited

 

• Bersianik, Louky. Le Pique-nique sur l’Acropole: Cahiers d’ancyl. Montreal: VLB Editeur, 1979.
• Bordo, Susan. “The Body and Reproduction of Femininity: A Feminist Appropriation of Foucault.” Gender/Body/Knowledge: Feminist Reconstructions of Being and Knowing. Ed. Alison M. Jaggar and Susan Bordo. New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers UP, 1992.
• Braidotti, Rosi. “Organs without Bodies.” Differences 1.1 (Winter 1989): 147-61.
• Courville, Cindy. “Re-examining Patriarchy as a Mode of Production: The Case of Zimbabwe.” Theorizing Black Feminisms: The Visionary Pragmatism of Black Women. London: Routledge, 1993. 31-43.
• Dangarembga, Tsitsi. Nervous Conditions. Seattle: Seal, 1988.
• Deleuze, Gilles and Felix Guattari. A Thousand Plateaus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia. Trans. Brian Massumi. Minneapolis: U of Minnesota P, 1987.
• Douglas, Mary. Purity and Danger: An Analysis of Concepts of Pollution and Taboo. London: Routledge, 1966.
• Fanon, Franz. The Wretched of the Earth. Trans. Constance Farrington. New York: Grove, 1963.
• George, Rosemary Marangoly, and Helen Scott. “An Interview with Tsitsi Dangarembga.” Novel: A Forum of Fiction 26 (1993): 309-19.
• Grosz, Elizabeth. Sexual Subversions: Three French Feminists. Sydney: Unwin, 1989.
• Kristeva, Julia. Powers of Horror: An Essay on Abjection. Trans. Leon S. Roudiez. New York: Columbia UP, 1982.
• McWilliams, Sally. “Tsitsi Dangarembga’s Nervous Conditions: At the Crossroads of Feminism and Postcolonialism.” World Literature Written in English 31.1 (1991): 103-112.
• Mohanty, Chandra Talpade, et al. Third World Women and the Politics of Feminism. Bloomington: Indiana UP, 1991.
• —. “Under Western Eyes: Feminist Scholarship and Colonial Discourses.” Boundary 2 12.3/13.1 (Spring/Fall 1984): 333-58.
• Ogundipe-Leslie, Molara. “African Women, Culture, and Another Development.” Theorizing Black Feminisms: The Visionary Pragmatism of Black Women. London: Routledge, 1993. 102-117.
• Nadel, George H. and Perry Curtis, eds. Imperialism and Colonialism. New York: Macmillan, 1964.
• Sartre, Jean-Paul. Preface. The Wretched of the Earth. By Frantz Fanon. Trans. Constance Farrington. New York: Grove, 1963. 7-31.
• Spivak, Gayatri Chakravorty. Forthcoming interview in Between the Lines: South Asians on Postcolonial Identity and Culture. Ed. Deepika Bahri and Mary Vasudeva. Philadelphia: Temple UP, 1995.
• Strachey, Lytton. Queen Victoria. London: Collins, 1968 [1921].
• Taussig, Michael. The Nervous System. New York: Routledge, 1992.
• Thomas, Sue. “Killing the Hysteric in the Colonized’s House: Tsitsi Dangarembga’s Nervous Conditions.” Journal of Commonwealth Literature 27.1 (1992): 26-36.
• Todorov, Tzvetan. The Conquest of America: The Question of the Other. Trans. Richard Howard. New York: Harper, 1984.
• Wilkinson, Jane. Talking with African Writers: Interviews with African Poets, Playwrights and Novelists. London: Heinemann, 1990.
• Wolf, Naomi. The Beauty Myth: How Images of Beauty are Used Against Women. New York: Anchor-Doubleday, 1991.
• —. Fire with Fire: The New Female Power and How It Will Change the 21st Century. New York: Random House, 1993.