Jon Thompson

Department of English
North Carolina State University
jthompson@unity.ncsu.edu

 

 

Forché, Carolyn. The Angel of History. New York: Harper Collins, 1994.

 
The title of Carolyn Forché’s newest volume of poetry comes from a famous passage of Walter Benjamin’s essay “Theses on the Philosophy of History,” in which Benjamin considers history’s power to dishevel human order and any human understanding of the past. In section IX, part of which is excerpted as an epigraph to Forché’s volume, Benjamin considers the possibility that this loss also brings about the loss of a present and a future:

 

This is how one pictures the angel of history. His face is turned toward the past. Where we perceive a chain of events, he sees one single catastrophe which keeps piling wreckage and hurls it in front of his feet. The angel would like to say, awaken the dead, and make whole what has been smashed. But a storm is blowing in from Paradise; it has got caught in his wings with such a violence that the angel can no longer close them. The storm irresistibly propels him into the future to which his back is turned, while the pile of debris before him grows skyward.

 

Tellingly, this passage from Benjamin’s essay emphasizes the destructive force of history. History here is perceived to be “one single catastrophe,” and “Paradise,” or the dream of utopia, far from being capable of restoring order, only adds to the storm. In subsequent sections of the essay, however, Benjamin insists upon the importance of a “hermeneutic of restoration” as a way of redeeming the past. For him the human imperative is to perform a hermeneutic of restoration as both a critical and social practice. For Benjamin, history can live meaningfully only as a redemptive vision and practice. Otherwise it becomes reified as a dead set of facts. The “weak Messianiac power” of utopianism is its power not only to make sense of the catastrophe of history, but also to redeem history by recasting its losses as part of a teleological journey which ultimately culminates in the establishment of a just social order. In this way, past, present, and future regain their lost connectedness and become part of one seamless, meaningful continuum.

 

It is useful to recall Benjamin’s argument here in order to see how Forché makes use of aspects of it while distancing herself from, or rejecting, others. As in section IX of Benjamin’s essay, in The Angel of History Forché sees history as a catastrophe, particularly twentieth-century history. For her, the decisive moments of our history are its large-scale calamities–World War II, fascism, the Holocaust, Hiroshima, the Soviet invasion of Czechoslovakia, El Salvador, Chernobyl. All of these events have a ghost-like presence in Forché’s poetry. Past and present are affiliated through the repeated experience of political trauma. For Forché, as for Fredric Jameson, history is what hurts. Pain is history’s most enduring common denominator. Haunted by the weight of the dead, the volume speaks with a finely elegiac voice that gives it a singular intensity. The characteristic feeling in these poems is one of desolation. This feeling is evident even in relation to events not usually regarded as tragic, such as the fall of the Berlin wall. In these poems, the awareness goes to what Milan Kundera calls “the unbearable lightness of being,” the sense that freedom is, in its own way, as illusory as nonfreedom. So for Forché, the fall of the wall ushers in an age of emptiness, filled only with the wreckage of the real brought about by both totalitarian and “democratic” governments. East and West have finally achieved a state of parity, but it is parity defined by moral nullity:

 

     The homeless squatters passed through the 
     holes into empty communist gardens, and the 
     people from the east passed from their side 
     into a world unbearable to them.

 

Forché’s volume attempts to convey her sense of the catastrophic nature of history formally by relying on poetic fragments. These are then linked together in thematically-related groups around the large-scale calamaties of the twentieth century. The continuity that exists between these poems therefore is ironic–the continuity of discontinuity.

 

The attempt of The Angel of History, as Forché acknowledges in the notes at the end, is to write a polyphonic poetry that breaks with her earlier mode of the first-person, free-verse, lyric-narrative poetry, a poetry that relies on the staging of multiple voices rather than just one. Indeed, in many of the poems Forché has rendered unknowable at least some of the distinguishing features of her earlier poetry. Here the identity of the speaker and the addressee are frequently ambiguous, as are the events described, the time period, even the physical locations of many of the poems. There is an eerie indeterminacy to all of this. Place, time, and identity fall away or become indistinct. Instead of using the conventions of lyric poetry, Forché orchestrates a variety of voices from the past and present which speak out of a largely decontextualized landscapes of pain. As the reader is led through these twentieth-century badlands, what dominates is the disembodied voice of the speaker-poet, and the odd, frequently grotesque, details here and there that come at the reader with surrealist force. Thus, the poetry is not really polyphonic, for the voice of the poet remains central, and subordinates the other voices to its own. While these voices never contest or displace the central voice of the speaker, the blending of voices and the precise use of horrific detail evoke the nightmarish depths to twentieth-century history. This can be seen in the first two sections of poem IX, in the section entitled “The Recording Angel”:

 

It isn't necessary to explain
The dead girl was thought to be with child
Until it was discovered that her belly had already been cut open
And a man's head placed where the child would have been
The tanks dug ladders in the earth no one was able to climb
In every war someone puts a cigarette in the corpse's mouth
And the corpse is never mentioned
In the hours before his empty body was found
It was this, this life that he longed for, this that he wrote of
desiring,
Yet this life leaves out everything for which he lived

Hundreds of small clay heads discovered while planting coffee
A telescope through which it was possible to watch a fly crawling the 
neighbor's roof tiles
The last-minute journey to the border for no reason, the secret house
where sports  
 trophies were kept
That weren't sport's trophies
Someone is trying to kill me, he said. He was always saying this
Oranges turning to glass on the trees, a field strewn with them
In his knapsack a bar of soap, a towel the size of a dinner napkin
A map of the world he has not opened that will one day correspond to the 
world he has  
 seen

 

The tendency of these poems is to generalize the experience of suffering. The various political systems responsible for specific forms of human pain are represented as vague and virtually indistinguishable principles of evil, wreaking death and destruction in the world at large. But there are other poems, arguably the most powerful ones in this collection, where Forché blends surrealistic detail with a more sharply etched evocation of readily recognizable historical situations. The impact can be tremendous, as in this excerpt from “The Garden Shukkei-en” which explores the ethics of using the atom bomb on Hiroshima:

 

     By way of a vanished bridge we cross this river
     as a cloud of lifted snow would ascend a mountain. 

     She has always been afraid to come here. 

     It is the river she most
     remembers, the living
     and the dead both crying for help. 

     A world that allowed neither tears nor lamentation. 

     The matsu trees brush her hair as she passes
     beneath them, as the shining strands of barbed wire. 

     Where this lake is, there was a lake,
     where these black pine grow, there grew black pine. 

     Where there is no teahouse I see a wooden teahouse
     and the corpses of those who slept in it. 

     On the opposite bank of the Ota, a weeping willow
     etches its memory of their faces into the water. 

     Where light touches the face, the character for heart is written. 

     She strokes a burnt trunk wrapped in straw:
     I was weak and my skin hung from my fingertips like cloth 

     Do you think for a moment that we were human beings to them? 

     She comes to the stone angel holding paper cranes.
     Not an angel, but a woman where she once had been, 

     who walks through the garden Shukkei-en
     calling the carp to the surface by clapping her hands. 

     Do Americans think of us?

 

In rejecting the interiorities of her earlier, more Romantic poetry, Forché has opened herself more directly to the world of transindividual historical experience. The Angel of History is her most worldly poetic achievement to date. In it, she has freed herself from the solipsistic preoccupations of much contemporary American poetry, which by fetishizing subjectivity, removes the articulation of that subjectivity from the world that surrounds it and shapes it. And like the Latin American and European poets who have apparently influenced her here, she succeeds in linking the destiny of the individual to that of the nation, and the world at large. In giving witness to the atrocities of the twentieth-century, and America’s complicity in many of them, Forché succeeds in questioning the legitimacy of power, and in particular, American power in this century. The tension of these poems is always the tension between the horror of atrocity and the controlled lyrical grace used to evoke it, as in “The Garden Shukkei-en.” This tension establishes an ironic dissonance between life and its representation in art. Although Forché’s poetry accentuates the chasm that separates the two, it also insists that art is only created in the world and, indeed, finally, is sculpted by it.

 

In adopting this subject matter and these poetic strategies, Forché takes a major risk. For in bringing up the question of the legitimacy of power via a poetry of witnessing, she inevitably raises questions about the legitimacy of her own witnessing. What responsibilities does the poet have to human catastrophe? Or alternately, to what extent may the poet distance herself from the horror of history and still remain responsible? And at what point does the witnessing of witnessed–and unwitnessed–human catastrophe pass from poetic and political necessity to the exploitation of the horror for dramatic effect?

 

It is one measure of Forché’s power and skill as a poet that she allows no easy answers to these questions. While The Angel of History repeatedly returns to them–sometimes explicitly, sometimes implicitly, sometimes deliberately, sometimes not–Forché seems deliberately to run the risk of incurring the charge of exploiting twentieth-century history as the price for witnessing it. There is considerable courage in this–the courage of a poet willing to assume the burden of engaging a history that includes, but transcends, the self. In invoking the example of Walter Benjamin, whose lyric reflections on history exist as a daunting measure for any poet or philosopher, Forché runs a related risk. And although Forché’s work largely manages to fulfill this difficult charge, it still leaves open the question of the sufficiency of conceiving poetry as a means of recording history. Does poetry so conceived offer us too much, or not enough? The poetic sequences that make up The Angel of History respond to this question time and again with a dramatic urgency born of ambivalence. To be sure, Forché’s predicament is not hers alone. It is the predicament of every engaged postmodern poet. Her achievement is to have hammered it into a rare poetry of spareness and elegance and raw power.

 

Matthew Causey

Department of Literature,

Communication and Culture
Georgia Institute of Technology
matthew.causey@lcc.gatech.edu

 

Kaye, Nick. Postmodernism and Performance. London: Macmillan, 1994.
In Postmodernism and Performance, a title in the New Directions in Theatre series from Macmillan, author Nick Kaye questions the possibility of attaining an adequate definition of the postmodern performance.

 

If the ‘postmodern event’ occurs as a breaking away, a disruption of what is ‘given’, then ‘its’ forms cannot usefully be pinned down in any final or categorical way . . . definitions cannot arrive at the postmodern, but can only set out a ground which might be challenged. (145)

 

Echoing Paul Mann’s position in The Theory-Death of the Avant-Gardethat theory facilitates the undoing of the avant-garde, that cultural criticism enacts a theory-death on the object of its discourse, Kaye notes criticism’s collusion in the construction of postmodern performance. He asserts that the organizing compulsion of criticism is antithetical to the strategies of postmodern aesthetic practices, which are designed to frustrate foundationalist thinking. Kaye’s refusal to reproduce the normal organizational categories leads him to draw together a wide range of contemporary American cultural events–performances of Kaprow, Brecht, and Finley; dance works of Cunningham and the Judson Dance Theater; music by Cage; theatre work by Foreman, Kirby, Wilson, and the Wooster Group–treating them all as more or less exemplary postmodern confrontations with, and disruptions of, the Modernist cultural project.

 

It seems that every book entitled Postmodernism and BLANK is required to begin with a rehearsal of the story of architectural postmodernism, and Kaye obligingly does so. Focusing on the architectural practices of Portoghesi, Klotz, and Jenc ks, he locates the key feature of postmodernism in a “falling away of the idea of a fundamental core or legitimating essence which might privilege one vocabulary over another” (9). He then offers a brief account of philosophical postmodernism, which is t o say of poststructuralist interrogations of history and meaning–interrogations which Kaye rightly claims are reproduced almost wholesale in much postmodern performance. Having thus sketched the rough contours of postmodernism as he understands it, Kaye proceeds to construct his more detailed argument about the relation between postmodernist and modernist art. He starts by glossing the modernist art theory of Clement Greenberg and Michael Fried. Greenberg’s article “After Abstract Expressionism” (1962 ) and Fried’s “Art and Objecthood” (1967) are, according to Kaye, the signal texts of modernism’s institutionalization, the texts that provided a systematic theoretical basis for the various assumptions and attitudes that had long informed the American cu ltural scene. Greenberg argues in a para-Hegelian manner that the history and progress of modernist art is a march toward purification, a divesting of art of all extraneous material, culminating in the work of art realized as a wholly manifest, self-suff icient object. Kaye quotes Greenberg’s theory that the modernist project in art is to demonstrate that many of the “conventions of the art of painting” are “dispensable, unessential” (25). Greenberg’s model of art historicity champions the works of Nola nd, Morris, and Olitksi as representing the modernist ideal of a totally autonomous art: their color fields seeped into the fabric of a dematerialized canvas achieve a coalescence of literalism and illusionism. As Greenberg wrote in “Modernist Painting,”

 

The essence of Modernism lies, as I see it, in the use of the characteristic methods of a discipline to criticize the discipline itself–not in order to subvert it, but to entrench it more firmly in its area of competence. (qtd by Kaye, 101)

 

The transitional stage between Greenberg’s defense of Field Painting and Fried’s attack on Minimalism is only briefly mentioned by Kaye but constitutes a critical moment in the history he narrates. In answer to the call for an autonomous art and maintai ning that the canvas was inherently representational, artists such as Donald Judd and Robert Morris furthered the quest for an essential art form through minimalist sculpture. The artists created, through the absence of connecting parts, artificial color , or representation, Minimalist sculptures that were realized as pure objects of indivisible wholeness. The “literalness” of Minimalist sculpture was meant to supplant the illusionism of the canvas. The objecthood of the object (the thingness of the thi ng in Heideggerian terms) became the object of art. However, Michael Fried spotted a problem in the work of the Minimalists. He argued that the Minimalist objects surrendered their objecthood by foregrounding the space that they occupied and the duration of the spectator’s experience of observation. Fried asserted that the Minimalist object was time-dependent and hence spectator-dependent, and that it was therefore theatrical and therefore not art.

 

In Fried’s view, “art degenerates as it approaches the condition of theatre” (141). For Fried, the theatrical is severed from the modernist ideal of a wholly manifest thing-in-itself by virtue of its contingent unfolding in real time, its moment-by-moment dynamic with a receiving audience, its adherence to the paradigm of subjectivity. The experience of witnessing the modernist paintings of Olitski or Noland or the sculpture of Anthony Caro has, according to Fried, literally no duration, “because at every moment the work itself is wholly manifest” (145). The properly Modernist goal is an instantaneousness and presentness characterized by the collapse of the subjectivity of the spectator into the objectivity of the work. Theater and performance, which work toward presence but not toward modernist presentness, are on this account effectively voided as non-art.

 

Having restaged the modernist arguments of Greenberg and Fried, Kaye proceeds to demonstrate the postmodernist–or more accurately anti-modernist–counter projects that have sought to disrupt any foundationalism or essentialism and have thrown into quest ion the concepts of authenticity, wholeness, meaning, and originality. If one accepts Greenberg and Fried’s model of modernism, then performance’s inherent disruption of the autonomous art work, its spatial and temporal specificity, its very “messiness,” or what Kaye calls its “evasion of stable parameters, meanings and identities” (35), make performance the perfect field on which to stage postmodernist rejections of modernist imperatives.

 

Certainly Kaye is not the first to make this claim for performance’s special stature in postmodernity. In The Object of Performance (a book to which Kaye is indebted), Henry M. Sayre quotes from a catalogue for an exhibition of contemporary sculpture at the Hirshhorn Museum (1982) written by Howard Fox, which states that

 

Theatricality may be considered that propensity in the visual arts for a work to reveal itself within the mind of the beholder as something other than what it is known empirically to be. This is precisely antithetical to the Modern ideal of the wholly manifest, self-sufficient object; and theatricality may be the single most pervasive property of post-Modernism. (9)

 

Quite apart from the modernist desire to create the thing-in-itself, the desire for the de-materialization of the art object has run concurrently and in some cases has prefigured the modernist projects, reflecting Lyotard’s suggestion that the postmodern is, in fact, premodern. It is no mere anomaly that the history of the Euro-American Avant-Garde carries with it a series of performative experiments: Symbolist and Expressionists theatre, the Futurist serate and Dadaist soiree, Surrealist drama, Happenings and Performance Art. My point is that performance’s qualifications as postmodern or anti-modern have been well established. Greenberg and Fried’s derriere-garde notions of authenticity, purity, essence, reside in a historical, foundationalist, and essentialist discourse that has been thoroughly discounted from a postmodern position, voided of relevance in a contemporary model of art. I would question the validity of a continued rehearsing of their arguments to sustain performance’s val ue. Fried’s “Art and Objecthood,” not unlike Benjamin’s “The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction” (whose assertion that an original is degraded through its mechanical repetition is problematized, not to say invalidated, in a digital age) is by now a tediously familiar argument with far too little contemporary resonance to function as the point of emergence for a “new vision” of postmodern art.

 

Aside from this over-reliance on polemic against already discredited theoretical positions, there is a problem, too, in Kaye’s reliance on theoretical discourse as such. Kaye is keenly aware of theory’s collusion in manufacturing, narrativizing, and con cretizing abstract “trends” in art. Yet his own procedure reproduces, perhaps inevitably, that very tendency. By positioning postmodern performance as essentially a philosophico-aesthetic response to Modernist art, Kaye simply disregards the concrete hi story–the cultural, political, and technological realities–of postmodern society, and the significance of this social field for the emergence of postmodern artistic practices. The point here is rudimentary: what engenders an art work is not only the theory and practice of previous schools, but a complex set of relations among contemporary social and cultural phenomena. The seductive labyrinth of “pure” art theory is finally of little use unless the theorist attempts, as Edward Said has suggested, to address its “worldliness.” This is a move that Kaye never makes, and as a result his theoretical discussion seems to take place in too isolated an arena of philosophical conceits. However, he astutely challenges some traditional theories, in particular, Sally Banes’s positioning of postmodern dance as modernist in the Greenbergian sense.

 

A large portion of the book deals with the theories and practices of modern and postmodern dance and this section is greatly indebted to the writings of Sally Banes for both its historical perspective and its theoretical model. Countering Banes, Kaye ch allenges “the very possibility of a properly ‘modernist’ performance and in turn . . . the move from a modern . . . to a postmodern dance” (71). Like Banes, Kaye traces American modern dance through the work of Martha Graham and Doris Humphrey, among others, and their rejection of conventional languages of classical dance and the formlessness of Isodora Duncan’s “free dance.” Modern dance relied instead on a formalistic expressionism aimed at representing the “inner life.” The Judson Dance Theatre (196 2-64), which included the choreographer/dancers Lucinda Childs, Steve Paxton, Yvonne Rainer, Trisha Brown and David Gordon, defined itself as postmodern, on the grounds that their work abandoned modern dance’s representational strategy of expression. Sal ly Banes has disputed this claim, defining their work as more correctly modernist, in the Greenbergian sense, in that their minimalist strategies sought to reduce dance to pure movement, severing its connection to expression and representation. Kaye counters Banes’s view by arguing that,

 

far from rehearsing Greenberg’s program through dance, the historical postmodern dance’s reduction of dance to simply ‘movement’, or even the presence of the dancer alone, attacks the very notion of the autonomous work of art, revealing a contingency, and so an instability, in place of the center the modernist project would seek to realize. (89)

 

Kaye is here maintaining Fried’s argument that a modernist project in performance is impossible. Banes might counter with her position that each art form has its own distinct positioning of the postmodern, or in other words, rather than constructing a me tanarrative of Modernism perhaps a local narrative of particular works would uncover more useful critiques.

 

The value of Postmodernism and Performance lies not in Kaye’s attempt to theorize postmodern performance as the perfect counter-project to high Modernism, but in his discussion of individual performance and dance works. Aside from offering stimulating analyses of well-known works, he brings to light some more obscure but important pieces, such as “First Signs of Decadence” from Michael Kirby’s Structuralist Workshop.

 

Kaye isolates three unifying elements in many of the postmodern works he approaches (an unavoidable but decidedly non-postmodernist tactic). The first is the deflation or dematerialization of the art object as an autonomous whole, in favor of an emphasis on the spectator’s construction of that object as an image in the mind. George Brecht in speaking of his Fluxus inspired “event-scores,” such as Water Yam (1962), said that “for me, an object does not exist outside people’s contact with it” (43). Brecht may very well be the most radical artist in Kaye’s collection, insofar as his performance works were “less concerned with the disruption or breaking down of a ‘work’ than with a catching of attention at a point at which the promise of a work, and the move toward closure, is first encountered” (40). Brecht’s Water Yam is presented as a boxed collection of white cards with black text that states various instructions or actions. One card reads, “THREE AQUEOUS EVENTS.” Under t he “title” are placed the words “ice, water, steam.” As Kaye notes, the “event scores” of Brecht can be read as a poem or procedural notation.

 

Considered as a score, the card seems to be even more open and unclear, as it becomes an ambiguous stimulus to something or other that is yet to be made or occur. In doing so, it places its own self-sufficiency into question and explicitly looks towards a decision yet to be made. (40)

 

From Kaye’s standpoint, one of the foremost postmodern theater companies is Richard Foreman’s Ontological-Hysteric Theatre, which carries out the shift from art as object to art as receptive event and also fulfills Kaye’s second criterion of postmode rn performance in its disruption of the meaningful. The Ontological-Hysteric Theatre has developed a performance-wrighting that stages the production of image, its immediate demise through discourse, and the persistence of a (re)appearing ideology . Kaye quotes Foreman who wrote,

 

as Stella, Judd, et al. realized several years ago . . . one must reject composition in favor of shape (or something else). . . . Why? Because the resonance must be between the head and the object. The resonance between the elements of the object is now a DEAD THING. (49)

 

Foreman’s performance works generally use a deceptively traditional style with a strict proscenium configuration and the trappings of the conventional stage. What Foreman does with that tradition is to turn the image-manufacturing into a “reverberation m achine” constantly undoing the image, colliding it against expectation, asking the spectator to think, to put the pieces back together in a new manner.

 

Kaye writes clearly about Michael Kirby’s Structuralist Workshop, an important but often overlooked moment in American avant-garde theatre. The Workshop, a loosely aligned group of NYC theatre artists, whose most productive work was done in the mid to l ate seventies, is likewise concerned with the structuring of performance in the mind of the spectator, “a recognition of relation and contingency” (48). In an interview with Kaye, Kirby said that

 

‘structure’ is being used to refer to the way the parts of a work relate to each other, how they ‘fit together’ in the mind to form a particular configuration. This fitting together does not happen ‘out there’ in the objective work; it happens in the mind of the spectator. (48)

 

Not unlike Foreman, Kirby employs the effects of the realistic stage only to complicate the reception of that aesthetic gesture through antithetical staging structures. In First Signs of Decadence, a work analyzed by Kaye, Kirby structures t he staging through a “complex array of rules to which the interaction of characters as well as entrances, exits, lighting, music, and even patterns of emotional response, are subject” (57). Kirby is attempting, in his words, to set up a “tension between the representational and non-representational aspects through which the performance is always being torn apart” (57); torn apart to disrupt meaning, content and closure and to open contingencies that in turn activate the spectator’s thinking.

 

The third feature or tactic of postmodern performance, according to Kaye, is its “upsetting [of] the hierarchies and assumptions that would define and stabilize the formal and thematic parameters of [the performance] work” (142). The performance work of the Wooster Group, in existence for nearly twenty years and a spin-off company from Richard Schechner’s Performance Group, ideally fits Kaye’s depiction of the anti-modernist move in postmodern performance. The Wooster Group, under the direction of Elizabeth LeCompte, has created a radical form of performance-wrighting that includes a collision of appropriated texts from such diverse categories as traditional modern drama (Our Town, The Crucible), popular culture (cable- TV, Japanese sci-fi films), personal narratives (family suicide), and the taboo texts of pornography and blackface caricature. The fragmented texts are cut-up, reworked and edited into a larger mediatized performance work that consistently undoes its own authority. Both Philip Auslander and David Savran have written about the Wooster Group’s political postmodernism, which effects a disempowering of the performance’s status as a “charismatic other.” An image played out in a Wooster Group performance is allowed to present itself without a moralistic posturing from the performer. When the company used black-face on white actors they made no effort to let the audience off the hook by pointing to the gesture and condemning it. Instead, the spectator was f orced to articulate a response, to take responsibility for how he or she would respond. The effect is powerful and has led to acrimonious debates and funding rejections for the company.

 

One difficulty in theorizing postmodern performance is the sheer size of the territory that the term “performance” maps out. It extends far beyond the theatre and galleries to include the total flow of the televisual, the indigenous performance, the int ertextuality of the postmodern cityscape within which we perform daily, the postorganic domain of virtual environments and cyberspace. A drawback of Postmodernism and Performance is that Kaye’s examination focuses on too narrow a series of p erformances from downtown NYC, and neglects this larger field. Though Kaye notes that postmodern performance has forgone the genres and the spatiality of modernism, he doesn’t seem to recognize that our performance theory needs to follow that lead. None theless, Kaye’s analyses of the specific performances are insightful and provocative. Whatever my specific reservations, Postmodernism and Performance is an important and thought-provoking addition to a troubled field.

 

Works Cited

 

• Fried, Michael. “Art and Objecthood.” Minimal Art: A Critical Anthology. Gregory Battcock, ed. New York: E.P. Dutton & Co., 1968.
• Sayre, Henry M. The Object of Performance: The American Avant-Garde Since 1970. Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 1989.

 

Steven Helmling

Department of English
University of Delaware
helmling@brahms.udel.edu

 

Fredric Jameson, The Seeds of Time. New York: Columbia University Press, 1994. xviii + 214 pages. $22.95.

 

Fredric Jameson’s new book revisits problems treated in earlier work, with results suggested in the titles of its three chapters. The first, “The Antinomies of Postmodernism,” queries whether the venerable Hegelian-Marxist problematic of the “contradict ion,” which the historical process (“the dialectic”) will resistlessly “resolve,” must now (or again) be rethought as “antinomy,” a static, self-reinforcing overdetermination, a “stalled or arrested dialectic,” Jameson calls it, whose apparent lock on the future complements its erasure of the past (except as commodified nostalgia), to produce an “end of history” in which all difference and otherness, including that of the once-Utopian future itself, homogenizes into a tepid, entropic, indifferent conditio n of always-already-more-of-the-same. Where “permanent revolution” was, there shall “permanent reification” be–except that we must scratch that future tense: there (here) permanent reification now appears always already to have been, and promises (or th reatens) always forever to remain. Jameson has evoked this anxiety before; in the tortured prose of Postmodernism (1991) it underwrote a thematic as well as a practice of “the sublime”; but here he is much more explicit about the terms of th e predicament, and as various therapeutics (including Jameson’s own “homeopathy”) would have predicted, “explicitation”–the making conscious of this particular (political) unconscious–has helped to lower the temperature.

 

“Utopia”–the authentic desire versus the marketable simulacrum–is a leitmotif throughout chapter 1; it becomes the main theme of chapter 2, “Utopia, Modernism, and Death,” in which an extended discussion of an only recently published early-Soviet text, Andrei Platonov’s “great peasant Utopia,” Chevengur (1927-8), reprises the “anxiety of Utopia” considered in the “Conclusion” to Postmodernism. For me, the most interesting feature of this chapter is Jameson’s speculation that it may now at last be time to credit modernism’s Utopianism, rather than dismissing it as “ideological.” (Jameson’s anti-modernism, like most academic anti-modernisms of the last two decades, was an animus more against academic appropriations of modernis m than against modernism itself, as if in despair of even the possibility of a critique that might extricate modernism’s ambitions and accomplishments from their domestication in an institutionalized “aesthetic ideology.” Can we yet entertain the challen ge of Adorno’s observation that, authorial allegiances notwithstanding, modernist art was de facto left wing? Jameson here indicates what a reconsideration of modernism in such a light might mean now.)

 

The last chapter, “The Constraints of Postmodernism,” is to me the least satisfying of the three: a discussion of several contemporary architects (the cited texts include manifestos as well as buildings and drawings) from Venturi, Koolhaas, Eisenman and Rossi to “deconstructionists” and “neo- (or “critical”) regionalists,” as if seeking in their differences some sort of contestation of what “the postmodern” might yet mean or become. Jameson apparently wants to test whether the complacent, I’m-OK,-you’re -OK “diversity” of a postmodern now might not already be reimaginable, as if in some future retrospect, as something more vitally conflicted “in the seeds of time” than has yet appeared.

 

I should say here, however, that my more or less obligatory attempt, as book reviewer, to provide a sketch of the “contents” of Seeds of Time is, as would be the case with any Jameson book, a futile undertaking. What Jameson has to say can’ t be summarized, because of the complication of his way of saying it. The interest of his work cannot be localized to any particular problems it takes up, solutions it offers, or positions it fortifies and defends. On the contrary: Jameson mobilizes his oft-noted “encyclopedic grasp of modern culture” not to find or propose a solution to every problem, but on the contrary, to problematize, as richly–as problematically–as possible, every possible solution; likewise his relation to any possible “positio n” is wary in the extreme, and most acutely so of those that might offer or impose themselves as his own. Like Apeneck Sweeney, who’s gotta use words when he talks to you, Jameson must traffic in positions to critique them–but only under protest: no mor e than Sweeney does Jameson like it. Most critique, partly because of its inevitably polemic motivations, operates on the model of the unmasking and the exposé, announcing its findings with the triumphant “Ah ha!” of discovery. By contrast , Jameson’s tone is a warier, wearier, “Uh oh”: not proclaiming successful conclusion, but facing up to whatever fresh prospect of obstacles and difficulties his analysis so far, in this text, on this page, in this sentence, has just now opened.

 

Jameson has been committed to a critical prose of this unconventional kind–i.e., he has been telling us that this is how he is trying to write, and how he wants to be read–from the beginning. The program is implicit in his first book (1961), which cel ebrates Sartre’s leavening of the philosophical drive to formulation and conclusion with the existential (a.k.a. phenomenological, sc. aesthetic) particularizing temporality of the narrative artist. It is explicit in Marxism and Form (1971), whose preface celebrates the “dialectical prose” of Adorno, and whose last chapter projects a program for what Jameson calls a “dialectical criticism.” Later, adapting Barthes, Jameson speaks of “the scriptible” and “the sentence”; and in his mos t recent work, especially Late Marxism (1990) and Postmodernism (1991), this ideal of a “theoretical discourse” that refuses the false security (or resists the inevitable familiarization) of “positions” or “conclusions” is projec ted negatively, in opposition to that intellectual reification or commodification–Jameson’s calls it “thematization”–that “dialectical criticism” would overcome.

 

A (critical) prose written on such principles is by now a familiar period feature, a veritable sign, all agree, of “the postmodern.” But the strengths enabled by such an aversion to the usual sorts of argumentative closure entail certain drawbacks; amon g them, in Jameson’s case, the difficulty that while Jameson’s work seems ready at every moment to project itself boldly out into confrontation with whatever problematic it might discover or invent for itself, its programmatic inconclusiveness can seem at times simply (or rather, complicatedly) evasive.

 

In the present instance, for example: what is, so to speak, the time, the “moment,” of The Seeds of Time? The two books Jameson has published since the devolution of the Soviet Union three years ago merely collected material from before the fall. By now (as I write) it is 1994; surely, I thought, in this new book Jameson will have something to say about the Second World’s cataclysm. Not quite: the book offers itself as a reprint of Jameson’s Wellek lectures at Irvine, given in April 1991 (i.e., before the fall), but the text has obviously been enlarged and supplemented since, leaving many traces of what we might call a “self-difference” that is not merely temporal but historical: as if the text itself has suffered asynchronously (which is not to say diachronically) the differential seismic shocks of an “uneven development.” Thus “Second World culture” may figure in the present tense on one page, in the past on the next, while “Eastern Europe” appears throughout as ex-socialist, but in th e context of a rollback that seems to have proceeded only as far as the Soviet border–i.e., as if the “moment” of this text were quite specifiably that of post-autumn 1989 but pre-, and without anticipation of, December 1991. It is a standard move of th eory to “suspend” rather than to answer pressing questions, but this is a perplexing suspension from a critic whose best-circulated slogan is “Always historicize!”

 

It is also, thereby, a telling sign or “symptom”–not simply of a residual nostalgia for the Soviet experiment that can seem almost a form of denial in face of its demise, but of a larger, more general and systemic conflictedness agitating all Jameson’s projects. Recall the affirmation in “Metacommentary” (1971) of the necessity of interpretation: “we are condemned to interpret at the same time that we feel an increasing repugnance to do so”; similarly, the imperative to “historicize” is not a “d esire” to do so: in The Political Unconscious, its burden is of a facing-the-worst sort, a chastening “Necessity” enforced by “the determinate [“inevitable”] failure of all the revolutions that have taken place in human history.” Since befor e The Political Unconscious, Jameson’s grim asides about “actually receding socialism” have owned that revolution’s “inevitable failure” as an established fact. But that was then, this is now: while one kind of anti-Soviet Marxist mig ht welcome the end of the USSR as good riddance to bad baggage, Jameson is of the more scrupulous sort whose qualms about the USSR were more salient before the fall than after, and whose loyalties to it will likely prove more poignant after than before.

 

So rather than moralize or score points against Jameson’s “evasion,” we can more fruitfully consider it as an instance of the later Jameson’s own constant theme, what the title of the last chapter of The Political Unconscious calls “The Dial ectic of Utopia and Ideology”: the Eros-and-Thanatos agon of Utopian desire in its fated conflict with the reality principle, or (to use a vocabulary Jameson favors) with that Lacanian “Real” which Jameson has glossed as “simply [!] History itself.” What ever else we might want to infer from this agon’s enactment in the motions and the motives of Jameson’s prose, we can’t ascribe any of this problematic’s “political unconscious” to Jameson himself: he is no doubt as “conscious” of it as anyone could be.

 

I put it this way to foreground what Jameson has at stake in this effort to Utopianize against the historical wind: the costs or conditions, the strains and contradictions (I-can’t-go-on-I’ll-go-on) of this Beckettian but also Promethean project. Take f or example the book’s title, drawn from a passage of Macbeth slightly misquoted in the book’s dedication to Wang Feng-zhen: “for who can look into the seeds of time / And say which grain will grow and which will not. . . .” The allusion is a t once elegiac and defiant: both a farewell to the Marxist dream of foretelling the plot of History’s grand narrative, and a protest against the postmodern ideology’s preemption of the future. Such are the ambivalences enacted in Jameson’s prose, so often suspended between, or rather overlapping and thus positioned to draw on the libidinal effects of both, a refutation of postmodernism as the (false) ideology of “late capitalism” and a raising of the alarm against a world-historical adversary that is only too real.

 

Hence the ambivalence we might name, with this volume’s title in mind, the desire called “time.” In Jameson, the desire called Utopia, as we’ve already remembered, is indissociable from a certain “anxiety of Utopia”; and a cognate conflictedness bel ongs to “time,” the temporal, the diachronic, narrative, “History itself.” These last, it will be remembered, were stuff and substance of the “historicizing” program of The Political Unconscious, whose subtitle, “Narrative as a Socially Symb olic Act,” made narrativity and/or historicity at once the determining limit point of the “ideological closure” by which Utopian energies find themselves “contained,” and the condition of possibility of any critique that would try (in Utopia’s behalf, eve n if not in its name) to open, breach, or at least contest that closure. The Political Unconscious, acclaimed in the United States, found a chilly reception elsewhere among Althusserians hostile to its Hegelian, “historicizing” program; and ever since, Jameson has deployed “space” as a virtual watchword for “the postmodern,” and (to make the “motivation” a bit more pointed) as the “other” of a putatively modernist “time”; the gesture has sometimes been so insistent as almost to seem a kind o f penance for the earlier work’s historicism. However that may be, some of the headiest moments (or topoi) in Jameson’s consideration of postmodernism have conjured with the atmospherics of “space”: “Architecture” (“Spatial Equivalents in the World Syste m”), “Demographics of the Postmodern,” “Spatial Historiographies,” “cognitive mapping,” a “geopolitical aesthetic,” “signatures of the visual,” heightened attention to the media of the eye, video, film, etc.

 

Even at its headiest, Jameson’s account of postmodernism was more equivocal than many of his readers seem to have grasped; but my point in thus projecting “space” as a vehicle for Jameson’s enthusiasm for the postmodern generally is that the new book’s t itle signals a renewed willingness to give “time” its innings, and in the context of a gesture most uncharacteristic for Jameson, a self-retrospect occasioned by (and confessing) a change of mind about “the postmodern,” springing, he says, from “a certain exasperation both with myself and with others, who have so frequently expressed their enthusiasm with the boundless and ungovernable richness of modern [sic: in context, read postmodern] . . . styles, which freed from the telos of modern, a re now “lawless” in any number of invigorating or enabling ways. . . . In my own case it was the conception of ‘style’. . . that prevented me for so long from shaking off this impression of illimitable pluralism.”

 

He goes on to make the connection of “personal style” with “the individual centered subject” (both of which the postmodern promised to leave behind), and of “period style” with “aesthetic or stylistic totalization” (both of which postmodernism’s p roliferation of borrowed styles, disjoined from their former motivations by an alientated practice of “pastiche,” likewise affected to exorcise). But the disdain of “aesthetic or stylistic totalization,” Jameson cautions, should not extend to “political or philosophical totalization”: it’s a chronic theme of his that analysis must not disown the aspiration to totalization as a Hegelian hubris, but rather must accept it as a Necessity imposed by the abjection of our historical moment. Once again, what th e overhastily zealous would dismiss as an incorrect “desire called totalization,” Jameson stages as an inescapable “anxiety of totalization.”

 

This desire/anxiety nexus has its own history; to an extent it is simply a generic feature of critique as such, the irresistible force of its meliorist motive in agon with the immovable object it aspires (with mere words) to change. But the anxiety and the desire tussle to different outcomes in different periods, different critics, and, within a given critic’s ouevre, different works–and indeed, on different pages, even in different sentences. Jameson’s own career begins with desire in the asce ndant. Sartre (1961) was a declaration of allegiance; and in Marxism and Form (1971), a sheer excitement about a variety of Western Marxist classics seemed to attest a limitless field of critical possibility. The Prison-H ouse of Language (1972) cautioned (in its titular metaphor) against a focus on “representation” at the expense (or even exclusive) of the “referent”; yet it too reveled in the multiple critical prospects opened by structuralism. Fables of Ag gression (1979) introduced, and The Political Unconscious (1981) consolidated, the darker themes of “inevitable failure” and “ideological closure,” but in counterpoint (still) with an enlarged sense of hermeneutic possibilities–as if (to recall the eleventh thesis on Feuerbach) the loss in our power to change the world could be compensated by our chance of an amplified understanding of it. But in Postmodernism (1991) and other writings of the ’80s, that opt imism receded before the “cultural logic of late capitalism.” Enter anxiety, by way of “the sublime,” which Jameson projected as “unrepresentable,” and therefore inevitably baffling any hermeneutic effort brought to bear on it–as if critique’s impotence to change the world now had to entail an inability to understand it as well. It was Postmodernism, not only projecting and dramatizing this dilemma, but impaling itself on its horns, that set, for me, the high-voltage mark fr om which the books that followed (The Geopolitical Aesthetic, Signatures of the Visible, and now The Seeds of Time) have fallen back.
But fallback needn’t mean loss, if anxiety’s loss is desire’s gain. Much as I enjoyed the excitements of Jameson’s “sublime,” I grew impatient with its premise, that “the logic of late capitalism” is unintelligible, while every day the lies seem mor e brazenly transparent than the day before. If, indeed, you can still think of them as lies, rather than as the monstrous and cynical boasting of “enlightened false consciousness.” (“We call six percent unemployment full employment, because below that w ages begin to rise!”) In any case, since Postmodernism, Jameson has mostly reverted to making more sardonic- (rather than sublime-) sounding kinds of sense–as if understanding the world is after all possible, and even, if not exactly desira ble, still, incumbent upon us, faute de mieux, however much we may, on our gloomier days, find ourselves prey to “an increasing repugnance to do so.” Thus put, though, the case is not desire’s gain at anxiety’s expense, but rather anxiety’s migrat ion to a more settled and resigned abode.

 

But there persists the Jamesonian vigilance lest “making sense” lapse into “thematization,” and Jameson’s prose, even when its aims are most unequivocally (or most sardonically) hermeneutic, meets this danger with a wariness in which “making sense” typic ally means un-making some oppressively familiar, “common [ideological kind of] sense.” Even at its most staid, Jameson’s impulse in practice is less toward “making sense” than toward “making difficulties.” The pursuit will qualify itself, or chan ge the subject, or multiply its aspects, in a way to preempt any achieved “sense” of anything in particular, except the ardor and the difficulty/impossibility of the quest. I offer this as value-neutral description of Jameson’s peculiar power, not as cri ticism of a weakness: on the evidence, indeed, I’d say that Jameson is least satisfying when he settles down to an extended discussion of something–in this new book, e.g., the pages on Chevengur had, for me, their longueurs; an d likewise, the consideration of architecture in the closing chapter, another connect-the-dots exercise based on one of those Greimassian rectangles Jameson so favors. The flashes come in (or through) the cracks, as asides, as details allowed their momen tary expansions that can become, for the space of a paragraph or a page, a departure from the drill. Escaping the dictates of “the drill” is the very condition of Jameson’s power.

 

Hence the persistence, and the fascination, of a calculated “unrepresentability” in Jameson’s later work–if not as a telos, yet as an ever present potentia (desire) or ananke (anxiety) exerting pressure away from “sense” toward its unrepresentable other, whether that other be “Utopian” or “sublime.” Which raises familiar quandaries: limits, boundaries, inside/outside, hither/”beyond,” Zeno’s paradox of the infinitesimal that separates quantitative from qualitative change, etc. Wal lace Stevens’s adviso, that a poem should resist the intelligence almost successfully, licenses us to put it (again) that cutting the “almost” finer and finer is almost a period convention of that postmodern genre (or almost-genre? not-quite-genre? ) called “theory”–a gesture enacting, I take it, a sense of the toils, the struggles, “the labor and the suffering” (Hegel) as well as the self-inflicted scruples, the vigilance against hubris and mauvaise foi, of the hermeneutic will-to-understan d–a desire tragically thwarted in an absurd world, and/or (“antithetically,” in Freud’s sense), a hubris, an “omnipotence of thought,” a suppose savoir, a crypto-totalitarian lust for “totalization” and “mastery” that is properly to be thwa rted, distrusted, chastened, subverted.

 

In this unstable and shifting scene, Eros and Thanatos change places (or “perspectives”) with dizzying facility; how to keep the dizziness from numbness, and the facility from facile-ness, are problems too many theorists negotiate altogether too successfully. Jameson’s “difficult” prose negotiates or (better) dramatizes them with more passion, as well as with more aplomb, than anyone else’s, and with a flair in the performance that makes, despite Jameson’s own “resisitance to thematization,” any dissociation of theme from practice “ultimately” unsatisfactory, even as it guards itself against, on the one hand, their premature or too-simple “synthesis,” and, on the other, an aestheticization that reifies the dissociation itself. Some such impo ssibly recursive and self-interfering “desire to desire” seems the very condition of the way we read (and write) now, drawing ambivalent satisfactions from a prose in which the satisfactions can’t be said to count for more than the frustrations, and in wh ich this (somehow) is the satisfaction, this continual deferral-yet-renewal of the promise (or mirage) of satisaction that keeps Jameson writing his texts, and us reading them. Enjoying our symptom? Repugnance to do so? I-can’t-go-on-I’ll-go-on? To the contrary, there’s no stopping him, or us.

 

Karen Morin

Geography Department
University of Nebraska-Lincoln
kmorin@unlinfo.unl.edu

 

 

Rose, Gillian. Feminism & Geography: The Limits of Geographical Knowledge. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1993. 205 pages. $44.95 cloth, $17.95 paper.

 

Geography is a notoriously male-dominated field. To cite just one recent statistic, a 1993 profile of the Association of American Geographers (the largest professional organization in the discipline) showed that only 18.6 percent of the membership who were employed by colleges and universities were women. Evidence has shown that, in addition, a disproportionately large number of the 18.6 percent probably hold less influential temporary, part-time, and/or lower paid positions within departments. As Gillian Rose asserts in Feminism and Geography, women’s under-representation in geography departments (and its byproduct, academic publishing) points to some serious problems. Not only does it mean that most geographic research is about men and men’s activities, but more fundamentally, it produces a bias in what passes for geographic knowledge itself. The subject of her book is how one type of human geography, “masculinist,” has been constituted and defined as geography in male-dominated academia, and how feminist perspectives can respond to it.

 

This book brings academic geography up to date with current feminist theory, something geography badly needed. Indeed, this is the only book-length work of its kind (at least in English). Whereas geographic studies of women’s work, women’s status in less developed countries, women’s relationship to imperialism, and women and the land have broadly taken off within the field, few attempts have been made to discuss feminist geography theory, at length, within the context of the history of geographic thought. More characteristic are widely-cited works such as R.J. Johnston’s Geography and Geographers: Anglo-American Human Geography Since 1945 (4th ed., 1991), which devotes only three pages to feminism. Though Rose brings together some of the substantive works in feminist geography, her primary concern is with the way geographers think and produce work, and she therefore focuses more on the “gender of geography” than the “geography of gender.”

 

A lot is packed into this small volume (200 pages, including notes). Rose argues that as a masculinist discipline, geography is stuck in dualistic thinking and in producing grand theories that claim to speak for everyone but that actually speak only for white, bourgeois, heterosexual males. Though masculinism effectively excludes women as researchers and as research subjects, Rose says that it is not “a conscious plot” by males (p. 10), and that both men and women are caught in it. And indeed, Rose finds herself caught in it. She attempts to create a more personal geography, locating herself through her whiteness, her lower-middle class upbringing, her “seduction” by the university. (She is now a lecturer at Queen Mary and Westfield College, University of London.) But she’s not all that successful at maintaining this personalism. Recognizing this, she admits how “extraordinarily difficult [it was] to break away . . . from the unmarked tone of so much geographical writing,” admonishing her own “complicity with geography” (p. 15). At the same time, Rose consistently tries to avoid overarching theories, which she believes are antithetical to feminism, and spends a good deal of text positioning authors of both masculinist and feminist writing.

 

Rose’s primary task is to mark the territory of masculinist thinking in geography. She demonstrates how just as there are many feminisms, so also there are many masculinisms, with boundaries that are not fixed and clear but permeable and unstable, and each invoked for particular purposes. Overall Rose discusses geographic thought at three scales: the scale of “places” (of humanistic geography), the scale of “landscapes” (of cultural geography), and the scale of individual “spaces” (of social and economic geography). She discusses the degree to which each associated branch of geography is embedded in masculinist thinking and/or holds promise for more feminist interpretations.

 

Humanist geography, which would seem to share feminism’s goal of recovering the places of individual and everyday experience, turns out to have constituted “place” itself as feminine. Rose asserts that humanists talk about places as homes, in strictly idealized and feminized terms associated with women–as nurturing places, free of conflicts. Rose argues that “home” may not be a place universally sought after, and may in fact be more like a prison for some women. The important point is that home’s significance varies from person to person and from social group to social group. Home may indeed signify refuge for some African American women, for instance, not as idealized Mother but as an escape from racism.

 

It is at the scale of landscape that Rose finds masculinism’s most apparent contradictions, particularly because the study of landscape often rests on “geography’s most embedded dualism”–nature/culture. Rose explains how images of the female side, nature, invoke something to be heroically conquered through fieldwork, but also something to be revered and respected. Masculinism, apparently, genders landscapes in whatever way seems most convenient for the purpose at hand, for example, by associating frontier lands with the female, a virgin awaiting penetration by male explorers, but at the same time signifying women as culture carriers, bringing “civilization” to those “savage” frontiers. Both culture and nature are gendered, but as Rose points out, one side is masculine and the other side is always the masculine idea of the feminine. Thus it is dangerous to empower the feminine side of the dualism, as radical feminists attempt to do. Instead, feminists need to destabilize the dualism itself, creating new categories to analyze how women relate to landscapes. As Rose notes, Monk and Norwood’s edited volume The Desert is No Lady: Southwestern Landscapes in Women’s Writing and Art (1987) provides an excellent model for such work. This collection demonstrates how Hispanic, Native, and Anglo women’s images of the American Southwest are quite unlike males’, yet also quite different from each others’. Women writers, photographers, and artists envisioned the desert land not in terms of its material resources to be exploited, a land awaiting metaphorical rape, but as a strong woman, unable to be conquered. The women artists’ imagery is sexual, not in terms of domination or suppression but in terms of uniting with the productive and reproductive energy of the earth.

 

In masculinism, space itself appears ungendered, a seemingly open path to anywhere. But Rose argues that some spaces offer particular constraints to women, and may in fact mean horror and violence to women, such as when we walk through the city at night. She writes about space as oppressive:

 

I have to tell my own fears of attack in terms of space: when I’ve felt threatened, space suffocatingly surrounds me with an opacity that robs me of my right to be there . . . space almost becomes like an enemy itself. (143)

 

Masculinism also forces women to sense their own embodiment. Whereas men’s bodies are transparent to masculinism, women are conditioned to be aware of their bodies, as objects in space, taking up space right along with other objects. Ultimately women are doubly affected by masculinism, then, because we move through space that has been gendered by a dominant ideology, with gendered bodies.

 

Though it is wrought with contradictions of its own, Rose cites socialist feminism’s theorizing of the domestic sphere in terms of economic life as “undoubtedly one of the major achievements of feminist geography” (p. 121). The contradictions arise when trying to account for the diversity of women’s experiences in production alongside their (seemingly) shared experiences in reproduction. On the reproductive side, feminist work has emphasized women’s spatial limitations as they try to combine domestic and waged work. Women, so the thesis goes, work closer to home to be nearer to childcare and schools, and are thus locked into female-segregated, part-time, and/or lower waged occupations, especially in the suburbs. This model turns out to be appropriate mainly for white, middle-class mothers, however. Rose asserts that when emphasis has been shifted to production, feminism has made greater strides. Research by feminist geographers such as Linda McDowell stresses difference in women’s work, particularly by social class and geographic region, where gender relations are unevenly developed because capitalism itself is.

 

The book’s conclusion left me a bit hanging, but that may be because Rose is more interested in exposing the limitations of masculinist geography and surveying current feminist responses to it, than in laying out a more positive future trajectory for the discipline. Rose succeeds admirably in marking the contested areas, and has shown how masculinism cannot represent the gendering of places, landscapes, or spaces. Self-representation is key to women’s advancement in geography, she says, as is recognizing our multiple axes of identity, and practicing “strategic mobility” by moving between the center of academic geography and its margin to ultimately subvert that center.

 

The book’s structure–which has it in effect beginning in the middle, then looking backward (chs. 1-4) into masculinist geography, and then moving forward (chs. 5-7) into feminist geography–is wonderfully appropriate to its argument. Yet it is also in the structure that the book reveals its most glaring flaws. Perhaps it was edited too heavily, perhaps not heavily enough. But readers will find themselves constantly reminded of what’s just been said, or previously been said in another chapter, or about to be said, so that instead of a gradual unfolding of themes, the discussion unfolds in short, awkward bursts. Moreover, the dense text is difficult to plow through at times, and Rose’s heavy reliance on academic jargon threatens to place her among the many feminists whose work is inaccessible to the very population of geographers that most needs to read it. Occasional misspellings don’t help matters, and the book’s three illustrations are merely adequately reproduced.

 

But who’s complaining? In comparison to the enormous project Rose has undertaken, these deficiencies can be overlooked. This book should be required reading for graduate seminars dealing with the history of geographic thought, and will be indispensable for feminist geographers and other social scientists grappling with feminist epistemology and who need the discussion wrapped up in a single volume.

 

Alan G. Gross

Department of Rhetoric
University of Minnesota-Twin Cities
agross@maroon.tc.umn.edu

 

 

Langer, Lawrence L. Holocaust Testimonies: The Ruins of Memory. New Haven: Yale University Press, 1991.

 

Young, James E. The Texture of Memory: Holocaust Memorials and Meaning. New Haven: Yale University Press, 1993.

 

Zuckerman, Yitzhak. A Surplus of Memory: Chronicle of the Warsaw Ghetto Uprising. Barbara Harshav, ed. and trans. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1993.

 

I am looking at a photograph of a double line of children–girls before, boys behind–waiting patiently for their mikvah or ritual bath. All the boys are dressed in suits and all wear hats, mostly men’s felt hats with brims. One boy in the rear foreground turns toward the photographer, Roman Vishniak, who takes the picture with a hidden camera. (These are orthodox Jews who object to photography on religious grounds.) It is a sunny day in 1937 in Carpathian Ruthenia in an area that was to become a part of Hungary two years later.

 

By 1945, by the time these boys and girls would have reached their late teens, they were, in all likelihood, dead at the hands of the Hungarian fascists or the Nazis. Their survival was possible, too; Lucy Dawidowicz estimates that thirty percent of the Hungarian Jews survived the war (403). But the point is that the war did not merely disrupt, it dislocated their lives, whatever the event. Even had they happened to survive, they would have had no lives to return to. Jewish life on the European Continent, which had survived fifteen hundred years of anti-Semitism, did not survive five years of Nazi rule. Thus the collection of which the photograph I have described forms a part, is entitled, appropriately, A Vanished World.

 

The significant distant between disruption and dislocation can be measured by comparing the recent Steven Spielberg film, Schindler’s List with an incident recounted in Langer’s Holocaust Testimony. In the film, the ending is managed so as to give the impression that the Jews freed by the allies were in fact free, that is, after an extended episode of incarceration, they experienced the pleasure of anticipation that a return to their normal pre-war lives would mean. This would have been especially true of the Schindler Jews, who had been protected during the war by their eccentric industrialist-benefactor. In reasonably good health, and reasonably well-fed, they are poised on the threshold of their new lives. In such a state, naturally, they bestow upon their erstwhile benefactor the gratitude he deserves. At the film’s end, real-life Schindler Jews who have happened to survive enact the Jewish ritual of placing small stones on his tombstone, a gesture of respect, even of homage.

 

The reality of the Schindler Jews is another matter altogether. In the Fortunoff Video Archive for Holocaust Testimonies at Yale there exists the testimony of the son of two actual Schindler Jews, Menachem S. In 1943, his parents, fearing the worst, smuggled the five-year-old out of a Polish labor camp in the hope that he would survive the war under the protection of some Polish Christian family. His parents promised to retrieve him after the war, a promise that they managed to keep, since they survived under Schindler’s protection. Nevertheless their reunion defeats all of our expectations of a happy ending. Both parents are emaciated; the six-foot tall father weights only eighty-eight pounds; his rotted teeth hang loosely from his gums.

 

Menachim S. sees little resemblance between these people and his memory of his parents and, not surprisingly, he does not recognize them. In a scene ironically and accidentally reminiscent of Odysseus’s recognition by his old servant at his return, Menachim S. holds up the picture of his mother given to him at their parting. Recognition, however, does not ensue. “I just couldn’t believe,” he says, “that they were my parents.” For some time he calls them Mr.and Mrs. S, rather than father and mother.

 

Lawrence Langer, whose account of the incident I have so far been paraphrasing, gets the meaning of this episode exactly right, one more insightful analysis in a masterpiece of analysis:

 

The bizarre spectacle of an adult speaking of a seven-year-old child remembering his five-year-old self as an unrecapturable identity reminds us of the complex obstacles that frustrate a coherent narrative view of the former victim’s ordeal from the vantage point of the present. . . . Memory functions here to discredit the idea of family unity and to confirm an order of being–or more precisely, a disorder of being–that appears to the witness to have been the unique creation of the Holocaust experience. (111-112)

 

This contrast between Hollywood and reality reveals just how Spielberg has betrayed the memory of Holocaust survivors like Menachem S. He has concealed beneath the veneer of a conventional narrative of separation and reunion the uncomfortable truth that the conditions of captivity rendered such conventional narrative impossible.

 

What could have permitted such a desecration of character? To some, it may matter that the victims of the Holocaust were diaspora Jews, trained to survive by passivity. They should have known, they should have struggled actively against their oppressors. For those who say this, these sentences translate into: I would have known, I would have struggled to maintain my sense of self. In Surplus of Memory, Yitzhak Zuckman, a survivor of the Warsaw Uprising, shows the flaw in this self-serving view. Of foreknowledge of the Holocaust, he says:

 

We read in Mein Kampf that Hitler would destroy the Jews; we read his speech in the Reichstag. But we didn’t take it seriously. Even today, who would consider every expression of anti-semitism? We saw it as rhetoric, not as the expression of something he intended to carry out. The idea was iberleben–we’ll get through this. (69)

 

On the question of the link between traditional Jewish passivity and the Holocaust, Zuckerman does not mince words:

 

When I talk to young people, . . . I explain that you can turn people of any nation, any race or religion into “Jews”–make them behave just like Jews. My comrades and I were lucky that we were always on the other side of the barricades. But those who fell into the hands of the Germans–and this time it was the Poles–behaved just like the Jews had. In a short time, in weeks, the Germans turned them into loathesome, humiliated, fearful people; and keep in mind, the Poles weren’t starved for years like the Jews in the ghettoes. (526)

 

If Zuckerman is right, we have discovered something, not about diaspora Jewry, but about our ability to make our fellow human beings so wretched that, while they do not cease to live, their lives cease to have meaning. If Zuckerman is right, Habermas’s view of the Holocaust becomes immediately relevant:

 

There [in Auschwitz] something happened that up to now nobody considered as even possible. There one touched on something which represents the deep layer of solidarity among all that wear a human face; notwithstanding the usual acts of beastliness of human history, the integrity of this common layer has been taken for granted. . . . Auschwitz has changed the continuity of the conditions of life within history. (quoted in Friedlander 3)

 

If Zuckerman and Habermas are correct, we have learned from the Holocaust that a life robbed of meaning is possible, and that the task of creating a world in which that theft is impossible may be beyond our powers. If Zuckerman and Habermas are correct, the examination of the effects of dislocation on the surivivors of the Holocaust tells us something about the difficulty of this daunting task. This difficulty is evident both in private and in public memory:in the testimony of surviving Jews and the the monuments we have built commemorating the experience to which they testify.

 

For the Jews, it is generally agreed, captivity meant passivity because those in the Nazi grip were granted virtually no freedom of action. They ceased to have their own story; they were forced, rather, to act out the story their captors had written for them. It is a story in which human beings were reduced to the moral status of sheep marked for slaughter. By actions for which they must be held responsible, the Nazis turned people into machines for survival, into men and women who cannot be held responsible for their actions.

 

Since the causes of the passivity of the prisoners of the Nazis were the conditions of captivity themselves, they cannot really be overcome: “any brave fighter,” says Zuckerman, “was liable to wind up in Treblinka. So the distinction many people make between the fighters and the masses ‘who went like sheep to the slaughter’, was artificial, absurd, and false” (261-262).

 

In his brilliant allegorical novel, Badenheim 1939, Aharon Appelfeld dramatizes the gradual descent into passivity that leads the Jews to their destruction. At the novel’s end,

 

An engine, an engine coupled to four filthy freight cars, emerged from the hills and stopped at the station. Its appearance was as sudden as if it had arisen from a pit in the ground. “Get in!” yelled invisible voices. And the people were sucked in. Even those who were standing with a bottle of lemonade in their hands, a bar of chocolate, the headwaiter with his dog–they were all sucked in as easily as grains of wheat poured into a funnel. Nevertheless Dr. Pappenheim found time to make the following remark: “If the coaches are so dirty it must mean that we have not far to go.” (147-148)

 

That there is no Jewish story after captivity–no coherent, morally satisfying narrative–is a problem for anyone who wants to represent these victims and their victimization. Raul Hilberg’s masterly historical account of the Holocaust and Spielberg’s popular film share this problem. It is Schindler’s list; it is Schindler who has control. Hilberg entitles his book The Destruction of the European Jews, a passive construction that reflects in its grammar the central fact of the camps. The Jews have no story, or rather they have only one story, the Nazis’ story about them.

 

The actions and lives of the incarcerated Jews are, in a strict sense, meaningless. From the point of view of the Jews, nothing that they do, or can or cannot do, makes sense. In Survival at Auschwitz, Primo Levi makes the point in a memorable anecdote:

 

Driven by thirst, I eyed a fine icicle outside the window, within hand’s reach. I opened the window and broke off the icicle but at once a large, heavy guard prowling outside brutally snatched it away from me. “Warum? I asked him in my poor German. “Hier is kein warum (there is no why here),” he replied, pushing me inside with a shove. (29)

 

The German means that there is no whyfor Levi (or for any prisoner.) The Jewish search for meaning in camp life is bound to fail.

 

A chief consequence of this absence of meaning is the decoupling of action from its usual consequences. According to the testimony of one survivor, he left his daily ration of bread in the care of a companion while he went off to the toilet. The companion ate the bread and the man complained. “Look, I asked him to look after my piece of bread, and he ate it up.” The Kapo [the inmate supervisor] said: “You took away his life. Right?” He said: “Well, I’ll give it back this afternoon, the ration.” He [the Kapo] said: “No, come outside.” At this point the Kapo orders the offender to lie on the floor, places a board across his neck, and stomps on it, breaking his neck (quoted in Langer 27). To grasp the “meaning” of this episode, we must imagine a world in which stealing bread is a fatal offense, murder a casual act without consequences.

 

In this world in which acts and their consequences are so mismatched, filial piety fares no better than complaint. Arriving with his family at Auschwitz, Abraham P. finds that his parents and youngest brother are sent to the left, to death, while he and two older brothers and a younger brother are sent to the right. Abraham P. recalls:

 

I told my little kid brother, I said to him, “Solly, geh tsu Tate un Mame [go to papa and mama].” And like a little kid, he followed–he did. . . . I wonder what my mother and father were thinking, especially when they were all . . . when they all went to the [gas chamber]. I can’t get it out of my head. It hurts me, it bothers me, I don’t know what to do. (quoted in Langer 185-186)

 

This disproportion disables normal moral judgment. Ordinarily, we would expect a mother to care for and to comfort her children in distress; normally, we would label as self-sacrifice the gesture of a stranger who ignores danger to comfort a child in trouble. But in the world of the camps, what looks like callousness may be helpless terror, and what looks like heroism may be despair. On the ramp at Auschwitz where, upon arrival, the first “selections” were made, a ten-year-old girl refused to go to the left (toward death). She kicked and stratched and screamed to her mother, who was standing by on the right, among those temporarily spared. She pleaded with her not to let the Nazis kill her. One of the three SS men holding the young girl down approached the mother, asking her if she wanted to accompany her daughter. The mother refused the offer. Was the SS man showing compassion? Did the mother lack compassion? Merely to ask these questions is to show the inadequacy of our moral vocabulary in this instance. In making sense of a world that makes no sense, onlookers on concentration camp life are as disadvantaged as participants.

 

During a selection at Birkenau Mrs. Zuckner, another mother, held fast to the hand of a little girl she knew, a little girl destined for the gas chambers. Mrs. Zuckner’s daughter, Esther, recalls, “This was the last time I saw my mother. She went with that neighbor’s child. So when we talk about heroes, mind you, this was a hero: a woman who would not let a four-year-old child go by herself” (Hartman 242). Was Mrs. Zuckner a heroine? We must tread delicately here so as not to dishonor her memory. But, equally, we must not do the unknown mother on the ramp the injustice of making her responsible for her conduct. The truth is we do not know how to judge in these cases, to distribute praise or blame when human beings are reduced to choices such as these. We could only know, perhaps, if we came to be in a similar situation, and we can only hope that we never do.

 

As Langer says, we view Holocaust testimony “expecting to encounter heroes and heroines, [but] we meet only decent men and women, constrained by circumstances, reluctantly, to abandon roles that we as audience expect (and need) to find ingrained in their natures” (25) We can see this need operating in the following interview, presented verbatim with interpolations by Langer in square brackets:

 

INTERVIEWER: You were able to survive because you were so plucky. When you stepped back in line . . .

 

HANNA F: No dear, no dear, no . . . no, I had no . . . . It wasn’t luck, it was stupidity. [At this, the two interviewers laugh deprecatingly, overriding her voice with their own “explanation,” as one calls out, “You had a lot of guts!”]

 

HANNA F.: [simultaneously] No, no, no, no, there were no guts, there was just sheer stupidity. (63-64)

 

In his commentary, Langer points to the contrast between the heroic thesaurus rifled for such terms as pluck and guts and Hanna F.’s impoverished thesaurus containing only the single word, reiterated, stupidity. He points out that the interviewers exhibit an anxiety over Hanna F.’s judgment so extreme that they deny Hanna F. her own experience.

 

The tension between Hanna F.’s insistence on her deflationary version of the past and the interviewers’ insistence on their inflationary one is evident also in the public memory, the way in which nations and future generations choose to remember their past. It is these tensions and the reconstructions and appropriations to which they lead that are the subject of James Young’s The Texture of Memory, his excellent book on Holocaust memorials and their meaning. Young’s presentation of Nathan Rapaport’s Ghetto Monument in Warsaw and the Jochen and Esther Gerz’s Monument Against Fascism in Hamburg provide us with a contrast that illustrates the strength of Young’s methods and the validity of his insights. They also illustrate what I take to be his chief weakness, an attitude of “scientific” objectivity, of tout comprendre, tout pardonner. However understandable on so potentially an explosive topic as Holocaust memorials, this attitude, unfortunately, also inhibits Young from carrying his best insights to their natural conclusions.

 

In his discussion of Rapaport’s Warsaw Ghetto Monument, for example, although Young notices the classical proportions with which these representatives of Jewish Defense Force are sculpted, he does not notice that they do not look like the actual Jews who fought so heroically against impossible odds. Young also notices that the heroic figures in front are complemented by a bas relief of the martyrs of the Jewish people at the back of the monument, but he does not notice the significance of this placement. It was the martyrs who actually predominated, not the heroes. Moreover, those who predominated in the Ghetto were not martyrs in any real sense, but victims.

 

Young notices the irony that the Memorial is built with stones meant for a monument to Nazi victory. Its sculptor was to be Arno Brecker, Hitler’s favorite sculptor. But Young fails to notice that the style of the Warsaw Monument is eerily remiscent of the style of the Nazi sculpture for which Brecker became known (Merker 246, 292). Despite the fact that Young notices the semantic fungibility of such monuments, used at one time to justify Israel’s struggle against its Arab neighbors, at another to justify the struggle of the Palestine Liberation Organization against Zionism, he does not notice the glorification of war inherent in the dramatization of military heroism, no matter how honorable the cause.

 

In contrast, the Gerzes’s Monument Against Fascism is proof against inappropriate appropriations. A tall hollow aluminum pillar covered with soft lead, it is set in a pedestrian shopping mall in a commercial suburb of Hamburg. Attached to the pillar is a steel stylus, to allow the citizens to inscribe their names. On the monument’s base is the following inscription:

 

We invite the citizens of Harburg, and visitors to the town, to add their names here to ours. In doing so, we commit ourselves to remain vigilant. As more and more names cover this 12 meter tall lead column, it will gradually be lowered into the ground. One day it will have disappeared completely, and the site of the Harburg monument against fascism will be empty. In the end, it is only we ourselves who can rise up against injustice. (30)

 

Instead of an orderly list of names–a sort of self-constructed Vietnam Memorial–the monument proved to be a site for graffiti, from Stars of David to Swastikas, from “Jurgen liebt Kirsten (Jurgen loves Kirsten)” to “Auslïnder raus (Foreigners, get out!).” The artists approved of the “desecration,” and local newspaper made the crucial point: “The filth brings us closer to the truth than would any list of well-meaning signatures. The inscriptions, a conglomerate of approval, hatred, anger and stupidity, are like a fingerprint of our city applied to the column” (35-37).

 

Like the Warsaw Ghetto Monument, the Monument against Fascism has been misused by onlookers, but the difference is significant: while the Ghetto Monument is incorporated into hostile fantasies with frighting ease, the Monument Against Fascism incorporates these fantasies, making them part of its trenchant message. Young does not notice this.

 

Young notices the appropriateness of this “counter-monument” to the event it commemorates: “How better to remember forever a vanished people than by the perpetually unfinished, ever-vanishing monument?” (31). But, in the economy of his exposition, countermonuments do not occupy the central place they deserve. Their analysis forms only the first chapter of a book whose organization is concentric. Young’s book moves from Germany, where the mass murders were planned to Poland, where most of the murders took place, to Israel, whose founding relates directly to the Holocaust, to America, whose Jews were untouched by the Holocaust. In the book’s economy, therefore, the commentary onthe countermonuments forms an anomolous prelude rather than a resounding climax. As a consequence, Young fails to notice the irony that the Monument Against Fascism in the heart of Germany is more deeply respectful of the Diaspora dead than the Warsaw Ghetto Monument at the center of Jewish heroism. We cannot respect the dead by misrepresenting them, no matter how flattering the misrepresentation.

 

We must face the unpleasant truth that the European Diaspora was a failed experiment in Jewish accomodation. The relative absence of heroism during the Holocaust is in part a function of the combination of deception, efficiency, and murderous purpose hatched in the deliberations of Nazi leaders, shaped at the Wannsee conference, and perfected in the death camps. But is also a function of Jewish life during the European Diaspora, a philosophy of iberleben, of living through persecution. We would therefore expect that Jewish heroes, if they revealed themselves, would manifest a personal history far different from the Diaspora average.

 

This was indeed the case if the testimony of Yitzhak Zuckerman is to be believed. Surplus of Memory, his recorded testimony, is not a book but a rambling account, not history, but the raw material of history. It is not meant to be read but to be mined. Though Zuckerman’s account must be treated with the skepticism appropriate to any reminiscence, it is nevertheless a moving depiction of the birth and biography of a hero.

 

Zuckerman was no ordinary Jew. He was a Zionist, specifically a leader of the He-Halutz Ha-Tza’ir (Young Pioneer) Zionist socialist movement, one of a collection of youth movements striving to realize their ideals on kibbutzim (collective farms) in Eretz Israel (The Land of Israel, then Palestine). It was this disciplined idealism, this task of leadership, that brought Zuckerman back to the Ghetto from which he had escaped, to organize educational efforts for the young. But by 1942 it was clear that these efforts would be hopeless, that the Jews were marked for destruction. In Zuckerman’s words:

 

In July, the idea of uprising was remote for me, because I didn’t know how to build a force. The question then was only how to announce, to alarm. This was the execution of hundreds of thousands of Jews. The question wasn’t uprising or Treblinka [a death camp]. There was only Treblinka. The question was how to make the Jews resist going to Treblinka. (217)

 

From this time on Zuckerman harbored no illusions: “We knew we were going to die. The question was only when and how to finish” (266). In January of 1943, there is a prelude to the Uprising that occurred in the middle of April:

 

The January fighting taught us something. . . . The Germans were routed because their situation was worse than ours. First, they were surprised; they were organized in small platoons. They were always below, and we were always above them. . . . The first time they came with the knowledge that these Jews were like all other Jews; after all, they had seen so many Jewish youths that it didn’t occur to them that any Jews were armed. . . . So it was beyond all my expectations and I was very happy. The first time we killed Germans, we felt that this was the final battle. But there was no drama, no heroic outbursts; except for one case of hysteria, there was nothing exceptional. After that, we no longer felt like people going to death. (Zuckerman 288)

 

Zuckerman is under no illusions about the military effectiveness of the Uprising. But the Uprising has a more general significance:

 

If there’s a school to study the human spirit, there it should be a major subject. The really important things were inherent in the force shown by Jewish youths, after years of degradation, to rise up against their destroyers and determine what death they would choose: Treblinka or Uprising. I don’t know if there’s a standard to measure that. (xiii)

 

The literature on the Holocaust has become, understandably, a Jewish industry. Each year sees the publication of dozens of books on the subject: memoirs, fiction, history, literary criticism. We might all be excused–Gentile and Jew–if we said genug (enough is enough). Nevertheless, the best of this work that I have come across–Claude Lanzman’s Shoah, Appelfeld’s Badenheim 1939, Levi’s Survival in Auschwitz, Langer’s Holocaust Memories–is fine by the highest standards of its various genres: film, fiction, memoirs, literary criticism.

 

Each of these masterpieces enables us to encounter and better to understand perhaps the most disreputable incident in our checkered human past. It is a story about the conditions under which the human spirit can be dismantled beyond repair. It is also a story about how this same spirit can survive (in isolated cases) despite such massive degradation. So long as we live in a world in which “Jews” continue to be created–in Bosnia, Somalia, and Ruanda, in the Occupied Territories (where Jews create “Jews”)–the literature of the Holocaust cannot, unfortunately, cease to be relevant.

 

Works Cited

 

• Appelfeld, Aharon. Badenheim 1939. Trans. Dalya Bilu. Boston: David R. Godine, 1980.
• Dawidowicz, Lucy S. The War Against the Jews: 1933-1945. New York: Bantam, 1986.
• Friedlander, Saul, ed. Probing the Limits of Representation: Nazism and the “Final Solution” Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1992.
• Hartman, Geoffrey H., ed. Holocaust Remembrance: The Shapes of Memory. Oxford: Blackwell, 1994.
• Hilberg, Raul. The Destruction of the European Jews. New York: Holmes and Meier, 1985.
• Levi, Primo. Survival in Auschwitz: The Nazi Assault on Humanity. Trans. Stuart Woolf. New York: Macmillan, 1993.
• Merker, Reinhard. Die bildenden Kánste im National sozialismus: Kulturideologie, Kulturpolitik, Kulturproduktion. Cologne: Dumont Buchverlag, 1983.
• Vishniac, Roman. A Vanished World. New York: Farrar, Straus, and Giroux, 1983.

 

Brent Wood

Methodologies for the Study of Western History and Culture
Trent University
bwood@trentu.ca

 

Burroughs, William S. Dead City Radio. Island Records, 1990.

 

—. Spare-Ass Annie and Other Tales. Island Records, 1993.

 

Ministry, with William S. Burroughs. Just One Fix. Sire Records, 1992.

 

Revolting Cocks. Beers, Steers and Queers. Waxtrax,1991.

 

—. Linger Ficken Good. Sire Records, 1993.

 

Music, it seems, has always been the art that most easily eludes the grasp of theory. Perhaps it is the spectator relationship implied by “theory” that allows the visceral vibrations of music, even art music, to remain unaccounted for. As Frith and Goodwin (1990) have pointed out, in the discourse of cultural studies the “textual” analysis of music itself–as opposed to lyrics, iconography or consumption–remains extraordinarily immature when compared with treatment of the visual arts. Popular music in particular poses a challenge to cultural theorists who must bridge the gap between traditional musicology, which tends to isolate music from its socio-political context, and sociological or anthropological perspectives which handle music’s physical presence poorly. Post-modernist theory has dealt with many such contextual challenges in its encounters with visual pop art in sculpture, painting, film, and even television. Why, then, is it so often necessary, when confronted with academic music commentary, to ask with McClary and Walser (quoting Bloom County‘s Billy and the Boingers), “yeah, but did we kick butt?”¹

 

One obvious reason that music is so resistant to theory is the difficulty of representing the object of study verbally. Musicians have enough trouble communicating to one another what they hear in their aural imagination without bringing in non-musicians to complicate the picture. As sound has become easier to record and to reproduce, however, the concept of sound as an object manipulable by artist (and consumer) has become less far-fetched. It seems we have reached a point where it has become necessary to think of music as operating in an “expanded field” if we are to have any possibility at all of comprehending Public Enemy and Stravinsky, Woody Guthrie and John Cage, Michael Jackson and The Dead Kennedys (all available in the same digital format at the same retail outlet) as instances of one and the same “art”.² The difficulty of commenting on music through the written word has been eclipsed by the possibilities of commenting on musical objects by manipulating copies of them with the help of sound-reproduction technology. As Laurent Jenny observed a generation ago, whenever new technological possibilities come into the hands of artists there is a tendency for the various arts to blend into one another.³ This occurs not only stylistically and thematically but also technically. In other words, modernist intertextuality explodes into a post-modernist inter-mediality. In 1994, with spoken word an MTV fad and William S. Burroughs advertising Nike products, it is past high time to examine the sort of music-poetry which is forming today, and which constitutes a major “post-modernist” project in music.

 

Why characterize this tendency as a “project”? Because it is, naturally, a “work-in-progress.” As a time-based art, it exists “in progress” as a moment of resistance to the results of the technological acceleration of the 20th century. The project today is essentially a continuous experiment in bricolage using the mechanical and verbal and sonic tools of commerce. It has perhaps become necessary to make use of Jacques Attali’s argument for music-as-theory in order to get a grip on the currents which are most prominent in the project.⁴ Attali hears currents of social (re)organization in the commercialization of sound, noise and rhythm; in these general terms, the post-modernist music project is about intervening in those patterns with new patterns, sculpting with garbage, found objects, and reclaimed enemy weaponry. This is a form of theory that doesn’t meet the requirements of the print-based academy. Whether it has the stereotypical “punk” stylistic trappings or not, we can confidently give a name to this localized, ever-changing, music-in-the-expanded field, theory-project. That name is “cyberpunk.”

 

I will now seek, in spite of the argument I have just made, to retain a modicum of credibility while attempting to describe and comment, in written words, on five interrelated instances of this project. The preceding three paragraphs may be read as a contextualization for the following review of five more-or-less-recent sound recordings in which the confluence of musical streams traceable to Euro-American and Afro-American sources forms a whirlpool around the venerable figure of William S. Burroughs. These recordings include Burroughs’s own Dead City Radio (1990) and Spare-Ass Annie (1993); the Revolting Cocks’ Beers Steers and Queers (1991) and Linger Ficken Good (1993); and the Ministry/Burroughs collaboration Just One Fix (1992). The reader will find that, like the music under study, I will end up attempting to explain the effects of various pieces by comparing them with other well-known musical texts. Perhaps I can justify my (electronically produced) literary commentary by offering it as a sort of annotated discography to contemporary recordings which can only be located as music within an expanded field. It will be up to the reader to take action (or not) in her or his sonic sphere.

 

The motivation for this review springs from a question that was posed to me over the recent television advertisement for Nike which features William Burroughs. In the ad, Burroughs appears on a miniature TV set being kicked around by joggers. “The purpose of technology is to aid the body, not confuse the mind,” says the bard. Nike isn’t selling shoes, of course; it’s selling a mainstream counter-culture, and Burroughs is only the most recent icon chosen by the champ of hip footwear. The question is, how did we get from Spike Lee to Bull Lee? It’s no secret that Burroughs has been rediscovered by a younger generation for whom the Beats and hippies that he once inspired are no more than the stuff of which movies are made.⁵ Receiving much less media attention than his appearance in Van Sant’s Drugstore Cowboy (1988), or Cronenberg’s adaptation of Naked Lunch (1992), however, has been Burroughs’s 1990 CD Dead City Radio, which has had a measurable influence through the medium of college radio if nowhere else.

 

Dead City Radio grew out of a 1981 appearance by Burroughs on Saturday Night Live during which he read “Twilight’s Last Gleaming” while an old NBC Radio Orchestra recording of “The Star Spangled Banner” was played.⁶ Hal Willner, then music co-ordinator for SNL, was struck by the power and grace of Burroughs’s reading voice. Willner grew interested in expanding the project of putting Burroughs on tape, and travelled to Burroughs’s home in the university town of Lawrence, Kansas to do the job. The majority of the music on Dead City Radio is drawn from those same NBC Radio Orchestra archives, and all the spoken word from the Lawrence sessions. Willner, on the recording’s liner notes, claims to have chosen the music in order to highlight Burroughs’s quintessentially American attributes. Indeed, the effect of Burroughs’s critiques of American government, Christian morality, racism, homophobia, and drug wars when set against the NBC orchestra’s nostalgic “program music” is a powerful one.

 

In 1993 Burroughs’s familiar aging figure, in hat and tie, appeared once again in the popular music racks in another Willner production entitled Spare-Ass Annie and Other Tales. Once again, Willner had taken tracks from the Lawrence sessions and set music to them; this time it was with the aid of The Disposable Heroes of Hiphoprisy, the multi-cultural hip-hop group whose earlier popular recording “Television–the drug of a nation” echoed Burroughs’s own feelings about the addictive American psychology. In stark contrast to the symphonic textures of Dead City Radio, most of the musical material of Spare-Ass Annie consists of relaxed hip-hop grooves created from looped sound-samples. Not only had Burroughs had been brought from the past (back) into the future (a copy of the one he once imagined in his 1960’s experimental fiction), he had also been “crossed-over” from white culture into black, a vital step in the passage from the Beat-jazz of Cronenberg’s Naked Lunch to a role as technological soccer-ball kicked around by shoes the size of Michael Jordan’s over the beat of a DJ. It is apparent that Burroughs now occupies a position with respect to mainstream corporate culture analogous to the one assumed by Public Enemy and other artists who specialize in cultural appropriation to make their critiques. Bring the noise!

 

The creation of silence through noise-making has an honourable history. Since white people deemed black people’s music to be noise several centuries ago, black people have had the lead in communicating publicly through noise. In twentieth-century art music, white European and American experimental composers, such as John Cage and Iannis Xenakis, began to play with the possibilities of noise. Since capital hit popular music in a big way, however, its principal figures have been Jimi Hendrix and Johnny Rotten, black and white icons for noise-resistance in popular music. Today, amid the never-ending war of words that characterizes our cybernetically-organized society, the control of communication technology is vital for any kind of resistance to the seductions of commercial culture. Public Enemy’s Chuck D called hip-hop “TV for black America”; in just this way, I would argue, cyberpunk music is the underground info-highway for white youth. Burroughs’s influence on Ministry’s Al Jourgensen and Paul Barker is evident throughout their work, including that done in the guise of the Revolting Cocks on the CDs Beers, Steers and Queers and Linger Ficken Good. Special tribute was paid when Burroughs’s voice and text were used on Ministry’s 1992 CD single “Just One Fix”.

 

All five recordings examined here use sound-reproduction technology to collage together a wide range of material, including readings from previously published texts, commercial film and television soundtracks, a variety of sound effects, and clips or imitations of advertising lingo. These are recombined with minimal new musical material. The effectiveness of the resulting tracks depends entirely on a redefinition of “noise” and a recognition of the necessity of throwing back the word-garbage and music-garbage which rains down upon us from corporate culture machines. The contrast between the various elements which make up a composition is the source of its success or failure in composition terms. The role of “noise” is central, not only in the form of distortion, white noise and background noise, but also as a paradigm for the creation of silent space in a soundscape saturated by mass media. Burroughs is the perfect candidate for this kind of textual re-arrangement, since much of his own work is self-consciously the rearrangement of the work of others, designed to function in just this way. What follows here is an attempt to read the various takes on William Burroughs texts that have surfaced in the expanded field.

 

Dead City Radio is destined to become a classic in the Burroughs catalogue. The performances by the NBC orchestra and various other sources are lush, and generally work with the texts by evoking a mood which is recognizable to the listener from other media experiences.⁷ The opening track, “William’s Welcome” is the exception on the album, a collectively produced soundscape for which Burroughs provides soundbites which are subjected to Pink Floyd-style electronic manipulation. In the majority of the tracks, music and text are overlaid to create a feeling of twisted Americana. This tactic is especially evident in “Kill the Badger” and “Thanksgiving Prayer,” both of which retell Burroughs’s own “Ugly American” story. In the first, the central role is occupied by Burroughs’s former counsellor at the Los Alamos boys school to which he was sent as a child. The music for this piece, an Aaron Copeland-like bit of orchestral program music, is made to feel terrible and twisted by the text. In the same way the “Pomp and Circumstance” march of “Thanksgiving Prayer” is made sad and ironic by Burroughs’s black version of grace, the blunt imagery of which, contrasted with the orchestra’s moody modal tensions, recalls in mood nothing so much as Morrison’s “American Prayer”.⁸

 

Other noteworthy pieces on the disc include “Ah Pook the Destroyer,” “Where he was going” and “Apocalypse.” “Ah Pook” succinctly iterates Burroughs’s standard warning against the tools of death (time, control, and junk). The warning is set against minimalist electronic accompaniment by John Cale reminiscent of much of Laurie Anderson’s recent work. The effect here is more like the science-fiction of Anderson’s earlier sound-recordings or of the Ministry pieces which I will deal with presently. “After-dinner Conversation/Where he was going,” Burroughs’s take on Hemingway, is perhaps the most sumptuous piece on any of the discs under review. The story is a variation on Hemingway’s classic short story “Snows of Kilimanjaro,” reset in a gangster-movie rural midwest. It uses church organ, sound effects, and mild electronic voice manipulation to achieve the effect of a radio play heard as an electronic Sunday night bedtime story. The preoccupation with death continues into the series of “moralist” texts (in Burroughs’s special sense of that word) that form a suite of interconnecting sound-poems culminating in “Apocalypse.” In some segments Burroughs reads from the Bible over a background of mock middle eastern music that could have been borrowed from Ben-Hur. “Apocalypse” itself is a monumental work, beginning with a celebration of an animist theology represented by Hassan I. Sabah: “Consider a revolutionary statement. . . . Nothing is True, Everything is Permitted.” Burroughs here explains the meaning of this soundbite whose citations continue to grow more common. The text, reminiscent of Naked Lunch, is, according to liner notes, drawn from an experiment with silk screen done in collaboration with artist Keith Haring, to whom the album is dedicated. The NBC orchestra here supports the feeling of apocalypse, changing intensities, moving from mood to mood like a ballet piece, at times seemingly imitating Stravinsky’s “Sacre du Printemps”. Burroughs’s reading of “The Lord’s Prayer” functions as an appropriate culmination of the suite. This is in turn complemented by the piece which follows it and concludes the CD, a curiosity in which Burroughs sings a German love to piano and clarinet accompaniment. The album is thus wrapped by instances of Burroughs’s lean positivism, which, as in his written work, just barely manages to rescue the whole from an utterly nihilistic cynicism.

 

In all the orchestral pieces on Dead City Radio there is an element of ironic commercial nostalgia that is not provided by the contemporary rhythms of Spare-Ass Annie. The musical arrangements on the second CD, which is either a “quick fix” attempt to surf the wave of Burroughs’s marketability or simply a poorly conceived project, are not nearly as rich as on the first. On the whole, Spare-Ass Annie is a very curious disc, one which will accordingly take its place in the curiosity bin next to other attempts to bring white media figures into the world of black-inspired popular music, such as Leonard Nimoy’s unforgettable recording of “Proud Mary.” The spoken texts used here are not as essential to Burroughs’s oeuvre as are those on Dead City Radio, nor are they as well performed. Worse still, it sounds as if Burroughs’s distinctive speech patterns have been electronically altered to fit the beats put down by the Disposable Heroes, either by digital editing, severe compression, or (ironically) by noise reduction systems. The result is that he occasionally winds up sounding something like Barney Rubble.

 

In general, the cyclical nature of the sample-loops works against Burroughs’s speech. As any mixer knows, the rhythm track is the track that is laid first. Burroughs’s tracks are thus by definition the rhythm tracks. When these are combined with the beats of the Disposable Heroes, both layers begin to sound as if they are off-time with one another. Chopping up Burroughs’s vocal gestures to better fit the overlaid digital rhythms only makes matters worse. The loops of his vocals on “Last Words of Dutch Schultz (this is insane)” and “Words of Advice for Young People” are comic in their attempt to make Burroughs’s words into a popular refrain. The inescapable fact is that Burroughs’s particular brand of poetry has no rhymes–the quintessential element to spoken rap/hip-hop rhythm in America.⁹

 

There are a few noteworthy moments on the recording. “The Last Words of Dutch Schultz” features a contradictory tape-loop similar to ones Burroughs once prescribed for therapeutic use.¹⁰ The listless repetition of “but I am dying / no you’re not,” however, ends up sounding clumsy and uninspiring. While the text of “Warning to Young Couples” is largely pointless, there is an amusing Simpsons-like irony achieved by attaching bouncy “Leave it to Beaver” type music to a story of dogs chewing babies to death. “One God Universe,” a companion piece to “Ah Pook the Destroyer” from Dead City Radio, is also tolerable, and highlights the anti-thermodynamic cosmology that supports much of Burroughs’s work. The music here is reminiscent of funky 1960s style pop and the reggae that grew from it, which at least dovetails with Burroughs’s penchant for keif-smoking.¹¹ There are two longer pieces on the recording, both drawn from Burroughs’s early work. “Did I Ever Tell You About the Man Who Taught His Asshole to Talk?,” one of his most famous comic routines, is a major disappointment. However dull Peter Weller’s reading of it in Cronenberg’s Naked Lunch, that rendition is nevertheless more satisfying than the terrible one on Spare-Ass Annie. “Junky’s Christmas,” a piece that went unpublished in written form until Interzone (1991), doesn’t work as well as Sandra Bernhard’s “White Christmas,” to which it is comparable in form if not in spirit, but it gets by, its musical component alternating between Christmas carols and rhythmic themes typical of incidental television fare.

 

Also in the vortex spinning around Burroughs is the work of Al Jourgensen and his cohorts in their bands Ministry and the Revolting Cocks. As Burroughs in the 1960s used the “pulp texts” of his childhood as raw material for his anarchist text-and-image-collage, so RevCo uses “video pulp” for their industrial pop music. The frontier theme so prominent in Burroughs’s narratives is treated by RevCo on the title track of their 1991 CD Beers Steers and Queers. Employing black-originated hip-hop sampling and rhyming techniques, the Cocks rhythmically cut pop culture sound-bites into their work in a way comparable to Burroughs’s importing of pulp texts into his fiction. This is, aside from the rhythmic clash, the principle area in which Spare-Ass Annie is lacking. Beers, Steers and Queers, like much of the Spare-Ass Annie material, consists primarily of a sequenced dance beat. In this case, the beat is deliberately distorted to sound as if the speakers can’t handle the volume. The only tonal portions of the composition are samples of banjo and bells from the soundtracks of the films Deliverance and The Good the Bad and the Ugly. The “rapped” lyrics concern the hypocrisy of American society as exemplified by Texan culture.¹² Dialogue from Deliverance setting up a homosexual rape scene opens the piece and recurs between flat recited rhymes mixing double entrendres of morality and depravity, righteousness and fellatio, such as “The truth is hard to swallow,” “there is a law man, there is the raw man, who is the right and who is the wrong man,” and “Get in my face.” The blatantly offensive images of homosexual activity operate for RevCo just as they do for Burroughs, innoculating their work against commodification while drawing into question conventional definitions of morality. The double-meaning of “revolting” is the central feature of a tension here as the piece concludes, “Texas has religion–revolting cocks are god!” As in Burroughs’s best work, morality and brutality are pushed so close together that a feeling of great discomfort results.

 

RevCo’s next release, Linger Ficken Good, opens with an unashamed Burroughs rip-off entitled “Gila Copter.” The opening of “Gila Copter” prefaces RevCo’s typical digital punk/funk sound with a free rhythmic soundscape. Although the spoken text is free of rhyme, it does have identifiable refrains, all included in a narrative format and returning at unpredictable intervals. This use of refrain is in contrast with the predictable and much less effective use on Spare-Ass Annie. “Gila Copter” is a highly self-conscious piece which introduces the album as if it were an advertisement included within the product.¹³ The text begins as a sales pitch but quickly degrades into crypto-political advice. The plea here is for silence, to be achieved by turning off the televisual manipulation of “the American prime-time victim show.”

 

Hey kids—you want a soundtrack that’s gonna make you feel tense–let you express your frustration–make you scared, want to run out and buy a gun? You’re looking for another rock and roll record that’ll make you feel like a victim. You love to be a victim, you love the American prime-time victim show. Hey bells, gila copters, machine guns–listen to that–listen to that–kill for Allah–kill for Jesus. . . . All that 1980s shit is over–brothers and sisters–we’re going to turn the volume down.

 

The voice subsequently begins to take on a suspiciously incestuous quality which throws a wrench into the interpretive works. It is just enough to taint the text with doubt and irony and reinforce the edge of perversity that runs through much of Burroughs’s work. In contrast to the Cocks’ typical punk-style vocals, the vocalist here has a low raspy drawl imitative of Burroughs, clear but electronically treated. “Chopper” sound effects and other television noise drones throughout the piece, erupting in a violent distorted cameo at the transition between the free rhythmic introduction and the bass/noise-percussion groove which constitutes the majority of the tune.

 

Although Burroughs’s most popular writing seldom treats technology explicitly, his experimental work from Naked Lunch to The Soft Machine (1967) does. What makes Ministry Burroughs’s digital-era doppleganger, however, is not only the theme of the spoken (or sung) texts, but the use of technology by the ordinary citizen to shatter the control system’s hold on emotional manipulation. To this end the last and title tune from Linger Ficken Good (in which the Revolting Cocks are aided by the Revolting Pussies and, apparently, by their Revolting offspring) is an excellent example of postmodernist, underground, digital kitsch that revels in both its commerciality and its marginality in commercial terms. In this respect RevCo’s work begins to resemble the “intentional failure” of Andy Kaufman’s characters Foreign Man (resurrected as Latka Gravas in Taxi) and Tony Clifton, or that of Sandra Bernhard in Without You I’m Nothing .

 

“Linger Ficken Good” is a fold-in of magnificent qualities when heard in these terms, a montage of advertising and pornography. Like Bernhard’s or Kaufman’s work, it is titillating and amusing at first, but demands the audience’s endurance and eventually gives rise to a level of sensibility above the merely commercial.¹⁴ The music consists of six minutes of a jazz-style walking bass with sequenced high-hat and scratching samples providing a simple beat. Over this repetitive but ever-changing groove various voices enter and leave: a male vocal chants “finger licking good” over a panting female “more,” with a chorus of “e i e i o”; the line “this is porno for your mind–porno for your crotch” is answered by an offhand comment of “family entertainment” and the sound of a chicken clucking. The result is a re-serving of the Naked Lunch, this one including meat which must have been processed in the world of David Lynch’s Eraserhead. In the second segment of the piece, the (male) members of the band are introduced by female voices as if in a television special. In a call-and-response format, with their own voices providing an ostinato of “linger ficken good,” the “revolting pussies” chant the names of the Cocks as if they were salivating over the possibility of getting a taste. The third segment is a simulated interview with a black male, ostensibly a studio-musician in the Cocks’ employ. He runs through all the members of band, telling the listener their nicknames and insulting their musical abilities. “Kiss my ass” he snorts, ” . . . punks”; the last word is spit out just as the music is pulled out from under him for a precious moment of silence. The fourth segment is another variation on this theme, with the pussies rhyming the qualities of their favourite cocks in response to an endlessly looped sample asking, “who’s your favourite cock?” The effect here is of a child repeatedly pulling the cord of a talking doll. The irony inherent in the Cocks’ name becomes clear in the piece’s repetitive (but not sampled) denouement, a group of children singing a commercial jingle melody “it’s a RevCo world–it’s a RevCo world” in warbly harmony. This clever elision of the “revolting cocks,” already a pun, into the banal ad-speak “RevCo” further confuses the position of the Cocks with respect to the corporate music machine and solidifies their ties to the tradition of Malcolm MacLaren style “punk.” This piece is a particularly extreme example of music in the expanded field; there is no element which is not to be heard as if between aural quotation marks.

 

“Just One Fix,” a CD single put out by Ministry in 1992, features Burroughs himself as this kind of quotable sonic text. Like much of Ministry’s work, the track begins with a scream; the subsequent vocals are distorted and mixed into the noise that forms the body of the track and its various remixes. Burroughs’s words are clipped carefully and mixed in with other noise textures, rather than being featured in their own right and played against a contrasting sonic background. The piece has an electronic dance beat which, like all Ministry work, is hypnotic in effect, lending Burroughs’s words a sense of delirium. “Smash the control images; smash the control machine” are sampled and repeated on the “12” edit,” while the “Quick Fix edit” features a slightly longer text in which Burroughs confesses an ambivalent position, presumably as an American or as a communication machine, with respect to the control machine as a whole. “To put it country simple, there are some things on earth that other folks might want–like the whole planet.” Burroughs admits, “I am with the invaders–no sense trying to hide that.” He makes his standard call for quiet, at which point a gap is inserted in the spoken text to allow the noise-samples compiled by Ministry to occupy the principal listenting space. The samples sound variously like highway traffic, airport noise and creaking machinery. The atmosphere of Nova Express is reconfigured in Burroughs’s muffled claims that “there is no place else to go–the theatre is closed . . . cut music lines–cut word lines.” Burroughs is here alluding to a universe which is entirely pre-scripted, like a biologic film running in a theatre which no one is allowed to leave. Ministry in their aggressive, chaotic composition are attempting to do just as Burroughs recommends–“cut music lines” and “cut word lines” by scrambling the codes through which commercial music manages the feeling and intellect of its audience. The products of commercial culture, including television and popular music, are here exposed as techno-drugs manipulating the addictive psychology of an audience that demands “just one fix.”¹⁵

 

There are of course other sound-recordings by other artists which exemplify the tendencies outlined at the beginning of this article. I have chosen to focus on Burroughs because his work speaks to me, and through it I have been able to connect with contemporary sonic counter-culture. I can only assume that it is because Burroughs is surely nearing death that corporate America can push him. He has become a grand old man of counter-cultural resistance, just crazy enough that his intentions are not clear to the masses. Like that of Ministry and RevCo, his revolutionary message is partially submerged in texts that promote themselves as commercial pleasure-devices, such as the five reviewed here. I hope the reader will forgive me for celebrating the theoretical possibilities of music in a wholly verbal format, and for repeatedly relating the musical texts in question to others in other musical spectra. I may not have been able to say whether or not any of the CD’s under review truly “kicked butt,” but I hope I have been able to outline some of the ways in which butt can be kicked today with nothing more than a CD player, a sampler, a tape deck and a TV set.

 

Notes

 

1.Susan McClary and Robert Walser pose this question intheir essay “Start Making Sense! Musicology Wrestles with Rock” (Frith andGoodwin 1990).

 

2.Rosalind Krauss (1979) has written of “sculpture in theexpanded field” bounded by the limits of site-construction, axiomaticstructures, marked sites and sculpture. Analogously, one might think of afour-cornered field bounded by music, soundscape, advertising and poetry. Heressay “Sculpture in the Expanded Field,” originally printed inOctober 8 (Spring 1979), appears in Foster, 1983.

 

3.Jenny’s essay “La strategies de la forme” fromPotéique 27 (1976) is referred to by Zurbrugg in his essay”Burroughs, Barthes and the Limits of Interxtuality” in the Burroughs issue ofthe Review of Contemporary Fiction (1984).

 

4.In his book Noise, French economist andwriter Jacques Attali makes it plain that he intends “not only to theorizeabout music, but to theorize through music” (Attali 1985: 4).

 

5.Besides Van Sant’s and Cronenberg’s film (the latterreleased in cooperation with a re-release of Burroughs’s written work byGrove, his first American publisher), the current Burroughs revival has beenfueled by Viking’s publication of Burroughs’s early work Queer(1985) and Interzone (1989) as well as the newly writtenThe Cat Inside (1986) and The Western Lands (1987)and by the popularity of Burroughs-influenced cyberpunk science-fiction(particularly Gibson’s Neuromancer (1984)).

 

6.”Twilight’s Last Gleaming” is one of Burroughs’s earliestand most often re-told tales, appearing in various forms at various times inBurroughs’s career, including on Dead City Radio and inInterzone as well as (in a folded-in form) in NovaExpress (1964). The tale is one Burroughs came up with as a young manin tandem with friend Kells Elvins, a black comedy in which all the “basicAmerican rotteness” pent up in the Titanic’s passengers and crew spills outwhen they have to run for the life-boats.

 

7.Other short sonic compositions to complement Burroughs’sreading were contributed by Donald Fagen, Cheryl Hardwick, Lenny Pickett,Sonic Youth and Chris Stein.

 

8.This is ironically, for those familiar with AmericanPrayer‘s “Lament for my Cock,” followed by some amusingly banalpronouncements by Burroughs on the topic of snakes.

 

9.The speech rhythm problem is highlighted in a peculiar wayby pieces in which Ras I. Zulu and Michael Franti read from the opening ofNova Express. This folded-in creation only barely hangs togetherwhen uttered by Burroughs, and gives a positively bizarre when read inJamaican and afro-American speech rhythms.

 

10.In The Job (Odier 1974), Burroughsrecommends several guerrilla tactics involving tape recorders and cameras forvarious purposes. One tactic, designed to shake the mind out of its habitualdeference to authority, is to assemble a tape in which contradictory commandsalternate at high speed.

 

11.See Burroughs’s biographers Morgan (1988) and Miles(1992) for information on the role of cannabis in the composition ofNaked Lunch and its experimental spin-offs.

 

12.The piece can be heard as an amusing retake of the manywhite blues rip-offs concerning mistreatment in Texas, such as Johnny Winter’s”Dallas” or Creedence Clearwater Revival’s “The Midnight Special”. Its moodalso recalls Mailer’s Why Are We in Vietnam.

 

13.The effect is similar to the one created by They Might BeGiant’s “Theme from Flood” from Flood (1990).

 

14.My comparison is based on Philip Auslander’s chapter onKaufman and Bernhard in his 1992 book Presence and Resistance:Postmodernism and Cultural Politics in Contemporary AmericanPerformance.

 

15.At the risk of doing exactly what Frith and Goodwindecry, I must describe the cover art of Just One Fix. It is amultimedia painting by Burroughs himself, entitled “Last Chance Junction andCurse on Drug Hysterics” consisting of a montage of newspaper articles (an AnnLanders column on drugs, an AP clip about religious fundamentalists and theend of the world, and a photograph of a steam engine with the caption “Casey’slast ride”), painted all around and over with random-looking squiggles ofblack and yellow.

Works Cited

 

• Attali, Jacques. Noise: the Political Economy of Music. Trans. Brian Massumi. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1985.
• Auslander, Philip. Presence and Resistance: Postmodernism andCultural Politics in Contemporary American Performance. Ann Arbor:University of Michigan Press, 1992.
• Burroughs, William S. Naked Lunch. New York: Grove, 1959.
• —. Nova Express. New York: Grove, 1964.
• —. The Soft Machine. New York: Grove, 1967.
• —. Queer. New York: Viking, 1985.
• —. The Western Lands. New York: Viking Penguin, 1987.
• —. Interzone. Ed. James Grauerholz. New York: Viking,1991.
• Foster, Hal. ed. The Anti-aesthetic: essays on postmodernculture. Seattle: Bay Press, 1983.
• Frith, Simon and Goodwin, Andrew, eds. On Record: Rock, Pop and theWritten Word. New York: Pantheon, 1990.
• Gibson, William. Neuromancer. New York: Ace, 1984.
• Jenny, Laurent. “La stratgie de la forme”. Poétique 27 (1976).
• Miles, Barry. William Burroughs: El Hombre Invisible. London: Virgin, 1992.
• Morgan, Ted. Literary Outlaw. New York: Holt, 1988.
• Odier, Daniel. The Job. New York: Grove, 1974.
• Zurbrugg, Nicholas. “Burroughs, Barthes and the Limits of Intertextuality”. Review of Contemporary Fiction (Spring 1984).

 

 

Karen L. Carr

English Department
Colby College
klcarr@colby.edu

 

Since the seer is caught up in what he sees, it is still himself he sees: there is a fundamental narcissism of all vision. And thus, for the same reason, the vision he exercises, he also undergoes from the things, such that, as many painters have said, I feel myself looked at by the things, my activity is equally passivity–which is the second and more profound sense of the narcissism: not to see in the outside, as the others see it, the contour of a body one inhabits, but especially to be seen by the outside, to exist within it, to emigrate into it, to be seduced, captivated, alienated by the phantom so that the seer and the visible reciprocate one another and we no longer know which sees and which is seen.¹

 

I am caught, embedded in the footsteps that lead into this moment of time in which I am frozen. There, pushing itself up, out, around, in front of everything else, the large round belly that forces time into position. This is no moment of death; nor is it a moment of life. . . . Caught, transformed, transfixed. . . . A death mask? A memory? A moment in which I will always be living, always be dying. Breath never leaving dust on the glossy surface.

 

Ultrasound uses sound waves to create an image of the fetus on a screen which is viewed by the patient, the ultrasound technician and (later, separately) the doctor. Like Freud, inquiring into the deaf mind, the ultrasound can be seen as an attempt to investigate the deafness of the pregnant body by producing sight. Sight and sound are linked via the medium of the ultrasound machine itself as well as the doctor who must be on hand to interpret its imagery. Like the psychoanalyst, the doctor is the agential figure. The image, like the memory of the hysteric, may come from the body but once it is brought into being and made visual, it has traversed the line between a “raw” visual conglomeration and into a “real” baby. This transformation of fetus to baby via the image cannot happen without the doctor. Fuzzy gray images floating, fragmented on the screen become hands, feet, penis, mouth, eyes, heart as soon as the doctor interprets them.

 

The ultrasound technician is caught between patient and doctor in this configuration. S/he may point out bodily parts and confer gender on the fetus, as long as the fetus looks “healthy.” Often, the pregnant woman can diagnose a “problem” herself just based upon the amount of silence in the room. The technician, then, becomes the person with a secret. The “baby” is in effect hidden in and by the image until the doctor can step in to bring it forth and make it clear and whole. It is in the process of revealing that which the patient cannot see that the doctor becomes the first agent of the developing fetus’ subjectivity. Ultrasound, in its opening of the pregnant body, becomes a marker of reality. Once the doctor constructs the image on the screen, sign and referent are brought together. The pregnant body is no longer concealing a private mysterious event; rather, it is holding a “life” that we can check in on–visit–via our ability to see. In the ideological terrain of modern reproduction, this technology functions so as to change fetuses into babies, possible existence into “life” and private into public.

 

Certainly, the rise of “fetal rights” cannot be separated from the rise in fetal technologies which allow us access to the fetus via images or via the pregnant body itself in uterine pre-partum surgery. Medical technologies which allow sight of the fetus engender a reproductive world in which, much like Foucault’s notion of panopticism, “I am seen therefore I am.” Indeed, Rosalind Petchesky argues that, from the clinician’s standpoint, fetal imaging becomes “a kind of panoptics of the womb.”²

 

The reproductive (pregnant) body exists as spectacle–it is always a profoundly sighted body that doesn’t exist apart from being seen. There is the external sense of people looking, but with technologies such as ultrasound, there is also the internal sense that the fetus itself is, somehow, looking. Representations of the fetus by anti-choice groups focus on this notion of the fetus by accentuating its human qualities–the tiny hands and fingers, organs and sensory apparati–ears, eyes, mouth. When this technique works, it is a means of setting up internal surveillance for the woman who is pregnant. Not only is the state watching but so is the human-like fetus itself. The pregnant body then is circumscribed by a visual line that is both in and out, private and public.

 

The pregnant woman takes on the job of surveillance herself, by “humanizing” and making real the fetus inside, by internalizing the camera eye and pulling the conglomeration of cells that is fetus into the ultrasonically constructed “whole” baby–“not only ‘already a baby,’ but more–a ‘baby-man,’ an autonomous, atomized mini-space hero.”³ This view is supported by medical and social ideologies which encourage women to view their fetuses as children from the moment they know they are there. In an episode of “Murphy Brown,” for instance, Murphy talks about the “little voice inside her” which helped engender her decision to continue her pregnancy. Pregnancy manuals, pamphlets at doctors’ and midwives’ offices frequently refer to the fetus as “your baby,” especially when directing women to refrain from “unhealthy habits which might harm the baby.” An American Cancer Society poster, circulated in the early 80s, depicted a fetus with a cigarette in its mouth to “really show” the ill-effects of smoking during pregnancy. Like ultrasound, the image of the smoking fetus worked by humanizing the fetus, by giving it representation within its womb environment. Once the “secret” of the womb environment is exposed, that environment too must be socially constructed via narrative, much like Dora’s bodily secrets. Once societal forces have gained sight, they must also construct representations which keep the fetus in circulation, in service of the ideology of pregnancy which demands rights for a fetus. This self-surveillance and social surveillance is what enables the legal regulation of the pregnant body. It is as if the woman who takes drugs, smokes or drinks during pregnancy has failed at policing herself, at merging the lines of public and private sight on top of her body. She becomes the ultimate transgressor because she has failed in her task to give the fetus subjectivity–to bestow upon it an identity which, once there, needs to be protected and nurtured at all costs. In other words, the woman who fails to be her own cop fails because she refuses to conflate pregnant body with mother by participating in the social mandate that the fetus become subject well before birth.

 

In the realm of reproductive technologies, sight rather than language becomes the crucial determiner of subjectivity. The fetal “body” that has been constructed by medicine and culture is one that needs no words; indeed, as Peteshky makes clear, it only need have the “Silent Scream” of the movie which anti-choice groups have used so effectively.⁴ If subjectivity is a process that is recognized and mediated by legal discourse and ideology, then the fetus, found in the moving glops of a video screen, is subject. Lacan’s infamous mirror instead becomes a video display screen where looking at and looking out produce images through which subjectivity is granted. It hardly matters that the fetus, unlike the child in the mirror, has no recognition of its own shape, or its mother’s. What matters is that it has been found, caught by the zig-zagging sound waves, caught by the photograph that freezes its “babyhood,” its subjectivity for all the world to see. In her discussion of reproductive discourse, Valerie Hartouni quotes from a physician’s description of ultrasound:

 

Physician Michael R. Harrison puts the issue this way:

 

it was not until the last half of this century that the prying eye of the ultrasound (that is, ultrasound visualization) rendered the once opaque womb transparent, stripping the veil of mystery from the dark inner sanctum, and letting the light of scientific observation fall on the shy and secretive fetus. . . . The sonographic voyeur, spying on the unwary fetus finds him or her a surprisingly active little creature, and not at all the passive parasite we had imagined.”

 

No longer a “medical recluse” or a “parasite,” the fetus has been grasped as an object of scientific observation and medical manipulation, not to mention anthropomorphic imagination.”⁵

 

As I look at my fetus, floating at me from within the sound hollow cavern of my womb, I am, in a sense, re-sutured even as I am being fragmented. My uterus, on display, lit up like some video game is, paradoxically, the means to my fragmentation as well as my access to “wholeness.” It is this very fragmentation that the ultrasound machine attempts to re-absorb into an ideology of wholeness that includes sighting the fetus and granting it subjectivity even as it still resides in the body. Birth, as Kristeva talks about it in “Motherhood According to Bellini,” is no longer the only possible moment of dual subjectivity; rather, the pregnant woman becomes holder of two subjectivities, two gazes out at the moment that her fetus is sighted/sited.⁶ During my own ultrasound, as the fetus careened off the walls of my uterus, its hands over its ears (“Does it hurt the fetus?” I asked. “Oh no; they can’t hear any of this. It has no effect on them.”), it suddenly turned and faced the screen, peering out like some sort of amphibious alien, caught in a screen that can only contain. It was an unsettling moment–one in which my fetus became too real. In looking out at the screen–a random and coincidental movement–the fetus had returned my gaze, somehow. And that changed everything. It is the photograph moving–turning real, taking on eyes and mouth, pressing its face up against the screen like a child pushing/disfiguring his face against a window and leaving fog. Barthes writes, “if the photograph then becomes horrible, it is because it certifies, so to speak, that the corpse is alive as corpse: it is the living image of a dead thing. For the photograph’s immobility is somehow the result of a perverse confusion between two concepts: the Real and the Live.”⁷

 

At the moment that I imagine a gaze for the fetus in side me, I am granting it life in death. The fetus remains as a death, as a mystery, a question until it prods one of the senses. A heartbeat, a kick or a sighting (which can be done long before a heartbeat can be heard or a kick felt) bring it into possibility–into the world of the Live. By looking out from the screen, looking back out, the fetus is both Real and Live; in looking out at me, it becomes real precisely because it is alive–precisely because it is moving through me like some wind up toy in a small box.

 

Fetus. Baby. Baby. Fetus. These terms have become polarized as all positions within the “debate” about the right to choose abortion have relied upon the most far-reaching extremes of opposition in advancing their arguments. The “pro-life” position relies upon the assertion of life at any and all moments while the “pro-choice” position walks right into the argumentative terrain mapped by the anti-choice crusaders by opposing a construction of life with a construction of tissue, of fetus. The pregnant woman is caught in this discursive net, floating somewhere between the terms of scientific technicality and procreative astonishment. To be pregnant and construct a “baby” out of the mass of cells rapidly splintering inside is to move precariously close to a political position in which “life” becomes the operant term for the thing, the stuff of the body’s hidden insides. For a feminist committed to intervention, it is a retracing of the line between public and private as the fantasies of kicking, twirling, suckling babies must be kept “in,” lest they fall into the hands and mouths of the “wrong side,” in this case, the anti-choice marauders. Thus, the personal must be re-inscribed away from the political as the deployment of the transformation of fetus to baby can become quite problematic. Similarly, the pregnant woman who doesn’t want to be pregnant must counter the narrative seduction of life, baby, gurgling, etc. and reconceive “baby” as “fetus.” Pro-choice constructions of pregnancy and abortion make this quite difficult however, by assuming that the choice of abortion must, necessarily, be “difficult,” “painful,” etc. Abortion stories are filled with descriptions of just this sort of abortion and only work to reinforce the boundary between women who have abortions for the “right” reasons and with the proper amount of guilt and suffering and women who “take it lightly,” “do it as a form of birth control,” or have frequent abortions. This moralistic position only reinforces the arguments of those who violently oppose women’s ability to act and move with any agency and autonomy. The construction of “right” and “wrong,” good and bad abortions is similar in effect to early twentieth century eugenecists’ constructions of fit and unfit mothers, and is, at its core, an argument that is still based on a conceptualization of the fetus as life, not tissue and cells. The expectation of, indeed, the demand for suffering and levity, trauma and pain belies any attempt to construct the stuff of pregnancy as cellular matter. If this were the case, then the arguments about abortion by those committed to its continued availability would be radically different, based not on an ethic of “choice,” a false either/or pluralism which only further obscures the issue, and is the continual re-circulation of similar logic, but rather on a construction of pregnancy which works its way out, which accounts for the vast, overwhelming and contradictory constructions of pregnancy that circulate around and on top of anyone who finds herself in that position. Rather than seeing everything as either/or, and expecting women to grieve…or not, to find it hard…or not, it’s important to keep the complexity hanging, to juggle the very multiple and deeply contentious images that construct pregnant subjectivities. The notion of choice is an overly reductive one, one that circulates in such a way that it brings to mind choices like lemonade vs. ice tea, french fries vs. baked potato and quickly reduces anything else in its signifying sphere–abortion, sexuality, etc.–to the same. As so many people arguing against the notion of sexual “choice” show, the concept remains locked in its binaristic prison where all choices are available from a menu of two items. Sexuality? choice or biology. Who would choose such a life? Why aren’t there more? Abortion? choice (i.e., death) or “life.” But the choice is never an easy one. No one is saying that it’s easy, only that the choice be hers.

 

Appeals to women to have ultrasound tend to construct ultrasound as a harmless diagnostic tool which can help the “mother” personalize the fetus, to make it more “real,” setting it up as a sort of pre-birth bonding tool while at the same time convincing women of its necessity to insure a healthy pregnancy. It’s meant to put women’s minds “at ease” in appeals, again to the unknown terrors of pregnancy–ill health, disabilities, death. As Rosalind Petchesky and Valerie Hartouni have both pointed out, ultrasound also functions as an ideological tool in that its personalizing of the fetus often sways women who might otherwise have wanted abortions.

 

Hartouni describes the “study” (based, as she points out, “on only two, entirely unrelated interviews”) of ultrasound that led to the making of The Silent Scream:

 

Fletcher and Evans noted that ultrasound imaging of the “fetal form” tended to foster among pregnant women a sense of recognition and identification of the fetus as their own, as something belonging to and dependent upon them alone. Constituting the stuff of maternal bonding, “the fundamental element in the later parent-child bond,” such recognition, Fletcher and Evans claimed, was more likely to lead women “to resolve ‘ambivalent’ pregnancies in favor of the fetus.”⁸

 

The rhetoric of ultrasonography clearly bears them out; ultrasonographers use language of personhood when describing the floating fetus, not language of it-hood. Fetuses are often referred to as he/she (indeed, conferred on the screen as he/she), pregnant women are told to notice how cute he/she is, how he/she is sleeping, looking, sucking her/his thumb, etc. The language is active, the fetus made alive and real by the sound screen. The imaging of ultrasound can also work beyond the resolution of “ambivalent” feelings about a particular, specific pregnancy. As a recent article in the Providence Journal, makes clear, the experience of ultrasound can consolidate ambivalent feelings about abortion in general. After finally “seeing” a “live” “daughter” (with “arms, legs, face, beating heart, life”) on the ultrasound screen after two successive miscarriages, the author determines that:

 

I now find the slogan “my body, my choice” amazingly arrogant. If there is one lesson I have learned through this year, it is that I do not create life. Life passes through me. . . . I do not create life, I house it. I did nothing different with any of my four children, but two lived within my womb and two died there. Life-giving is beyond my power, beyond my body, beyond my choice.⁹

 

Rosalind Petchesky discusses the need to see ultrasound and other reproductive technologies as more than simply “an omnivorous male plot to take over their [women’s] reproductive capacities,” because this view assumes a “transhistorical need,” while also denying any possibility of women being “agents of their own reproductive destinies.”¹⁰ This is a crucial point, one that is too quickly and easily overlooked in the discourse on/of reproductive technologies. While ultrasound can be looked at as simply another aid to feminine fragmentation, the fragmentation itself is too often dismissed as automatically problematic. Here it is useful to consider Haraway as she takes a view of fragmentation which encompasses the various technological apparatuses that have become part of the web of interpellative factors. Haraway writes:

 

A cyborg world might be about lived social and bodily realities in which people are not afraid of their joint kinship with animals and machines, not afraid of permanently partial identities and contradictory standpoints. The political struggle is to see from both perspectives at once because each reveals both dominations and possibilities unimaginable from the other vantage point.¹¹

 

To dismiss ultrasound, then, as a re-fragmentation of the female body is to insist that fragmentation is something that we should fight against. That we have abandoned the humanist model of “the individual”, nicely rounded and whole, but left in place the desire for a physicality that is somehow free of the variety of cultural signposts that meet at the body, is a mistake. We need to be able to affirm the very fragmentation which we would fight, to welcome the screaming eyes of the fetus glaring/gazing back. The very subjectivity that ultrasound constructs for the fetus in the service of anti-choice, pro-nuclear heterosexual family ideology also operates in such a way that the pregnant woman herself is able to attempt to make sense of a process (pregnancy) which is always already a profoundly fragmenting, disjunct enactment.

 

(IMAGE)

 

Both of my children were dressed in their names the day we saw them on the ultrasound screen. Like clothing on a naked body, their names, gendered and “personal,” reached over and marked the quickly moving forms that swam across the screen. The siting of my sons, in the names we had picked for them, changed the way I perceived myself as a pregnant woman. No longer floating polymorphous possibilities–BOYS stared out at me from behind a screen which had suddenly granted them gender. No matter how much I thought that I had thought and theorized my way out of gender, when my boys were called into shape by the sight and language of the ultrasound technician, they existed, from that moment on, both separate and apart from me. Boys in my body. My body in boys. The fragmentation was no more complete or incomplete than it had been before I was allowed the sight of my two male fetuses; it was only more real.

 

(IMAGE)

 

In the infamous pregnant nude and glamour photographs of Demi Moore in Vanity Fair, a highly erotic, decorated pregnant body stares at the viewer.¹² Moore is neither apologetic nor shy, reluctant or removed from her sensuality; indeed the photographs are informed by the genre of glamour movie star photos. The pictures of Moore provoked enough controversy for the magazine to wrap that particular issue before it went out to stores and newsstands.

 

The attempts, on the part of the magazine, to keep the pregnant body (especially the naked pregnant body) out of view is part of a cultural history in which the pregnant female body is a sight of both idolization and embarrassment. The pregnant body is perhaps the most visible marker of heterosexual sexuality–the X was here grade school desk graffiti transferred to the body of women. At the same time that the pregnant body can exist so as to re-establish, or disrupt the ideology of the heterosexual nuclear family, it is also meant to exist in a de-sexualized zone, as though all women were the Virgin Mary of Christianity. On the one hand, pregnant bodies are patted and stroked by random strangers on buses, on streets, in classrooms, yet on the other hand, their sexuality is a contained one–sexuality with a reason. For the pregnant woman to stand as a sexualized body even while she’s pregnant (presumably, the reason to be sexual/have sex is already inside her, so why would she want more?) is to transgress the boundary not only of sexuality and desire, but also of inside and outside. Sexuality occurs even as the fetus is in the body; the sexuality continues, around, on top of, next to the fetus. The pregnant woman who is represented as erotic is crossing the boundaries, even as they exist inside her.

 

There is a looking at that photographs of Demi Moore engender. She is pregnant woman as spectacle without being specimen. She is a pregnant body that exists firmly outside of medical representation; her luxurious green gown, her diamonds, her sophisticated, cutting edge haircut all push her further away from the image of pregnant woman as medical subject who needs to be helped, medicated or somehow pathologized. Indeed, these are the very features of pregnant representation which allow it in the first place. Moore’s huge diamond wedding ring glares off her finger and the fashion that her pregnant body exudes and performs is that of completely “right” pregnancy: her body is not excessive beyond its pregnant status, and her status within society is firmly entrenched in and reiterated by the poses she strikes. Moore, then, can resist pathologization because she has already been granted that power by her acquiescences to other normalized expectations: heterosexuality, marriage, wealth, status and beauty. Still, within the rather tight frame of acquiescences which the particularity of Moore’s body reasserts, there is a space being made for an alternate representation of the pregnant body. The photographs of Moore work against pathologization by instead constructing Moore in the discourse of eroticization which works directly against the aims of medical constructions of pregnancy which seek to de-eroticize the pregnant woman’s body by various means, from dictates that women not eat too much when they’re pregnant so they don’t “gain too much weight” (wouldn’t want to mix excesses) to lack of adequate information about various sexual practices/positions as pregnancy progresses. Pregnant women are supposed to “glow” with the flush and excitement of impending motherhood and the subsumation of self into other; clearly, against this ideology, the glow of orgasm, of sexuality in progress, poses enormous resistance which leads, as in the case of Vanity Fair, to a reduction of sight–ironically, a move that only transferred the locus of sight from public to private.

 

Sighting, then, always depends upon who is being looked at. In the case of ultrasound technology, the thing being sighted is the fetus–the raison d’être for the entire field of obstetrics, and, it is presumed, for the woman lying on the table. In a photograph of Demi Moore, pregnant, it is not her baby we see; we don’t have access to the inside; all we see is the swollen belly poking out–the maternal body that is entirely absent from the ultrasound picture. The ultrasound picture, as Petchesky has pointed out, becomes part of the family record, part of the evidential world of the family photo album; it exists as an “origin” for the fetus floating in its bit of outer space.¹³ As Rosalind Kraus observes: “The photographic record . . . is an agent in the collective fantasy of family cohesion, and in that sense the camera is a projective tool, part of the theater that the family constructs to convince itself that it is together and whole.”¹⁴ In my own photo albums, the ultrasound photos start my sons’ pictorial record; photographs of me pregnant exist in another album entirely, one that ostensibly traces “me.”

 

Within the representational space that ultrasound constructs, women are, for a moment, suspended from their bodies–caught in the impossible “elsewhere” between self and other, organism and machine. The machine itself becomes the very instrument of recognition, through the ability of the woman to “site” her own body, and, like the hysteric, enact it. The woman’s body becomes the very means to link public and private, inside and outside via its performative fragmentation. For it is the machine itself–standing in the room, hooked to the belly of the woman by its long thick tangled cords–that represents, finally, the impossible fusion of those boundaries even as it tries to enact them. Thus, she is left fragmented by the very blurring of boundaries which ultrasound enables. The female body traversed by ultrasound, rummaged through via cesarean sections, is one through which the location of boundaries has been effected. It is, then, a sited body–one that can no longer exist merely as the “natural” pregnant body which so inexplicably holds and contains contradictions. The ultrasound screen shows us that containment is no longer possible–that private and public, inside and outside have all merged at the site of the fragmented pregnant body. There are no longer any clear lines of corporeal representation which we can depend upon; nothing makes this more clear than the process of ultrasound in which the pregnant body is left suspended somewhere between memory and its performance, presence and lack, transgression and suture.

 

I lay on the cool slab of padded stretcher watching as she moves the instrument across me. She tilts the screen towards me, but not enough so that I can really see. What can I see anyway? Is there anyway to see in those blurs of shadows and light bouncing across the screen without her there? She becomes the eyes that this technology takes from me. Yet I am the one who is asked to fashion the gaze that she produces–to turn and twist and interpret until I have called the fetus in from its shadows, from its blurry frozen lines and taken it, like the picture book snapshot I hold in my hand, and made it real. Yet I have no sight here. I am blind as my seeing sees nothing but light moving and pulsing. Skull/baby, skullbaby, skull…baby. She moves the instrument and as she pushes buttons on the screen the fetus turns from baby to skull, from human to skeletal monster–all sunken sockets and splintered silence. Each time the face of the baby retreats, I long for its return as I so much want to participate in this drama of creation. Here, in the ultrasound room, is where the “life” is created. Here is where I know there is no turning back. Here is where the howling ghostly possibility becomes real. Here is where the sewing begins, and the aural images of feet, head, heart, spine, bone are all taken and pieced together and handed back to me like the fuzzy snapshots I clutch so carefully. Here is where the notion of wholeness becomes reified through a collection of the pieces of the phantom fetal body. No longer just part of the mother, a dreamlike possibility hovering somewhere in still fluids. The very wholeness of the maternal/fetal body is made possible, if not complete, by this ultrasonically induced act of interpellation. Pieces identified. Fragments made whole until a body has been made within a body which is then expected to be nothing more or less than self-sacrificing vessel for the remaining months of occupation. Mother and child are called forth there in the darkened screen blazing room, made whole by the relief of separation healed, fragmentation sited, sighted and repaired.

 

(IMAGE)

 

Skull. Baby. Skull. Baby. Where are we left then? I carry both fetus and baby inside me. I carry a political fetus, insofar as I challenge anyone refusing or restricting me based upon my increasingly public body. People stare at my abdomen before they meet my eyes. They have expectations, demands, desires for that abdomen as it juts out beyond the usual circumference of private space. Oh, you’re not due until then? Hmm…maybe it’s twins. You’re not drinking are you? Smoking? Eating junk food? Lifting, straining, pulling, sniffing, breathing or otherwise exposing the baby…. So my public baby is a fetus, one that must remain my body, one that must enlarge the circumference of the spaces of the private rather than those of the public. But my private fetus is a baby. Late at night when it starts its musical tumbling through the air of me, it is a baby in me. Late in pregnancy when I am tilted large, my breath overtaking me with each small step, my bladder lost in the organ crush inside me, my ligaments stretching in all directions each time I move, it is only the baby in me, not the fetus, that keeps me distanced from my body in a necessary recognition of a temporary state. Not me. Later still, pushing and screaming with sweat, pains erasing all consciousness of time, space and motion, it is only the thought of a baby–slippery and soft, fingers curled in tiny sharp-nailed fists–that even begins to justify this pain. My public fetus remains a secret to my private baby just as my private baby remains a secret to my public identification as a pro-choice feminist. Fragments. Splintery pieces which will never meet. There is no outside. Only complicated and complicitous circulations–motions, movements.

 

A postmodern positics (politics and positionality) of pregnancy recognizes and retains that complicated, twisted and contradictory experiences of pregnant subjectivity without expecting pregnant women to fall into either of the waiting binaries of sad silence or eerie effusiveness. Narrative air tunnels, blowing and pulling wait on either side of the pregnant woman as she must filter her experience into one wholesale ideological adoption or another. Rather than watch, if not assist, in the propulsion of women into one side or another, in the easy sewing up of experience into neat and tidy bundles, we need to return to the fragmented subject and not expect that, when it comes to things like pregnancy, a de-centered, atomized subjectivity will suddenly be rendered whole. This expectation is itself a retreat to a body-based subjectivity rather than an embodied one, as it takes the fact of bodily transformation (pregnancy) and reads it as constitutive of the resulting re-sutured subjectivity. Pregnancy becomes the thing which must provoke action to one side or another rather than a site of conflictedness itself. The pregnant subject is called to beat a hasty retreat from the field of fluid, partial and provisional identity and race to a position from which her body will not define her, yet the very necessity of the race is engendered by the change of her somatic status.

 

We are left then, with images–images floating, bending, bursting–that themselves constitute pregnant bodies, pregnant subjectivities. Fragmented, dispersed, disjunct–they reach in all directions simultaneously, and threaten to rip apart ideologies like jagged lines of lightning severing the sky.

 

Notes

 

1. Maurice Merleau-Ponty, The Visible and the Invisible (Evanston: Northwestern UP, 1968), 139.

 

2. Rosalind Pollack Petchesky, “Foetal Images: the Power of Visual Culture in the Politics of Reproduction,” Reproductive Technologies: Gender, Motherhood and Medicine, Michele Stanworth, ed. (Minneapolis: U of Minnesota Press, 1987), 69.

 

3.Petchesky, 64.

 

4.Petchesky, 64.

 

5.Valerie Hartouni, “Containing Women: Reproductive Discourse in the 1980s,” Technoculture, Constance Penley and Andrew Ross, eds. (Minneapolis: U of Minnesota Press, 1991), 38.

 

6.Julia Kristeva, “Motherhood According to Bellini,” Desire in Language: A Semiotic Approach to Art and Literature, Leon Roudiez, ed. (New York, Columbia UP, 1980). While Kristeva’s essay is an intersting look at the fragmentation that occurs in and out of the maternal body, it ultimately reinforces the romanticized view of the semiotic, in which the privileged route of access is through a pregnant body, thus reinforcing naturalistic and restrictive ideas about women and pregnancy.

 

7.Roland Barthes, Camera Lucida, trans. Richard Howard (New York: Hill and Wang, 1981), 79.

 

8.Hartouni, 37.

 

9.Lori Stanley Roeleveld, “My Turn” (weekly column), Providence Journal, Sun., June 27 1993: E-3.

 

10.Petchesky, 72.

 

11.Donna Haraway, “A Manifesto for Cyborgs,” Feminism/Postmodernism, Linda Nicholson and Nancy Fraser, eds. (New York: Routledge, 1990), 196.

 

12.Vanity Fair, August 1991: Cover, 96-101, 142-150; August 1992: Cover, 112-119, 188-192.

 

13.Petchesky, 70.

 

14.Rosalind Kraus, “A Note on Photography and the Simulacral” The Critical Image Carol Squiers, ed. (Seattle: Bay Press, 1990), 19.

 

Dion Dennis

Department of Criminal Justice, History, and Political Science
Texas A&M International University
diond@igc.apc.org

 

I. Tales of Lost Glory

 

In “American Tune,” Paul Simon gave an early if somewhat hazy voice to what is now a prolific and impassioned motif in premillennial American economic and political life. For many, “what’s gone wrong” is the sum total effect of global structural changes upon the once mighty U.S. economy. It is the mass exodus to the Third World of once lucrative manufacturing and management jobs from the U.S. and the subsequent replacement of the promise of stable and secure careers with “McJobs” (Coupland 5). Concurrently, millions of middle-management positions have disappeared below the incessant waves of corporate “downsizing.” What’s gone wrong, writes political pundit Kevin Phillips, is that:

 

People were starting to sense that the so-called middle-class squeeze was really much more: a sign of America’s declining [economic] position . . . [and] a threat to their own futures and their children’s. (Boiling Point 163)

 

And a fair number of those domestic jobs that were neither expunged nor exported across political boundaries in the ’80s and ’90s have reemerged at the American socio-economic margins–that is, at the urban core–in Hong-Kong-like or Sao Paulosque scenes, as described by Roger Rouse:

 

In a hidden sweatshop in downtown Los Angeles, Asian and Latino migrants produce auto parts for a factory in Detroit. As the parts leave the production line, they are stamped “Made in Brazil.” (Mexican Migration 8)

 

Auto parts are not the only simulated Brazilian import. As Barlett and Steele note, income stratification patterns in the U.S. between 1959-1989 show a rapid acceleration of the gap between rich and poor. This gap occurs at the expense of a rapidly shrin king and disproportionately taxed middle-class. That is, much of the middle class is economically downwardly mobile (America: What Went Wrong?). Coupland dubs this mass process Brazilification:

 

Brazilification: The widening gulf between the rich and poor and the accompanying disappearance of the middle classes. (Generation X ix)

 

All of this is a long way from the American techno-utopian workers paradise portrayed in the famed 16mm industrial cartoon, King Joe (1949). “King Joe” was an animated factory worker whose work and leisure activities were meant to be an ideol ogical sign. They depict the average (white-male, blue collar) American “Joe” as the most productive and best materially compensated worker in world history. He was an early icon of the American Empire that emerged in the post-WWII period. According to Walter Russell Mead:

 

The basis of the American Empire after 1945 was economic. The military might that seems so awesome is the result of wealth. America rose to power because the rest of the world was exhausted. As the world recovered from the war, it was inevitable that America’s relative power would weaken. (Mortal Splendor 54)

 

Since 1973, the material equivalents of King Joe and his realm have all but vanished. His kingdom now serves as social history and the ground for parody, nostalgia and simulation. As Europe and East Asia recovered from the effects of global and/or civil wars, new or resurrected industries, many nurtured by U.S. Cold War deterrence and containment strategies, provided stiff competition in a swiftly globalizing marketplace. As rival corporations concentrated their resources in transnational mergers and a cquisitions, the feasibility of setting in motion mobile production, capital and information strategies at sites across the globe seemed as enticing as it was necessary. In the Third World, U.S., European and Asian transnational corporations (TNCs) devel oped an economic environment characterized by low wages and low corporate tax rates. Unions were absent or ineffective and corrupt. Child labor could be easily and inexpensively procured. Environmental and/or safety regulations were non-existent or of ten easily circumvented. These competitive advantages accelerated the exodus of rust-belt manufacturing jobs. And with the mobility that the digitalization of business activity provides, the New World Order can be construed as a period of shifting flows of globalized capital and migrant bodies along information highways of magnetic oxide.

 

As Main Street yielded to the Mall and Woolworth’s succumbed to Walmart, the factories that typified the heavy industry of the Northeast were shuttered. Decrepit brick automobile plants and rusting steel mills, surrounded by sagging cyclone fences and ba rbed wire, littered deserted urban tableaus as if they were the modernist ruins of King Joe. Two or three generations of Eastern European immigrants may have been steel workers or auto assemblers. But in the new international labor market, Gary, Indiana became a mausoleum for the Protestant ethic. And Flint, Michigan achieved cinematic celebrity through the sad but tough eyes of Fred Roth, a county sheriff’s eviction agent (Roger and Me).

 

In the early post-WWII period, the idea and practice of social mobility had been a simple thing. Social and economic mobility was marked by a generational and spatial event such as a move into a “better” community. Mobility meant a unidirectional move f rom the crowded tenements of the inner city outward in concentric rings to emerging bungalow suburbs. (Often, this took the form of overt and collective acts of racism known as “white flight.”) Alternatively, this notion of mobility also refers to the de population of small family farms and rural towns, as youthful and not-so-youthful labor-seeking masses, displaced by the industrial efficiencies of agribusiness, emptied into the world’s service and industrial megacenters. Migration across space was tied to aspirations of upward economic mobility or the push for survival. As Rouse points out, each of several variants of the spatial concept of migration implies the idea of movement between two well-defined communities. The migrant’s dominant allegiance is assumed, in the long run, to belong to one of these distinct communities only (Mexican Migration 10-13).

 

But this assumption, Rouse claims, is inadequate to describe current formations of social reproduction. It fails to account for the complex impacts of major transglobal circuits on the way we produce, reproduce, transmit and circulate goods, services, im ages and information, relations of power, economic benefits, bodies and social roles. We now traverse ambiguous and conflicted sites shaped by vectors of converging and diverging economies. We are hailed by intersecting and paradoxical constructions of meaning and identities. And, in a world that is simultaneously more totalizing and chaotic (the future seems unpredictable but Coca-Cola and Disney motifs are everywhere), alienation mixes with anxiety, resentment resonates with resignation and hope bond s with nostalgia on a mostly downward socio-economic escalator. It may well be, as Christopher Lasch (The Minimal Self) and R.J. Barnet and John Cavanaugh (Global Dreams) have suggested, that entire populations are now deemed ec onomically expendable. To understand how these economic marginality effects have occurred is to grapple with complexity. This marginality is a product of an intricate and mobile hardware mix of robotics, computerization, and automation of modes of produ ction and control. It has been nurtured by the extensive use of subcontractors, suppliers and temporary workers (many of the latter comprise neo-cottage industries of ersatz “independent contractors”). Spurred by the high debt levels of the leveraged bu yout (LBO) frenzy of the mid and late 1980s, the impetus to simultaneously raise productivity, while cutting personnel and production costs, allowed for internal structural reconfiguration of businesses that maximized output per employee over the short te rm while minimizing the total number of employees. One result has been an incessant wave of layoffs across industrial and information-based corporations. Another outcome is that the application of microchip-based technologies has already transformed fie lds of power on the global economic and political stages. It has reshaped the direction and purpose of higher education. It has essentially altered the fields of work, imagination, self-expression and play in the culture industries. To understand somet hing of its genealogy is to recognize the postmodern reconfiguration of fields of work, culture and knowledge.

 

II. Fear of Losing: Security-Seeking Subjects Constituted at the Altar of Risk

 

Among the objects of the law, security is the only one which embraces the future; subsistence, abundance, equality, may be regarded for a moment only; but security implies extension in point of time with respect to all the benefits to which it is applied. Security is therefore the principal object. (Jeremy Bentham, cited in Gordon 19)

 

One Arizona State University professor, working recently with upper-division undergraduates in a course on the Politics of Social Movements, asked his students to pen their inscriptions of danger (with the idea that social movements are, in some sense, a response to perceived dangers and, by extension, shape security concerns). The excerpts below illustrate Bentham’s point:

 

(Student A): I fear that I may become a nameless cog in a corporate machine . . . that I will become a wealth creating device used by some at the expense of others . . . that I will be judged only on my ability to feed the wealthy and powerful . . . because there will be no other way to maintain a reasonable standard of living . . .

 

(Student B): The principal danger . . . is the uncertainty of my future. In a society which is dominated by change one is never able to predict or control their future with reliability. Going through proper channels and procedures no longer guarantees [anything]. . . . Will I join the quickly growing fraternity of unemployed university graduates?

 

(Student C): The major danger is the pressure to quickly graduate while there is a shortage of jobs. Loan payments start stacking, the pressure is on to land a good paying job and your parents are staring at you as if you accomplished nothing but managed to spend half their life savings. “Go to college,” “invest some time in your future through education.” What happened to the old cliché about a college degree assuring happiness and prosperity?

 

(Student D): [I fear] the immense uncertainty of facing the growing, intense competition for fewer and fewer jobs . . .

 

(Student E): I’m worried that when I finally have my degree the world will have progressed to the point where you have to have a degree to be a “ditch digger.”

 

(Student F): My danger lies in the fear of failure due to circumstances beyond my control. I have always been responsible . . . . However, when outside forces impose upon my life, I find it difficult and frustrating. (Ashley)

 

These are tangible concerns, about the extension of personal security, into the future that are largely rooted in structural changes in the U.S. economy. Although U.S. economic productivity has increased seventy-five percent since 1970, this gain was real ized with a five percent net reduction in the labor force (“The End of Jobs” 48). This growth in output has been the combined result of belated responses, such as wage and work-rule concessions on the part of unions in response to fierce global competiti on; organizational restructuring in the wake of LBOs; the entrance of Japanese firms and heteroglot capital into the U.S. real estate, financial and labor markets and the productive application of electronic and digital technologies to previously labor-in tensive tasks. And there are no signs that the inverse relationship between material productivity and employment levels will soon abate. Not surprisingly, the expectation of downward socioeconomic mobility is now widely perceived as the norm.

 

Concurrently, electronic and digital technologies have despatialized work sites while the functional divisions between a domestic residence (home) and work dwindle. All the while, U.S. workers confront vigorous transnational competition against less expe nsive skilled intellectual labor and semi-skilled product labor. Similarly, the diffusion of media ensembles and McDonaldization of the planet create struggles for the survival of pre-electronic cultures. In all these scenes, complex and visceral senses of loss, anger, disaffection, alienation and economic marginality present new problems for older and newer regimes of Security. One key alteration in the objects of Security is the shifting of risk-management and security concerns away from notions of “generalized risk” spread throughout a population toward those that reinscribe the Self as primary bearer of an individualized risk. This is the (philosophically) neo-liberal notion of Self as a unique site of enterprise (espoused by both Rush Limbaugh a nd Bill Clinton):

 

Work for the worker means the use of resources of skills, aptitude and competence which comprise the worker’s human capital, to obtain earnings [that are] the revenue on that capital. Human capital is composed of an innate component of bodily and genetic equipment and an acquired component of aptitudes produced as a result of investment in the provision of appropriate environmental stimuli such as education. Economically, an aptitude is defined as a quasi-machine for the production of a value . . . akin to a consumer durable which has the peculiarity of being inseparable from its owner. The individual is in a novel sense not just an enterprise but the entrepreneur of himself. (Gordon 44)

 

The Self becomes the primary site for continuous self-surveillance and self-construction. The notion of the Self as human capital is part of the project that globally reinscribes social reality in terms of market logics (and away from notions of race, et hnicity and group or place-based definitions, except as a demographic segment to be worked upon by the seductions of consumption). As a bicapitalized “good,” the Self circulates as a mobile commodity. Deeming the Self as the site of self-enterprise also suggests that one is constantly absorbed in self-reconstruction, self-maintenance and self-preservation (of Self as a capital investment). It is the conceptual brace for the application of regimes of oversight such as Total[izing] Quality Management (o r CQI–Continuous Quality Improvement) on self-presentations, where standardization of self-presentation is the object and goal of TQM in service organizations. It informs Bill Clinton’s calls for “permanent retraining.” It is the key assumption in the shifting paradigms of risk that hail subjects to take “responsibility for preventive care.” It resonates with Peter Drucker’s recent pronouncements on the current attributes of the corporation.

 

For Drucker, corporations are now “temporary institutions.” Vigorous organizations are now inherently destabilizing (and this is a desirable state of affairs). As a Harvard Business Review abstract icily puts it:

 

The organization as well as the knowledgeable individual must acquire knowledge every several years or become obsolete. (New Society)

 

As noted elsewhere, there is an affinity between these world views, contemporary sociobiological theories and older forms of Social Darwinism (License and Commodification). Some proponents, such as Michael Rothschild, assert that hyperindust rial capitalism, with its emphasis on an information economy, is an isomorphic expression of our “natural” genetic makeup. That is, for Rothschild, capitalism is not merely a human construct but the essential expression of life itself (Bionomics xi-xii). For those on an unstable or downwardly mobile economic vector, this is a harsh judgment.

 

It is these shifts in economic, perceptual and demographic fields that have Generation Xers so worried. Is it possible, then, in the context of a hyperglobalizing economic and information infrastructure; a despatialized and derealized physical and cultur al environment; an ascending “fin de millennium” consciousness and among a demographic bulge of “Grumpies” (grown-up mature professionals) and aging baby-boomers facing economic decline and intimations of mortality, that a mythology of a “Golden Age” has emerged? For Blonsky

 

American mythology is now in transition from that of being a sense of a fresh beginning to that of looking back at a golden age. Once we lived in a shining city in a time of perfection. This is why, taking a trivial example, our ‘business books’ so emphasize quality, performance, all the other sorry signifiers. Roman Jakobson wrote that ‘a mask is not primarily what it represents but what it transforms, that is what it chooses either to represent or omit . . . or conceal.’ We always have to ask how a myth is able to deny what it is affirming while simultaneously remaining affirmative. Let there be quality, excellence, all the positivities, say the business books, meaning: there was [once] strength, there [once] was vigor, there [once] was coherence. (American Mythologies 500-501)

 

And for Barbara Stern, a marketing professor at Rutgers, this is but one expression of historical nostalgia:

 

Historical nostalgia expresses the desire to retreat from contemporary life by returning to a time in the past viewed as superior to the present. No matter whether the long-gone era is represented as richer and more complex or simpler and less corrupted, it is positioned as an escape from the here and now. (Historical and personal nostalgia 14)

 

That is, historical nostalgia is an idiom of resistance, perhaps as escape, although it is implicated in more complex and active political fields than mere escapism. Bill Clinton has groused about such resistances (as a political problem) in two October 1993 speeches. Not so coincidentally, the subject of those speeches were claims about the changing shape of security concerns:

 

We are living in a time of profound change. No one fully see[s] the shape of the change or imagine[s] with great precision the end of it. But we know a lot about what works and what doesn’t. And we know that if we do not embrace this change and make it our friend . . . it will become our enemy. And yet all around I see people resisting change, turning inward and away from change. And I ask myself why.

 

When I listen . . . I hear a longing for yesterday. But I tell you my friends . . . yesterday is yesterday. If we try to recapture it, we will only lose tomorrow. (Remarks at UNC)

 

But Clinton is not just contesting a mere politics of memory. If it were so, marketing his programs would be a much easier job. But what Clinton faces is a kind of hyper-real pastische. For example, Stephanie Coontz, in her book on 20th Century U.S. fa milies, The Way We Never Were: American Families and the Nostalgia Trap, describes the arrangement of those imagistic television fragments that shape her students’ perceptions of “the traditional family”:

 

[Stereotypical] visions exert a powerful pull and with good reason, given the fragility of many modern communities. The problem is not only that these visions bear a suspicious resemblance to reruns of old television series, but that the scripts of different shows have been mixed up: June Cleaver suddenly has a Grandpa Walton dispensing advice in her kitchen; Donna Stone, vacuuming the living room in her inevitable pearls and high heels, is no longer married to a busy modern pediatrician but to a small town sheriff who, like Andy Taylor of “The Andy Griffith Show,” solves community problems though informal, old-fashioned common sense. (8-9)

 

These recombinant video scripts occupy a significant part of the global cultural imagination. As such, they are active in fields of cultural, political and economic discourse and desire. The simulated world of an endless “Nick at Night” or TBS presents- –The Dick Van Dyke Show or The Brady Bunch–provide the building blocks of an active social imaginaire. As Appadurai suggests:

 

The past is now not a land to return to in a simple politics of memory [but] is a synchronic warehouse of cultural scenarios, a kind of temporal central casting, to which recourse can be had as appropriate . . . .

 

The crucial point is that the U.S. is but only one node of a complex transnational construction of imaginary landscapes . . . . The imagination has become an organized field of social practices, a form of work and a form of negotiation between sites of agency and globally defined fields of possibility. (“Disjuncture” 273)

 

The imagination, as a contestable social practice, works in complex, highly active and disjunctive spheres of cultural and political signs. These signs are consumed, altered, recirculated and their meaning is constantly renegotiated. These are fields of signification through which aspects of de facto social contracts are negotiated and renegotiated. Modifying Appadurai’s taxonomy somewhat, I call these signifying fields iconospheres. And it is in our peculiar time and space of global dreams, tr ansnational corporatist practices and technological redisciplining that the promise of a reemergent Pax Americana is extended to anxious citizen-consumers in a post-sovereign world. And these promises are constructed and circulated with those iconosphere s that form the agitated nexus for the politics of signification, of which the sign of Saturn, as a promise of plentitude and security, is a prominent example.

 

III. Signifying Practices, Sovereignty and the Search for Security: The Sign of Saturn

 

For most, the globalization of the U.S. economy has generated persistent and troubling socio-economic problems. One famous problem-effect has been a destabilization of durable and legitimating American myths. For example, the decline of the American Dre am (which has been declared vanished or dead in some quarters and dismantled, diminished or reduced “to a nap” in others) has become an incessant and conspicuous motif in political discourse. Electronic and print media recite narratives of recoveries and reversals. Well-heeled think-tanks formulate ideological etiologies of character, consequences and countermeasures. Policy recommendations are then routinely dispensed on the shape of education, the family, job training or enterprise zones. For TNCs a nd their governmental allies, the task has been to recover the iconography of the American Dream as a positivity in a time of dislocation and disaccumulation. More specifically, iconocrats at TNCs and corporatist-shaped administrations cultivate a claim that transborder information and production practices do not represent the death of the American Dream. In the amended account, the American Dream is resurrected, phoenix-like, in the promised embodiment of a postindustrial, information-driven, “next gen eration” form.

 

For public relations bureaucrats (iconocrats), the “problem” is how to reorganize public fields of attitudes and perception toward acceptance of this revised American Dream in a New World Order. It is about the engineering of consent.

 

Several specific PR events and corporatist retooling projects (promising economic salvation via hypertechnological deployment) are the Saturn School of Tomorrow and GM’s Saturn subdivision. These projects, in their public relations and workplace reconfig uration practices, are part of the reorganization of economic practices and public spaces yoked, by iconocrats, to an assortment of repetitively invoked signifiers. In each, the common theme is an implicit pledge of a return to an age of economic plentit ude and technological preeminence–a “Golden Age.” Collectively, the ensemble of signifiers that may be deployed, directly or indirectly, in such representational efforts form what Kristeva called an intertext. For her, intertextuality is

 

Any text [that] is constructed as a mosaic of quotations; Any text is the absorption and transformation of another. The notion of intertextuality replaces that of intersubjectivity. (37)

 

Kristeva’s initial definition does not begin to exhaust the power and range of the notion of intertextuality, which is derived from Bakhtinian notions of dialogism and heteroglossia. (Both concepts underscore the active and constant renegotiation of the denotative and connotative meanings of signifiers in changing and mutually constitutive material and semiotic fields.) In an alternate formulation, she describes intertextuality as “the transposition of one or more multiple sign systems into another,” wi th the production of new accretions of meaning (cited in Stam et al. 204). This sense may be extended to include the reader’s grasp of the relations between a text and all the other relevant past, present and future texts. As such, the intertext of an I mperial signifier such as Saturn may include all depictions of Saturn and/or any and all possible imperial signifiers within an actively and plausibly constructed intertextual chain (Stam 205). Like Barthes’ notion of the readerly text, these various fra mes of reference provide a preassembly of (conventional) signifying units. As such, a series of intertextual frames may be constructed. These units are usually intended to bolster specific sets of meanings, suture troublesome narrative gaps and mold the direction of reader’s/viewer’s inferences about the account through a series of intertextual prompts.

 

Bakhtin’s notion of a deep generating series, developed in a response to the Soviet monthly Novy Mir in 1970, delineates a typology of sign systems and signifying practices that are relevant to the analysis of historical, intertextual semioti c field (“Response” 5). For Bakhtin, a deep generating series forms rich constellations of elaborate and highly productive (political, cultural, social) signifying systems. Deep generating series have extensive histories and a profusion of meanings and usages that routinely cross cultures, idioms, representational forms and temporal periods. Conceptually mining the layers of meaning in such deep generating series is akin to a type of linguistic and cultural archeology. The sign of Saturn, with a genea logy of two dozen centuries, is just such a deep generative series.

 

IV. “Saturnizing America”: Contexts, Texts and Intertexts

 

On the morning of Wednesday, May 22nd, 1991, President George Bush was in St. Paul, Minnesota. He began his day with a tour of an experimental magnet school, the Saturn School for Tomorrow. During the walkaround tour of the refurbished YWCA building, Bu sh, a personal computer novice, seemed mesmerized as fifth, sixth and seventh graders sat at computer terminals working on assignments. As if imitating Star Trek’s Mr. Spock, Bush repeatedly uttered “fascinating” in response to the ensembles of technolog ical largess and preadolescent skill displayed for him (Johnston). With its emphasis on computerized “Personal Growth Plans,” interactive video, word processing, modems, LEGO-LOGO robotics and Hypercards, proponents claim that learning is project-based, student-centered and active. According to Saturn teacher-proponent Thomas King:

 

[We] use the ICS Discourse System (which allows the teacher to see student answers typed at their keyboards hooked to the teacher’s computer) . . .

 

Students have access to interactive integrated learning systems (ILSs) . . . . Hundreds of lessons on reading, math, writing, science . . . are always available. . . . These ILSs pre-test and then select lessons [for students]. . . . Reports are generated for staff, students and parents . . . .

 

ILS is also tied to . . . math manipulative classes [and] whole language instruction. . . . Because of the assumption of passivity of textbooks, Saturn students almost never use them. (“The Saturn School”)

 

On that May morning, George Bush was still basking in the political afterglow of victory in the Gulf War. It was a military exploit that was perceived as the high-tech triumph of computer-guided heat seeking “smart bombs” and “patriot missiles” over seco nd-rate Soviet SCUDS. For Bush, the Saturn School of Tomorrow, with its routine use of high-technology in the service of pedagogy, was “a school for a New World Order.” Waxing enthusiastically, Bush declared that this pilot project was

 

breaking the mold, building for the next American century, reinventing, literally, starting from the bottom up to build revolutionary new schools, not with bricks and mortars, but with questions and ideas and determination. We’re looking at every possible way to [reinvent] schools while still keeping our eyes on the results. (MacNeil/Lehrer)

 

For Bush, just as the technology-based Gulf War victory had “finally gotten that monkey [of moral and performative doubt provoked by the Vietnam War] off our back” (Bush 1991), the application of such computerized ensembles to presumably intractable and s ystemic educational problems would provide comparably swift and productive results. Such results would dispel those open questions of moral malaise, economic insecurity and performative deficits that beset the next generation of Americans. That is, Bush ‘s sense of education is instrumentalist and techno-utopian. His notion of desirable educational horizons appears to consist of the social production of a durable political allegiance best expressed through the superior technical competence of citizen-su bjects. The idea of education as critical reflection seems noticeably absent. For Bush, war and education are but dual aspect of a single project funneled through a common technological imperative:

 

(IMAGE)

The American soldiers manning our Patriot stations perform such complex tasks with unerring accuracy. And they, along with the children in our schools today, are part of the generation that will put unparalleled American technology to use as a tool for change. (Remarks at Raytheon)

[Quicktime clip (6.0 MB)]

 

Through the matrix of Bush’s rhetoric on the relations between technology, education and war, several points are worth mentioning. Saturn, as a technologically imbued sign, is a marker of a project of self-restoration. (This is signified by the phrases of “revolutionary new schools and the determination employed in building [them].”) And, for Bush, the Saturn School of Tomorrow is a desirable and innovative prototype for securely anchoring the project of civic rejuvenation in schools. (This is signifi ed by the positive connotation of “mold-breaking.”) Furthermore, in the second excerpt (from the Raytheon Speech) Bush, in his lavish praise of American techno-competence, condensed the identities of soldiers and schoolchildren (“soldiers along with chil dren”) as mutually engaged in the service of the patriotic by way of the technological. The intertext formed by these statements is meant to signify a redemptive recouping of American might through manifestations of techno-efficiency. (This is signified by the phrase “[they] deployed Patriot missiles with unerring accuracy.” In doing so, they “put unparalleled American technology” in service of the “next American Century.”) And who are they? Soldiers and children, exemplars of institutionally docile and technically efficient Patriots (all of them–citizens and missiles).

 

But Saturn, as signifier, is part of a larger, more complex and intricate intertextual system. For example, the Saturn signifier adopted by the school was transposed from General Motors’ highly visible and expensive project to reinvent its behemoth corpo rate practices and redress its well-deserved negative public image. As an early participant in the Saturn School for Tomorrow project explains:

 

A planning committee met for a three-year period beginning in 1986 to envision a new schooling process. A major catalyst was American Federation of Teachers’ (AFT) president Al Shanker’s exhortation for a ‘Saturn project’ to re-tool American education, just as General Motors’ Saturn automobile project was to invent a ‘quality team’ approach to challenge [the] Japanese. (MacNeil/Lehrer)

 

By appropriating the signifier Saturn, Shanker tacitly acknowledged that the public schools had common ground with GM. That is, both have been widely perceived to be competitive product and market failures with bloated bureaucracies and negative public i mages. Like GM, the schools needed extensive reform to reduce costs and increase productivity in a New World Economic Order. But GM had funded Saturn Corporation, its symbol of self-transformation, with a capital investment of 3.5 billion dollars. Satu rn’s first seven years were devoted to intra and interorganizational negotiation, the development of infrastructure and the implementation of new labor and management practices. AFT’s President Al Shanker was calling for an infusion of money on a similar scale, similar processes of negotiation and a similar request for patience. In return was the promise of reshaping administrative and pedagogical practices toward corporatist “quality” circles and reinscribing students as “customers,” “consumers” or “cl ients.” This is consistent with what David Payne, a teacher at the Saturn School, said about how the goals of the project were shaped:

 

What we’ve done at [the] Saturn [School] is we’ve looked at what the futurists, what the business leaders, and what the education leaders say people are going to be able to do in order to be successful in the 21st Century. (MacNeil/Lehrer)

 

For a variety of tactical reasons, educational bureaucracies eagerly absorbed the intertext of GM’s Saturn signifier, shaping it and being shaped by it. But GM’s Saturn is a only one point of emergence for the sign of Saturn. In the next section, we con sider how GM’s Saturn signifier relates to relevant past Saturnian texts.

 

V. The Long and Winding Road: Saturn as GM’s Bid to Rescue a Moribund Empire

 

By the early 1980s, the threat to General Motors’ long-term future took a complex but identifiable shape. One facet of the threat was the substandard quality of its vehicles and the (then) well-deserved reputation that followed. By 1985, the Chevrolet C elebrity, Citation and Chevette, Oldsmobile Ciera, Buick Century and Pontiac 6000 were legendary for a myriad of serious and endemic manufacturing defects. The sheer number and frequency of factory defects across GM’s cookie-cutter divisions was a major public relations embarrassment.

 

Another menacing threat to the once proud flagship of “the industry of industries” was structural. For example, a January, 1992 article in Fortune Magazine claimed that despite improvements in quality, mammoth capital investment

 

and even with massive cutbacks, [GM] lagged behind major competitors in almost every measure of efficiency. By some key standards–how many worker hours it takes to assemble a car–GM was an astounding 40% less productive than Ford. In 1991 GM lost, on average, $1500 on [each] of the more than 3.5 million [vehicles produced] in North America. It ended [1991] with 34% of the U.S. market. In 1979, [its share of a larger U.S.] market was 46%. [Reform efforts] had been crippled by middle-management . . . and the UAW.

 

Perceptive managers see a company that is building better cars . . . but has yet to confront enormous structural problems: Says one: ‘There is a monumental challenge ahead. We can make great products. But can we do that and make money?’ (Taylor et al.)

 

Since 1953, when then GM President “Engine Charlie” Wilson uttered the notorious aphorism that “what’s good for country is good for General Motors” and vice versa, GM has become something of a synecdoche for the U.S. economy. And it is in the context of confronting an external threat (the “rising sun” of Japanese economic power as signified by automotive imports) with a deteriorating base of productive power (the “setting sun” of U.S. economic power as signified by GM) that the sign of Saturn surfaced. A ccording to one account:

 

Saturn was conceived [in 1982 as] an all-out, all American effort to beat the Japanese in the small car market. Starting from scratch, Saturn would slash costs and boost quality by using the best technology and organization . . . show[ing] GM how a car company should be run in the 21st Century. Roger Smith set the stakes when he formed Saturn as an independent subsidiary, proclaiming it “the key to GM’s long-term competitiveness, survival and success. (Taylor et al.)

 

In giving their small-car project the code-name of Saturn, GM’s public relations unit invoked a chapter in the history of the Cold War. In 1957, the Soviet Union launched the world’s first orbiting satellite, the Sputnik. For the U.S. government, electr onic and print media and public opinion, complaisant in an assumption of technological superiority, the reaction to Sputnik’s success was alarm, panic and paranoia. Newspaper and magazine headlines issued dire warnings about Soviet superiority in space. Frenzied prophecies about the likelihood of a Soviet nuclear attack from orbiting satellites were in wide currency. Sputnik’s success was seen as the dominant threat, in technological form, to U.S. sovereignty and national security. The federal governm ent mobilized resources as if in a national emergency. Congress created NASA and funded countless science and technology initiatives on multiple institutional levels.

 

In the 1950s and 1960s, both the Pentagon and NASA were fond of naming their technological projects and specific pieces of hardware after mythological Greek and Roman gods or characters. For example, early intercontinental ballistic missiles (ICBMs) were christened as the Atlas or Titan series. NASA’s space ventures were designated as the Mercury and Apollo projects. In line with this, a set of rockets deployed in the late 1950s and the early 1960s, the Saturn series, marked those technological events t hat soared past early Soviet space accomplishments, never to look back. The Saturn project became the symbol of an ideological triumph made possible through a successful recouping of technological preeminence. Deployed at the height of economic and mili tary dominance, the Saturn project became a signifier for an epic narrative, one in which a resourceful redeployment of technological talent repelled a perceived threat to sovereignty and security.

 

By the time of GM’s inauguration of its Saturn project in the early 1980s, the globalization of social, political and economic arrangements had already recast U.S. socio-economic practices. In its legitimating narrative, the neo-conservative movement had already constructed an American mythology that roughly corresponded with GM’s symbolic move to reappropriate elements of a certain moment in American history, through the redeployment of the sign of Saturn. That moment was 1962-1963. It was just before the tragic tide of assassinations, just before a massive escalation of U.S. involvement in Vietnam and just before the significant expansion of transfer payments and entitlement programs initiated by the “Great Society.” It was just before the onset of urban riots and campus demonstrations. It was just prior to psychedelia and the widespread burnings of flags and draft cards. It was at the dawn of an environmental movement that soon exposed long-term toxic consequences of unregulated industrial and ag ricultural practices. And it was just before intensive and novel forms of business regulation were set in motion. The fiscal budgets for the years of 1962-1963 were also the first to employ, in a very measured way, the practice of federal deficit spendin g. As Walter Russell Mead notes:

 

The art of economic management was, people believed, nearly perfected. . . . The Kennedy tax cuts nipped a recession in the bud, giving a classroom demonstration of effective government management. . . . The so-called Kennedy round of tariff cuts resulted in the closest approach to pure free trade that world had ever known. . . . Economists believed that [key] economic problems had been solved. (Mortal Splendor 44)

 

This was the zenith of the Pax Americana. Quickly idealized as Camelot (1964), this is the proximate, if somewhat variable (1955-1973), temporal referent for prolific narratives of “a Golden Age.” GM, by transposing the profuse threads of social history , imperialist nostalgia and contemporary security concerns onto the Saturn Car Corporation, seemed to be saying, to workers, commodity markets and potential customers (in a deliberately intertexutal way): Participate in this reinvention of socio-technolog ical fields and we (implicitly) promise a return to a stable and secure Saturnian order (“the golden happy age” Webster’s). Even at this layer, the sign of Saturn is a productive and revealing intertextual site. But it is only one of a prof use series of intended and unintended intertextual meanings. These are discussed below.

 

VI. The Sign of Saturn as a Metonym for the Imperial 60s: Intertexts of Dominance, Domesticity, Dissent, Decadence and Danger

 

Common to these various sites, signs, and practices associated with the sign of Saturn is the promise of a new “Golden Age.” Saturn signifies both the result and the means under which this (mythological) Golden Age effect will reappear. A confident, ord erly and recognizable domesticity will reemerge and flourish by means of intensive digitalization of social fields. The contemporary function of the scientific and ideological success of the Saturn rocket in the early ’60s was to serve as a symbolic cent er for a remembrance of a still reclaimable politics of dominance and a restoration of economic security. Whether it is invoked by a U.S. President, a pilot educational project, a President of the American Teachers’ Federation or General Motors, the depl oyment of the sign of Saturn, in this way, is a conscious public relations gesture designed to tap into current public habits of historical nostalgia and the abiding American creed of techno-utopianism.

 

But both the social history of the 1960s and the intertext of Saturn exceed these attempts to denotate and domesticate both social history and the range and meaning of Saturn, as a sign of an imperial period. As Bakhtin says:

 

No living [sign] relates to its object in a singular way: between the [sign] and its object, between the [sign] and the speaking subject, there exists an elastic environment of other, alien [signs] about the same object, the same theme, and this is . . . the specific environment that the [sign] may be individualized and given stylistic shape.

 

Indeed, any utterance finds the object at which it was directed already overlain with qualifications, open to dispute, charged with value, already enveloped in an obscuring mist, entangled . . . [and] enters a dialogically agitated and tension filled environment of value judgments and accents [that] weave in and out of complex interrelationships . . . . This is the social atmosphere of the [sign]. (Dialogic 276)

 

And this is true of the sign of Saturn. Even a quick glance at Websters’ delineations of several aspects of the word Saturn is revealing:

 

a. Saturn n., L. Saturnus, connected with Serere, to sow. 1. in Roman mythology, the god of agriculture and husband of Oops, the goddess of the harvest, identified with the Greek God Chronos. . . . 3. in alchemy, lead (the metal);

 

b. Saturnian, adj., from Saturnius, of Saturn. 1. pertaining to the Roman god Saturn, whose reign was called “the golden happy age”–hence, prosperous, contented, happy and peaceful;

 

c. Saturnine (Fr. Saturnien, sad, sour) 1. heavy, grave, gloomy, morose, glum, phlegmatic;

 

d. Saturnalia (L. belonging to Saturn) excess, orgy, orgiastic rituals (performed in times of the Roman Empire at the Winter Solstice). (1611)

 

That the generative intertextual series of Saturn is deeply embedded in the Pax Romana is almost too obvious to mention. General Motors’ use of the sign is eerily resonant of several connotative intertexutal aspects of the deep generative series of Satur n. For example, GM’s Saturn complex, at Spring Hill, was built in the midst of Tennessee farmlands (agriculture). The Saturn Car Corporation, with its innovative technological arrangements and reshaped labor/management social fields, was intended, at S pring Hill, to sow the seeds (serere) that would lead General Motors, in time (Chronos), from the current Saturnine period (phlegmatic, gloomy) with its bloated workforce and inefficient management practices to a Saturnian period (prosperous and happy tim e). One evocative connotation is that GM, through the sign of Saturn, intends to (metaphorically) conjure up a social and economic alchemy (of practices) that will transmute (dense, dead weight) lead into gold (Saturnian).

 

General Motors’ iconocrats, conflating the (older) deep generative series of Saturn with the political and economic dominance of the 1960s (represented by the Saturn rocket), covered all the major connotative fields but one. That omission is the signifie r of excess, the Saturnalia. And that was, undoubtedly, an intentional exclusion. But the self-described “counterculture,” of the 1960s, as a sign of excess, was the arational twin, the alternative face of the American Empire–a drugged-out Nietzschean Dionysus shadowing the rationalizing technocrat Apollo.

 

These Saturnalian aspects were rendered by Tom Wolfe’s chronicle of the Merry Pranksters (Acid Test). These were the “summers of love” and protest and of sexual promiscuity and recreational use of marijuana and hallucinogens. There was a si gnificant revival of interest in pagan practice and ritual. Drugs, anti-war demonstrations, riots and the sense of revolution were an integral part of daily life on urban streets. As one popular chronicle stated, it was a time when, out of hubris, anger , indignation, idealism, impatience, curiosity or noble sentiment, many were “storming heaven” (Stephens).

 

These activities are now often portrayed as self-absorbed and part of a treacherous rounds of excess. The panoply of the dead rock ‘n roll icons of the period–Jimi Hendrix, Janis Joplin and Jim Morrison–routinely signify the deleterious effects of dang erous orgies of sex and drugs–a Saturnalia. In retrospect, it is likely that some of the behavioral excesses of the ’60s were the result of (then) emerging technological deterritorialization. The onset of commercial jet travel, the invention and expans ion of television and satellite communications, the construction and expansion of the interstate highway system that hastened enormous changes in the demographics of the urban core and the northeastern industrial belt, all of these generated novel express ions of desire and opened up new forms of physical and psychological mobility. It was these fields of desire and mobility that became the objects for our current round of intensive reterritorializations. According to Deleuze and Guattari:

 

Capitalism constantly counteracts, constantly inhibits this inherent tendency [of the mobility of bodies, consciousness and information] while at the same time allowing it free rein; it continually seeks to avoid reaching its limit while simultaneously tending toward that limit. Capitalism institutes or restores all sorts of residual and artificial, imaginary or symbolic territorialities attempting to recode, rechannel persons. . . . Everything returns or recurs: states, nations, families. That is what makes the ideology of capitalism “a motley painting of everything that has ever been believed.” There is the twofold movement of decoding or deterritorializing flows on the one hand, and their violent and artificial reterritorialization on the other. The more the capitalist machine deterritorializes, decoding and axiomatizing flows . . . the more its ancillary apparatuses . . . do their utmost to reterritorialize. (Anti-Oedipus 34)

 

For public and corporate administrators in the post-Watergate, post-Vietnam era, the paroxysm of events characteristic of the late 1960s required the invention of new wrinkles on a Benthamite techno-political problematic of governance. In the face of unr uly generational “mobs” and ersatz liberation movements, the technical issues focused on how to redesign, redeploy or invent architectural and informational regimes to fix and intensify the surveillance of movement and activities of those bodies, identiti es and allegiances that escaped a normalizing gaze. In a general sense, the social construction of danger inscribed and ascribed to those who would “turn on, tune in and drop out” on the streets of San Francisco, circa 1969, resembles the way English pau pers were portrayed (as a threat to social order) in the early and mid-19th Century:

 

[It is indolence] intensified to the level of social danger: the spectre of the mob; a collective [and] urban phenomenon. It is a composite and [ominous] population which ‘encircles’ the social order from within. . . . It is a magma in which are fused all the dangers which beset the social order, shifting along unpredictable, untraceable channels of transmission and aggregation. The definition [of hippies?] does not work essentially through economic categories . . . images put the stress on feelings of fluidity and indefiniteness, on the impression, at once massive and vague [of menace]. (Procacci 158)

 

Then, as Procacci asserts, and now, as I claim, social morality is often equated with the idea of order: “The moral element is order, that order which liberal society [embraces] as [the] vital need” (159). That is, order as morality, grafted onto the eco nomic and all summed up in the term “Personal Security,” is the rationale for ongoing projects of reterritorialization. And these modes of postmodern reterritorialization–the commercialization of public space represented by the mall and the New American City, the intensification of digital regimes of surveillance, the commodification and licensing of information and icons formerly external to direct market logic and the renarration of the 1960s as a reclaimable Apollonian project–are all activities of governance (except the last) whose emergence predates the 1960s but whose organizing principle remains consistent with both cold-war-era themes of security and the newly emergent objects for novel security concerns (such as enforcement of a convertible ab stract intellectual property rights of the TNCs).

 

VII. Conclusion

 

Gilles Deleuze has depicted historical configurations of governance, including the nation-state, as specific, localized and variable “immanent models of realization” of mobile global capital formations. He makes a persuasive argument that modern nation-s tates are but one of several possible modes of territorialization (A Thousand Plateaus 454). For Deleuze, capitalism may develop an economic form of governance that would render the State superfluous. He says that:

 

capitalism is not short on war cries against the State, not only in the name of the market, but by virtue of its superior deterritorialization. (454)

 

The dispersion of commodities (Coca-Cola, Levi’s), transnational cultural iconographies (Disney, MTV) and technological ensembles of hyperindustrial capitalism (satellite dishes), are highly effective, in certain moments and sites, at “authorless” tasks o f nation-state deterritorialization. Often, the result is a subsequent reterritorialization of identity and desires, primarily recognizable within global consumption circuits such as malls, suburban housing configurations or televised home shopping netwo rks. Generally, this is accompanied by local stylistic adjustment while stroking the population through the propagation of a reassuring ideology of a free, secure and stable domestic identity, heroically reaffirming itself through repetitive acts of comm odity consumption. Within U.S. national technocratic circuits, I argue that the sign of Saturn functions in a similarly Janus-inflected way. As a signifier for a promise of a return to a “happy and prosperous” Pax Americana, it is deployed as a pledge ( rooted in highly selective constructions of memories of an Imperial 1960s) that functions to discipline potential and acutal discontented U.S. subjects in an era of disaccumulation and downward mobility. To do this, iconocrats had to re-encode the stream s of desires, dissent, death and excess that the late ’60s represented. They emerged as streams of consumables, as “lifestyles,” or as new and more finely attenuated “market segments” within reinvented realms of collectively marketed but privately consum ed pleasures. Or, other practices, the Saturnalia, have been reinscribed, as in the age of AIDS and the War on Drugs, as cautionary moral tales. Collectively, many remember the fate of those humans as a series of cautionary tales about the effects of su ccumbing to dangerous, corrosive and indolent practices.

 

There are many aspects of the 1960s that, at different points in time, embody more than a single connotative aspect of the sign of Saturn. Often, a denotative construction of an icon of the 1960s exorcises personal history or political programmatic from an officially sanctified (and sanctifying of the present) remembrance. For example: The passage of a National Civil Rights Day, to honor the selective reconstruction of Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., elevated a pre-Selma (1965) iconography of King as proof that “the system works.” The historical reality of the last years of King’s life, which was spent in critical reflection and action in response to an emerging transnational corporate order (1965-1968), has been all but completely erased (Smith). There is a lesson here: States, and the icons that legitimate states, are absorbed into the order of TNCs. But they are given new economic, iconic and policing functions. They become a bureaucratic tool for a corporatist reterritorialization. (Think about Fo rtune 500 sponsorship of PBS programming or the still unfolding effects of NAFTA and GATT.)

 

Likewise, the sartorial and sonic styles of the period have become the object of nostalgic aestheticization, even among those (nationally and globally) who longingly gaze back to a world they have never lost. This is also a postmodern irony that Appadura i characterizes as “nostalgia without memory” (“Disjuncture” 272). Much of the electronic social imaginaire is tied to a memory of a nation-state empire that obscures full reflection on the effects of corporate transnationalism. Regardless of the sophistication of Saturnian promises, it seems unlikely that the cultivation of a national hypertechnical competency will dent these transnational flows in favor of the reconstitution of the economically-predominant nation-state, at least in the near ter m. Already, forty-seven of the world’s one hundred largest economies are TNCs (Barlow).

 

The iconography of global dreams and a New World Order dominated by the repetitive commercial simulacra of TNCs is reminiscent of Foucault’s characterization of pre-Cartesian discursive regimes. Like the four similitudes that shaped representational fiel ds in the Middle Ages, the video, audio, and digitized products of the infoconglomerates could be characterized by

 

First and foremost, the plethoric yet absolutely poverty-stricken character of this knowledge. Plethoric because it is limitless. Resemblance never remains stable within itself; it can be fixed only if it refers back to another similitude, which then, refers to others. . . . For this reason, this knowledge will be a thing of sand. (The Order of Things 30)

 

Whether this type of judgment will be visited upon our ways of knowing and doing is still unclear. But it will be up to us to reflect upon the consequences of these regimes of distraction and consumption. It will be up to us to decode their products and imagine, from a conceptual space outside of these effects, thought and representational possibilities that will resist and exceed the material and semiotic poverty of these practices.

 

Works Cited

 

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Jeffrey Yule

Department of English
Ohio State University
jyule@magnus.acs.ohio-state.edu

 

After they waxed Kriger, he was supposed to stay dead. Kriger, that Kriger anyway, was a rare one. Wanted nothing to do with reconstitution. Reconstruction was okay, for light stuff. You lose an arm or some brain tissue, maybe even a whole lobe, of c ourse you get that fixed. He wasn’t a fundamentalist. But the part about no reconstitution was supposed to have been an actual clause in his contract. That was the word out about it, anyway. Of course you hear rumors about all sorts of things in this business and a lot of it’s crap. Still, I think that story was true. I say that because I talked to him about it once. Not much, but it was enough.

 

I’m not saying the guy took me into his confidence. He didn’t. I’m no big operator myself, but Kriger–well, that Kriger anyway–he was good, as big a deal as everybody says. He didn’t talk much to people like me, only even ran into ’em every once in a while and never for very long. We were just subcontracted labor. But I did a job for him in Belize once, and that’s where I got the impression the stories were true. Down there, they called him the man, el hombre, but the way they said it was like in capital letters–El Hombre. They wanted to call him el hombreisimo, you know, like he was the most incredible of men, but he didn’t like the way it sounded. So it was El Hombre, pronounced like with capital letters. And wit h the job he did, he earned that too. During some down time on that job, I asked him what he thought about reconstitution. I was thinking about it for myself for after I could afford it, but I was also curious about him. Even then he had quite a reputa tion.

 

What he said was, “Guys get re-sti clauses, they don’t have to worry much anymore. They get sloppy.”

 

He said it like he’d seen it happen, and I guess that’s why he didn’t go in for reconstitution. He didn’t want to get soft. Maybe because his work was his art or maybe because if he got soft, he wouldn’t pull down the same sort of money on each job. M aybe both. And maybe he was right, because he was sharp then. He was almost too good.

 

You still hear a lot of stories about Kriger, but who the hell knows for sure what happened and what didn’t? I don’t know that anyone could ever sort it all out now. But I know this for sure. On that Belize job, we had two teams setting up perimeter d iversions for him so he could go in solo somewhere else along the line, into this guy’s compound. No names, okay? But you know the type. The guy had his hands in some of this and some of that, major supply contacts with different organizations, some of them competing–Mafia, Tong, Yakuza, everybody. As a consequence of his clientele, he’s a real security freak, trying to make sure nobody’s going to pay him a visit–cut him up, kidnap him, maybe even make an example of him. Mess him up bad but keep sh owing his reconstitution company that he’s alive so they can’t replace him. He was a real paranoid operator. Too much white powder and cash will do that to people. Given the type, of course, his place is wired every which way: motion sensors, IR trip b eams, countermeasures, everything. We even ran into some cyborged guard dogs his security people were running off an AI system. Nasty things–godawful tough to kill. Plus he’s got guards all over the place with IR equipment. But it’s a very strange si tuation. There’s this self-contained, high-tech fortress, built right into the side of a mountain, right? But the people who grow the man’s plant live in huts, so all around this place things are strictly stone age, third world.

 

Apparently the target had connections with somebody in the government and he stepped on the wrong toes. So Uncle says, “Central, wax that problem.” Central takes a look and thinks, “What we need here is deniability and lots and lots of insulation becau se this is an ugly situation that’s just waiting to blow up in our faces.” So they contract it out to Kriger, and he subcontracts out for support and I get a spot on a diversion team. It was my first big job and to me it was exceedingly smooth, almost s upernatural. We did our thing and he did his. He didn’t say how and nobody asked, but we all wondered. He went in and waxed the guy rough. Napalm, I think, one of those mini-flamethrower rigs. I guess they sent the guy a vid of the way it went after his reconstitution, one of those, “Next time, there better not be a next time” kind of messages. After that job, everybody called Kriger “The Man,” with capitals. And he really absolutely was. He was the best in the business, maybe the best ever. I’v e done some other big jobs where security was tight, but I’ve never seen anything tighter. I’m telling you, that place was seamless. And those goddamned dogs. Believe me, you don’t know how hard those are to deal with unless you’ve ever tried to shake one and found out that there was no other way but to kill it. Even with the diversions, I have no idea how Kriger got past everything and to the target. That was impressive enough. But he also cooked the guy and vidded it. He didn’t just go in and ner ve gas the place or even find the guy and shoot him. He found out where he was, got to him, did his things for fifteen, twenty minutes at least, and then he left. I never saw anything like it.

 

But that was a long time ago. Kriger himself got it, let’s see, about four, four and a half years ago now. Any number of people were supposed to have done it. There were a lot of rumors at the time. Some people thought Central might have been behind it because Kriger was getting too wild, taking on contracts they didn’t like. With Central you never know, especially with Uncle getting sloppy sometimes, a little old and not so much on the cutting edge anymore. Sometimes the parts just don’t do what t he head tells them when things get to that point, so that talk about Central might’ve been right. I heard some other people talking about a year later who thought a renegade state might’ve done it. Again, no names, okay? But there were sure people who he crossed in some of those governments, and some of them he’d really pissed off doing it. To me that theory makes a lot more sense than a Central-directed hit, but it’s damn near impossible to say. It could’ve been any number of people or groups that k illed him. Maybe it was a government-sanctioned job or maybe something that an intelligence clique put together. Could even have been one or another terrorist groups behind it. He’d thrown a few wrenches into the moving parts of some of their operation s over the years and taken out some of their people doing it. It might’ve been corporate or a criminal organization or maybe some independent contractor looking to make a name for himself with the right people. It could’ve been a combination of things. Shit, for all I know it could’ve been the guy he cooked with napalm on that Belìze job.

 

I’m not saying there aren’t people who know. I’m sure there are, but there you’re talking about people who move in higher circles than me. I’m strictly middle level, right? That’s something I’m not ashamed of either. Maybe I could’ve made it in those circles–the money’s certainly attractive–but there’s just too much pressure. There were people I worked with who went that way, and they were always walking around like they couldn’t afford to relax for a split second. This one guy went through two, three stomachs in something like eight years. Ulcers. You got other people who’d be burning holes through their noses with powders or needing liver transplants because of the drinking and the drugs. Sure the money’s good, but what did they do but spend it on extra security, bribes, transplants, and reconstructions. Now maybe some of those people know who waxed Kriger, but they’re the ones who have to worry about the fact that they know. Screw that. There are a few things that I can tell you, though.

 

Just after it happened, there was a rumor that it was a clean hit, a sniper, and that it went down in Dresden when he was on vacation or some sort of bullshit. That’s one story, the main one everybody heard for about a year. There was also talk that it was one of those old M-9 grenades launched into his car outside of Los Angeles. Either way, though, it was supposed to have been gentle. But it was probably rough no matter what you heard. On this security job a few years ago I had to liason with a co mputers op who had a thing for hardware and the merc scene, and he’d heard of Kriger and was all hard to talk to me about him and about the business. Said he had some good information to trade, and it was down time, so I figured, why not? He showed me t his vid clip he’d turned up which his source said was a partial copy of the Kriger hit. I’m no vid expert, but I watched the thing and it looked like the genuine article. The guy told me he got it in trade from an AI that pops up now and then on the net . Maybe or maybe not. I didn’t even bother trying to check into it. It fell into my lap so I gave it a look, sure, but I wasn’t going to go poking around in something that might end up giving somebody a reason to come and step on me. But, like I said, it looked genuine enough.

 

The clip is short, maybe a minute and a half long. The picture was a little jumpy, like the computer they used to edit the thing couldn’t smooth it out completely. Looked like it was shot by someone wearing a concealed camera and following along on bac kup while the rest of the team did the actual job. At first it’s a stable picture, though. You see this guy who looks like Kriger come into a building, a big hotel lobby or maybe something corporate, a place with marble floors, lots of metal, glass, sus pended balconies, fountains, like that. A man in uniform, the concierge or corporation toad boy, whatever, comes from behind the counter to meet Kriger, reaches out to shake his hand, and the picture jumps a little as the person with the vid equipment ge ts up. From that point on, it stays a little jumpy, but it’s still a good, clear sequence.

 

On the balcony out of Kriger’s field of vision, you see a guy suddenly looking very bothered. He’s probably someone on Kriger’s security team, and it looks like he’s seeing something he doesn’t like. I had the computer kid enhance the image, and what i t looked like to me was that he was trying to use a throat mike to tell Kriger or somebody else that something looked funny, but he wasn’t getting the message through. Either he was getting jammed or the people that waxed Kriger had some sort of interfer ence software on-line and they were jamming and sending all clear signals at the same time on the skip frequencies Kriger’s people were using. It’s a pain in the ass to do, but you can pull it off if you’ve got an AI with an expert system hookup that’s f ast enough to track the shifts from frequency to frequency. The thing is, though, if the people whose signal you’re substituting for find out quick enough, your operation’s probably blown because the whole target team finds out what’s going on instantly.

 

Kriger’s people apparently had some sort of countermeasure that picked up the problem or something else tipped Kriger off because he all of a sudden veers away from the concierge-type guy. In the upper right of the picture, you see the guy who was havin g trouble with his throat mike go for a gun. He gets some shots off at one or more people who aren’t in the picture. Then he just gets absolutely raked by small flechette fire–the things hit his whole left side in a wave. One second you see him and th e next you lose sight of that half of his body in a red mist. It was very messy–painful, too, I bet–but it looked like the people who planned it probably meant for him to live. The computer liason guy couldn’t give me a good enough image to be sure, b ut I don’t think the stuff they used was meant to do a lot of deep tissue damage. It was just supposed to take off the skin and mess up the muscle–that way even if you’ve got a guy pumped with endorphin analogs, he won’t be able to do anything because t he muscles are too torn up and he doesn’t have enough blood to run them anyway.

 

While this is going on, Kriger’s moving away from the concierge. This guy’s still got his hand out, and there’s the start of a surprised look on his face as Kriger turns away from him. Then this guy takes a wave of flechette fire at about a thre e quarters full angle, and this time the hit team was obviously using something that would do deep tissue damage. It looks like most of his right side just explodes. But you only see that for a second because the camera’s following Kriger, who would’ve taken that flechette wave full in the back and gone down if he hadn’t gotten out of the way. As it is, he takes some fire from the outside edge of the scatter pattern, and you see some blood on him but not much. He was probably wearing light armor fabri cs, so his clothes took a lot of the kinetic energy out of the stuffbefore it got to him. If it hadn’t just been some some scatter, though, it would’ve torn him up too, even if he was wearing a tougher fabric. That’s probably why the hit team tried to u se the heavier flechettes on Kriger. Those things pretty much sandblast anything up to a medium-grade body armor right off a target. The hotel guy wasn’t wearing anything like that, though, and he just got torn up.

 

By this time, I suppose that any security Kriger had must have been out of the picture, if there was even anybody else still standing when the guy with the throat mike realized things were going sour. That’s how it goes on rough waxes: targets have to be cut completely loose from their support. Kriger must have known he was on his own by then. While he’s running, he lays down some flare grenades and suddenly it’s like he’s inside his own little supernova, which I suppose threw a tangle into the plans of whoever was running the op because you can’t draw a bead on somebody who’s inside that sort of lightsource. But of course the tradeoff is that Kriger can’t see anything either, so if he’s firing, he’s firing blind too. You can’t tell for sure, but b efore he threw down the flares it looked like he was headed for a cluster of furniture next to a fountain. Looked like the best available cover.

 

Now even though the camera’s still going, all you see for about three, four seconds is a lot of white light, until Kriger’s flares burn out. Then the person with the camera pans around trying to find Kriger. You see some more bodies, although it’s hard to say for sure which were on the hit team and which were with Kriger. Most of them are either still armed or lying near weapons, though, so it looks like the only person hurt who wasn’t involved was the concierge, but–if he was a crooked, greedy, or c orporate–he might not have been an innocent bystander anyway. You also see four people moving in toward the furniture where Kriger was headed when the camera last had him. They’ve all got filter masks on and they’re launching cannisters in a standard s pread pattern. There’s no visible gas, though, so they were using something colorless, a mild nerve agent probably–something that would cause a lot of pain and either full voluntary muscle paralysis or at least a lot of problems with motor function and reflex.

 

Then three of these four get slammed in quick succession, all within about five centimeters dead center of their sternums, by something high caliber. Blows right through any armor they were wearing. These three are write offs–no doubt in my mind they were dead before they hit the floor. Whatever they got hit with probably tore them to pieces internally. No surprise there. A guy who doesn’t go in for reconstitution certainly wouldn’t treat the squad hitting him gently. Anyway, one of the guys who w as firing the gas cannisters gets to some cover without getting shot. From the camera angle, I couldn’t see where the shots came from that killed the three who were with him, and I’m not sure that he could either. Certainly, though, this guy’s got reaso n to be careful. It’s no surprise that he doesn’t come into the picture again.

 

At about this point, the person carrying the camera must have gotten involved in the operation, because the picture you see from then on isn’t just a vid of the hit anymore. It’s an operative’s-eye view. You see everything from the perspective of some one a lot closer to the ground, like what an op sees when he’s trying to stay low enough to avoid drawing fire. The camera shows this guy taking a winding course from cover to cover toward the place where it looks like Kriger was headed. A few times you even see his rifle barrel come into the picture. Then the camera carrier must have gotten the all clear because the picture jumps, and you can tell he’s gone into an upright position. The camera moves forward smoothly after that and, after going around this huge marble-backed leather couch that’s been chewed up by fire, you see Kriger on the floor, eyes open, teeth clenched, and his muscles all knotted up. He’s twitching a little too, his nerves obviously not firing right. Looks like he’d taken some more fire, too, something high caliber in the left leg. There was a lot of blood, some of it splattered all the way to the edge of the fountain. The camera stays on Kriger for about three seconds and no one touches him during that time. Then the clip ends.

 

The guy who showed me the thing said he didn’t know if Kriger got away or, if he was killed, how it was done. He said he asked the AI who traded him the clip, and the thing either didn’t know or wouldn’t tell. As far as I’m concerned, that’s just as we ll. Like I said before, it’s not like Kriger and I were friends, but I had a lot of respect for the man’s work. I had no reason to want to see someone mess him up on camera. This merc groupie asks me all these questions, like was it possible maybe that Kriger could’ve gotten away or something, and the answer to that is absolutely not. Before the clip ends what you see is an immobilized target. Kriger wasn’t going anywhere alive.

 

What it looked like to me is this: it was supposed to be a rough wax, and it started out well enough and should’ve gone smoothly except that Kriger was just too good at what he did. After the point where he veered away from the guy who was getting ready to shake his hand, things went badly for the hit team. Counting the downed bodies and figuring that even if only half of them were part of the hit, Kriger and his people took down something like ten or eleven of them. And that’s just counting the bodies I could see. The fact that the person with the camera started out on backup and had to move into an active role also tells me things didn’t go well. But it looks like they wanted to do as clean a job as they could. The hotel guy getting killed was probably a mistake. Based on everything else, I’d say they just wanted Kriger dead and the people on his security team out of the picture while they killed him. They got what they were after, but it took too long, they took too many losses, and it was messy.

 

After all that, it’s hard to imagine that the hit team killed Kriger quickly. Obviously, someone had reason to make sure he died rough because what you see in the vid is a very expensive job. There wouldn’t have been any sense in going to all the trouble of cutting him off from his support and immobilizing him if they were just going to pop him in the head and make extra sure afterward with a few more shots to the heart and spine. So, no, I didn’t see what happened exactly, whether it was corrosives o r inflammables or what, but I don’t doubt they picked a bad way for Kriger to die.

 

What surprised me was that he turned up again at all. This was about six or eight months after I saw the vid clip. I got a call from this guy with an accent, asking am I free to do support on an external job, something in the Baltics, but, again, no names, all right? He also tells me the pay and gives me a few general details. I say, maybe, who wants to know?

 

“The job is to do support for Kriger. Same sort of scenario as before. Take it now or not, but no more questions either way,” he said.

 

“Sounds interesting,” I tell the guy. “But last I heard, Kriger was dead.”

 

“Just a rumor. In or out?”

 

I wondered if maybe it was a set up to take me out because I’d seen that partial clip of the Kriger hit, but it didn’t figure. People don’t need to go to that kind of trouble to kill guys like me. They had my job pickup number, which is at a public loc ation. The line was secure but they wouldn’t have had any problem tracing it and just meeting me outside to blow me away if they wanted to. So the offer looked as safe as any other. And I was curious about it. So I tell the guy, “I’m in.”

 

“Fine. You’ll hear from me again this time tomorrow. Be ready to move out any time after that. You’ll get half up front and half on completion. We supply the hardware. You can bring anything else you want so long as the total weight is under thirty- five kilos. Questions?”

 

“No.”

 

“Fine. Tomorrow then.”

 

And so I was in.

 

Except that I was hired help for a diversion team, it wasn’t much like the Belize job. I never knew what the operation was about exactly, and it didn’t matter. I saw Kriger and I wanted to talk to him, see if he remembered me, but the opportunity never came up. He briefed us and made sure everything was clear. He looked like I remembered. Sounded the same. There were no differences I could see, so I started to wonder if maybe the vid clip I saw was fake–still, you’re not supposed to be able to tel l the re-sti copy from the original. So I wasn’t sure. But something happened that convinced me that this wasn’t the same Kriger I worked with in Belize.

 

Like I said, I didn’t know what the objective was on this job. I just knew what my team was supposed to do: make a lot of noise and draw as much attention as possible so Kriger could get in there and do his thing. There was another diversion team too, which means he had as much backup there as in Belize. So the time comes and we do our jobs. But the thing I notice right away is that this isn’t a tight target area. There’s security, sure–some armed guards, some motion sensors. But it’s just a little more than enough to keep the amateurs off the grounds–radio shack hardware and rent a cops. Nowhere near what Kriger went up against in Belize. I think there was just one guard with IR equipment, and he was an easy take down, probably didn’t even hav e any special training. There was nothing remotely as much a problem as those cyborged dogs were, either. The site wasn’t even self-contained. They had people coming and going on a daily basis. The place was a little sloppy, really. I remember thinking at the time that whoever paid for the job must have had paranoid fits. Any competent solo operator could have handled it without diversions, probably without a support team either if it came down to that.

 

But I get paid to do my job whether they need me there or not, so I did what I was supposed to do: set off some charges, got a fix on the guard with the IR equipment and made sure they dropped him. We even managed to draw a guard squad completely outside their perimeter. Plain amateurs. No security team worth anything gets drawn out like that. It looked to me like having two diversion teams along was serious overkill. But we wrapped up the job and got to the rendezvous for airlift out. And that’s w here I saw the difference between this Kriger and the man I saw in the vid, twitching on a floor waiting to get waxed. Because this Kriger showed up at the rendezvous shot, and he looked like he’d barely made it out. He gave me that feeling you hate to get. I don’t know how to describe it, exactly. You have to experience it yourself, maybe. It’s the feeling you get off people whose op went bad. It’s like a smell almost, or a kind of metal taste in your mouth. You work enough jobs and you can pick i t up off even some of the very best people. And we all picked it up off Kriger. He even looked a little rattled, scared or pissed off maybe. Maybe something else. And then it occurred to me.

 

Whoever brought him back must have edited his psychic makeup, mellowed him on reconstitution–probably so they could get him to go in for more frequent brain tapings. That way he wouldn’t lose so much memory if he got killed again. See, somebody who’s at most willing to have a lobe replaced isn’t going bother going in for recordings as often as a reconstitution company’s clients would. And, like I said, Kriger wasn’t a reconstitution client, so whoever brought him back must have done it on their own initiative. They were treating him as a long-term investment. He was a kept operator at that point, probably. If they’d tinkered with him enough to change his mind about reconstitution, they might’ve done more. Made him a career corporate boy or Central op, any number of things. That’s some nasty black bag medical, but there are people out there bent enough to do most anything for a price, so it happens sometimes.

 

But the people who did it didn’t get what they were after. Serves them right, too, the fucks. An op has a clause in his agent’s contract, it ought to be honored. But those helix robbers not only ignored the clause, they tinkered with the man’s psych profile and memory. The thing is, though, that when you take away from an operator like Kriger the thing that gives him his edge, what you end up with isn’t an operator like Kriger. You get something a lot less than that, a guy who maybe looks the same and acts the same and seems the same but who isn’t the same. The Kriger I knew got inside a place and did a job that I wouldn’t have believed was possible if I hadn’t been there myself. He got waxed later, sure, but that’s reality. Nobody’s invulnerable . And even though the hit they put on him was first quality, he still took a lot of their people with him. Kriger, that Kriger, was the genuine article. That guy on the Baltics job, he was just a cheap copy, a meat puppet. You wanna know the truth, I felt sorry for him. The original Kriger, I bet he’d rather be dead than going around like that. But the copy, he probably doesn’t even know. Probably just feels like something’s wrong and can’t figure out what. It’s a shame, really. Poor son of a bitch.

 

Hassan Melehy

Dept. of French and Italian
Vanderbilt University
melehyh@ctrvax.vanderbilt.edu

 

To overturn Platonism: what philosophy has not tried?

 

–Michel Foucault¹

 

There are two things I would like to do in this paper: elaborate on some Deleuzian concepts and examine recent science fiction cinema from Hollywood and its periphery (Canada, Britain, and the usually suspicious European transplants, whose films enter into “mainstream” flows or circulation). Ideally, I will do both in the same act, working the concepts and showing how they work themselves into and out of the movies in question,² producing a configuration that says something about philosophy and its relation to other aspects of the world as well as about the importance of the films. The mapping of various relations that will occur in the process will not take either philosophy or film studies as starting points or guiding frameworks, will not explicitly reject the integrity of either, but rather will reach into an interdisciplinary field that resists accusations of eclecticism yet refuses to call itself an institutional unity. I would like, among other things, to argue for the consideration of Gilles Deleuze as a philosopher because of (not in spite of) his interest in non-philosophical practices, in a nomadic entrance into cinema, in conducting “one of the finest contemporary reflections on the liveliness and grandeur of the seventh art” (Bensmaïa 57). In his reflection he makes connections between aspects of this art and trajectories of the philosophical project that may be discerned running through his books. I would also like to argue for the appreciation of science fiction films from the eighties as participating in the production of philosophical concepts, while, in their capacity as movies and especially “B” movies, they wrest these concepts from the institutional closure that the term “philosophical” might tend to impose on them.

 

An evident place to start is with Deleuze’s work on the cinema, which has received less critical attention than many of his other texts. This is in part because of their relatively recent appearance and translation but also in part, I suspect, because the connections Deleuze tries to make between philosophy and cinema are very demanding–because the concepts he produces are new, unknown, alien to traditional film studies, and particularly illustrative of Deleuze’s treatment of philosophy as a Foucauldian “system of dispersion” (Foucault, Archéologie 44-54) rather than an institutional unity. To begin with the Cinema books, then, one would have to proceed through extensions of the multidirectionality of their project and would not be able to avoid various enlistments of other sections of Deleuze’s work. This process can’t start by summarizing the books or by taking a set of statements from them as a guiding principle in critical analysis of the films.³ It must rather select a line in them, with a certain agenda in mind, and follow it through various materials as it gathers layers–other texts of Deleuze, the films in question–and work with the becomings that take place.

 

What I would like to do is see the cinema books in light of Deleuze’s earlier alliance of his own philosophical project with that of Nietzsche’s as something that would contribute to the overturning of Platonism.⁴ And I would like to see the films as contributing to the same event, by seeing them in light of certain Deleuzian concepts–becoming, image, multiplicity, body without organs, assemblage, becoming-animal, simulacrum, the machinic, becoming-woman, etc. (which Deleuze himself has gathered from a variety of planes–hence Deleuze’s “counter history” of philosophy [Douglass 47-48]). Their examinations of, among other things, the cyberneticization of the human organism–the destabilization of its organic structure–and the displacement of a grounded notion of the real by the simulacrum of the televisual image do not simply constitute a social or aesthetic epiphenomenon, but rather participate in the emergenc(e)(y) that Deleuze’s efforts map, as well as, in so far as in their images they present crystallizations of philosophical concepts, disturb the unified and privileged discourse of philosophy, something the latter retains from its Platonic legacy. This is the period in which it may be said that “there is no more philosophy in the sense that metaphysics has become impossible as a discourse, simply because it is realized in the contemporary world” (Lyotard 45)–that is, in which philosophy can no longer be an autonomous, self-crowning discipline. One begins, then, to see philosophy and philosophers at the movies.

 

Deleuze’s writing on cinema may be seen as directly tied to the task of overturning Platonism in that it bears on freeing the image from the hold that mimesis has placed on it throughout the history of the west (Bogue, especially 77-78). Constituting as much a treatise on Henri Bergson as an appreciation of the cinema, the two books work with a concept of image that may be attributed to the earlier French philosopher. The following definition goes a long way, I think, toward illuminating the importance Deleuze assigns to the cinema in the revaluation of experience and philosophy’s relation to the actual world: “Matter, in our view, is an aggregate of ‘images.’ And by ‘image’ we mean a certain existence which is more than what the idealist calls a representation, but less than that which the realist calls a thing,–an existence placed half-way between the ‘thing’ and the ‘representation’” (Bergson x; quoted in Douglass 51). This notion of image is a direct challenge to the Platonic dualism that would hold the “representation” in a subordinate relation of mimesis to the “thing.” To say that “matter” is made up of images is to suggest that consciousness apprehends and inhabits its world in a way fundamentally different from that conceived in the traditional subject-object relationship that has dominated western thinking since Descartes–indeed that it is not the exclusive property of the organic human being at all. Hence Deleuze may speak of the “machine”–here and elsewhere–not in opposition to the organic but as an assemblage of elements in motion, as extending vitality through movement into all of matter.⁵ If cinema becomes a locus of the image in the twentieth century–one of the “social and scientific factors which placed more and more movement into conscious life, and more and more images into the material world” (Cinema 1 56)–it must be seen as nothing else than the plane on which this transformation in philosophy takes place.

 

Deleuze acknowledges that Bergson did not find much use for the early cinema in demonstrating his theses on movement: Bergson wanted to free movement from its conception as a sequence of privileged instants, from its subordination to the immobilizing representation of the thing, and to allow it to be considered as belonging to matter and hence to matter’s intertwining with consciousness (1-11). Nonetheless Deleuze pays homage to his predecessor in showing that Bergson’s conception of the material universe, the “infinite set of all images” (58), involves precisely the identification of image and matter that the cinema makes available after its first twenty or thirty years. The image is the movement that belongs to matter, the latter no longer subordinate to a frozen, single-frame representation or an accompanying ideal form, but in constant flow, all of its elements interacting: “This is not mechanism, it is machinism. The material universe, the plane of immanence, is the machinic assemblage of movement-images. Here Bergson is startlingly ahead of his time: it is the universe as cinema in itself, metacinema” (59). The cinema becomes what Deleuze, writing with Félix Guattari, elsewhere terms a “map” (Plateaus 12-13)–it doesn’t separate itself from and raise itself up as a mimetic image of the world, but rather weaves itself into the world, becoming the world as the world becomes it, each and both a multiplicity rather than a unity or part of a duality. If the cinema begins as a series of mimetic representations, each frame giving an isolated idea of the thing, it immediately transforms: “If these are privileged instants, it is as remarkable or singular points which belong to movement, and not as the moments of actualisation of a transcendent form. . . . The remarkable or singular instant remains any-instant-whatever among the others” (Cinema 1 5-6). In its placement in the cinematic series, an instant of this type cannot claim a superior position; each image constitutes a portion of the machinic interaction of matter. This machinic interaction, this assemblage or agencement, is a whole, if not the Whole, a universe, and each of its portions is a set of moments in and of motion, a segment of time or durée. With the Bergsonian concept of the image, which Deleuze sees actualized in the cinema, there is no matter that may be abstracted as an ideal form from its reality in time (10-11; also Bogue 83-84).

 

Though Deleuze devotes much of Cinema 1 to producing “a taxonomy, an attempt at the classification of images and signs” (Cinema 1 xiv)–masterfully borrowing from and adapting the semiotics of Charles Peirce as he gives detailed attention to his examples drawn from the history of cinema–my interest here bears more strongly on the outcome of the study of signs and images, which occurs in the second book. This is the advent of “a direct time-image” (ix), the completion, as it were, of the valorization of the Bergsonian image, whose links with the project of overturning Platonism I would like to comment on here. In this type of image time is no longer subordinate to movement: that is, it is not in sequential segments of movement that time is viewed. The image is freed from its placement in a sequence; instants do not need to follow their order as determined in movement, but may all become available to view, such that a restrictive picture to which the world must conform⁶ is no longer possible. There is no more progression of time such that all past moments are seen to be contributing to the constitution of the present; rather, they begin to assume directions and vitalities of their own, and present and past cease to be a dualism. Again Deleuze acknowledges his predecessor: “Bergson’s major theses on time are as follows: the past coexists with the present that it has been; the past is preserved in itself, as past in general (non-chronological); at each moment time splits itself into present and past, present that passes and past which is preserved” (Cinema 2 82). Time first becomes available as time-image with Orson Welles’s Citizen Kane (1941), in which “time became out of joint and reversed its dependent relation to movement; temporality showed itself as it really was for the first time, but in the form of a coexistence of large regions to be explored” (105). In this film, the present is constituted through several parallel narratives of the past, not always congruent with each other. None of them manages to make any greater claim to reality than the others, yet all permeate the present and are part of what makes it a complex reality, unbounded by narrative closure (“Rosebud” remains, largely, a floating signifier).

 

It is in relation to such a multiplicity of possible worlds that Deleuze introduces another concept of fascination to him, that of Leibniz’s “incompossibility”: “Leibniz says that the naval battle may or may not take place, but that this is not in the same world: it takes place in one world and does not take place in a different world, and these two worlds are possible, but are not ‘compossible’ with each other” (130).⁷ A figure from Deleuze’s “counter history” of philosophy, Leibniz presents a challenge to the Platonic heritage in which our understanding of the world may reflect only one, noncontradictory reality. “He is thus obliged to forge the wonderful notion of incompossibility (very different from contradiction) in order to resolve the paradox while saving truth: according to him, it is not the impossible, but only the incompossible that proceeds from the possible; and the past may be true without being necessarily true” (130).⁸ But Deleuze wants to free the incompossible worlds from the restrictions that Leibniz places on them: still a party to the ascendancy of the west as self-instituting dominancy, Leibniz leaves it up to God to choose which of the possible worlds will exist (The Fold 63). The cinema’s direct time-image may take philosophy a step beyond, as Deleuze states in connection with Alain Robbe-Grillet’s L’Homme qui ment, “contrary to what Leibniz believed, all these worlds belong to the same universe and constitute modifications of the same story” (Cinema 2 132).

 

So, for Deleuze, the cinema becomes a part of the counter history of philosophy, constitutes a series with the latter’s imagery, in that it participates in the shaking loose of the Platonic dualism of reality and representation in a way that is akin to the flashes that are available in various philosophical texts. Deleuze makes the cinema accessible to philosophy in a way that it perhaps has not been before, in large part because of its status as image–and particularly, as Deleuze shows, Bergsonian image. The cinema is simulacrum, phantasm, excluded from philosophy’s world of admissible representations because of the threat it poses to the ordered world of “true” representations, copies determined by their originals.

 

But as Deleuze demonstrates in “Plato and the Simulacrum,” the distinction is problematic in the Platonic dialogues themselves. It is possible that it is not a distinction of opposition, but rather of degree:

 

To participate is, at best, to rank second. The celebrated Neoplatonic triad of the “Unparticipated,” the participated, and the participant follows from this. One could express it in the following manner as well: the foundation, the object aspired to, and the pretender. . . . Undoubtedly, one must distinguish all sorts of degrees, an entire hierarchy, in this elective participation. Is there not a possessor of the third or the fourth rank, and on to an infinity of degradation culminating in the one who possesses no more than a simulacrum, a mirage–the one who is himself a mirage and simulacrum? (255)

 

Deleuze’s example is from the Statesman, which distinguishes “the true statesman or the well-founded aspirer, then relatives, auxiliaries, and slaves, down to simulacra and counterfeits” (255-256). The simulacrum and the good representation–the copy or the icon–may then be seen as constituting a series with one another. It is possible, then, that the “original” is instituted through a ruse on the part of those in “second” place to maintain their place in the hierarchy, and that they designate the false pretenders, the simulacra, the phantasms, as dangerous because in essence the latter are the same as they are: and their nature as simulacrum threatens the stable order–which is the same thing as the tyranny–of the situation.⁹

 

[I]t may be that the end of the Sophist contains the most extraordinary adventure of Platonism: as a consequence of searching in the direction of the simulacrum and of leaning over its abyss, Plato discovers, in the flash of an instant, that the simulacrum is not simply a false copy, but that it places in question the very notions of copy and model. The final definition of the Sophist leads us to the point where we can no longer distinguish him from Socrates himself–the ironist working in private by means of brief arguments. Was it not necessary to push irony to the extreme? Was it not Plato himself who pointed out the direction for the reversal of Platonism? (256)

 

And it may then be said that this division in the founding discourse of western philosophy–that between the discovery of the value of the simulacrum and the ruse by which this value is hidden in order to maintain a hierarchy–persists through the history of philosophy, leaving traces of itself that may be discerned only if philosophy is read, as it were, against itself, against the determinations on its own understanding of itself that it would enact. Throughout the history of western metaphysics philosophy is able to maintain itself as a discourse on being only by instituting a simulacrum of itself. “Affirming the rights” (262) of simulacra, overturning Platonism, is thus to free philosophy from the restrictions it has placed on itself from the outset. It is to link up with a series that has always been available in philosophy, but that has been repressed. In the age of the cinema as locus of the image, the world may reveal itself as image, image reveal itself as simulacrum, philosophy recover simulacrum. And the latter in so doing may redefine its own relation to the world. Philosophy may function according to one of its most traditional tasks, as “the art of forming, of inventing, of fabricating concepts” (Deleuze and Guattari, Philosophie 8), and elaborate the relation of thought and matter not as one of opposition–as between subject and object–but as one of coinhabitation, intertwining, or machinic assemblage.

 

In this age of the image, and in about the same period in which Deleuze’s philosophy has been written–in the very decade of A Thousand Plateaus and the cinema books–there appears a variation on the image in the form of specifically technological phantasms. In its various manifestations–television, computer-generated images for television and cinema that can’t be distinguished from images of “real” objects–it displaces the cinematic image, effectively suppressing the latter’s effectiveness. It may be seen as a kind of coup de force¹⁰ against the productivity of the cinematic image, imposing a world picture that is a veritable microcosm, a severance of the relation of thought and matter, a last and tyrannical effort on the part of metaphysics to preserve the domination of a homogeneous, limited, and overwhelming reality. But on the other hand it is the outcome of the emergence of the image as Deleuze describes it: the distinction between virtual and actual worlds, and between imagination and reality, and even between subject and object, is less tenable than ever; any world at all may come into being on the little screen, and the world itself begins to be composed of the picture elements or pixels that make up its own simulacrum. The power to produce worlds is redirected to the production of a single, untouchable world; what we see is the ultimate simulacrum enacting the ultimate exclusion of the simulacrum.¹¹

 

Where is this coup de force, as well as the conflicts that ensue from it, most visible, and where are its effects represented? In the cinema: in that particular cinema that takes an interest in the technological production of phantasms, in the accompanying transformation of the human body in its ever more intimate interaction with machinery, in the role of the televisual image in relation to consciousness–and that also reflects on its own dependence on the technology of special effects as well as the restriction of its own images through mass production on videocassettes. The genre that makes phantasms out of the material of the extreme truth-telling discourses of the technological sciences is of course science fiction. I am referring to a group of science fiction films that appeared, in my view, as something quite new to cinema in the 1980s, precisely because they may be seen as participating in as well as criticizing, in a sometimes painfully concentrated way, the technological conditions in which the phantasms are produced.

 

I would like to examine these movies with the Deleuzian notion of the image, as well as a number of other Deleuzian concepts, in mind. The films may be said to constitute a set, or an arrangement, or an assemblage, in the ways that they address and interact with the conditions. As I have mentioned, they are what might be considered “B” movies, often cheaply made, and occasionally expensive but deemed unworthy of serious consideration because participating in some of the forces of which they at least partially reflect on–pretenders, simulacra with regard to the “art” of cinema. There has, of course, been some attention paid to them, as there has been to the genre of science fiction, in which the reasons for their being received a certain way are understood, acknowledged, and taken as an object of criticism. Often enough, this attention is paid in connection with Deleuze and certain Deleuzian concepts, because of the affinity the latter machinic assemblage has with the transformations of the body, spatiality, temporality, and the very idea of the human being represented in science fiction and its recent cinema.¹²

 

One figure, in several senses of the term, that recurs in science fiction film from the eighties is that of the cyborg, the cybernetic organism from science and science fiction, which is a “coupling” of machine and animal, and which provides, in the destabilization of the organic structure of the human being, a site for different sorts of becoming.¹³ The cyborg often appears as something monstrous–as it should be, since the intermeshing of human and machine defies a number of traditional oppositions (spirit/matter, life/death, among others)–and is seen, inscribed in Hollywood narrative codes, as incarnating something evil or potentially evil. The cyborg is usually violent; it is so in its essence, as it is the product of machinery making ruthless incisions into flesh. But evaluation should be disengaged from the prescriptive ideological systems that operate in the films, and offered the chance to present something that marks a fundamental transformation in the human being that may well have very progressive aspects. In their valorization of the simulacrum and their contestation of metaphysical oppositions, I would like to argue, these movies undermine the ideological systems in which they function. Since in every instance an effort is made at producing an identification between the point of view of the spectator and that of the cyborg, the violence of the human-machine relation (the cyborg relation–I would rather see the cyborg as a relation than as a thing or a unity) should be seen as a figuration of the violence of the everyday interface of human beings and technology, particularly televisual technology, that results in the imposition of the strictest of world pictures, the programmed redirection of desires, and an unprecedented hierarchization of the flesh.

 

In James Cameron’s The Terminator (1984), for example, the cyborg, played by an appropriately stony Arnold Schwarzenegger, is described as a “hyperalloy combat chassis” with human flesh “grown for the cyborgs” on the outside, produced by a machine intelligence whose purpose is to exterminate the human population. Ostensibly a simulacrum built for infiltration, this cyborg may be seen as a quaint metaphor for the human-machine relations the film’s dystopian vision depicts: human beings have allowed machinery to run them, until they are little more than pieces of flesh hanging on the periphery. But the intertwining of organism and machine is more complex and subtle¹⁴. It is by way of machinery–not as accessory or extension, but body part–that the Terminator will be defeated: Reese, the resistance fighter played by Michael Biehn, is sent back in time from the dark future (2029) to stop the Terminator’s mission, which is to kill Sarah Connor (Linda Hamilton), future mother of resistance leader John Connor, in contemporary Los Angeles. The time travel machinery (which Penley suggests is a kind of figure of the cinema [“Time Travel” 66]), then, not only is essential to the continuation of life–both the life of Reese, from 2029 to 1984, and that of humanity–but also enhances life, transforms it, turns it into something else by freeing it from the constraints of linear time (part of a system of determined mimesis).

 

The time travel machinery is explicitly connected to the cinematic apparatus through its use in the production of the narrative. Relying on a simple, standard Hollywood story, The Terminator removes the time of the narrative from the requirement of conformity to linear progression. The narrative moves, of course, toward a future: killing the Terminator, saving Sarah, during the course of the movie, and of course then saving humanity farther in the future. But it plays with the relationships of past, present, and future: the film uses a customary technique of flashing back, so that the past may be employed to endow the present with sense. But these are Reese’s flashbacks, and so are representations of the future; and this past is as malleable as the future, since saving Sarah would save the resistance movement through the preservation of its leader’s life. The same type of sense is derived from references to the past as from those to the future. In one sequence, a sound overlap is used for a cut from a junkyard in the present, in which a moving industrial vehicle is seen, to a similar vehicle in the future. The change is registered when the vehicle’s treads are seen rolling over skulls. But the sound overlap and the visual similarity work together to give the effect of a continuity between moments that would otherwise be discontinuous; and in the time sequence of Reese, the cut is to the past, while in “our” time sequence it is to the future. The machinery becomes the cinematic machinery, in its production of images bringing the past, the future, and the present to inhabit each other, their relations of causality, sense-determination, and even sequence transformed.

 

And later in the film the cyborg relation is seen as having a direct effect on the view of the spectators, both as violence and as creating the capacity to see the production of the restrictive images, exactly what the televisual apparatus would disallow. This sequence involves close-ups of the cyborg eye–several in a quickly cut succession–which has already been identified as participating in the viewer’s perspective, through a number of point-of-view shots done in “cybervision.”¹⁵ The Terminator’s sight is composed of red-tinted pixels, as though mediated by a television screen, as would be that of most of the spectators watching the film, with the advent of movie viewing on VCRs well established by 1984. The sequence is an evident reference to Un chien andalou:¹⁶ there is an extreme close-up of the eye as the cyborg cuts into it with an Exacto knife. Where Buñuel and Dali were concerned with a metaphor involving the cutting process of cinematic production, depicting it as a cutting into the viewing apparatus of the spectator, Cameron turns the image into that of a surgical machine incision. What is revealed beneath the human eye surface is a camera lens–moving around, microprocessor controlled, all-seeing, its aperture dilating and contracting. The cyborg cutting–identified with the cinematic/televisual apparatus–reveals and promotes the affinity between human and machine views.

 

The Terminator attempts to delineate what, in the present, would constitute a progressive cyborg relation–one that would have the effect of dehierarchizing the human body–and a repressive one. Deleuze and Guattari make a comparable distinction between types of bodies without organs, which may assist in understanding the different cyborg relations. The body without organs (BwO), it must be affirmed, “is not at all the opposite of the organs. The organs are not its enemies. The enemy is the organism. The BwO is opposed not to the organs but to that organization of the organs called organism” (Plateaus 158). The organism is a structure that hangs the organs on it as subordinated bits of flesh. And, further, the organism can destroy the body in its attempt at strict, hierarchical layering, which itself produces a kind of body without organs.

 

Take the organism as a stratum: there is indeed a BwO that opposes the organizations of the organs we call the organism, but there is also a BwO of the organism that belongs to that stratum. Cancerous tissue: each instant, each second, a cell becomes cancerous, mad, proliferates and loses its configuration, takes over everything; the organism must resubmit to its rule or restratify it, not only for its own survival, but also to make possible an escape from the organism, the fabrication of the “other” BwO on the plane of consistency. (162-163)

 

The globe-encompassing machinery itself of The Terminator, reproducing itself to no end, growing formless flesh to put on the mechanical frames, is akin to this second type of BwO, cancerous. And though, in the end, the human-machine relation seems to be sorted out with the “human” in the superior position–the film’s ideological inscription, or unreflective metaphysical determination, shows here–Cameron’s engagement of the cinematic apparatus in the exploration and deployment of the cyborg relation tends to weaken that hierarchy.

 

Another movie that plays with the double possibility of the cyborg relation, the body without organs, is Robocop (1987), directed by Paul Verhoeven, a filmmaker of Dutch origin who would set spending records after his arrival in Hollywood. Robocop is the first of his exclusively U.S. productions, and is lower budget, less afraid of transgressing Hollywood convention, and less ideologically entrenched than his subsequent efforts (Total Recall, Basic Instinct–though these too have a number of noteworthy qualities, in a rebarbative imbalance with their overt inscriptions). There are moments when Robocop engages in a detailed critique of the late-capitalist management of flesh, of the technocratic colonization of the human body–even though it seems to reaffirm the benevolent paternity of the corporate structure at the end, in keeping, one would suppose, with Verhoeven’s own position in the film industry.

 

The story concerns a Detroit police officer, Murphy (Peter Weller), who is brutally executed by criminals (whose own connections with and participation in the corporate structure is made patent–Verhoeven for the most part avoids the Manicheanism of traditional U.S. representations of illegality). He is mutilated, his right arm shot off by high-tech shotgun blasts, his legs destroyed, before being killed. His flesh, it turns out, fits right into the plans of the corporation–Omni Consumer Products (OCP), a caricature of Reagan-era privatization and malignant corporate growth–that has taken over the operation of the Detroit Police. The company will build a cyborg, made of machinery and Murphy’s remains. According to Bob Morton (Miguel Ferrer, with exquisite ruthlessness), the executive in charge of production, “We get the best of both worlds: the fastest reflexes modern technology has to offer, on-board computer-assisted memory, and a lifetime of on-the-street law-enforcement programming. It is my great pleasure to present to you–Robocop.” This bigger and better police officer is the result of already-existing company policies concerning human flesh. When it is being discussed whether the cyborg transformation should involve “total body prosthesis”–the complete subordination of the flesh to the machinery–one executive remarks, “He signed the release forms when he joined the force; he’s legally dead–we can do pretty much what we want to.” The creation of this law-enforcement product is presented as a continuation of the operation of the organized crime group–particularly when it is established that the group is directed by one of OCP’s top executives.

 

Robocop is, to an extreme degree, a cancerous body without organs, a “body of war and money” (Plateaus 163). The corporate extensions are evidently cancerous, with their proliferation into all areas of life (“Good business is where you find it”)–and the Robocop project even follows the failure of another law-enforcement device, a comically monstrous robot that in a display of corporate brutality kills an executive in the OCP boardroom during a demonstration gone awry. In this meeting, before the robot goes haywire, the CEO of OCP, the Old Man (Dan O’Herlihy), speaks of the “cancer” of crime–the very same processes, evidently, as those which move the corporation, which the corporation will turn against some of its own human elements. But through the engagement and mise-en-scène of the cinematic/televisual apparatus, the cancerous proliferation of images that Robocop depicts and participates in–its overtly stated appeal is “classic” Hollywood action–is undermined. There are a number of sequences done in “cybervision”–these are almost too unsubtly reminiscent of the TV screen, with their pixelated composition and the corner-inset flashbacks, the latter exactly like those on the news programs that constitute segments of the film’s narrative. Verhoeven goes out of his way to show the ties between this cyborg POV and the constitution of our own televisually mediated experience, as though the time lines of our lives, and the memories by which we narrate these time lines, were determined entirely by the editing of news program videotape.

 

The most interesting of these sequences is the one that effects a transition from Murphy’s point of view to that of Robocop–its time sequence is delimited by the cyborg’s machine functioning. It begins after Murphy’s execution, in a frantic urban emergency room, with attempts to revive him. The medical machinery already makes its incisions into his body, the technologization of the flesh quite under way before the event of the cyborg’s construction. The recurring shot is Murphy’s point of view, intercut with a reverse shot of his dead eyes. The camera participates directly in the cyborg relation: the gaze is dead, but still sees, indicating broader possibilities of life than those offered by the organic alone. This relation, instituted between the spectators and the image, is then placed inside the represented cyborg; the cyborg then becomes a figure of the cinematic/televisual apparatus. At the moment of Murphy’s death the screen goes black; the image begins to come back on, exactly as a TV screen would light up. It is clear that it is Robocop’s POV. The image disappears a few times, sometimes because of a technical error, sometimes because the cyborg is shut off, but we see and hear nothing that is not seen and heard by the cyborg: this includes conversations about him, in a very cinematic/televisual way, under the pretense that he (the camera and microphone) is not there.

 

In this interweaving of flesh and machinery that works through the characters on screen and at the same time cuts across the relation between the screen and the spectators, a subversive and transgressive BwO is produced, at least at certain moments in the film. As a point in the corporate grid of control, Robocop undergoes a type of individuation; there is no more unified consciousness for him, but rather the capacity to move in that grid and to form unanticipated linkages with other elements in the network. Though Robocop’s recovery of the identity “Murphy” is ideologically inscribed as a triumph of individualism, it may rather be seen as the affirmation of what Deleuze and Guattari call a “haecceity.”¹⁷ The production of a cyborg identity in the corporate structure gives way to the possibility for the subjected body to become something quite different.

 

This notion of becoming, through haecceity as a mode of individuation, involving transformations on the “molecular” level that do not allow for the persistence of the organic unity of the “molar” individual, is exemplified in the most viscerally horrific of this set of films, The Fly (1986). This movie was directed by David Cronenberg, a Canadian who, though often working with U.S. money, remains mostly in Toronto, deterritorializing the Hollywood system of production. The Fly is arguably one of the finest cinematic renditions of the Deleuzoguattarian concept of “becoming-animal,”¹⁸ as it involves the transformation of a man into a monstrous genetic hybrid of a human being and a housefly.¹⁹ A remake of an earlier Hollywood movie whose setting is Montreal, the distinctive feature of this version is that neither human being nor fly, in the process of teleportation that takes place on the molecular level, retains any trace of its composition as a molar entity. In the 1958 movie, two creatures result from the transference, a human being with a fly’s head and a fly with a human head; in Cronenberg’s, there is only one remaining, a multiplicity of various fly and human parts and characteristics.

 

The teleportation devices in this film–this set of films always produces images of flesh-altering machinery–are explicitly figures of electronic reproduction. In a conversation over lunch, the inventor, Seth Brundle (Jeff Goldblum), and the journalist, Ronnie Quafe (Geena Davis), compare the disgusting results of attempts to transport organic matter to what they are eating, fast food–an excellent example of a copy without an original. And when Brundle steps out of the telepod after successfully transporting himself, he remarks, “Is it live or is it Memorex?”–he repeats an advertising slogan that may be considered a hallmark phrase of the “precession of the simulacrum.” The telepods figure the valorization of the simulacrum, which also entails the essential transformation of the spatiotemporal coordinates in which mimesis, and the institution of molar entities as those constituting the nodes of reality, take place. Brundle’s purpose in creating the telepods is to overcome a phobia, that of being transported physically. From now on, movement will not be required to submit to the Cartesian grid of space; lines of motion will be valorized, freed from their subordination to fixed points; travel will more and more resemble the cuts of cinema and, to a greater extent, TV. Time will be transformed in that it won’t be measured according to movement, will no longer be constituted as the gap between two places. Brundle, becoming-simulacrum, becoming-image, ceases to be a molar entity: he is not a man but rather a becoming-animal.²⁰ He loses his scientist’s clear consciousness, his dominating subjectivity, and becomes a haecceity by way of this becoming-fly. He discovers what has happened to him through assistance from his computer–his scientific mind has always functioned in interface, through forming an assemblage, with the machinery–which prints its description of the event on its screen: “Fusion of Brundle and fly at molecular-genetic level.” At this level, the molecular plane of consistency, the organic being cannot retain its integrity, its molar composition, and must engage in becoming.

 

The body without organs that Brundle becomes (in the mutation his external organs fall off and his internal organs become useless) is, as in Robocop, one in which there is a fight between the cancerous and the productive kinds of BwO. But the possibility that these two could form an intersection, that the cancer might actually work toward a transformative productivity, is raised. Describing his mutation to Quafe, Brundle says that the fusion is showing itself as a “bizarre form of cancer.” Further along in the process of transformation, he terms his affliction “a disease with a purpose–maybe not such a bad disease after all”; he remarks that the disease “wants to turn me into something else, . . . something that never existed before.” We see here an instantiation of what Cronenberg terms a “creative cancer,” elaborated in a number of his works (Rodley 80).²¹ And though the transformation does end up being destructive–“Brundlefly” becomes violent, almost murders, and brings on its own death–the moments in which transformation becomes possible are of interest here. Cronenberg produces these images in the machinic assemblage of the cinematic apparatus: the molecular, machinic transformation is represented as a series of figures flashing across the computer screen, the latter shot in cutaway so that it fills the movie screen. Such an image of the computer screen is frequently used as an establishing shot for sequences in Brundle’s lab, as though, to follow the rhetoric of North American editing convention, it constituted and determined the space depicted in the assemblage of shots that compose the sequence. And there is an identification of the fly’s eye, belonging to the molecular transformation, and the machinery of cinema in the opening sequence: it is an unrecognizable image, the view from an insect’s composite eye, with the cinematic colors separated, movements discernible but not attributable to any entity, until it transforms and reveals itself to be a shot from the ceiling of the convention where Brundle and Quafe first meet and the unity of the narrative begins.

 

Other movies in this set show the cyborg coupling, the assemblage of machinery and human being that turns out to be machinic and thereby productive of becomings, molecular transformations, as being both repressive and transgressive. Ridley Scott’s Alien (1979), a British production and historically the first of the set, elaborates a relation of self and other in which self, combating other, cannot maintain integrity and must reveal to itself that it is a becoming, in a series and molecular relation with the other rather than in opposition to it. The alien–in constant mutation throughout the movie, at one point incubated in the guts of a human being, whom it subsequently destroys by disemboweling him in its “birth”–is placed in homologous relation with the human beings themselves in their spaceship. The computer that runs the ship–the consciousness that inhabits the machinery–is called “Mother,” and has a biological relation to the crew: they are “born” in its interior at the outset of the movie–the ship brings the crew into life, awakening them from their prolonged sleep in chambers that look like incubators. This “birth” sequence is preceded by a series of shots, moving down one corridor after another of the ship, figurative of endless machine intestines (Greenberg). The human-machine coupling, as well as the intestinal birth that will be reproduced later with the alien, suggest monstrosity, the elusion of pregiven forms and the bypassing of normal routes of genetic reproduction. The coupling is monstrous because it produces a cyborg relation and because it produces the film’s monster. But on the one hand, it limits life, and on the other extends it multidirectionally: the alien kills ruthlessly, but the relationship that Ripley (Sigourney Weaver), the crew’s one surviving member, reworks with the machinery is what provides the possibility of transgressing the limitations.

 

And in John Carpenter’s overlooked gem They Live (1988), the cyborg relation takes the form of the possibility of reprogramming, or even rewiring, the human brain. The movie begins as a critique of Reaganism, unusually stark for Hollywood of the period: it takes place in a very contemporary urban U.S., depicted of images borrowed from Depression-era cinema. John Ford’s The Grapes of Wrath (1940) and Preston Sturges’s Sullivan’s Travels (1941) are distinct references–the film announces its participation in an instituted system of representation.²² What becomes immediately evident is the disparity between the images of everyday life and those seen on numerous television screens. The narrative follows the main character, played by professional wrestler Roddy Piper, a nomadic member of the lumpenproletariat (who goes unnamed, but is identified in the credits as “Nada”: a movement without solid form, a haecceity), who, sleeping on the streets, settling in a camp for the homeless, cannot avoid exposure to electronic representations of extreme affluence. After suggestions of a proto-fascist police state, in which the poor are constantly under surveillance and attack, the movie reveals its surprise: none of what anyone is seeing is real, since a signal is transmitted directly into the brain, by a TV broadcasting company, to construct perception. Everything looks quite “normal,” when quite a lot is wrong: the film’s dramatization bears on the capacity of simulated images to declare themselves as real, and thus exclude the production of alternative images.

 

What turns out to be the case, when “Nada” gains the capacity to see, is that there has been an alien invasion, the earth is being exploited, treated as “their third world.” In the simulacrum-world, the aliens look like human beings; they maintain a social hierarchy through control of corporations, recruiting human collaborators through a proliferation of consumerism. And the “reality” of the consumerist images that “Nada” sees is a shock: instead of advertising’s pretty pictures, he sees a bombardment of blatant commands. “Marry and reproduce” is the “real” content of an ad depicting a woman on the beach; “Stay asleep,” “Do not question authority,” and other messages appear regularly; money becomes white sheets of paper with the words “This is your God” printed across it. The urban landscape, with such phrases plastered across it, are an evident reference to Barbara Kruger’s collages: their ugliness and blatancy, in continual interference with seeing, uncannily calls attention to the functioning of a society of consumption. It is the “society of the spectacle” in which nothing may be seen that isn’t preconfigured in a determined system.

 

Though the distinction that They Live makes between the simulacrum-world and the “real” one may at first sight seem to be a simple dualism, the relation is more complicated. “Nada” is able to engage in resistance by transforming the destructive cyborg relation into a productive, machinically transgressive one. The apparatus with which he discovers the simulation is a pair of dark glasses, manufactured and distributed by the underground movement. Wearing them he can see the aliens and the commands. But these “real” images are themselves constructed: besides being a visual pun on the “society of the spectacle(s),” the glasses are borrowed from 1950s 3-D movie viewing²³–the image looks more “real” because it is more faked. And the “real” world appears in black and white, reminiscent of both classic science fiction cinema and the television of the same period. This world is just as much a construction, an assemblage of images taken from instituted systems of representation, just as much a simulacrum; but it is the simulacrum that breaks the hold of the image that declares itself to be real. It does this through “Nada’s” nomadic practice of transformation, becoming-machine. Putting the glasses on also then becomes a figure for the act of going to see this “B” science fiction movie, a construction of images by which the constructed nature of the images of everyday life, determined by mechanisms of economic and social repression, is revealed.

 

A similar problematic is explored in the film from this set that treats most thoroughly the concepts I have introduced, a film to which Carpenter gives a number of admiring nods, Cronenberg’s Videodrome (1982).²⁴ This movie also concerns the transmission of a mind-altering signal. The target is Civic TV, a Toronto cable operation that specializes in sex and violence; the signal would induce hallucinations in the viewer, as part of a global conspiracy by a multinational called Spectacular Optical. “We make inexpensive glasses for the Third World and missile guidance systems for NATO,” says Barry Convex (Les Carlson) to Max Renn (James Woods), manager of Civic TV and the guinea pig for the Videodrome signal. The company, as it were bringing the world into focus, has interests in spectacles, the spectacle, and domination through representation: its interest in Civic TV derives from the station’s transmissions of sexual violence because of their capacity to initiate a cutting into the spectator’s perceptual apparatus. Max finds himself cut into, after several days of watching the “Videodrome” tapes: in front of the television, his face lit by the flicker of the screen (in the movie all images seem in one way or another generated by TV), he discovers a new orifice in his abdomen. He assumes the position of spectator to the horrific corporeal transformation to which he is subject: the opening is distinctively vaginal, but it also functions, according to the traditional masculine viewpoint identified by psychoanalysis, as a wound, a phantasm of the castration anxiety. But this initial coding of the orifice is reconfigured; just as Deleuze and Guattari suggest that Freud’s characterization of the castration anxiety results from a molar conception of the human body, and that rethinking the latter as a machinic assemblage may give way to a release from the limitations of strict sexual division,²⁵ Max is able to give way to the transformation and engage in a productive becoming-woman. He is not losing his body, but becoming a body without organs; he is losing his molar composition as a man, a dominant male, the integrated subject of the spectacle.

 

His transformation is molecular: as in The Fly, it is the effect of a “creative cancer.” The Videodrome signal induces a brain tumor, which will become “a new organ, . . . a new outgrowth of the human brain,” according to media theorist Professor Brian O’Blivion (Jack Creley) who only appears as a televisual image. This freely acting organ–the organic composition of the body is losing its grip–will allow hallucination, or, as it turns out to be the case, the production of simulacra such that the hold of instituted reality ceases to be viable, reveals itself to be the ruse of a simulacrum. And the transformation is machinic, occurring when Max engages in a coupling with his video equipment: in a bizarre sequence the TV screen bears the image of his lover, Nicki Brand (Deborah Harry), first her face and then just her mouth in enormous proportion, as the VCR displays the contours and motions of desirous flesh. Neither the VCR nor Nicki, in their merging, are organically female, with the multiple machine parts functioning as all manner of sexual organs whose molar gender specificity has been dislocated. Max moves toward the large, open mouth, as it gives him “head,” transforming his head as well as his other organs in this machinic assemblage.

 

In the mutation, Max spends some time as a product of the corporate engineering, a cancerous BwO whose control he is completely under. His new orifice also functions as a video slot–in the completely passive position, forced open, in which the shows his station runs would place the female sexual organs–so that he may be “programmed” by Spectacular Optical to eradicate the opposition, a movement directed by Bianca O’Blivion, the daughter of the media image. But his transformation advances as he reconfigures the machinery, activating the creative and transgressive aspects of the cancer: the program becomes the destruction of the repressive force, Spectacular Optical–Max turns the corporation’s own weapons against it, using the gun he had obtained in company service.

 

Videodrome‘s violence is troubling, its mutilated bodies often seeming to be equivalent to those represented in Civic TV’s programming, gratuitous. However, the idea of violent death undergoes a reconfiguration at the end of the movie, when Max turns the gun against his own head, a final transgression of the limits imposed by the organic composition of the body. At the sound of the shot the screen goes black; the credits run, marking the film’s own limit, the end of its possibilities of representation.²⁶ After considering several possible endings that would show Max after this “death,” which becomes a transformation of life, Cronenberg opted for this one as the best (Rodley 97). Its effect is to affirm an incapacity to depict what is effectively the end of a metaphysical system, the becoming of the body without organs, within a system of cinematic and televisual representation that is still quite infected with mimesis, by the simulacrum that excludes the production of simulacra. Such a cinema can go to the limit, and can show the limit, but cannot yet move to the intertwining and coinhabitation of thought and matter, the liberation of the image from its Platonic determination. Its indirect presentation, its “presenting the unpresentable,” which by all means leaves a feeling of incompleteness at the end, also resists a recuperation by the forces that would subordinate the image to mimesis and, through a limitation of the possibilities of thought, promote a complete spectator passivity.

Notes

 

1.Foucault, “Theatrum Philosophicum” 166. Translation slightly modified.

 

2.Deleuze, Cinema 2 280: “[Philosophical theory] is a practice of concepts, and it must be judged in the light of the other practices with which it interferes. A theory of cinema is not ‘about’ cinema, but about the concepts that cinema gives rise to and which are themselves related to other concepts corresponding to other practices, the practice of concepts in general having no privilege over others, anymore than one object has over others.”

 

3.Marie-Claire Ropars-Wuilleumier suggests of these books–and this could be said of all of Deleuze’s writing: “In the form of organization they adopt–that of non-linearity–and in the conceptual order they engage–that of divided thought–the two books defy any synthesis other than a disjunctive one. And even this sort of synthesis might betray an exposition that takes the form of a becoming” (120).

 

4.In a 1967 essay entitled “Plato and the Simulacrum,” which appears as an appendix to the 1969 Logic of Sense.

 

5.Deleuze and Guattari, Plateaus 256: “This is not animism, any more than it is mechanism; rather, it is universal machinism: a plane of consistency occupied by an immense abstract machine comprising an infinite number of assemblages.”

 

6.It is this determination of representation that Heidegger sees occurring with Descartes, as the culmination of western metaphysics, following groundwork laid by the Greeks. The latter is evident in Plato’s designation as eidos, something seen, of the ideal form that determines the being of a thing (131 and 143-147).

 

7.Leibniz elaborates this concept in the Théodicée, 414-416.

 

8.A treatment of the idea of incompossibility that Deleuze gives in his recent book on Leibniz may be of interest here: “Leibniz innovates when he invokes a profoundly original relation among all possible worlds. By stating that it is a great mystery buried in God’s understanding, Leibniz gives the new relation the name of incompossibility. We discover that we are in a dilemma of seeking the solution to a Leibnizian problem under the conditions that Leibniz has established: we cannot know what God’s reasons are, nor how he applies them in each case, but we can demonstrate that he possesses some of them, and what their principle may be” (The Fold 59-60).

 

9.Deleuze acknowledges Jacques Derrida’s closely related work on writing as simulacrum in Plato, its being viewed as a threat to the paternal order of the transmission of the Logos, in “La Pharmacie de Platon”; Logic 361:2.

 

10.I purposely use the term that Foucault chooses to describe the exclusion of madness by a restrictive and tyrannical reason–of a certain production of phantasms by institutional order–at the outset of modernity, in Histoire de la folie, 56-59 (this section, on Descartes, does not appear in the abridged English translation, Madness and Civilization); I wish to mark the phenomenon I am describing as a repetition of that event.

 

11.Cinema 2 265: “The electronic image, that is, the tele and video image, the numerical image coming into being, either had to transform cinema or to replace it, to mark its death.”

 

12.Most notably: see Bukatman, “Postcards from the Posthuman Solar System,” and “Who Programs You?”; and Stivale, “Mille/Punks/Cyber/Plateaus.”

 

13.I am, of course, bringing in Donna Haraway’s notion of the cyborg, from her 1984 “A Cyborg Manifesto.”

 

Stivale is very interested in possible rapprochements between Haraway’s idea of the cyborg and various Deleuzoguattarian concepts, such as the “machinic” and the “body without organs.”

 

14.Constance Penley goes into some detail on the ambiguities of the human-machine relations in the film in her “Time Travel, Primal Scene, and the Critical Dystopia.”

 

15.The term is Cameron’s, from the script.

 

16.Cameron, as well as a number of the other directors I will consider, is fairly liberal with references, to both film and television history. His purpose is one that, after the New Wave, may be called a traditional cinematic one: to call attention to the fact that this sequence of images is part of a coded system of representation. The practice becomes quite interesting, though, when it is coupled with representations of the technological production of images, and when the cinematic references are adapted to comment specifically on the electronic age, as in this sequence.

 

17.Plateaus 261: “A season, a winter, a summer, an hour, a date have a perfect individuality lacking nothing, even though this individuality is different from that of a thing or a subject. They are haecceities in the sense that they consist entirely of relations of movement and rest between molecules or particles, capacities to affect and be affected.”
See also Stivale 71-72.

 

18.For elaborations on molar unities and molecular transformations, as well as on becoming-animal, see Plateaus, ch. 10, “1730: Becoming-Intense, Becoming-Animal, Becoming-imperceptible,” 232-309.

 

19.Cronenberg’s own term for the genre that The Fly delineates is “metaphysical horror” (Rodley 134).

 

20.Plateaus 292: “There is no becoming-man because man is the molar entity par excellence.”

 

21.This intersection or hybrid of two types of BwO would seem to be a transformation of the concept put forth by Deleuze and Guattari; they speak of the “dangers” and the necessary “precautions” involved in the fabrication of the BwO, since there is the possibility of “cancerous tissue” (Plateaus 162-163). But we should also be cautious about making such a clear-cut distinction in their concept: they speak of a cancer cell as becoming “mad,” a term that cannot be separated from the various critical works on the history of psychiatry, mental illness, and insanity (especially Foucault’s), which designates, in one way or another, the proliferation of phantasms or simulacra as well as the latter’s repression. The cancer cell may transgress the organic composition of the “healthy” cell–the transformations the cell undergoes in its submission to the hierarchy may give way to its capacity to be productive, creative.

 

22.See note 16.

 

23.A later U.S. edition of Guy Debord’s manifesto has as its cover photo the image of a crowd wearing 3-D glasses.

 

24.The remarks that follow derive from a paper that I co-wrote with Larry Shillock, delivered at the 1992 MMLA convention in St. Louis, entitled “Cronenberg’s Videology.” I would like to add now that I owe many of the observations on the films in the present paper to lengthy viewing sessions and discussions with Larry over the last few years.

 

25.Plateaus 256: “When Little Hans talks about a ‘peepee-maker,’ he is referring not to an organ or an organic function but basically to a material, in other words, to an aggregate whose elements vary according to its connections, its relations of movement and rest, the different individuated assemblages it enters. Does a girl have a peepee-maker? The boy says yes, and not by analogy, nor in order to conjure away a fear of castration. It is obvious that girls have a peepee-maker because they effectively pee: a machinic functioning rather than an organic function. Quite simply, the same material has different connections, different relations of movement and rest, enters different assemblages in the case of the boy and the girl (a girl does not pee standing or into the distance). Does a locomotive have a peepee-maker? Yes, in yet another machinic assemblage. Chairs don’t have them: but that is because the elements of the chair were not able to integrate this material into their relations, or decomposed the relation with that material to the point that it yielded something else, a rung, for example.”

 

26.Bukatman, “Postcards” 353-354: “Wren [sic] may in fact be approaching the Body without Organs when he fires at his temple, but that’s precisely the point at which the film has to end. This re-embodying is inconceivable: even the imagination can only approach its condition.

 

Works Cited

 

(For the French texts that I cite, the translation is in each case mine. –H. M.)

 

• Alien. Dir. Ridley Scott. Brandywine, 1979.
• Bensmaïa, Réda. “Un philosophe au cinéma.” Magazine Littéraire 257 (1988), 57-59.
• Bergson, Henri. Matter and Memory. Trans. Nancy Margaret Paul and W. Scott Palmer. London: Allen & Unwin, 1911.
• Bogue, Ronald. “Word, Image and Sound: The Non-Representational Semiotics of Gilles Deleuze.” Mimesis, Semiosis and Power. Ed. Ronald Bogue. Mimesis in Contemporary Theory: An Interdisciplinary Approach 2. Philadelphia: John Benjamins, 1991, 77-97.
• Bukatman, Scott. “Postcards from the Posthuman Solar System.” Science Fiction Studies 55 (1991), 343-357.
• —. “Who Programs You? The Science Fiction of the Spectacle.” Alien Zone: Cultural Theory and Contemporary Science Fiction. Ed. Annette Kuhn. New York: Verso, 1990, 196-213.
• Debord, Guy. The Society of the Spectacle. Detroit: Black and Red, 1983.
• Deleuze, Gilles. Cinema 1. Trans. Hugh Tomlinson and Barbara Habberjam. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1986.
• —. Cinema 2. Trans. Hugh Tomlinson and Robert Galatea. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1989.
• —. The Fold. Trans. Tom Conley. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1993.
• —. “Plato and the Simulacrum.” The Logic of Sense. Trans. Mark Lester and Charles Stivale. New York: Columbia UP, 1990, 253-266.
• Deleuze, Gilles and Félix Guattari. Qu est-ce que la philosophie? Paris: Minuit, 1991.
• —. A Thousand Plateaus. Trans. Brian Massumi. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1987.
• Derrida, Jacques. “La Pharmacie de Platon.” La Dissémination. Paris: le Seuil, 1972, 69-197.
• Douglass, Paul. “Deleuze and the Endurance of Bergson.” Thought 67 (March 1992), 47-61.
• Fly, The. Dir. David Cronenberg. Brooksfilms, 1986.
• Foucault, Michel. L’Archéologie du savoir. Paris: Gallimard, 1969.
• —. Histoire de la folie à l’âge classique. Paris: Gallimard, 1972.
• —. “Theatrum Philosophicum.” Language, Countermemory, Practice. Ed. Donald F. Bouchard, Trans. Donald F. Bouchard and Sherry Simon. Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1977, 165-196. Greenberg, Harvey R., M.D. “Remaining the Gargoyle: Psychoanalytic Notes on Alien.” Close Encounters: Film, Feminism, and Science Fiction. Ed. Constance Penley et al. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1991, 83-104.
• Haraway, Donna. “A Cyborg Manifesto.” Simians, Cyborgs, and Women: The Reinvention of Nature. New York: Routledge, 1991, 149-181.
• Heidegger, Martin. “The Age of the World Picture.” The Question Concerning Technology and Other Essays. Trans. William Lovitt. New York: Harper and Row, 1977, 115-154.
• Lyotard, Jean-Francois. “Que peindre?” Interview with Bernard Macade. Art Press 125 (mai 1988), 42-45.
• Penley, Constance. “Time Travel, Primal Scene, and the Critical Dystopia.” Close Encounters: Film, Feminism, and Science Fiction. Ed. Constance Penley et al. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1991, 64-6.
• Robocop. Dir. Paul Verhoeven. Orion, 1987.
• Rodley, Chris, Ed. Cronenberg on Cronenberg. London and Boston: Faber and Faber, 1992.
• Ropars-Wuilleumier, Marie-Claire. “The Cinema, Reader of Gilles Deleuze.” Trans. Dana Polan. Camera Obscura 18 (1988), 120-126.
• Stivale, Charles. “Mille/Punks/Cyber/Plateaus: Science Fiction and Deleuzo-Guattarian Becomings.” SubStance 66 (1991), 66-84.
• Terminator, The. Dir. James Cameron. Hemdale, 1984.
• They Live. Dir. John Carpenter. Alive Films, 1988.
• Videodrome. Dir. David Cronenberg. Filmplan International, 1982.

 

 

Charles Shepherdson

Department of English
University of Missouri at Columbia

 

The entrance into world by beings is primal history [Urgeschichte] pure and simple. From this primal history a region of problems must be developed which we today are beginning to approach with greater clarity, the region of the mythic.

 

–Heidegger, The Metaphysical Foundations of Logic¹

 

The Oedipus myth is an attempt to give epic form to the operation of a structure.

 

–Lacan, Television²

 

By the madness which interrupts it, a work of art opens a void, a moment of silence, a question without answer, provokes a breach without reconciliation where the world is forced to question itself.

 

–Foucault, Madness and Civilization³

 

The historicity proper to philosophy is located and constituted in the transition, the dialogue between hyperbole and finite structure, between that which exceeds the totality and the closed totality, in the difference between history and historicity.

 

–Derrida, “Cogito and the History of Madness”⁴

 

Satire

 

In spite of the difference between English and Continental philosophy, there is a link between Foucault and writers like Swift, as there was between Nietzsche and Paul Rée: “The first impulse to publish something of my hypotheses concerning the origin of morality,” Nietzsche says, “was given to me by a clear, tidy and shrewd–also precocious–little book in which I encountered for the first time an upside-down and perverse species of genealogical hypothesis, the genuinely Engl ish type . . . The Origin of the Moral Sensations; its author Dr. Paul Rée” (emphasis mine).⁵ Taking this upside-down and perverse English type as a starting point, let us begin with the strange tale by Jonathan Swift.⁶

 

At the end of Gulliver’s Travels, after returning from his exotic and rather unexpected voyage to the land of the Houyhnhnms, where the horses are so wise and discourse so eloquently, while humans sit up in the trees throwing food at eac h other and defecating on themselves, our poor traveller goes back to his homeland, where he is so dislocated that he cannot even embrace his wife or laugh with his friends at the local pub (being “ready to faint at the very smell” of such a creature, tho ugh finally able “to treat him like an animal which had some little portion of reason”); and in this state of distress, he goes out to the stable and sits down with the horses, thinking that maybe he will calm down a bit, if only he can learn to whinny an d neigh.

 

In Swift, how is it that this voyage to the land of the Houyhnhnms and Yahoos is not simply an amusing story about some ridiculous foreign land? How is it that this “topsy-turvy world,” this inverted world (die verkehrte Welt), where horses d isplay the highest virtue and humans are regarded with disgust because they are so filthy and inarticulate–how is it that this is not merely an amusing departure from reality, an entertaining fiction, but also a revelation of the fact that our own world, the world of reality, is itself inverted, already an absurd fiction, a place where human beings are already disgusting irrational filthy inarticulate and comical creatures, worthy only of satirical derision? How is it that the inverted image turns out t o reflect back upon the real one–that what begins as the very reverse of our normal world, an absurd, excessive, and foreign place, a world of science fiction, where madmen wander freely in the streets and objects in nature are inscribed with strange ins ignias, written on their surfaces by god, turns out to be both foreign and yet also a picture, both exotic and yet precisely a mirroring of our own world, by which we are brought to see ourselves?

 

This is a question of fiction and truth, but it is also a question of history, a question concerning genealogy. How is it that genealogy, which wanders around in what is most distant and unfamiliar–not the old world where we recognize ourselves, fi nding continuity with our ancestors, but a strange and unfamiliar land–turns out to be, at the same time, an account of our own world, a history of the exotic that is also our own history?

 

Before we turn to the historical aspect of the question, let us stay a moment with the problem of fiction. For the exotic tale told by Swift captures the problem art posed for Plato: the problem is not that art produces an illusion, that it is merel y a copy of what already exists in reality, or even a deranged, imaginary substitute; the problem is rather that art rebounds upon the world, that it discloses a dimension of truth beyond immediate reality, a truth that competes with what Plato regarded a s the proper object of philosophy. As Lacan says, “The picture does not compete with the appearance, it competes with what Plato designates as beyond appearance, as the Idea.”⁷ In the artistic competition, it is not the still life of Zeuxis that wins the prize, a work so accomplished that even the birds come down to peck at the imaginary grapes; it is rather the veil of Parrhasios, the illusion painted so perfectly that Zeuxis, upon seeing it, asks Parrhasios to remove this veil so that he may see the painting of his competitor. This is the difference between the level of the imaginary and the level of desire. The function of art is to incite its viewer to ask what is beyond. Art is the essence of tr uth: it leads us not “to see,” as Lacan would put it, but “to look.” For the human animal is blind in this respect, that it cannot simply see, but is compelled to look behind the veil, driven, Freud would say, beyond the pleasure of seeing. This is where we find the split between the eye and the gaze that Lacan takes from Merleau-Ponty. This is where the symbolic aspect of art emerges, as distinct from its imaginary dimension. And it is here that the question of true and false ima ges must be replaced with a question about language.

 

If we return now to satire, it is clear that at one level, the satirical, inverted picture of the world, in which everything is rendered in an excessive form, may well evoke our laughter and entertain us, but the true function of satire, as a form of art that is also a political act, must be situated at another level, where the inverted image rebounds upon the so-called normal world, and shows that this world is itself already inverted. At the first level, we have an illusion, the false reality of a rt that distracts us from the truth, like a distorted mirror-image that captivates us while alienating us from reality; at the second level, we have an image that, precisely because of its unreal character, shows us that there is no reality, that reality itself is already an inverted image in which we are not at home. This is where the image goes beyond a picture, true or false, mimetically accurate or surrealistically bizarre; this is where art has to be understood, not in terms of the imaginary and rea lity, but in its symbolic function, its function as representation. The implication is that as long as we remain content with a discussion of the image and reality, fiction and truth, we will in effect repress the question of language.

 

The Place of Enunciation

 

Let us now pass from satire to consider the historical issue, the problem of how these stories that Foucault constructs for us (the strange laboratory of Doctor Caligari or the fantastic clinic of Boissier de Sauvages), however distant and unfamiliar , operate neither as “mere” fiction, nor simply as truth, neither as an entertaining disclosure of strange practices long ago forgotten, nor as a compilation of facts about the past, but rather by rebounding upon us, to show us who we are for the first ti me, as if in spite of everything these bizarre images were portraits of ourselves. In an interview from 1984, François Ewald asks, “Why turn your attention to those periods, which, some will say, are so very far from our own?” Foucault replies: ” I set out from a problem expressed in current terms today, and I try to work out its genealogy. Genealogy means that I begin my analysis from a question posed in the present.”⁸

 

With this remark, Foucault stresses the fact that the position of enunciation, the point from which he speaks, is always explicitly thematized in his works. This feature gives his writings a dimension that can only be obscured if one views them as a neutral, descriptive documentation of the past (history), or as an attempt to construct a grand methodological edifice (theory). This is the point at which Foucault’s work touches on something th at does not belong to history, or even to philosophy, something we might speak of as fiction. “If philosophy is memory, or a return of the origin,” Foucault writes, “what I am doing cannot, in any way, be regarded as philosophy; and if the history of tho ught consists in giving life to half-effaced figures, what I am doing is not history either.”⁹ This is also the point at which we may understand his work as a kind of action, what Foucault calls a “making of di fferences.”

 

The New Historicism, which often views Foucault’s work as revealing the specificity of various historical formations, without appealing to grand narratives of continuous emergence, or to universal notions (of “humanity” or “sex” or “justice”), nevert heless also regards his work as an effort at knowledge (rather than as a practice). If Foucault’s work is taken as a form of historicism, by which the real strangeness and diversity of historical formations is revealed (and, to be sure, this captures one aspect of his work), such a view nevertheless subscribes to the idea that his work is a variety of historical knowledge, which aims at the truth about the past: which is to say (A) a truth that is partial, no doubt, and elabor ated from within a historical perspective, but that still shows us what was previously hidden, like any form of hermeneutics (the secret normalization being installed under the guise of “liberal” institutions such as psychiatry, or the modern judic ial system), and at the same time (B) a truth about the past, since it is always a question, in this perspective, of re-reading the archive, a question of historical knowledge, knowledge that is bound to the past since, according to the ofte n-quoted position, the archaeologist can by definition have no knowledge of his own archive, and thus cannot address the truth about his own discursive arrangement. Given this virtually canonical stress upon the “historicist” aspect of Foucault’s work, w hich is thought to reveal the contingent moment in which things are given a historically specific form, one might take pause at Foucault’s remarks in The Archaeology of Knowledge: “My discourse,” he writes,

 

does not aim to dissipate oblivion, to rediscover in the depth of things the moment of their birth (whether this is seen as their empirical creation, or the transcendental act that gives them origin); it does not set out to be a recollection of the original or a memory of truth. On the contrary, its task is to make differences. (205, original emphasis)

 

There are in fact two separate questions here. First, how are we to construe the relation between the present and the past? For if history traditionally represents itself as a neutral recounting of the past, at the level of knowledge, Foucault by c ontrast, however much he may insist upon the documentary and empirical nature of his work, nevertheless also emphasizes that the work is not written from the standpoint of eternity, as a knowledge or representation that would have no place of birth, but r ather has an origin of its own, in the present. What is the function of memory in genealogy, if it is not simply the recollection of the past, in the name of information or knowledge? With this question, we come close to the psychoanalytic problem of me mory: what does it mean to say that in dredging up the past, repeating it, going back across the river to where the ancestors lie buried, one is concerned, not so much with what really happened–with what Leopold von Ranke called “the past as it really wa s in itself”–but rather with intervening, rewriting the past, producing a shift in the symbolic structure of the narrative that has brought us to the point where we are now?¹⁰ As is often said, Freud’s disco very concerning the symbolic nature of the symptom also meant that he had to shift his focus–to abandon his initial and “realist” interest in getting the patient to remember exactly what had happened, and to recognize instead that fantasy was every bit a s real as reality. This is why it is correct to say that psychoanalysis begins with the displacement of the theory of trauma. With this displacement, Freud abandons the idea that the primal scene is a real event that took place in historical time, and r ecognizes instead that the trauma has the structure of myth, and that human history as such differs from natural, chronological time, precisely to the extent that it is subject to myth.

 

This first question about genealogical memory and the relation between the present and the past is consequently linked to a second question about truth and fiction. How are we to understand the peculiar duality in Foucault’s work–the patient, archi val research, the empiricist dedication, and on the other hand his continual assertions that he has never written anything but fictions? Can we genuinely accept both of these features without eliminating one? In fact Foucault believes that the standard histories are the product of institutions that write grand narratives culminating in the discoveries of the present, tales of the gradual emergence of truth and reason. These histories, according to Foucault, are false, and can be replaced with a more ac curate account by the genealogist, who is not seduced by the mythology of a prevailing narrative.

 

But what are we then to make of his claim that he has never written anything but fiction? Is it simply a stylish, French gesture that forms part of the public image of Foucault, a rhetorical aside that has no serious philosophical weight? To say th is would be to refuse the statement, not to take it seriously. Or does the remark simply mean that he knows he might not have all his facts straight, and that one day someone may find it necessary to improve his account, in short, that his account is tru e but contingent, or true but written from a perspective? To say this would be to remain within the arena of knowledge, in which a “relativism” is endorsed that covertly maintains the very commitment to truth which it seems to overcome, by admitting that it is “only a perspective,” while simultaneously insisting upon a rigorous adherence to documentary evidence that tells the truth better than the grand narratives of the received history. What is this vacillation that makes genealogy neither an operatio n of knowledge, a true (or at least “more true”) account of the past, nor simply a fable, a distorted image, an entertaining but bizarre representation of a time that is foreign to us? If we ask about the nature of genealogical knowledge, the fiction tha t genealogy is, how can we distinguish it from this dichotomy between the imaginary and the true? Once again, it is a question of language, a question that cannot be resolved at the imaginary level, by appeal to the dialectical interplay of image and rea lity.

 

Foucault touches here on the very structure we find in Swift, whereby the function of satire is not simply to create a strange and unfamiliar world, but rather to return, to rebound upon the present, such that the real world is shown to be itself a p arody. Slavoj Zizek explains the shift from the imaginary to the symbolic in the following way, arguing that we will only misconstrue the relation between the image and reality if we attempt to resolve it dialectically (by showing that the image and real ity are interwoven, that the image is a fiction that nevertheless rebounds upon the true world with formative effects, as Hegel shows in the Aesthetics). For there is a point at which the relation between the distorted image and the real thi ng becomes unstable, beyond all dialectical mediation, a point at which, moreover, it loses the generative force that is given in the concept of productive negation. The fact that the inverted image turns out not to be an inversion, but to reveal that the normal world is itself already inverted, calls into question the very standard of “normality” by which one might measure invertedness.¹¹ Freud says something similar about hallucination when he elabo rates the concept of “the reality principle.” According to the usual, “adaptive” view of analysis, the analyst seeks to replace the patient’s “delusions” by adjusting the client to “reality.” The patient’s “narcissism” and the ego’s pleasure principle a re thus opposed to the “reality principle.” But Lacan stresses that, contrary to the usual interpretation, Freud’s “reality principle” is not simply opposed to the pleasure principle, as a “pre-linguistic” domain (the “external world”). On the co ntrary, “reality” is the strict counterpart of the ego, and is constructed as much as the ego is, though not in exactly the same way. Thus, “reality” is not simply opposed to the realm of delusion or hallucination, but constituted through t he formation of the “pleasure principle.” Consequently, as Freud himself discovered, analytic technique must abandon the aim of “adjusting the patient to reality,” and the entire framework which sets the “imaginary” against the “real”: it is not by means of shock therapy or behavior modification or any other adaptive technique (which are all governed by a certain conception of “reality”), nor through any “reality-testing,” that one modifies a hallucination or fantasy; on the contrary, it is only t hrough a symbolic action that the mutually constitutive relation between the “imaginary” and the “real” can be realigned.¹² This is why Lacan spoke of analysis as a way of working on the real by symbolic mean s.¹³

 

To understand the relation between the imaginary and reality when it is regarded from the standpoint of the symbolic, consider the example of Adorno’s remarks on totalitarian authority. How does the liberal individual, the free, authentic moral subj ect, stand in relation to the oppressive totalitarian dictator (the figure parodied by Charlie Chaplin)? According to Martin Jay, Adorno described the typical authoritarian personality by reversing all the features of the bourgeois individual: as Zizek puts it, “instead of tolerating difference and accepting non-violent dialogue as the only means to arrive at a common decision, the [totalitarian] subject advocates violent intolerance and distrust in free dialogue; instead of critically examining e very authority, this subject advocates uncritical obedience of those in power” (slightly modified).¹⁴ From one standpoint–what one might call standpoint of “realism,” the imaginary level where reality is bro ught face to face with its distorted image–these two are in complete opposition, mutually opposed ideals charged with all the pathos and investment of realist urgency; but from the standpoint of satire, from the standpoint of fiction, which asks about re presentation itself, the authoritarian personality reflects its image back onto the bourgeois democratic subject, and is revealed as already contained there, as the truth of the liberal individual, its constitutive other–or, to put it differently, its common origin.

 

This common origin is at play in Madness and Civilization, when Foucault speaks of the peculiar moment when madness and reason first come to be separated from one another, and are shown to have a common birth. This raises a question about history, for Foucault seems to suggest that the common origin of madness and reason is always concealed by historical narrative. The usual history of madness is a discourse of reason on madness, a discourse in which reason has already established itself as the measure, the arena within which madness will appear; it is therefore a history in which madness is relegated to silence. As a result, th e standard history, according to Foucault, is one in which a separation between madness and reason has already occurred, thereby concealing their original relation. Derrida stresses this point when he cites Foucault’s own remark that “the necessity of madness is linked to the possibility of history”: history itself would seem to arise only insofar as a separation has been made between madness and reason. To go back to their common origin would thus be not simply to aim at writing history, but also to raise a question concerning the very possibility of history.¹⁵ This would be, as Derrida puts it, “the maddest aspect of Foucault’s work.”16

 

Thus, the peculiar identity which links the liberal individual with the obscene and tyrannical force of fascism must be disavowed, and the best form of disavowal is narrative: what is in fact an original unity, a structural relation linking th e Reign of Terror with the rise of free democracy and the Rights of Man, is best concealed by a genetic narrative, in which the original condition is said to be one of pure freedom, liberty, fraternity and equality, an ideal which eventually comes to be corrupted by a degenerate or perverted form. In this case–what we might call the case of realism, the imaginary level where the true reality is set over against its distorted image–we would be tempted to denounce the authoritarian personal ity as an extreme distortion of the natural order of things, by measuring this degenerate form against the liberal, democratic individual; we would seek a return to the origin, before it was contaminated by the tyrannical violence of a degenerate form; bu t in the second case, when we see with the eye of the satirist who recognizes that the natural order of things is already a parody, we have to recognize that the supposedly natural state of things, the normal, liberal individual who has “natural rights” a nd a native capacity for moral reflection, is itself already inverted, that it contains the totalitarian authority in its origins, not as its opposite, not as its contradiction, not as its degenerate or perverted form, but as its repressed foundation, its internal “other.”¹⁷ In Lacanian terms, the first relation of aggressive, mirroring opposition (in which the communist and the democrat face off) is imaginary, whereas the second relation (in which they are m utually constitutive) is symbolic, which means that it can only be grasped at the level of language, and not by a return to some mythical origin–the liberation of our supposedly innate but repressed libido, or the restoration of our so-called “natural” d emocratic rights.

 

The point here is not simply to dwell on the purportedly shocking revelation concerning the symptomatic link–what one might call the equiprimordiality–of totalitarianism and democracy, but rather to show that the ideal of the liberal individual (wh ose right to freedom is accompanied by an inborn capacity for tolerance, and whose healthy conscience is the sign of an innate moral disposition, and so on), is a construction whose supposedly natural status is a fiction. This amounts to dismantling the idea that totalitarian governments are a secondary formation, the corruption of an origin, or the perversion of what would otherwise be a natural system of equally distributed justice. That story of the origin and its subsequent perv ersion is a myth, in the sense in which Lacan uses the word when he writes that the Oedipus myth is the attempt to give epic form to what is in fact the operation of a structure. This is where Rousseau is more radical than other “state of nature” theoris ts: his explanation of the social contract relies on the idea that originally, before any conventions or institutional constraints were established, human nature took a certain form, but as his argument unfolds, it becomes clear that this original state i s purely mythical, a fiction that his own political discourse confronts as such, whereas other writers who engage in the “state of nature” argument rely unequivocally on a theory of “human nature” that is always presupposed rather than demonstrated (as is suggested by the Hobbesian model, in the fact for example that when I agree to leave your acorns alone if you agree to leave mine alone, I am already operating as the rational agent whose existence is supposed to be generated by the social contract, and not presupposed as original–since originally nature is said to have been merely violent and aggressive, and thus dependent upon the arrival of law for its rational coherence).¹⁸ We there by see that the symbolic order forces upon us a confrontation with the equiprimordiality of two opposed positions which an historical account would regard according to a genetic narrative, as sequential, and also as hierarchically ordered in such a way th at one position can be regarded as natural, while the other is treated as a cultural product–the choice being left open as to whether one prefers a “return to nature,” or a celebration of the “higher law” of culture, though in either case the common orig in has been repressed.

 

The “Historical Sense”

 

In his essay on Nietzsche, Foucault distinguishes the work of the historian from the first genealogical insights that go under the name of “the historical sense”: “The historical sense,” he writes,

 

gives rise to three . . . modalities of history [all of them deployed against the pious restoration of historical monuments]. The first is parodic, directed against reality, and opposes the theme of history as reminiscence or recognition.¹⁹

 

The historian’s gaze is thereby distinguished from that of the satirical genealogist:

 

The historian offers this confused and anonymous European, who no longer knows himself or what name he should adopt, the possibility of alternate identities, more individualized and substantial than his own. But the man with historical sense will see that this substitution is simply a disguise. Historians supplied the Revolution with Roman prototypes, romanticism with knight’s armor, and the Wagnerian era was given the sword of the German hero. (160, emphasis added)

 

“The genealogist,” Foucault continues,

 

will know what to make of this masquerade. He will not be too serious to enjoy it; on the contrary, he will push the masquerade to its limit and prepare the great carnival of time where masks are constantly reappearing. . . . In this, we recognize the parodic double of what the second Untimely Meditation called ‘monumental history’. . . Nietzsche accused this history, one totally devoted to veneration, of barring access to the actual intensities and creations of life. The parody of his last texts serves to emphasize that “monumental history” is itself a parody. Genealogy is history in the form of a concerted carnival.” (160-61, slightly modified)

 

Fiction

 

Parody is of course only one of the lessons Foucault takes from Nietzsche. If we ask more generally about the relation of genealogy to fiction, we may recognize the peculiar “distance” that genealogy inhabits–not the transcendental distance that al lows a perfect view of the past, and not the distance of escape, the distance of an imaginary world that takes us away from reality, but the distance of words. In an essay on Robbe-Grillet, Foucault writes:

 

What if the fictive were neither the beyond, nor the intimate secret of the everyday, but the arrowshot which strikes us in the eye and offers up to us everything which appears? In this case, the fictive would be that which names things, that which makes them speak, and that which gives them in language their being already apportioned by the sovereign power of words. . . . This is not to say that fiction is language: this trick would be too easy, though a very familiar one nowadays. It does mean, though, that . . . the simple experience of picking up a pen and writing creates . . . a distance. . . . If anyone were to ask me to define the fictive, I should say . . . that it was the verbal nerve structure of what does not exist.²⁰

 

Later in the same essay, Foucault returns to the word “distance”:

 

I should like to do some paring away, in order to allow this experience to be what it is . . . I should like to pare away all the contradictory words, which might cause it to be seen too easily in terms of a dialectic: subjective and objective, interior and exterior, reality and imagination. . . . This whole lexicon . . . would have to be replaced with the vocabulary of distance. . . . Fiction is not there because language is distant from things; but language is their distance, the light in which they are to be found and their inaccessibility. (149)

 

Thus, when we ask (in regard to Jonathan Swift and his satirical text) how the inverted image is not just an entertaining fiction, a journey to the underground world of the Marquis de Sade, or the exotic dungeons of Bicêtre, but rather an image that reflects back upon the normal world, the “arrowshot” that returns to “strike us in the eye,” we cannot understand this in terms of the opposition between “fiction and truth.” This answer, even if it proceeds beyond opposition to a sort of dialectic al interplay, in which the imaginary and “reality” interact, is insufficient, because it does not adequately confront the role of language.²¹ If we wish to understand language, then, we cannot rest con tent with a dialectical solution, according to Foucault: “reality and imagination,” Foucault says: “This whole lexicon . . . would have to be replaced.” When we speak of fiction then, we are no longer in the realm of truth and falsity; we have passed fro m the image to the word, from the opposition between reality and imagination, to the symbolic.

 

Image and Word

 

This discrepancy between the image and the word is the source of Foucault’s constant preoccupation with the difference between seeing and saying, perception and verbalization, the level of visibility and the function of the name. If, as we have seen , the relation between the image and reality is not a matter of productive negation, in which the encounter with an alien image cancels out our own self-knowledge and requires us to be transformed; if the dialectical account of the image and reality someh ow obscures the role of language, perhaps this is because there is a difference between the image and the word, a gap or void that, according to Foucault, is not sufficiently confronted by phenomenology. Perhaps “distance” names the lack that separates t he symbol from the domain of perception, evidence, and light. “Fiction is not there because language is distant from things; but language is their distance, the light in which they are to be found and their inaccessibility (149). Perhaps ” distance,” in naming the lack of any dialectical relation between speech and vision, also amounts to a refusal of all attempts to generate a stable historical unfolding, the gradual emergence of an origin, or the teleological production of something that had to be gradually constructed through the handing-down of a common tradition. Perhaps “distance” is the name for why Foucault refuses to participate in the Husserlian response to the crisis of the human sciences (see AK, 204).

 

In that case, language would not only destabilize the usual dialectic between fiction and truth; it would also call for a reconfiguration of the concept of history, one in which things would retain their inaccessibility, beyond all phenomenological r etrieval, even the retrieval that might seem to operate in archaeology itself. This would bring archaeology very close to what Foucault speaks of as fiction. Such a revision of historical knowledge is evident in the remark already cited, where Foucault remarks that his work does not aim “to dissipate oblivion, to rediscover in the depth of things . . . the moment of their birth (whether this is seen as their empirical creation, or the transcendental act that gives them origin); it does not set out to be a recollection of the original or a memory of the truth. On the contrary, its task is to make differences” (205, original emphasis).

 

Such a making of differences, such a disruption of phenomenological retrieval, can only be grasped through maintaining the space that separates the image and the word, the instability that keeps the relation of perception and language perpetua lly subject to dislocation: in The Birth of the Clinic, his analysis shows that modern medicine was organized precisely through a mapping of discourse that would coincide with the space of corporeal visibility, and that this perfect formaliza tion of the field can be maintained only through a metaphysics of the subject, a modern philosophical anthropology. The first sentence of The Birth of the Clinic reads: “This book is about space, about language, and about death; it is about the act of seeing, the gaze.”²² In The Order of Things, we find a similar gesture, when Foucault discusses the image painted by Velasquez: in one sense, it would be possible to regard this painti ng as a complete display, a Gestalt, the manifestation of all the techniques of representation at work in Classical thought, the very image of representation, in which the distance between the visible world and its verbal representation would be definitiv ely closed within the confines of the encyclopedia.²³ In order for this to be possible, Foucault says, all that is necessary is that we give a name to the one spot at which the surface of the painting seems i ncomplete (the mirror at the back which does not reflect, but which should show the subjects being painted, who will eventually appear on the canvas whose back we see in the painting called Las Meniñas): this hole could be filled with the proper na me, “King Philip IV and his wife, Mariana” (OT 9). Foucault continues:

 

But if one wishes to keep the relation of language to vision open, if one wishes to treat their incompatibility as a starting-point for speech instead of as an obstacle to be avoided . . . then one must erase those proper names. (9)

 

The play of substitutions then becomes possible in which, as Foucault shows, the royal subjects alternate place with the spectator of the painting, who also becomes the object of the painter’s regard. In this opening, this void that marks the relation be tween the image and the word, we can begin to approach what Lacan calls the question of the real.

 

Repression and Power

 

Let us now see if we can carry these remarks over into Foucault’s analysis of power. In an interview with Bernard Henri-Lévi, Foucault remarks that movements of humanitarian reform are often attended by new types of normalization. Contempora ry discourses of liberation, according to Foucault, “present to us a formidable trap.” In the case of sexual liberation for example,

 

What they are saying, roughly, is this: ‘You have a sexuality; this sexuality is both frustrated and mute . . . so come to us, tell us, show us all that. . . . ‘ As always, it uses what people say, feel, and hope for. It exploits their temptation to believe that to be happy, it is enough to cross the threshold of discourse and to remove a few prohibitions. But in fact it ends up repressing.”²⁴

 

Power, according to Foucault, is therefore not properly understood in the form of juridical law, as a repressive, prohibitive agency which transgression might overcome, but is rather a structure, a relation of forces, such that the law, far from bein g simply prohibitive, is a force that generates its own transgression. In spite of the claims of reason, the law is always linked to violence in this way, just as the prison, in the very failure of its aim at reform, reveals that at another level it is a n apparatus destined to produce criminality (Lacan’s remarks on “aim” and “goal” would be relevant here). This is why Foucault rejects the model of law, and the idea that power is a repressive force to be overthrown. Transgression, liberation, revolutio n and so on are not adequately grasped as movements against power, movements that would contest the law or displace a prohibition; for these forms of resistance in fact belong to the apparatus of power itself. Transgression and the law thus have t o be thought otherwise than in the juridical, oppositional form of modernity, which is invested with all the drama and pathos of revolutionary narratives; we are rather concerned with a structural relation that has to be undone.

 

We can see here why Foucault says that genealogy is not simply a form of historical investigation. It does not aim at recovering lost voices, or restoring the rights of a marginalized discourse (speaking on behalf of the prisoners, or recovering the discourse of madness). Genealogy does not participate in this virtuous battle between good and evil, but is rather an operation that goes back to the origins, the first moments when an opposition between madness and reason took shape, and came to be ord ered as a truth.²⁵ This distinction between genealogy and historical efforts at recovering lost voices bears directly on Foucault’s sense of the ethical dimension of genealogy: “What often embarrasses me toda y,” he says,

 

is that all the work done in the past fifteen years or so . . . functions for some only as a sign of belonging: to be on the ‘good side,’ on the side of madness, children, delinquency, sex. . . . One must pass to the other side–the good side–but by trying to turn off these mechanisms which cause the appearance of two separate sides . . . that is where the real work begins, that of the present-day historian (emphasis added).²⁶

 

Beyond Good and Evil

 

This is not to say that there is no difference between the fascist and the liberal, madness and reason. This game of dissolving all differences by showing that you can’t tell one thing from another is not what is at stake.²⁷ The point is rather to refuse to reanimate the forces of moral approbation and censure–denouncing the enemy and congratulating oneself on having achieved a superior stance–and rather to ask how one is to conduct an analysis. Fou cault’s work often reaches just such a point, where he seems to pass beyond good and evil.

 

In books like Discipline and Punish, and even as early as Madness and Civilization, he says that, as terrible and oppressive as the imprisonment of the insane may be, as intolerable as the torture and public humiliation of c riminals may seem to us today–we who look back with our enlightened eyes–it is not our censure of this barbarism that Foucault wishes to enlist. What really matters, for us today, is not the deficiency of the past, but the narrative that reassures us a bout our own grasp on the truth, our possession of more humane and rational methods. As horrific as the tale of the torture of Damiens may be in the opening pages of Discipline and Punish–and it is a story, a little image or vignette, that frames this long mustering of documentary evidence, as Velasquez’s artful painting frames the meticulous and patient discourse on knowledge in The Order of Things (see also the opening of The Birth of the Clinic)–this scene of t orture, which captures the eye and rouses the passions, is not offered up as a spectacle for our contempt. To be sure, it does tempt the appetite of our moral indignation, but also our satisfaction in ourselves, our certainty that we have arrived at a be tter way. But the genealogy of the prison is not the story of the progressive abandonment of an unjust system of monarchical power, and the emergence of a more democratic legal order; it is the story of the formation of the modern police state, a network of normalization which is concealed by the conventional history of law and justice. That history is a narrative written by the conquerors, in which the truth about the present is lost.

 

Counter-Memory

 

It is the same in Madness and Civilization. Foucault’s work is often written against a prevailing narrative, as a kind of counter-memory: it is usually said, he tells us, that the liberation of the insane from their condition of imprisonment constitutes an improvement, a sort of scientific advance–a greater understanding of the insane, and a progressive reform of the barbaric practices which previously grouped the insane together with the criminal and the poor. But this story o nly serves the interests of the present; it is not the true history, but a history written by the conqueror. For the fact is that the organization of this supposedly liberal and scientific discipline of psychiatric knowledge only served to produce greate r and more diversified forms of subjugation, a greater and more subtle surveillance of the minutiae of interior mental life. The body has been freed, Foucault says, only for the soul to become a more refined an effective prison: you watch too much tv., y ou eat too much, you don’t get enough exercise, you waste your time, you criticize yourself too much, and you should be ashamed for feeling guilty about all this, for dwelling so much on your pathetic problems. This is “the genealogy of the modern ‘soul’ .”²⁸ “Th[is] soul is the effect and instrument of a political anatomy.” It was once the body that was put in prison, but now “the soul is the prisoner of the body” (DP 30). And it is on the basis of this mo dern psychological soul that “have been built scientific techniques and discourses, and the moral claims of humanism” (DP 30), whose handbooks can be found on the bestseller lists, and whose various institutional forms are distributed across the entire so cial network, from outpatient clinics to recreational packages. It is that contemporary regime, and not the earlier incarceration of the insane, that captures Foucault’s attention. It is the story we tell ourselves, and not the barbarism of the p ast, that Foucault wishes to interrogate. That is why he does not simply produce a history for us, but also tells us the usual story, and asks us to think about who it is that tells that story, who is speaking in the received narrative.

 

In The History of Sexuality, we find a similar gesture: it looks as if the Victorians repressed sex, and perhaps it could be shown that repression is not an adequate concept, that in fact power does not operate by means of repression, bu t that there was rather an incitement to discourse, a complex production of sexuality. And yet, however much ink has been spilled over this thesis, the central focus of this first volume is not simply on whether there was “repression” among the Victorian s, or something more complex, but also on the way in which the usual story of liberalization is a history written by the conquerors, their fiction.

 

We may return here to our basic question. In fact it is incorrect to say that whereas the Victorians repressed sex, we have liberated it. Our knowledge of the past should be altered in this respect. But Foucault does not simply drop the usual hist ory, in order to replace it with a better one. He is not simply interested in the truth, a better method, a more accurate history. He does not simply reject the false narrative, but asks: if it is so often told, what satisfactions does the received stor y contain? This is a question about the present and not about the Victorian era. If this story of repression is told so often, who does it please and who does it celebrate? Who is the subject that enunciates this history? For the story of liberated se xuality, or the promise of its liberation, does contain its satisfactions: even if it is not the truth, Foucault writes at the beginning of the first volume, the narrative of sexual repression among the Victorians, has its reasons, and “is easily analyzed ,” for we find that “the sexual cause–the demand for sexual freedom . . . becomes legitimately associated with the honor of a political cause”.²⁹ The received history is thus a lie that has its reasons. How now? These brave Europeans! That they should need to tell such tales about their ancestors! “A suspicious mind might wonder,” says Foucault (HS 6).

 

It is therefore not the oppressiveness of Victorian life that interests Foucault at this point, nor even a revised account of the past; what concerns him is rather our story, the narrative we have consented to believe.³⁰ There may be a reason, he writes,

 

that makes it so gratifying for us to define the relationship between sex and power in terms of repression: something that one might call the speaker’s benefit. If sex is repressed . . . then the mere fact that one is speaking about it has the appearance of a deliberate transgression. . . . [O]ur tone of voice shows that we know we are being subversive, and we ardently conjure away the present and appeal to the future, whose day will be hastened by the contribution we believe we are making. Something that smacks of revolt, of promised freedom, of the coming age of a different law, slips easily into this discourse on sexual oppression. Some of the ancient functions of prophecy are reactivated therein. (HS 6-7, emphasis added)

 

History, Theory, Fiction

 

In short, it is true that Foucault wishes to tell us a different history, to show us that sex in the nineteenth century was not in fact repressed, but rather incited to speak, articulated in many new discursive forms, and not simply silenced or prohi bited. It is also true that this argument, this revised history, contributes at another level to a theoretical elaboration of power. But we cannot be satisfied with this operation of knowledge. For in addition to the revised history, and beyond the theoretical doctrine, what ultimately drives Foucault is a desire, not to construct a more accurate history (the truth about the past–that of the historian), or to erect a great theoretical edifice (a universal truth–that of the philosopher), but to dismantle the narratives that still organize our present experience (a truth that bears on the position of enunciation).³¹ “I would like to explore not only these discourses,” Foucault writes,

 

but also the will that sustains them . . . The question I would like to pose is not ‘Why are we repressed?’ but rather, ‘Why do we say, with so much passion and so much resentment against our most recent past, against our present, and against ourselves, that we are repressed?’ (HS 8-9)

 

It is the same in Discipline and Punish, when Foucault responds to an imaginary reader who wonders why he spends so much time wandering among obsolete systems of justice and the obscure ruins of the torture chamber. “Why?” he replies. “Simp ly because I am interested in the past? No, if one means by that writing a history of the past in terms of the present. Yes, if one means writing a history of the present” (DP 31, emphasis added). It is this counter-memory, this interplay betwee n one story and another, that leads us to consider the relation between history, theory, and fiction.

 

Transgression and the Law

 

Although Foucault’s refusal of the repressive conception of power appears in his discussion of the Victorians, one does not have to wait for the History of Sexuality to find this thesis on power, this rejection of the theory of power as prohibition, the so-called repressive hypothesis, which generates so many discourses of resistance and liberation. In 1963, Foucault formulates a similar claim in his “Preface to Transgression.”³² Curiously enough, this formulation also has to do with sexuality.

 

Foucault begins his essay with the same focus on the present: “We like to believe that sexuality has regained, in contemporary experience, its full truth as a process of nature, a truth which has long been lingering in the shadows” (LCMP 29, e mphasis added). But as writers like Bataille have shown us, transgression is not the elimination of the law by means of a force or desire that might be thought to pre-exist all prohibition. It is not the restoration of an origin, a return to immediacy, or the liberation of a prediscursive domain, by means of which we might overcome all merely historical and constituted limits.³³ On the contrary, “the limit and transgression depend on each other” (LCMP 34). “Transgression,” Foucault writes, “is not related to the limit as black to white, the prohibited to the lawful, the outside to the inside” (LCMP 35). Long before his final books on the relation between sexuality and ethics, these remarks already have co nsequences for our conception of the ethical. Transgression is therefore not the sign of liberation; it “must be detached from its questionable association to ethics if we want to understand it and to begin thinking from it. . . it must be liberated from the scandalous or subversive” (LCMP 35). This is what would be required if we were to think the obscure relation that binds transgression to the law.

 

Let us add that these reflections on the limit, on power and transgression, are not simply formulated as an abstract philosophical question, as though it were a theoretical matter of understanding power correctly. On the contrary, Foucault’s claims only make sense if they are seen as part of his understanding of history. It is a question of the contemporary experience of transgression, in which the concept of the limit does not take a Kantian form, does not entail a line that cannot (or shou ld not) be crossed (a logical or moral limit), but is rather a fold, the elaboration of a strange non-Euclidean geometry of space, another mathematics, in which the stability of inside and outside gives way to a limit that exists only in the moveme nt which crosses it (like a Moëbius strip, the two sides of which constantly disappear as one circles around its finite surface–as if the point at which one passes from one side to the other were constantly receding, so that the mathematization of s pace, the difference between one and two, were constantly being destabilized).³⁴

 

In short, this concept of transgression has a historical location: it is clearly bound up with the epoch for which anthropological thought has been dismantled. Foucault puts the history very concisely in the “Preface to Transgression,” where he uses the categories of “need,” “demand” and “desire.” In the eighteenth century, Foucault writes, “consumption was based entirely on need, and need based itself exclusively on the model of hunger.” This formulation will be developed in The Order of Th ings when Foucault elaborates the Enlightenment’s theory of exchange and its political economy, in their fundamental dependence on the concept of natural need. “When this element was introduced into an investigation of profit,” when, in other word s, the natural foundation of need was reconfigured by an economics that aimed to account for the superfluity of commodities, an economics that went beyond natural law, explaining the genesis of culture through a demand that exceeded all natural need (what Foucault calls “the appetite of those who have satisfied their hunger”), then the Enlightenment theory of exchange gave way to Modern philosophical anthropology: European thought

 

inserted man into a dialectic of production which had a simple anthropological meaning: if man was alienated from his real nature and his immediate needs through his labor and the production of objects . . . it was nevertheless through its agency that he recaptured his essence. (LCMP 49)

 

For contemporarythought, however, this shift from need to demand will be followed by yet another dislocation, a shift from demand to desire, in which the conceptual framework of modernity no longer functions; and this time, instead of labor, sexua lity will play a decisive role, obliging us to think transgression differently than in the form of dialectical production.

 

This new formation is not a return to “nature,” but an encounter with language. “The discovery of sexuality,” Foucault argues, forces us into a conception of desire that is irreducible to need or demand (the requirements of nature or the dialectical self-production of culture that characterizes anthropological thought). “In this sense,” Foucault writes, “the appearance of sexuality as a fundamental problem marks the transformation of a philosophy of man as worker to a philosophy based on a being who speaks” (LCMP 49-50). The same historical shift is stressed in Madness and Civilization: this book, which might at first glance seem to include an indictment of Freud, as one of those who participate in the modern, psychiatric impri sonment of madness, in fact argues that Freud marks an essential displacement in relation to psychiatry, a displacement that coincides with what the “Preface to Transgression” regards as the end of philosophical anthropology:

 

That is why we must do justice to Freud.³⁵

 

Between Freud’s Five Case Histories and Janet’s scrupulous investigations of Psychological Healing, there is more than the density of a discovery; there is the sovereign violence of a return. . . . Freud went back to madness at the level of its language, reconstituted one of the elements of an experience reduced to silence by positivism; . . . he restored, in medical thought, the possibility of a dialogue with unreason. . . . It is not psychology that is involved in psychoanalysis. (MC 198)

 

The break with psychology that arrives with Freud marks the end of philosophical anthropology.

 

Lacan

 

If, as we have seen, resistance belongs to the apparatus of power, and is consequently not so much a threat to power, as a product, an effect of power (just as the totalitarian state is structurally linked to the founding of the democratic community, which would seem to be opposed to it in every respect), then it is the obscure, symptomatic relation between the two that Foucault’s conception of power obliges us to confront.

 

Lacan says something similar about transgression and the law: we do not enjoy in spite of the law, but precisely because of it. This is what the thesis on jouissance entails: jouissance is not the name for an instinctual pleasure that runs counter t o the law (in spite of the biological paradigm that still governs so many readings of Freud); it is not the fulfillment of a natural urge, or a momentary suspension of moral constraint, but quite the contrary: it is Lacan’s name for Freud’s thesis on the death drive, the name for a dimension of (unnatural) suffering and punishment that inhabits human pleasure, a dimension that is possible only because the body and its satisfaction are constitutively denatured, always already bound to representation. Joui ssance is thus tied to punishment, organized not in defiance of the repressive conventions of civilization, not through the transgression of the moral law, but precisely in relation to the law (which does not mean “in conformity with it”). This is precis ely Foucault’s thesis on the productive character of power, even if it does not entail a complete theoretical overlap with Lacan in other respects.

 

Slavoj Zizek reminds us of Lacan’s paradoxical reversal of Dostoevski here: “against [the] famous position, ‘If god is dead, everything is permitted,’” Lacan claims instead that “if there is no god. . . everything is forbidden.” Zizek remarks:

 

How do we account for this paradox that the absence of Law universalizes prohibition? There is only one possible explanation: enjoyment itself, which we experience as ‘transgression,’ is in its innermost status something imposed, ordered–when we enjoy, we never do it ‘spontaneously,’ we always follow a certain injunction. The psychoanalytic name for this injunction, this imperative to ‘Enjoy!’ is Superego. (slightly modified)³⁶

 

We find here, in the relation between the law and transgression, not a simple opposition of outside and inside, prohibition and rebellion, cultural conventions opposed to natural desires, but rather a paradoxical relation of forces, not the Newtonian syst em of natural forces, the smooth machinery in which every action produces an equal and opposite reaction, not a physics of libido based on natural law, a theory of charge and discharge, tension and homeostasis, but a more peculiar form of power, one that takes us away from natural law toward the law of language, in which force is tied to representation.³⁷

 

Here the space of the body is given over to the unnatural network of discourse and its causality. In this framework, the relation between law and transgression is such that the rule of law appears not to “repress” or “prohibit,” but to produce its o wn exception, not to function but to malfunction, thereby making manifest the incompleteness of the law, the impossibility of closure, the element of lack that destabilizes the structural, symbolic totality. As a result, moreover, the symbolic order itse lf appears to function only on the basis of this exception, this peculiar remainder, this excess–as though the very rule of law somehow depended upon a level of malfunction and perverse enjoyment (what Freud called the “death drive,” and what Lacan formu lates in terms of jouissance).³⁸ Now this is precisely how the prison seems to function in relation to the “criminal element” that it supposedly aims at eliminating: for the prison acts not simply as a limit or prohibition, but carries within it a perverse productivity, a level of sadistic enjoyment that Kafka represented so well, by generating the illusion that behind the mechanical operation of a neutral, anonymous, bureaucratic law there lay an obsc ure level of sadistic enjoyment, a peculiar agency that wants the criminal to exist, in order to have the pleasure of inflicting punishment (this Other who is imagined to enjoy is one aspect of the father, a perverse manifestation Lacan gestures to ward with the word “père-version,” perversion being a “turning-towards the father” in which the father is outside the law).³⁹ This is the point of jouissance that marks the excess that always accompani es the law, an excess that Freud called “primary masochism.”⁴⁰ This excess is not a natural phenomenon, a primordial force that disrupts the polished machinery of culture; it is rather a peculiar feature of c ulture itself, not a matter of natural law, but an effect of language which includes its own malfunction–the “remainder” or “trace” of what did not exist before the institution of the law, but remains outside, excluded, in an “a priori” fashion that is l ogical rather than chronological. This is what Lacan understands as the relation between the symbolic and the real.

 

Freud: The Myth of Origins and the Origin of Myth

 

Freud explains this relation between the law and transgression in Totem and Taboo, by giving us two equiprimordial aspects of the father. This conception of the paternal function does not simply reduce to the figure of prohibition or la w, as is so often said, but reveals a primordial split by which the law is originally tied to a perversion of the law. We should note here that in this text, which seeks to account for the origin of the law (and Freud even refers to Darwin), Freud does not conceive of desire as a natural fact that would eventually, with the advent of culture, come to be organized by various prohibitions. He does not seek, in other words, to provide a genesis, a genetic narrative, in which the law would be subsequ ent to desire, like the imposition of a convention or social contract upon what would otherwise be a natural impulse; nor, conversely, does he follow the usual historicist argument according to which desire is simply the product of the law, the effect of various cultural prohibitions. Freud’s account, in effect, abandons the genetic narrative, and gives us instead an account of the origin that is strictly and rigorously mythical. That is the radicality of Totem and Taboo.⁴¹

 

Freud’s mythic account thus gives us two simultaneous functions for the father: one is the father of the law, Moses, or God, the giver of language and symbolic exchange, the father who represents the limiting function of castration; the other is the father of the Primal Horde, the mythical figure who, before he is murdered, possesses all the women, and is (therefore) precisely the one outside the law, the one whose enjoyment has no limit, who does not rule with the even hand of disinterested justice, but rather takes an obscene pleasure in arbitrary punishment, using us for his sport, devouring his children like Chronos, feeding his limitless appetite on our sacrifices and enjoying the pure expression of his will–“the dark god,” as Lacan puts it: no t the Christian god of love and forgiveness, who keeps together the sheepish flock of the human community, but the god of terror and indifferent violence, the god of Abraham and Job, so much more clearly grasped in the Judaic tradition.⁴²

 

The Symbolic and the Real: Jouissance

 

We can therefore see in Freud the precise relation between prohibition and this peculiar excess, between the law and violence, that Foucault develops in his remarks on power. This explains why Foucault argues that the contemporary experience of sexu ality is a central place in which the relation between the law and transgression demands to be rethought, beyond the legislative, prohibitive conception that characterizes modernity. This obscure, symptomatic relation by which the law is bound to its own transgression, to that dimension of excess, violence and suffering, can perhaps be seen in its most conspicuous form in America: with all its defiant freedom and carefree self-indulgence, America does not show itself as the land of freedom and pleasure, but may be said to display the most obscene form of superego punishment: you must enjoy, you must be young and healthy and happy and tan and beautiful. The question, “What must I do?” has been replaced with the higher law of the question: “Are we having fun yet?” The imperative is written on the Coke can: “Enjoy!” That is American Kantianism: “think whatever you like, choose your religion freely, speak out in any way you wish, but you must have fun!”⁴³ The reverse side of this position, the guilt that inhabits this ideal of pleasure, is clear enough: don’t eat too much, don’t go out in the sun, don’t drink or smoke, or you won’t be able to enjoy yourself!⁴⁴

 

Thus, as Foucault argues in his thesis on power, it is not a matter of overcoming repression, of liberating pleasure from moral constraint, or defending the insane against the oppressive regime of psychiatry, but of undoing the structure that produce d these two related sides. Such is the distance between the Kantian position and that of Foucault and Lacan: the law no longer serves as a juridical or prohibitive limit, but as a force, an imperious agency that does not simply limit, but produces an excess which Kant did not theorize, a dimension of punishment and tyranny that it was meant to eliminate.⁴⁵ This is the kind of logic addressed by Foucault in Discipline and Punish, when he a sks, for example, whether the very failure of the prison as an institution, the malfunction of the law, the fact that the prison seems to be a machine for organizing and proliferating criminality, is not in fact part of the very functioning of the prison: that the law includes this excess which seems on the surface to contradict it. Lacan puts Kant together with Sade in order to show the logical relation between them, in the same way that we might speak of the obscure relation between the Rights of Man a nd the Reign of Terror–two formations which, from an imaginary point of view, are completely opposed and antithetical, but which turn out to have an obscure connection.⁴⁶

 

In Lacan’s terminology, the establishment of the symbolic law, the (systemic) totalization of a signifying structure, cannot take place without producing a remainder, an excess, a dimension of the real that marks the limit of formalization. Somethin g similar occurs in Foucault: where the Kantian formulation gives us an anthropology, a form of consciousness that is able, freely, to give itself its own law, and thereby to realize its essence, Foucault speaks instead of an apparatus that produces the c riminal, the insane, and the destitute, all in the name of the law–so that the excess of Sade is the strict counterpart of Kant, and not his contradiction or antithesis. It should come as no surprise that Foucault mentions, in connection with Kan t’s text, “What is Enlightenment?,” that it raises, among other things, the question of “making a place for Jewish culture within German thought.” This text, which Kant wrote in response to a question that had been answered two months earlier by Moses Me ndelssohn, is part of his effort to elaborate a “cosmopolitan view” of history, in which the promise of a community of Man would be maintained; it is thus, according to Foucault, “perhaps a way of announcing the acceptance of a common destiny.” And yet, as Foucault points out, history produced for us a paradoxical perversion of this common destiny. Contrary to everything Kant might have hoped for, Foucault remarks, “we now know to what drama that was to lead” (WE 33). It is this product, this excess, t his remainder which accompanies the very morality meant to exclude it, that Foucault addresses by his formulation of power as a relationship that does not take the form of justice and law (nor, we might add, of mere tyranny, mere “force” or exploitation, the simple “opposite” of law), but is rather productive, a force that must be conceived in relation to this excess or remainder that Lacan calls jouissance.⁴⁷

 

The “Origin” of Foucault’s Work (Origins Against Historicism)

 

What would it mean to focus on this element of excess, as it appears in Foucault’s own work, this strange relation between the symbolic and the real, the law and its own disruption–as though the meticulous order of things, the symbolic totality governing thought, were in fact confronted with a fundamental disorder, a domain of chaos or nonsense that falls outside representation, but nevertheless remains present, like a traumatic element that cannot be put in place, or given a name with in the encyclopedic mastery of Foucault’s work, but that continues to haunt it like a ghost, or like the perpetual possibility of madness itself? Commentators who take pleasure in the encyclopedia of knowledge are not very happy with this grimace that em erges demonically behind the lucid surface of Foucault’s pages. It would be better, and we would feel less anxiety, if Foucault confined himself to the documentary procedures that constitute historical research, or if he would be content with the elabora tion of great theoretical models–archaeology, or genealogy, or the theory of “bio-power.” These are the things the commentaries would prefer to discuss.

 

And Foucault does in fact devote himself to both these tasks–the task of the historian and that of the philosopher. The Order of Things for instance is both a history and a contribution to the theory of history. But something else eme rges in his work, something that is neither history nor theory, something we might call fiction, but that is perhaps more accurately grasped in terms of what Lacan calls the real–that element that has no place in the symbolic order, but manifests itself as a trauma that cannot be integrated, and not only as a trauma, but often, in Foucault’s work, in the forms of laughter, anxiety and fiction. It is this distress and this laughter that might be called the origin of Foucault’s work. Perhaps more attention could be devoted to these places where Foucault refuses to identify his work with the accumulation of historical knowledge, or with the discipline of history, which has nevertheless tried to renew itself by appeal to Foucault. “I am not writing a history of morals, a history of behavior, or a social history of sexual practices”–Foucault makes such remarks again and again (such remarks do not keep his readers from proceeding as if this were precisely his project). “I had no intention of writin g the history of the prison as an institution,” he says; “that would have required a different kind of research.”⁴⁸

 

What do such claims mean for Foucault’s relation to the discipline of history? One approach to this question would be to lay out the distinctions that separate genealogy from traditional history: history is continuous, genealogy is discontinuous; hi story is always the history of reason, a narrative written from the point of view of gradual discoveries and progressive clarification; genealogy is the recounting of acts of aggression, violent usurpations, interpretations that made certain statements va lid and ruled out others. And so on. Such distinctions are important, but we might also return here to the link between genealogy and fiction, a link we have already touched upon, which could be understood as the aspect of Foucault’s work that brings hi m closest to Lacan. This approach would have to entail a consideration of the way in which Foucault’s work, far from aiming to give an abstract, neutral, descriptive account of the past, for the sake of knowledge, in fact always begins from within a particular situation, and may perhaps be more accurately understood as an act–an act aimed at the present, rather than a knowledge serenely directed elsewhere, towards the past, the place of the other, where it can be contained.

 

This emphasis on the particular situation of writing does not merely mean that Foucault writes from a perspective, like anyone else, and that he acknowledges this while some others do not. It means rather that the entire analysis, however descriptiv e and documentary it may be, is explicitly governed by the position in the present (“Genealogy means that I begin my analysis from a question posed in the present” Kritzman 262). In short, unlike the “new historicism” with which Foucault is so often conf used, genealogy is not an elaboration of knowledge that admits to having a perspective, in the sense that it may one day prove to be inadequate, or to be only one point of view, but rather an act that bears on the present, on what Lacan call s the position of enunciation. The same holds for psychoanalysis: its aim is not to uncover the truth about the past, contrary to many commentators; it does not seek to discover “what really happened,” as if a realist view of the past could address the q uestions proper to psychoanalysis.⁴⁹ On the contrary, it is directed at what Lacan calls imaginary and symbolic elements, at the narrative which, however real or fabricated, has brought the client into analys is. In a similar way, genealogy is irreducible to history; it is not a discourse on the past that admits to having a perspective, and will eventually be seen as the product of its time, but rather a discourse on the present, something like an analysis of the position from which it speaks. To maintain a realist view of history, however partial, limited, and subject to revision, is to read genealogy as if it were reducible to history; to maintain a realist view of the past in psychoan alysis, according to which it is the task of the analyst to know what really happened, and to given this knowledge to the patient, in the interest of reflection, introspection, and self-knowledge, is to abandon what Lacan calls the ethics of psychoanalysi s, replacing it with the false reassurance of a supposed science of the past, in which the objectivity of the researcher is covertly secured, and the analyst is secretly maintained as the subject supposed to know.

 

Thus, in contrast to the historian, the genealogist not only speaks, like everyone, from a particular place in the present (the Crocean thesis), but directs his attention to that place, in order to act upon it. This place, this point o f departure, might in fact be called the origin of Foucault’s books. This is as much a philosophical question as it is historical, or rather, it raises the problem of the relation between philosophy and history: “since the 19th century,” Foucault says, “philosophy has never stopped raising the same question: ‘What is happening right now, and what are we, we who are perhaps nothing more than what is happening at this moment?’ Philosophy’s question therefore is the question as to what we ourselves are. That is why contemporary philosophy is entirely political and entirely historical” (Kritzman 121). To the extent that Foucault’s work bears on his own position of speech, it cannot be reduced to historical research, or regarded as the proliferation of knowledge about the past, but must be considered as an event, an intervention in the present. If we examine the position of enunciation, this origin that serves as the finite point from which Foucault speaks, we will be led along a trajectory that li nks history, theory, and fiction. This is the point at which his work may be characterized as an encounter with the real, a moment when Foucault’s thought reaches its own limits.

 

Let us look in closing at The Order of Things in order to grasp more clearly how Foucault’s work bears on its own place of enunciation, and issues in a form of anxiety that we have spoken of in terms of fiction, and that might also be ca lled an encounter with the real. We will consider two examples in which the book encounters its own contingency. The first example is drawn from the descriptive content of the book, its concrete, historical exposition. The second example comes from the theoretical framework, where Foucault addresses the problem of his method. The first example involves an interplay of light and shadow; the second takes up the question of laughter and anxiety.

 

Example One: The Backward Glance

 

At the very beginning of chapter 9, Foucault concludes his discussion of the Classical Age: “Classical thought can now be eclipsed. At this time, from any retrospective viewpoint [pour tout regard ulterieur], it enters a region of shade” (314 /303). Before proceeding with his apparent task of accumulating knowledge, before bringing more archaeological evidence to light, Foucault finds it necessary to hesitate here, weighing this further. Already it is clear, however, that precisely the ecli pse of Classical thought has made possible its manifestation to the retrospective gaze. For as Foucault repeatedly points out, Classical discourse is invisible as long as it functions; it only shows itself in its demise, to retrospection (as though histo ry were the tale of Orpheus). Obviously this does not mean that the Classical Age knew nothing about representation. On the contrary, they took great trouble to examine it in detail. But this examination, which Foucault explores in chapters 3 and 7, an d especially in the section titled “Idealogy and Criticism,” consisted in demonstrating how that discourse functioned, how it exercised its representational capacities; it did not suspend representation in order to examine its conditions of possibility. Thus, once it was no longer maintained in its functioning, Classical discourse became visible as such in its demise. One began to ask not about the methods by which we might arrive at clear and distinct representations, but rather about the horizons with in which representation can arise: a transcendental arena was opened in which actual representations were now only a surface effect, whose conditions of possibility had to be provided elsewhere, outside or beneath representation.

 

This analysis, however, does not simply give a description of events in intellectual history. It suggests that the Classical Age could not have understood itself in the way that the archaeologist understands it. The very nature of representation in the Classical Age functioned by means of a kind of invisibility, which was removed only with the death of Classical thought: the moment it becomes visible to the archaeologist is also the moment that the Age of Reason acquires the status of myth. There is here, and throughout this book, a question as to how historical difference can be known, how one period, with its dense, opaque construction of knowledge, its specific discursive possibilities, and its own empirical orders, can “communicate itse lf,” or at least “show itself,” to the backward glance of another. This is a question concerning historical knowledge, a question which moves Foucault beyond the historicist procedure of explaining a period by articulating it in terms of the concepts and values it would have had regarding itself. If we acknowledge Foucault’s vocabulary of “eclipse” and “manifestation,” moreover, we will recognize another question, quietly sustained, entirely unheard by the historians whose guide-books have no use for it, concerning light and shadow, in which it becomes clear that the gaze of the archaeologist is not only explicitly finite, located rather than transcendent or purely objective, but also that the position from which the archaeologist looks is a central thematic issue in the book. These two questions overlap, as the first example already indicates: entering a region of shade, one period will suddenly show itself to the retrospection of another. It is the death of thought that makes history p ossible, but in death, the object is lost, irrevocably given over to a world of shadow, an alterity that we can only present to ourselves through a memory supported by the protective power of myth. At this juncture, the text requires of us a sustained in quiry into the complex, Heideggerian meditation on truth as the interplay of lethe and aletheia, a meditation which forms the minimal background against which the question of the truth of Foucault’s historical representations can begi n to be read.

 

Pushing on however, let us only note here that the death of Classical thought, its entrance into a land of shadow, is also its manifestation–for the first time?–as Foucault will go on to indicate:

 

a region of shade. Even so, we should speak not of darkness but of a somewhat blurred light, deceptive in its apparent clarity [faussement evident], and hiding more than it reveals [et qui cache plus qu’elle ne manifeste]. (314/303)

 

Not only does the Classical Age appear only in the moment of its eclipse, but it also shows itself deceptively, with a false evidence, hiding more, in its manifestation, than it reveals. Thus, before offering us further historical information, before une arthing more knowledge to the light of day, Foucault will finish this paragraph:

 

When [Classical] discourse ceased to exist and function. . . . Classical thought ceased at the same time to be directly accessible to us. (315/304)

 

In passages such as these, Foucault makes it unmistakably clear that archaeology cannot possibly be regarded as a new methodology that would finally provide a means of access to a transcendental point of view, a kind of linguistic formalization that would turn history into a genuinely rigorous science. For this book, this history of forms of representation, it will not be possible to dismiss the question of the truth of history and historical representations. This is not at all to say that the book is s imply content to offer its account as somehow less than “true,” and thus as “fictional” in some trivial sense (as if it were already self-evident what truth is, and as if history does not oblige us to engage in a question concerning truth). The po int is not to ask whether Foucault’s account is truth or fiction, an accurate archaeological picture of the past or the expression of the present perspective; the point is rather to raise the question of the relation between the content of the book, its h istorical exposition or knowledge, and its functioning as a discursive practice, the degree to which it intervenes in the forms of thought that have produced it. The question concerns the difference between its character as knowledge and its chara cter as an event. Not only does the text refuse to function as a new foundation for historical knowledge, the discovery of the so-called archaeological method, not only does it resist the transcendental model according to which it (archaeology) wo uld provide the conditions of possibility governing discourse at a certain time; it also issues in a thought concerning the relation of representation and death (of which the phrase “retrospective gaze” is only the most obvious example).

 

There is a second example in which it becomes clear that Foucault’s book, passing between history and theory, between concrete historical exposition and theoretical reflection upon history itself, begins to open up a question that belongs to neither of these two dimensions of his book, a question that is neither a matter of historical information, nor a matter that concerns the theoretical apparatus of archaeology, its methodological procedures (“discontinuity,” “episteme,” “discursive regularity,” e tc.). This example is drawn from the preface to the book, where Foucault speaks of a certain “experience.” We must proceed carefully here, for this “experience,” which belongs neither to history nor to theory, is what Foucault expressly calls the ori gin of his work.

 

Example Two: The Middle Region

 

In The Order of Things, Foucault wants to give us a history, a revised account of the past, which would replace the usual story of the gradual development of the human sciences, their slow emergence out of error and superstition, into th eir current state of scientific sophistication. At this level, his work is historical and documentary. At another level, The Order of Things develops a theoretical reflection on history itself; it is a contribution to the archeological meth od. These two aspects of the book have been given the most attention–the content of his historical reconstruction, and the theoretical position it entails. But there is another aspect of the book that is perhaps more fundamental, the status of the book as an act, an event, and perhaps even an experience.

 

This is a peculiar feature of the book, one that does not fit very well with its historical and methodological aspects. In The Order of Things, he speaks of it as “the pure experience of order” (13/xxi, emphasis added)–not the p articular order which characterizes the Classical Age, or our own Anthropological Era, and not the order of Foucault’s own book, the great, encyclopedic system of archaeological knowledge, but rather the experience of what he calls “order itself [en so n être même]” (12/xxi) and “order in its primary state [l’être brut de l’ordre]” (12/xxi). The passage is well-known: The fundamental codes of a culture, he writes,

 

establish for every man . . . the empirical orders with which he will be dealing, and in which he will be at home. At the other extremity of thought, there are scientific theories or philosophical interpretations which explain why order exists in general [pourquoi il y a en general un ordre]. (11-12/xx)

 

We must hesitate here on a point of translation (a point, one might add, of representation). There are, on the one hand, fundamental codes, those which establish the empirical orders which govern a particular historical period, and, on the other hand, re flections upon those empirical orders, scientific or philosophical efforts to explain “pourquoi il y a en general un ordre,” that is, why generally speaking there is an order such as this one. The English text says “why order exists in general,” but it i s not at all a question of “order in general,” or of why order “exists.” Rather, it is a matter, in the case of scientific theories or philosophical efforts at reflexive knowledge, of determining the general configuration (en general) of an order like this (un ordre), determining the empirical situation of those who act and know.

 

With this distinction between the empirical codes and philosophical reflection, we are of course on familiar ground: these two levels, one which is determining for all concrete investigation and another which seeks to analyze that determination, will appear again in great detail in chapter nine, in the context of what Foucault calls “the empirical and the transcendental.” In that context Foucault characterizes “man” as a figure that appears to mediate between and unify precisely these two orders, on e of empirical determination, and one of theoretical reflection upon that empirical determination, by means of which the external, empirical determination of thought from outside (by conditions of speech or labor of physiology) can be reflected upon, mani pulated, and “taken in hand,” as Heidegger might say. Man is thus the figure who, in spite of being totally given over to external, contingent, historical determination, can nevertheless–or precisely for this reason, precisely on the basis of this empir ical, concrete existence–alter the conditions of existence, and thereby make his own history, come to stand at the origin of what would otherwise precede and determine him.

 

The passage continues. Between these two levels, the empirical and the transcendental, there is another level: “between these two regions,” he says, “lies a domain which, though its role is mainly an intermediary one, is nonetheless fundamental”:

 

It is here that a culture, imperceptibly deviating from the empirical order prescribed for it by its primary codes, instituting an initial separation from them . . . frees itself sufficiently to discover that they are perhaps not the only possible ones or the best ones; this culture then finds itself faced with the stark fact . . . that order exists [qu’il y a de l’ordre] . . . [and] by this very process, [comes] face to face with order in its primary state [l’être brut de l’ordre]. (12/xx-xxi, original emphasis)

 

“This middle region,” he adds, “can be posited as the most fundamental of all,” for it is here, “between the use of what one might call the ordering codes and reflections upon order, there is the pure experience of order” (13/xxi, emphasis added). “The present study,” he writes, “is an attempt to analyze that experience” (13/xxi, emphasis added).

 

This experience cannot be situated at the level of historical knowledge; nor can it be understood as an element within the theoretical framework of archaeology. It is neither a piece of historical knowledge, nor part of the theoretical apparatus, bu t an excessive moment, something that calls into question the other levels of Foucault’s analysis, exceeding and contradicting them, marking their contingency–something outside the symbolic system that is unthinkable, beyond representation, but that neve rtheless marks the point of trauma, and shows the incompleteness of the very symbolic structure that has been established with such masterful and encyclopedic comprehensiveness. This is what Lacan calls the encounter with the real, something that falls o utside the operation of knowledge, the deployment of the signifier. Foucault speaks of it in terms of anxiety, and also in terms that bring us back to the question of literature.

 

Let us recall Foucault’s remarks on the origin of The Order of Things. “This book,” Foucault says, “arose out of a passage in Borges, out of the laughter that shattered, as I read the passage, all the familiar landmarks of my thought–< b>our thought, the thought that bears the stamp of our age” (7/xv). Later he adds, “the uneasiness that makes us laugh when we read Borges is certainly related to the profound distress of those whose language has been destroyed” (10/xviii-xix).^{< a name=”ref50″ href=”#foot50″>50} This distress is also the anxiety of the aphasiac who creates a multiplicity of groupings, only to find that they “dissolve again, for the field of identity that sustains them, however limited it may be, is stil l too wide not to be unstable; and so the sick mind continues to infinity . . . teetering finally on the brink of anxiety” (10/xviii).

 

It is clear that these remarks are meant to rebound upon archaeology itself. If we return the previous question, we can see that in spite of his interest in producing a revised history, a truer history, and in spite of his effort to construct a theo retical edifice–or rather precisely because of these things, these patient, empirical, documentary procedures–there emerges a level of anxiety that cannot be mastered by the operation of knowledge, historical or theoretical, a level that Foucault addres ses explicitly in his preface. To read Foucault’s text for its historical analysis, or for its methodological innovations, would be to refuse this experience, this encounter with the real, this domain of anxiety in which the symbolic operation of archaeo logical knowledge comes face to face with its own contingency. Reading without this encounter is reading in the name of man.

 

We know that Heidegger’s work undergoes a similar deformation, in which the effort to locate an origin for metaphysics perpetually recedes–being located first sometime after the Greek term aletheia was converted into homoiosis, and the n perhaps earlier, already in Plato and Aristotle, who did not really think aletheia as such, and then perhaps even earlier, in the pre-Socratics. We know that this displacement of the origin is accompanied by a symmetrical difficulty regarding the place of enunciation, the position from which Heidegger speaks, namely the moment of the “end” of metaphysics, its termination, closure, or perhaps its perpetual, and perpetually different repetition. The question about the end of metaphysics is not simply a historical question, a matter of recording birth and death, but a question about history itself. But it is also not simply a theoretical question, a matter of determining the proper conceptual approach to the problem of origins and ends. I t is also a matter of encountering the place from which one speaks–not for the sake of a transcendental reflection upon the conditions which would validate one’s own discourse, but for the sake of a movement that would exhaust what is most tedious and re petitious in one’s own speech, to let it go, and make room for something else.

 

Notes

 

1. Martin Heidegger, The Metaphysical Foundations of Logic, trans. Michael Heim (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1984), 209.

 

2.Jacques Lacan, “Television,” trans. Denis Hollier, Rosalind Krauss, and Annette Michelson. Television: A Challenge to the Psychoanalytic Establishment, ed. Joan Copjec (New York: Norton, 1990), 30. Translat ion modified.

 

3.Michel Foucault, Madness and Civilization: A History of Insanity in the Age of Reason, trans. Richard Howard (New York: Vintage, 1965), 288.

 

4.Jacques Derrida, “Cogito and the History of Madness,” Writing and Difference, trans. Alan Bass (Chicago: University of Chicago, 1978), 60. Henceforth cited in the text as WD.

 

5.Friedrich Nietzsche, On The Genealogy of Morals, trans. Walter Kaufmann (New York: Vintage, 1967).

 

6.This essay was first given as a lecture at the Collegium Phaenomenologicum in Perugia, Italy, in 1993. I thank the directors, Charles C. Scott and Philippe van Haute, for the invitation, and for their hospitality.

 

7. Jacques Lacan, The Four Fundamental Concepts of Psychoanalysis, trans. Alan Sheridan (New York: Norton, 1978), 112. Translations are occasionally modified; see Le Séminaire, livre XI: Les quat res concepts fondamentaux de la psychanalyse, ed. Jacques-Alain Miller (Paris: Seuil, 1973).

 

8. Michel Foucault, “The Concern for Truth,” interview with François Ewald. Michel Foucault: Politics, Philosophy, Culture: Interviews and Other Writings, ed. Lawrence D. Kritzman (New York, Routledge , 1988), 255-67. Cited from 262, emphasis added. This volume will henceforth be cited as “Kritzman.”

 

9.Michel Foucault, The Archaeology of Knowledge, trans. A. M. Sheridan-Smith (New York: Pantheon Books, 1972), 206. References will henceforth appear in the text preceded by AK.

 

10.Leopold von Ranke, Sämmtliche Werke (Leipzig:Verlag, 1867). See also Leonard Krieger, Ranke: The Meaning of History (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1977), and Haydn White, Metahistory: the Historical Imagination in Nineteenth-Century Europe (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins UP, 1973).

 

In The Archaeology of Knowledge, Foucault conjures up an imaginary interlocutor, who challenges him to distinguish his work from structuralism, and then upon hearing Foucault’s reply, says “I can even accept that one should dispense, as far a s one can, with a discussion of the speaking subjects; but I dispute that these successes [of archaeology, as distinct from structuralism] give one the right to turn the analysis back on to the very forms of discourse that made them possible, and to question the very locus in which we are speaking today.” Instead, the interlocutor argues, we must acknowledge that “the history of those analyses . . . retains its own transcendence.” Foucault replies, “It seems to me that the difference betwe en us lies there [much more than in the over-discussed question of structuralism]” (202).

 

11.Slavoj Zizek, For They Know Not What They Do: Enjoyment as a Political Factor (New York: Verso, 1992), 13.

 

12.See Sigmund Freud, “Instincts and Their Vicissitudes,” vol 14, 117-40; “Formulations of the Two Principles of Mental Functioning,” vol 12, 218-26; An Outline of Psychoanalysis, vol 23, 144-207; esp. “The Psychic Apparatus and the External World,” 195-207. All references are to The Standard Edition of the Complete Psychological Works of Sigmund Freud, trans. and ed. James Strachey et al. (London:Hogarth Press, 1953). Lacan’s account of pleas ure and reality is scattered throughout his work. But see “La chose freudienne,” Écrits (Paris: Seuil, 1966), 401-36; and “D’une question préliminaire à tout traitment possible de la psychose,” Écrits , 531-83. Available in English as Ecrits: A Selection, trans. Alan Sheridan (New York: Norton, 1977). See “The Freudian Thing,” 114-45, and “On a Question Preliminary to any Possible treatment of Psychosis,” 178-225. See also The Sem inar of Jacques Lacan, Book II: The Ego in Freud’s Theory and in the Technique of Psychoanalysis, 1954-55, Jacques-Alain Miller, trans. Sylvana Tomaselli, with notes by John Forrester (New York: Norton, 1988), 134-71, and Book VII, The Ethics of Psychoanalysis, 1959-60, ed. Jacques-Alain Miller, trans. Dennis Porter (New York: Norton, 1992), 19-84. see also Moustafa Safouan, L’échec du principe du plaisir, (Paris: Seuil, 1979); in English as Pleasure and Bein g, trans. Martin Thom (New York: Macmillan, 1983).

 

13.In his essay on psychosis, Lacan makes it explicit that the categories of “reality” and the “imaginary” not only overlap, but are themselves structured through the symbolic. Thus, “reality” no longer ha s the status of a “true reality” that one might oppose to an “imaginary” or “fictional” construction, and in addition, the fact that these two categories are in some sense mutually constitutive is itself the result of language. Thus, whereas the animal m ight be said to “adapt to reality” (in the usual sense of that word), the human being “adapts” (if one can still use this word) by means of representations that are constitutive of both “reality” and the “imaginary.” See Jacques Lacan, “D’une question pr éliminaire à tout traitment possible de la psychose,” Ecrits (Paris: Seuil, 1966). A portion of this volume has appeared in English. See “On a Question Preliminary to any Possible Treatment of Psychosis” in Ecrits: A Sel ection, trans Alan Sheridan (New York: Norton, 1977). Henceforth references will appear in the text preceded by E, French pagination first, English (whenever possible) second; in this case, E 531-83/179-225).

 

14. Zizek, 14. See also Martin Jay, The Dialectical Imagination (London: Heinemann, 1974).

 

15.Foucault makes just such a remark in “The Concern for Truth”: “The history of thought means not just the history of ideas or representations, but also an attempt to answer this question. . . . How can thought . . . ha ve a history?” (Kritzman 256).

 

16.Derrida, WD 34.

 

17.To develop this properly, one would have to explore Foucault’s remarks on the specifically modern form of “the other,” as he explains it in Les mots et les choses: une archéologie des sciences humaines (Paris: Galimard, 1966); The Order of Things: An Archaeology of the Human Sciences (New York: Random, 1970). References will henceforth be to both editions, French first, English second. As he says in “The Retreat and Return of the Or igin,” for modern thought, the origin “is very different from that ideal genesis that the Classical Age had attempted to reconstitute . . . the original in man is that which articulates him from the very outset upon something other than himself. . . . Par adoxically, the original, in man, does not herald the time of his birth, or the most ancient kernel of his experience . . . it signifies that man . . . is the being without origin . . . that man is cut off from the origin that would make him contemporaneo us with his own existence” (331-32).

 

18.Jacques Lacan, Television, 30. See also Jean-Jacques Roussaeu, Discours sur l’origine et les fondements de l’inégalité, in Oeuvres complètes, ed. Bernard Ga gnebin and Marcel Raymond (Paris: Gallimard, 1964), vol 3. Also, Thomas Hobbes, Leviathan, ed. Michael Oakeshott (Oxford: Blackwell, 1946).

 

19.Michel Foucault, “Nietzsche, Geneology, History,” Language, Counter-Memory, Practice: Selected Essays and Interviews, ed. Donald F Bouchard (Ithaca, Cornell UP, 1977), 139-64. Cited from 160; henceforth cited in the text as LCMP.

 

20.Michel Foucault, “Distance, aspect, origine,” Critique, November 1963, 20-22. Cited from Raymond Bellour, “Towards Fiction,” in Michel Foucault: Philosopher, trans. Timothy J. Armstrong (New York: Routledge, 1992), 148-56.

 

21. See Jean Hyppolite’s remarkable but succinct discussion of Hegel on just this point, in The Structuralist Controversy: The Languages of Criticism and the Sciences of Man, ed. Richard Macksey and Eugenio Donato (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins, 1970). This suggests that what we are here calling “dialectic” in fact refers not so much to Hegel as to a received version of “dialectic.”

 

22.Michel Foucault, The Birth of the Clinic: An Archaeology of Medical Perception, trans. A. M. Sheridan Smith (New York: Vintage, 1973), ix.

 

23. Another relevant discussion of this painting from a Lacanian perspective is Pierre-Gilles Guéguen, “Foucault and Lacan on the Status of the Subject of Representation,” Newsletter of the Freudian Field, vol. 3, nos. 1-2 (Spring/Fall 1989), 51-57.

 

24.Michel Foucault, “Power and Sex,” interview with Bernard Henri-Lévi in Kritzman, 110-24. Cited from 114.

 

25.”A few years ago, historians were very proud to discover that they could write not only the history of battles, of kings and institutions, but also of the economy . . . feelings, behavior, and the body. Soon, they wi ll understand that the history of the West cannot be dissociated from the way its ‘truth’ is produced. . . . The achievement of ‘true’ discourses . . . is one of the fundamental problems of the West.” See Kritzman, 112.

 

26.Kritzman, 120-1.

 

27.Bernard Henri-Lévi points out that because Foucault suggests that there is a relation between the (mistaken) thesis asserting sexual repression and those practices which aim at liberation, he has sometimes been misunderstood to argue that they are the same: “Hence the misunderstanding of certain commentators: ‘According to Foucault, the repression or liberation of sex amounts to the same thing’” (Kritzman, 114). Foucault replies that the point was not to erase the difference between these two (or between madness and reason), but simply to consider the way in which the two things were bound to one another, in order to recognize that the promise of liberation takes part in the same conceptual arrangement that pr oduced the idea of repression, to such a degree that the very aim of liberation often “ends up repressing” (as in the case of psychoanalysis, perhaps). This is why Foucault regards psychoanalysis with such suspicion, in spite of the connections we are pu rsuing between Foucault and Lacan. The question is whether psychoanalysis indeed remains trapped within the modern discourses of liberation that were born alongside what Foucault regards as the “monarchical” theories of power (what he also speaks of as t he “repressive hypothesis”), or whether, as Foucault sometimes suggests, psychoanalysis in fact amounts to a disruption of that paradigm, just as genealogy does.

 

28.Michel Foucault, Discipline and Punish: The Birth of the Prison (New York: Vintage, 1977), 29. Henceforth cited in the text as DP.

 

29. Michel Foucault, The History of Sexuality: An Introduction, trans Robert Hurley (New York: Vintage, 1978), 6. Henceforth cited in the text as HS.

 

30.The paper by Jana Sawicki responding to a paper by Issac Balbus shows very clearly the difference between a genealogical perspective and the “modern” discourses of liberation. These two papers offer an admirable exam ple of the contrast between a “Marxist” analysis and a feminism that is influenced in part by genealogy. In her remarks, Sawicki shows how the promise of a liberated future is haunted by the “most virulent” forms of humanism, in the sense that liberation carries with it a normative componant that that would itself escape genealogical analysis. See Isaac Balbus, “Disciplining Women: Michel Foucault and the Power of Feminist Discourse” and Jana Sawicki, “Feminism and the Power of Foucaultian Discourse,” i n After Foucault: Humanistic Knowledge, Postmodern Challenges, ed. Jonathan Arac (New Brunswick: Rutgers University Press, 1988).

 

31.Just as with psychoanalysis, there is here a focus on the past, and an elaboration of general principles, but the final word bears on the subject who is speaking, for that is where the reality of history lies.

 

32.Michel Foucault, “Preface to Transgression,” Language, Counter-Memory, Practice, 29-52. The essay was first published as “Hommage à George Bataille” in Critique, nos. 195-96 (1963), 7 51-70.

 

33. At the end of HS, Foucault makes a similar point: sex is the most refined product, and not the origin; it is what one might call a discursive effect and not a “natural” basis that is shaped by various restrictions or prohibitions. The question we are asking, with Lacan, however, is whether “sex” is simply or entirely discursive. To speak of the “real” is not to speak of a “pre-discursive reality” such as “sex,” but it is to ask about what “remains” outside represen tation (as madness, for Foucault, is left in silence or in shadow by the discourses of reason.

 

34. I am thinking here of Lacan’s reflections upon the body itself as structured by such limits–the eyes, ears, and other orifices seeming to participate in just this dislocation of Euclidean space. See Jeanne Granon-L afont, La topologie ordinaire de Jacques Lacan (Paris: Point Hors Ligne, ). I have discussed this briefly in “On Fate: Psychoanalysis and the Desire to Know,” in Dialectic and Narrative, ed. Dalia Judowitz and Thomas Flynn (New York: SUNY, 1993).

 

35. See Derrida’s recent remarks on this sentence in “Etre juste avec Freud,” in Penser la folie: Essais sur Michel Foucault (Paris: Galilée, 1992), 141-95.

 

36. Slavoj Zizek, 9-10.

 

37. It is true that the “mechanics” of libido at one point occupied Freud, when he still believed it possible to measure libido according to a model of charge and discharge, homeostasis and tension: but something always disturbs this model, and Freud’s use of such paradigms always follows them to the limit, to the point where they collapse, rather than elaborating them as a satisfactory answer. This does not keep his commentators from taking the bait, and putting their faith in an engine Freud has dismantled.

 

38. Nestor Braunstein, La Jouissance: un concept lacanien (Paris: Point Hors Ligne, 1990).

 

39. See Catherine Millot, Nobodaddy: L’hystérie dans la siècle (Paris: Point Hors Ligne, 1988).

 

40. See “The Economic Problem of Masochism,” Standard Edition vol 19, 155-72.

 

41. Sigmund Freud, Totem and Taboo, Standard Edition, vol 13, 1-161.

 

42. See the end of “Vital Signs: The Place of Memory in Psychoanalysis,” Research in Phenomenology 1993, 22-72.

 

43. See Foucault’s “What is Enlightenment?” trans. Catherine Porter, in The Foucault Reader, ed. Paul Rabinow (New York: Pantheon, 1984), esp. 35-36. Henceforth cited in the text as WE. See also Zizek’s re marks on Kant in For They Know Not What They Do, 203-9 and 229-37. In “What is Enlightenment?” Foucault’s question is very close to Lacan’s: what linkage, what common origin, do we find between these two fathers, terror and enlightenment?

 

44. Zizek argues that racism is another symptom in which the moral law reveals its dependence on this excess: the reason we hate the Jews is that they have too much money; the blacks have too much fun; the gay community has too much sex, and so on. The formation of the law that limits pleasure will always produce a locus in which the “stolen” pleasure resides, a place where we can locate the “original” satisfaction that has supposedly been given up, or “lost”: namely, i n the other [or in the paranoia that confuses the other with the Other of jouissance]. The myth of an original state of nature, a natural plenitude that was lost when we agreed to sign the social contract, would thus be linked by psychoanalysis to the my thology that is always constructed in order for racism to operate.

 

45. This thesis has been elaborated in considerable detail by Slavoj Zizek, in The Sublime Object of Idealogy (New York: Verso, 1989).

 

46. Jacques Lacan, “Kant avec Sade,” Écrits, 765-90. “Kant With Sade,” October 51 (Winter 1989), 55-75.

 

47. The discussion of Foucault and Derrida by Ann Wordsworth (“Derrida and Foucault: writing the history of historicity,” Postructuralism and the Question of History, ed. Derek Attridge, Geoff Bennington, an d Robert Young (Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 1987), 116-25.) mentions the fact that the question of violence is one of several points at which these two thinkers, in spite of their apparent conflict, comes closest together. Foucault points out that madness a nd reason are not distinguished by natural necessity or by right, but only by the contingency of a certain formation of knowledge, and that history itself can be understood as occurring precisely because of the inevitability (the “law”) of such contingent formations, and not as the unfolding of a fundamental “truth” of culture or human nature (teleological or merely sequentially continuous). Derrida himself says this “amounts to saying that madness is never excluded, except in fact, violently in history; or rather that this exclusion, this difference between the fact and the principle is historicity, the possibility of history itself. Does Foucault say otherwise? ‘The necessity of madness is linked . . . to the possibility of history’” (WD 310). Like F oucault and Lacan, so also Foucault and Derrida are much closer than their current academic reception would suggest.

 

48. Kritzman, 256-7. See also 121, 262, 112.

 

49. See Charles Shepherdson, “On Fate: Psychoanalysis and the Desire to Know,” Dialectic and Narrative, ed. Thomas R. Flynn and Dalia Judowitz (Albany: SUNY Press, 1993), 271-302.

 

50. As Nietzsche remarks in the Genealogy of Morals: “On the day when we can say with all our hearts, ‘Onwards! our old morality too is part of the comedy!’ we shall have discovered a new complication and po ssibility for the Dionysian drama” (21-2).

 

Hank De Leo

 

 

Get Change

oil on linen, 31 3/4 x 48″, 1993
Collection of Drs. Marc and Livia Straus

 

The Brain Has a Mind of Its Own

oil on linen, 30 3/4 x 37″, 1993
Collection of the artist

 

 

Ewa Ziarek

Department of English
University of Notre Dame
Krzysztof.Ziarek.2@nd.edu

 

Once again, politics must be conceived as a relationship of strangers who do not understand one another in a subjective and immediate sense, relating across time and distance.

 

–Iris Marion Young

 

A paradoxical community is emerging, made up of foreigners who are reconciled with themselves to the extent they recognize themselves as foreigners.

 

–Julia Kristeva

 

Nancy Fraser’s influential critique of Kristeva points to the central difficulty in Kristeva’s theory and to a strange paradox in its reception.¹ Within the space of the same essay, Fraser reads Kristeva’s work as both a traditional psychoanalytic elaboration of subjectivity–and therefore irrelevant for social theory–and as a devastating critique of social relations–to which social theory has to respond. On the one hand, she argues that Kristeva’s work “focuses almost exclusively on intrasubjective tensions and thereby surrenders its ability to understand intersubjective phenomena, including affiliation . . . and struggle”; on the other hand, she claims that Kristeva’s thought “is defined in terms of the shattering of social identity, and so it cannot figure in the reconstruction of the new, politically constituted, collective identities and solidarities that are essential to feminist politics.”² Fraser’s essay addresses two important questions to Kristeva in particular, and to psychoanalysis in general. First, it asks about the relation between the psychic and the social, between the decentered self and the “shattered social identity.” Second, it inquires whether group formations and social affiliations are conceivable without a reference to collective identities.³

 

In Kristeva’s 1989 Etrangers à nous-mêmes, translated into English as Strangers to Ourselves, this difficult intersection between the split psychic space and the fractured social identity leads to a rethinking of the possible ways of being in common in the wake of the crisis of the religious and national communities. In this text, Kristeva focuses on the status of the foreigner/stranger in the context of the historical and political conceptions of social identities, in particular, in the context of the Enlightenment’s dissolution of religious ties and the subsequent emergence of the modern nation-state: “With the establishment of nation-states we come to the only modern . . . definition of foreignness: the foreigner is the one who does not belong to the state in which we are, the one who does not have the same nationality.”⁴ Kristeva argues, however, that this “legal” definition merely covers over the deeper symptom provoked by the appearance of the foreigner: “the prickly passions aroused by the intrusion of the other in the homogeneity of . . . a group” (ST, 41). The foreigner provides the best exemplification of the “political” logic of the nation-state and its most vertiginous aberration–the logic that founds and con-founds the distinctions of man and citizen, cosmopolitanism and nationalism, civil and political rights, and finally, law and affect: “The difficulty engendered by the matter of foreigners would be completely contained in the deadlock caused by the distinction that sets the citizen apart from man . . . The process means . . . that one can be more or less a man to the extent that one is more or less a citizen, that he who is not a citizen is not fully a man. Between the man and a citizen there is a scar: the foreigner” (ST, 97-98). Seen as the aporia of the Enlightenment and, especially, as the impasse of its political rationality, the figure of the scar both enables and prevents a clear separation between myth and reason, the archaic and the modern, affect and law, same and other. Fracturing the imagined unity of the national body, the figure of the foreigner–a supplementary double of the Enlightenment’s political rationality–anticipates the Freudian “logic” of the uncanny.

 

Kristeva’s strategy to rethink social affiliations at work in modern nation-states from the marginal and ambivalent position of the foreigner parallels the project of Homi K. Bhabha to interpret the narrative of the nation from “the perspective of the nation’s margin and the migrants’ exile.”⁵ Not surprisingly, both Kristeva and Bhabha turn to Freud’s discussion of the uncanny in order to underscore not only the duplicity and ambivalence of the margin but also the threat it poses to the homogeneity of the national identity. This emphasis on the liminality fissuring the unity of the nation from within serves as a corrective to the accounts of nationality, which presuppose the imaginary unity of the people or “the sociological solidity of the national narrative” (DN, 305). While rightly criticizing Kristeva’s too hasty embrace of the pleasures of exile, Bhabha at the same time credits her for “a powerful critique and redefinition of the nation as a space for the emergence of feminist political and psychic identifications” (DN, 303).

 

Bhabha refers here to Kristeva’s analysis of the double temporality undercutting the continuity of the national historical narrative in “Women’s Time.” In Strangers to Ourselves Kristeva not only focuses far more explicitly on “the critique and redefinition” of the national space, but intertwines this political diagnosis of the aporia in the logic of nationalism with an inquiry into the possibilities of an ethics of psychoanalysis–an issue only briefly broached in “Women’s Time.” In the context of ethics, the foreigner becomes the figure of otherness as such–otherness inhabiting both the inter and the intra-subjective relations: “in that sense, the foreigner is a ‘symptom’ . . . : psychologically he signifies the difficulty we have of living as an other and with others; politically, he underscores the limits of nation-states and of the national political conscience” (ST, 103). Posited in this double way, the figure of the foreigner in Kristeva’s argument opens a space where politics is entwined with ethics. As Kristeva insists, “the ethics of psychoanalysis implies a politics,” because both are fundamentally concerned with the critique of violence and with the elaboration of different ways of being with others. Not dependent upon violent expulsion or “peaceful” absorption of others into a common social body, psychoanalysis, Kristeva argues, “sets the difference within us in its most bewildering shape and presents it as the ultimate condition of our being with others” (ST, 192). In this essay I would like to ask what notion of alterity is implied by the intersection, or perhaps, a disjunction, between politics and ethics.

 

Kristeva finishes her Strangers to Ourselves with a reading of Freud’s concept of the uncanny, arguing that the Freudian essay might implicitly create a discursive space for a different concept of sociality divorced from the violence of xenophobia underlying national affiliations. As has been frequently pointed out, the Freudian uncanny belongs to the specific historical formation of the Enlightenment, emerging as the obverse side of the modern subject and its scientific, secular rationality.⁶ Kristeva supplements this discussion by arguing that the uncanny has to be understood as the counterpart of yet another legacy of the Enlightenment–the disintegration of religious communities and subsequent formation of the modern nation-states.⁷ This discursive location of the critique of nationalism and its forms of social affiliations is at the same time the most valuable and the most problematic aspect of Kristeva’s analysis because it brings into sharp focus the uneasy relationship between the disintegration of the psychic space and the transformation of the social space. It might be worth recalling that despite more and more frequent references to the uncanny in the political context (as, for instance, in Bhabha’s case, the uncanny underscores the ambivalence and liminality of the national space), Kristeva’s choice of this particular essay is rather odd in the context of psychoanalysis: as far as the psychoanalytical interpretation of the social formation is concerned, Freud’s Group Psychology and the Analysis of the Ego, Civilization and its Discontents, or Moses and Monotheism, for instance, would be more logical, and seemingly more rewarding, texts. Although Kristeva is first to admit the absence of explicit political concerns–“strangely enough, there is no mention of foreigners in the Unheimliche” (ST, 191)–she argues that it is precisely this silence that is strange, itself uncanny: “Are we nevertheless so sure that the ‘political’ feelings of xenophobia do not include, often unconsciously, that agony of frightened joyfulness that has been called unheimlich . . . ?” (ST, 191).

 

On the basis of the explicit parallel between the political feelings of xenophobia and the affect of the uncanny, Kristeva argues that the condition of non-violent being with others lies in the renunciation of the imaginary subjective unity and in the subsequent acceptance of alterity within the self:

 

Delicately, analytically, Freud does not speak of foreigners: he teaches us how to detect foreignness in ourselves. That is perhaps the only way not to hound it outside of us. (ST, 192)

 

No matter how ethically admirable, Kristeva’s thesis is bound to disappoint as an answer to the political violence of nationalism and xenophobia. The idea of welcoming others to our own uncanny strangeness not only appears individualistic, it also risks psychologizing or aestheticizing the problem of political violence, not to mention the fact that the focus on the uncanny might obfuscate specific historical and political genealogy of nationalism and the memory of its victims–issues Kristeva herself raises only briefly in the historical part of her analysis. We seem to be confronted here with a dangerous reduction of the political crisis to a psychologism of sorts–to an unchangeable psychological trait, like, for instance, the subjective fear of one’s internal otherness. Written in non-technical and sometimes personal style, the whole project might even strike us as banal. It might appear so at first, especially when Kristeva’s thesis is left unqualified or extracted from the overall argument of the text. The question with which we are confronted here is whether the crisis in the social relations, and especially the crisis of nationality, can be explained (and perhaps redressed) by the analysis of the disintegration of the psychic space.

 

Needless to say, Kristeva inherits this difficulty from Freud. Contrary to her claim that Freud does not speak about foreigners in “The ‘Uncanny’,” there are of course numerous political references to foreigners in the Freudian text: from the strangers destroying the heimlich character of one’s country to the protestant rulers who “do not feel . . . heimlich among their catholic subjects”; from the conspirators and revolutionaries whispering the “watchword of freedom,” to those who are “deceitful and malicious toward cruel masters.” It would be rather difficult to imagine more explicitly “political” examples of social unrest. All of them suggest a crisis of national affiliation, a subversion of political authority, and an erosion of communicability as a consequence of this subversion. If we recall that religion and the army are Freud’s privileged instances of the libidinal group organization, then these “political” examples of the uncanny are not merely casual references but in fact paradigmatic cases of a disintegrated community. The problem remains, however, because these political examples are not intended to illustrate the social crisis but to exemplify the subjective affect–the dread evoked by castration anxiety, repetition-compulsion, or the uncanny doubling. Nonetheless, there remains something excessive about the sheer multiplications of these political instances–and this excess of the political leads us to the difficult question whether this subjective anxiety can figure as a possible transformation of the social.

 

For Kristeva, this excess of the political in “The ‘Uncanny’” is a subtle reminder of the difficult circumstances of Freud’s life, in particular, of his experience of anti-Semitism: “Freud’s personal life, a Jew wandering from Galicia to Vienna and London, with stopovers in Paris, Rome, and New York (to mention only a few of the key stages of his encounters with political and cultural foreignness), conditions his concern to face the other’s discontent as ill-ease in the continuous presence of the ‘other scene’ within us” (ST, 181). However, Kristeva locates “The ‘Uncanny’” not only in Freud’s historical context but also in her own. Strangers to Ourselves, and especially, Nations without Nationalism (a text which includes an open letter to Harlem Dèsir, a founder of SOS Racisme) is meant to speak to the contemporary crisis of national identity in Europe generated by the opposite tendencies of economic consolidation and ethnic particularisms: on the one hand, the growing economic integration of the European community; on the other hand, the disintegration of the Soviet Block and the subsequent rise of nationalism and ethnic violence in Eastern Europe, the rise of anti-Semitism, the unification of Germany, the increasing violence against immigrants (especially non-European immigrants), and finally, the rise of French chauvinism in response to the crisis of French national identity.⁸ In this context, one should also mention the ambiguity of Kristeva’s position as a Bulgarian living in France and attempting to speak as a cosmopolitan intellectual (as she admits, tongue in cheek, “I am willing to grant the legitimacy of the ironic objection you might raise: it is beneficial to be a cosmopolitan when one comes from a small country such as Bulgaria”⁹).

 

Despite the pressure of these immediate political concerns, however, Kristeva’s reading of Freud still suggests a certain displacement of politics–the politics of psychoanalysis does not emerge from an explicit discussion of the political. The specific character of this displacement becomes apparent if we recall that Kristeva attempts to articulate the politics of psychoanalysis by reading an essay that is preoccupied, perhaps more explicitly than other Freud’s texts, with aesthetics. Aware of the difficulties that this uneasy relation between politics and aesthetics creates, especially in the aftermath of modernist aestheticism, Kristeva situates Freud’s and her own work at the crossroads of modernity described by Walter Benjamin: between the politicization of aesthetics and the aestheticization of politics.¹⁰ The implication of her argument is that aesthetics cannot secure its autonomy, that it is perpetually haunted by its repressed and yet intimate relation to politics. In this particular case, Kristeva, like Benedict Anderson and Homi Bhabha, is interested in the place of aesthetics in the construction of national narratives. All three of these writers focus on aesthetics in order to oppose, in Bhabha’s words, the temptation of historicism presuming the self-evidence of the event and the transparency of language. Yet, in contrast to the linearity of realistic narrative evoked by Anderson as the model of national community, both Kristeva and Bhabha turn to the aesthetics of the uncanny in order to underscore the ambivalence and heterogeneity underlying national affiliations.

 

In Kristeva’s case, however, this recourse to aesthetics performs yet another function–it provides a certain mediation between the crisis of the psychic space, or what Kristeva calls the “destructuration of the self,” and the transformation of social relations. Therefore, it is only by disregarding this mediating role of aesthetics that we can confuse Kristeva’s critique of nationalism with psychologism, that is, with the explanation of social crisis in terms of unchangeable psychological phenomena. The attempt to seek in the aesthetics of the uncanny what Jay Bernstein calls “an after-image” of an alternative political practice is intertwined specifically with the question of affect and its place in social relations.¹¹ I would like to suggest that Kristeva’s reconstruction of an alternative “group psychology” on the basis of aesthetics and affectivity repeats Hannah Arendt’s strategy to recreate Kant’s political theory–the missing fourth Critique–on the basis of the Critique of Aesthetic Judgement.¹² What Arendt retrieves from Kantian aesthetics is, first, an alternative sense of politics based on judgement rooted in affect–that is, on the mode of thinking the particular without the reference of the encompassing totality, rather than on the rational free will elaborated in the second Critique–and second, a model of political sensus communis implied by such a judgement. The greatest achievement of Kantian aesthetics, according to Arendt, lies in the destruction of the assumption that the judgements of taste, and therefore affectivity, lie outside the political realm. What aesthetics has in common with politics, therefore, is the presupposition of a certain community on the basis of the communicability of judgements and an inscription of affectivity in the public sphere. The turn to aesthetics allows, therefore, to supplement the discussion of nationality and political community based on rational will with the haunting question of affectivity and judgement.¹³

 

Although Kristeva shares with Arendt an approach to aesthetics as a place holder for the absent or alternative sense of politics, both ultimately appeal to different aesthetic phenomena and arrive at a different understanding of community. Arendt turns to the pleasure in the beautiful in order to reconstruct a community based on identification with others–achieved “by putting oneself in place of everybody else” and by sharing a commitment to public communicability of judgements, which, needless to say, presupposes a certain transparency of language. Kristeva, on the other hand, derives the alternative sense of politics neither from the aesthetics of the beautiful nor from the sublime, but rather from the Freudian aesthetics of the uncanny. In repeating the Freudian move “beyond the pleasure principle” on the level not only of psychoanalysis but also of aesthetics, she points to the far more drastic consequences of supplanting rational will with the notions of affect than Arendt is willing to acknowledge. By confronting us with the confusion and uncertainty of judgement, the negative affect of the uncanny reveals the erosion of the communicability of language and the instability of communal boundaries.

 

Let us recall that Freud’s analysis of the uncanny opens an inquiry into a “remote region” of aesthetics, neglected by the standard works of the discipline: “as good as nothing to be found upon this subject in elaborate treatises on aesthetics, which in general prefer to concern themselves with what is beautiful, attractive and sublime, that is with feelings of a positive nature . . . rather than with the opposite feelings of unpleasantness and repulsion.”¹⁴ In other words, the subject-matter Freud discusses is itself uncanny, which, although marginalized and removed from the field of aesthetics as such, nonetheless haunts even its most “obtuse” theoreticians. Freud sets up the relation between psychoanalysis and aesthetics at the beginning of the essay in terms of a corrective supplement: psychoanalysis illuminates what the traditional field of aesthetics fails to elaborate by adding a negativity of the uncanny to the positive articulations of the beautiful and the sublime. The implication of Freud’s argument is that even the Kantian articulation of the sublime is not radical enough since the initial pain generated by the failure of imagination to present the sublime object is compensated by the pleasure in the idea of the practical reason, “surpassing every standard of sense.”¹⁵

 

By the end of Freud’s discussion, however, the relationship between psychoanalysis and aesthetics is reversed: now it is psychoanalysis that is confronted with a residue of aesthetics, a residue which not only exceeds its competence but also questions its main premises of interpretation:

 

We might say that these preliminary results have satisfied psycho-analytic interest in the problem of the uncanny, and what remains probably calls for an aesthetic valuation . . . . One thing we may observe which may help us to resolve these uncertainties: nearly all the instances which contradict our hypothesis are taken from the realm of fiction and literary productions. (U, 401, emphasis added)

 

The remains of aesthetics contradict the hypothesis of psychoanalysis (in particular, Freud’s exclusion of the intellectual uncertainty or the confusion/conflict of judgement) and call instead for an “aesthetic valuation” of psychoanalysis itself. The most disquieting instance of the uncanny calling for such “an aesthetic valuation” occurs, according to Freud, when “the writer pretends to move in the world of common reality” and “then after all oversteps the bounds of possibility” (U, 405). The confusion of judgement brought about by the affect of the uncanny is perhaps most devastating in this case because it questions the boundaries of the common world, the progressive development of community, the surmounting of animalistic beliefs by modernity, and finally, the very distinction between the real and the imaginary: “there is a conflict of judgement whether things which have been ‘surmounted’ and are regarded as incredible are not, after all, possible” (U, 404). Characterized by the absence of any positive affect and by the confusion of judgement, the uncanny questions not only the parameters of aesthetics but also the boundaries of being in common–the boundaries which Freud’s own libidinal theory of political bonds sets up in Group Psychology. Itself the menacing double of Group Psychology, the uncanny haunts and unravels the communal bonds of identification produced by Eros. As Homi Bhabha remarks, “the problem is, of course, that the ambivalent identifications of love and hate occupy the same psychic space; the paranoid projections ‘outwards’ return to haunt and splitthe place from which they are made” (DN, 300).

 

I would now like to suggest more specifically how Kristeva’s analysis of the affect and the confusion of judgement produced by the uncanny intervenes in the concept of community represented by modern nationalism. As Benedict Anderson has argued in his influential Imagined Communities: Reflections on the Origins and Spread of Nationalism, the formation of modern nation states is characterized by the imaginary logic of identification. A nation can be defined, therefore, as an imagined political community, because despite the physical dispersion of population, despite the conditions of exploitation and inequality, and, we have to add, despite the arbitrariness of language, the members of the nation imagine their belonging together as “communion,” comradeship, or fraternity: “The idea of a sociological organism moving calendrically through homogenous empty time is a precise analogue of the idea of the nation, which is also conceived as a solid community moving steadily down (or up) history.”¹⁶ By the end of his discussion of the institutions and social processes that enable the rise and spread of nationalism–in particular, the appearance of the modern conception of “empty” historical time and arbitrary language, the convergence of capitalism with print technology, and the growing reading public–Anderson surprisingly admits that this institutional and cultural analysis fails to explain the crucial role of affect in the formation of national consciousness. It cannot explain why nation, the imaginary social formation dependent on the emptiness of time and language, inspires nonetheless self-sacrificing love among its members. Even more problematically, Anderson’s discussion fails to show the relation of this love to the hatred of racism: “It is doubtful whether either social change or transformed consciousnesses, in themselves, do much to explain the attachment that peoples feel for the inventions of their imaginations . . . it is useful to remind ourselves that nations inspire love, and often profoundly self-sacrificing love.”¹⁷ Put in a different way, the mysterious “attachment” points to a curious tension between the rhetoric of emptiness, so consistently stressed in Anderson’s analysis of language and temporality, and the semblance of organicism and “fraternity” produced by imaginary identification. Although unexplained, affect is crucial in the formation of a national affiliation because it mediates between the emptiness of time and language, and the imaginary organic unity of the nation. Affect thus converts the empty signs into the emblems of “communion” and reifies the arbitrary signifiers into the expression of empathy.

 

Anderson’s acknowledgement of the importance of affect, which nonetheless is left without a theoretical elaboration, can help us to situate the political implications of Kristeva’s reading of the uncanny. Like Slavoj Zizek, Kristeva underscores the ambivalent role of affectivity in the process of national identification. For Zizek, let us recall, it is the enjoyment of the shared substance, of the “national Thing” uniquely embodied in the particular way of national life, that fills in the symbolic emptiness and thus endows the national bond with its seeming sociological solidity. The enigmatic “national Thing” fills the void on several levels: on the political level–the void of the Sovereign power created by democracy and capitalist economy; on the moral level, the void of the Supreme Good created by Kant’s formal conception of the categorical imperative; and, on the linguistic level, the void created by the arbitrary character of the sign. A collective fantasy, the function of nationalism is similar to the Kantian transcendental illusion of a direct access to the Thing: “This paradox of filling-out the empty place of the Supreme Good defines the modern notion of Nation. The ambiguous and contradictory nature of the modern nation is the same as that of vampires and other living dead: . . . their place is constituted by the very break of modernity.”¹⁸ As Zizek argues, national affiliation cannot be sustained merely by symbolic identification; it requires the supplementary function of affect, transforming the emptiness of formalism into the imaginary solidity of national community.¹⁹

 

What Kristeva’s discussion of the uncanny emphasizes is the ambiguity of such a supplement: the imaginary identification that fills the linguistic void becomes in turn a source of threat. Thus, the temporal and linguistic void not only undercuts the process of positive affective identification but also changes the very nature of affectivity at work in the formation of nationality. Perpetually threatened by the irruption of the irreducible difference within the imagined communal unity, the national bond is inseparable from the negativity of the uncanny. As the semiology of the uncanny suggests, the communal desire to “invalidate the arbitrariness of signs” and to reify them “as psychic contents” does not generate the feeling of belonging but its opposite, a threatening experience of strangeness (ST, 186). Anderson himself comes close to acknowledging the uncanniness of the national imagination when he considers its striking icon, the tomb of the Unknown Soldier. Instead of producing the fantasy of organic unity, the void of the tomb–indeed, a fitting figure for the emptiness of historical time and the gaps of arbitrary language–turns the national imagination into something ghostly: “Void as these tombs are of identifiable mortal remains or immortal souls, they are nonetheless saturated with ghostly national imaginings.”²⁰ If the arbitrariness of the sign opens a space for the secular national identification, it at the same time prevents the transformation of this void into “organic solidity.”²¹ As the primary reminder of the ghostly character of the imaginary identification, the figure of the foreigner disorients the judgment about belonging to the common world and thereby reveals the glaring gaps and discontinuities beneath the national affiliation. By juxtaposing the ideal of political love with the uncanniness of the “ghostly national imaginings,” Kristeva strives for a different conceptualization of belonging together, in which mutual affective identification is undercut by the very gaps and discontinuities of language.

 

As I have suggested at the beginning of this essay, another mediation between the disruption of the psychic space and the reconfiguration of the social relations is performed, in Kristeva’s argument, by ethics. Despite the numerous but nonetheless cryptic references to and remarks about ethics in her work, the reconstruction of the specific meaning of “ethics” in Kristeva’s project is not an easy undertaking. This is perhaps the case because Kristeva’s ethics of psychoanalysis does not offer a positive program–it does not formulate a set of rules for a new morality–but merely demands respect for an inassimilable alterity: “Psychoanalysis is then experienced as a journey into the strangeness of the other and of oneself, toward an ethics of respect for the irreconcilable” (ST, 182). If Kristeva’s analysis of aesthetics reveals an ambivalent role of affectivity in the formation of social relations, the turn to ethics calls for the transformation of this affect–of the political love haunted by the hatred of the other–into respect for alterity.

 

The “respect for the radical form of otherness” not only contests the reification of language (where the arbitrary signs become emblems of the communion with others) but also demystifies the identity of the symbolic order itself. As Kristeva writes in “Women’s Time,” the entwinement of aesthetics and ethics points to the limits of the symbolic as a system of exchange–a system, which sets equivalences among diverse elements: “It seems to me that the role of what is usually called ‘aesthetic practices’ must increase not only to counterbalance the storage and uniformity of information by present-day mass media . . . but also to demystify the identity of the symbolic bond itself, to demystify, therefore, the community of language as a universal and unifying tool, one which totalizes and equates.”²² The concern for the irreconcilable moves Kristeva to criticize both the imaginary communion of Einfühlung and the contractual community of language in so far as the symbolic totality subsumes differences into a system of equivalences. Not merely a celebration of linguistic indeterminacy, the respect for the irreconcilable poses a new demand for ethics

 

in order to emphasize the responsibility which all will immediately face of putting this fluidity into play against the threats of death which are unavoidable wherever an inside and an outside, a self and an other, one group and another, are constituted . . . . What I have called “aesthetic practices” are undoubtedly nothing other than the modern reply to the eternal question of morality.²³

 

This reference to responsibility suggests that the linguistic instability does not suspend the necessity of judging but reverses the stakes of judgement. If the aesthetic of the uncanny points to the impasse of judgement, ethics shifts the priority from the subjective faculty of judgment to the experience of being judged. As Kristeva’s famous formulation of the subject-in-process/on-trial suggests, the instability of the symbolic order and the fragility of subjective identity do not imply subjective complacency or the “happy” celebration of linguistic multiplicity but impose responsibility in the face of judgement coming from the other.

 

As I have argued elsewhere, such a minimal formulation of ethics that posits a “respect” for the irreconcilable in place of any positive program recalls Levinasian ethics.²⁴ Based likewise on the “respect” for the irreducible alterity, Levinas’s thought protests against the assimilation of otherness to the order of the same–against the absorption of alterity to the order of the subject, community, or linguistic totality. In order to prevent the assimilation of the other, which amounts in the end to the violent constitution of the other’s identity, Levinas underscores the irreducible exteriority or the excess of alterity overflowing both social formation and signifying systems. Yet, in what way can the Freudian notion of the uncanny open such a non-violent relationship to “the irreconcilable otherness” in Levinas’s sense? Perhaps one could risk a claim that the Levinasian ethic is itself uncanny, since encountering the other it describes always involves a profound displacement of the subject, an insurmountable disturbance of the domestic economy, a disruption of propriety and property–a calling into question of everything one wishes to claim as one’s own. In an uncanny resemblance to psychoanalysis, Levinas’s ethics takes us back to “the infancy of philosophy” in order to cure reason from its allergic reaction to “the other that remains other”:

 

Western philosophy coincides with the disclosure of the other where the other, in manifesting itself as a being, loses its alterity. From its infancy philosophy has been struck with a horror of the other that remains other–with an insurmountable allergy.²⁵

 

The heteronomous experience we seek would not be an attitude that cannot be converted into a category, and whose movement unto the other is not recuperated in identification.²⁶

 

Although it disrupts the economy of the proper, the heteronomous experience of “the fundamental strangeness” in Levinas’s work does not reproduce anxiety or fright, as is the case with the uncanny. On the contrary, it commands the subject to ethical responsibility for the other. Consequently, if Kristeva’s re-reading of the uncanny is to clear the ground for ethics, this interpretation has to negotiate the passage from fright–what Levinas calls “insurmountable allergy”–to responsibility.

 

In order to see how Kristeva navigates this passage from the horror of the other toward the respect for the irreconcilable, we need to clarify the difference between the alterity at the basis of Levinas’s (and Kristeva’s) ethics and the kind of otherness that manifests itself in the experience of the uncanny. As Kristeva is well aware, the experience of the uncanny does not consist in the encounter with the irreducible alterity of the other person–it is certainly not the face to face encounter in the Levinasian sense–but, on the contrary, it brings an unsettling recognition of the subject’s own strangeness. Underscoring the otherness that inhabits the subject from within, Freud’s analysis of the uncanny points to “an immanence of the strange within the familiar” (ST, 183). Not surprisingly, then, Kristeva suggests that the notion of the uncanny both belongs to and disrupts the “intimist” Romantic filiation: “with the Freudian notion of the unconscious the involution of the strange in the psyche . . . integrates within the assumed unity of human beings an otherness that is both biological and symbolic and becomes an integral part of the same” (ST, 181). Kristeva argues, however, that this difficult recognition of the irreconcilable alterity within the self is precisely what enables a non-violent relation to the other. In other words, the ethical encounter with the other, with the foreigner and the stranger, is inconceivable without the acknowledgement of alterity inscribed already within the most intimate interiority of the self. Thus although the uncanny is not equivalent to ethics, in so far as it “reconciles” us with the irreconcilable within ourselves, it opens its possibility.

 

Kristeva’s reading suggests an “improper” parallel between the strangeness disrupting the intimacy of the self from within and the irreducible exteriority of the other eluding any form of internalization. This strange parallel is what shatters any proper distinction between interiority and exteriority, immanence and transcendence. Needless to say, Kristeva’s interpretation of the uncanny repeats its paradoxical logic: the instability of the opposition between the inside and the outside, between interiority and exteriority, is unheimlich par excellence. In Freud’s well-known linguistic analysis, the ambivalence of the word “heimlich”–what is familiar, intimate, belonging to the home–“finally coincides with its opposite, ‘unheimlich’.” For Kristeva this instability of logic, the uncertainty of conceptual boundaries, is itself both a source and a symptom of the uncanny. She adds, however, another twist to this already convoluted and unstable logic by arguing that the uncanny coincidence of the most intimate interiority with the threatening exteriority is at the same time what upholds their radical non-coincidence. Put in a different way, “the immanence of the strange within the familiar” preserves the transcendence of the other in Levinas’s sense.

 

This added twist is at the core of the double movement of Kristeva’s argument: the first part of her argument, following Freud’s analysis, performs a certain internalization or inscription of otherness within the subject, whereas the second part reasserts the radical exteriority and non-integration of alterity. Kristeva claims that in order to elaborate an ethics of respect for the irreconcilable, otherness has to be seen as already constituting the subject from within: “A first step was taken that removed the uncanny strangeness from the outside, where fright had anchored it, to locate it inside, not inside the familiar considered as one’s own and proper, but the familiar potentially tainted with strangeness and referred to . . . an improper past” (ST, 183). This is what Freud refers to when he claims that “this uncanny is in reality nothing new or foreign, but something familiar and old-established in the mind that has been estranged only by the process of repression” (U, 394). Such externalization of what remains “irreconcilable” within the subject is especially emphasized by Freud in the context of the uncanny doubling: it is “the impulse towards self-protection which has caused the ego to project such a content outward as something foreign to itself” (U, 389). Consequently, Kristeva argues that the exteriority of the uncanny is merely an effect of a defensive projection of the narcissistic self: “the archaic, narcissistic self, not yet demarcated by the outside world, projects out of itself what it experiences as dangerous or unpleasant in itself, making of it an alien double . . . . In this instance the strange appears as a defense put up by a distraught self” (ST, 183).

 

The first part of Kristeva’s argument unravels, then, defensive projections, but at the high price of a radical disintegration of the subject. By relocating “the irreconcilable” within the self, the uncanny might be more appropriately described as a destructuration of the self: “In short, if anguish revolves around an object, uncanniness, on the other hand, is a destructuration of the self” (ST, 188). Why does the paradoxical disintegration of the self remain for Kristeva a necessary condition for the acknowledgement of the radical exteriority of the other? The implication of Kristeva’s approach to ethics is that the encounter with irreducible alterity can emerge only at the end of a rigorous analysis of the way the other constitutes and is in turn constituted within the subjective experience. By confronting us with the difficulty we have in relation to the other (“The uncanny strangeness allows for many variations: they all repeat the difficulty I have in situating myself with respect to the other” [ST, 187]), the experience of the uncanny reveals the “fascinated rejection of the other” at the very center of the imaginary constitution of self.

 

To explain what Kristeva means by the “fascinated rejection of the other,” we need to turn now to her earlier work on the aporia of the primary identification–the aporia persisting in all the subsequent identifications in psychic life. Reworking of the mechanism of primary identification in Tales of Love, Kristeva not only stresses the semantic emptiness underlying this process but also calls attention to two very different modalities of otherness. Understood as a metaphorical shifting, primary identification functions as the transference of the not yet ego–the Beckettian not-I–into the place of the Other. The Other functions here as “the very possibility of the perception, distinction, and differentiation . . . that ideal is nevertheless a blinding, nonrepresentable power–a sun or a ghost.”²⁷ Called by Kristeva “the imaginary father,” this Other provides a place of unification, which is produced by a metaphorical condensation of the drive and the signifier. Yet if the transfer to the place of the Other opens the possibility of the fragile transformation of the not-I into an Ego, this unification is threatened by the emptiness of transference and, even more so, by the abjection of the “unnamable” otherness of the mother:

 

primary identification appears to be a transference to (from) the imaginary father, correlative to the establishment of the mother as “ab-jetted.” Narcissism would be that correlation (with the imaginary father and the “ab-jetted” mother) enacted around the central emptiness of that transference.²⁸

 

I would like to stress two points in Kristeva’s diagnosis of the aporia of primary identification. First, the objectless identification both preserves the emptiness of transference (which Kristeva sees as an antecedent to the symbolic function) and, at the same time, provides the means of defense against this void–it functions as a screen over the emptiness of transference. Second, as an obverse side of the fascinated rejection of the other, primary identification provides the means of defense against abjection.

 

We might say that the aporia of the objectless identification sets up two modalities of otherness and a double operation of displacement constitutive of the narcissistic self: on the one hand, the other becomes a metaphorical destination of sorts (even if this destination is only “seeming”), a place of a possible unification for the archaic not-I; but on the other hand, the unnamable otherness of the abject turns the fragile position of an I into a permanent exile. As Kristeva writes, abjection can be described as a perpetual displacement, disrupting even a temporary crystallization of identity: “the one by whom the abject exists is thus a deject who places (himself) . . . and therefore strays instead of getting his bearings . . . Instead of sounding himself as to his “being,” he does so concerning his place: ‘Where am I?’ instead of ‘Who am I?’.”²⁹

 

Although in The Tales of Love Kristeva argues that abjection has to be offset by identification in order to demarcate an archaic narcissistic space, she nonetheless ends her discussion once again with the figure of an exile, which anticipates the predicament of the foreigner in Strangers to Ourselves. The work on identification prior to the mirror stage produces, paradoxically, a strayed Narcissus “deprived of his psychic space, an extraterrestrial with a prehistory bearing, wanting for love.”³⁰ This Narcissus in the throes of abjection can be read as an interruption of the primary identification, as the mark of a prior relation to the other that cannot be subsumed into even a “seeming” destination for an I. By repeating the effects of such an interruption, every subsequent encounter with the other provokes the narcissistic crisis: “Strange is indeed the encounter with the other–whom we perceive . . . but do not ‘frame’ within our consciousness. . . . I do not even perceive him, perhaps he crushes me because I negate him” (ST, 187). Is the rejection of the foreigner a narcissistic defense against the profound displacement experienced in the encounter with the other?

 

If such a violent rejection of the other is to be surmounted, then the I has to give up the fantasy of the proper self: proper self “no longer exists ever since Freud and shows itself to be a strange land of borders and othernesses ceaselessly constructed and deconstructed” (ST, 191). Although the uncanny shatters the imaginary integrity of the self, Kristeva argues that this destructuration of the self is a resource rather than a threat: “As . . . source of depersonalization, we cannot suppress the symptom that the foreigner provokes; but we simply must come back to it, clear it up, give it the resources our own essential depersonalizations provide, and thus only soothe it” (ST, 190, emphasis added). Depersonalization becomes a “resource” when, by undoing the defensive projections, it enables an encounter with the absolutely other. It is at this point in her discussion that Kristeva shifts the emphasis from the “irreconcilable” within the self to the encounter with the other who “activates” the experience of the uncanny–the other of death, the other of femininity, or finally, the foreigner: “While it surely manifests the return of a familiar repressed, the Unheimliche requires just the same the impetus of a new encounter with an unexpected outside element” (ST, 188). The impact of this new event remains ambiguous–it may lead either to psychosis or to an opening toward the new, toward the absolutely other: the uncanny experience “may either remain as a psychotic symptom or fit in as an opening toward the new, as an attempt to tally with the incongruous” (ST, 188). The resolution of this ambiguity depends on whether or not the self is successful in “a crumbling of the conscious defenses, resulting from the conflicts the self experiences with an other” (ST, 188). Such an opening toward the new and the incongruous, if we recall Kristeva’s earlier definition, constitutes precisely an ethics of respect for the irreconcilable: “Strange is the experience of the abyss separating me from the other who shocks me” (ST, 187). This is perhaps the most clear instance in Kristeva’s reading of Freud where the abyss within the subject maintains the abyss between the subject and the other, pointing to the limits of both subjective integration and intersubjective identification.

 

Since individual or collective identity is inextricably bound with a “fascinated rejection of the other,” Kristeva argues that only a departure from that logic of identity–from the affective Einfühlung at the heart of the organic Gemeinschaft to be sure, but also from its opposite, from the equivalences set up by the symbolic totality–can create non-violent conditions of being with others. No longer based on the common affective bond or the symbolic equivalences, the non-violent relations to others have to preserve the irreducible non-integration of alterity within the common social body: “Freud brings us the courage to call ourselves disintegrated in order not to integrate foreigners and even less to hunt them down, but rather to welcome them to that uncanny strangeness, which is as much theirs as it is ours” (ST, 192). Such a disintegrated community might appear, to refer to Jean-Luc Nancy’s argument, “inoperative.”³¹ Indeed, the paradoxical mode of solidarity with others–a solidarity which respects differences between and within subjects rather than seeking their reconciliation–does not work in the sense that it fails to produce a common essence. And yet, it is the only mode of being with others that refuses to obliterate alterity for the sake of collective identity. As Kristeva writes, with this notion of solidarity,

 

we are far removed from a call to brotherhood, about which one has already ironically pointed out its debt to paternal and divine authority–“in order to have brothers there must be a father” . . . On the basis of an erotic, death bearing unconscious, the uncanny strangeness–a projection as well as a first working out of death drive– . . . sets the difference within us . . . and presents it as the ultimate condition of our being with others. (ST, 192)

Notes

 

1.Kristeva’s work has produced many controversies and debates among feminist critics. See for instance, Judith Butler, “The Body Politics of Julia Kristeva,” Gender Trouble: Feminism and the Subversion of Identity (New York: Routledge, 1990), 79-93; Ann Rosalind Jones, “Julia Kristeva on Femininity: The Limits of a Semiotic Politic” Feminist Review 18 (1984): 46-73; Jacqueline Rose, Sexuality in the Field of Vision (London: Verso, 1986), 151-57, and the collection of essays, Ethics, Politics, and Difference in Julia Kristeva’s Writing, ed. Kelly Oliver (New York: Routledge, 1993).

 

2.Nancy Fraser, “The Uses and Abuses of French Discourse Theories for Feminist Politics,” Boundary 2, 17 (1990): 98.

 

3.In contrast to Fraser’s powerful critique of Kristeva’s project, Iris Young advances quite a different interpretation of Kristeva’s politics. In her influential essay, “The Ideal of Community and the Politics of Difference,” Social Theory and Practice 12 (1986), Young focuses precisely on what kind of a reconstruction of social relations could emerge from Kristeva’s notion of the subject as a heterogenous process. According to this reading, Kristeva’s theory not only does not “surrender the ability to understand intersubjective phenomena” but, on the contrary, it allows for a reconceptualization of group solidarity and political community beyond the notion of collective identity. For Young this different sense of belonging together corresponds to a different sense of politics–which she calls the politics of difference. However, if Young’s commitment to the politics of difference has been accepted within a large circle of feminist theorists–witness the proliferation of the recent anthologies like Practicing the Conflict in Feminism, ed. Marrianne Hirsch and Evelyn Fox Keller (New York: Routledge, 1990)–her claim about the political significance of Kristeva’s theory remains much more controversial.

 

4.Julia Kristeva, Strangers to Ourselves, trans. Leon S. Roudiez (New York: Columbia UP, 1991), 96. Subsequent references to this edition will be marked parenthetically in the text as ST.

 

5.Homi K. Bhabha, “DissemiNation: Time, Narrative, and the Margins of the Modern Nation,” Nation and Narration, ed. Homi K. Bhabha (London: Routledge, 1990), 291. Subsequent references to this edition will be marked parenthetically in the text as DN. One can also mention here a parallel project by Tzvetan Todorov, On Human Diversity: Nationalism, Racism, and Exoticism, in French Thought, trans. Catherine Porter (Cambridge: Harvard UP, 1993).

 

6.See for instance Mladen Dolar, “‘I Shall Be with You on Your Wedding-Night’: Lacan and the Uncanny,” October 58 (1991): 6-23, p. 7.

 

7.My argument at this point opposes Norma Claire Moruzzi’s reading of Kristeva’s Strangers to Ourselves. By ignoring the leading role of the Freudian concept of the uncanny in the structure of Kristeva’s argument, Moruzzi sees Kristeva “resorting to the traditional comforts of Enlightenment humanism.” See Norma Claire Moruzzi, “National Abjects: Julia Kristeva on the Process of Political Self-identification,” Ethics, Politics, and Difference in Julia Kristeva’s Writing, 140.

 

8.The famous 1989 incident “l’affaire du foulard”–the expulsion from public school of three young women from North African families who insisted on wearing head-scarves–is but one instance of the tensions accumulating around immigrants in France, especially around Islamic immigrants from North Africa. For a detailed discussion of the role of this incident as a background for Kristeva’s text, see Moruzzi, “National Abjects,” 136-142.

 

9.Julia Kristeva, Nations without Nationalism, trans. Leon Roudiez (New York; Columbia UP, 1993), 15.

 

10.The politicization of aesthetics in Kristeva’s argument is intertwined with the problem of translation. One of the few instances where Freud does raise the issue of foreigners is during his terminological discussion of the uncanny in foreign languages. Although he cites the Greek word xenos, the word in which the strange coincides precisely with what is foreign, Freud immediately dismisses this new interpretative perspective by insisting that “foreign dictionaries tell us nothing new” and that other “languages are without a word for this particular variety of what is fearful.” What is raised yet not pursued in this example is the complex relation between the uncanny and the foreign, between the national language (represented both by the mother tongue and the mother’s body) and translation. Yet these seemingly futile exercises in translation (exercises that seem to reassure us about the good fortune of the native tongue by reminding us that foreign etymologies do not contribute anything new to the discussion) paradoxically situate the problematic of otherness at the limits of translatability–the limits that seem to affect primarily the language one wishes to call one’s own. By underscoring the important historical role national literatures and the philologies of national languages have played in the formation of modern nation-states, Kristeva at the same time underscores the political significance of this necessity and the impossibility of translation as the limit of nationalism.

 

11.J.M. Bernstein, The Fate of Art: Aesthetic Alienation from Kant to Derrida and Adorno (University Park: The Pennsylvania State UP, 1992), 11-16.

 

12.Hannah Arendt, Lectures on Kant’s Political Philosophy, ed. Ronald Beiner (Chicago: U of Chicago P, 1982).

 

13.For an interesting discussion of Arendt’s theory of judgement and of the controversies her theory has created, see Maurizio Passerin d’Entreves, The Political Philosophy of Hannah Arendt (London: Routledge, 1994), 101-138.

 

14.Sigmund Freud, “The ‘Uncanny’,” Collected Papers, vol. 4, trans. Joan Riviere (New York: Basic Books, 1959): 368-69. Subsequent references to this essay are marked parenthetically in the text as U.

 

15.Immanuel Kant, Critique of Judgement, trans. J. H. Bernard (New York: Macmillan, 1951), 89.

 

16.Benedict Anderson, Imagined Communities: Reflections on the Origin and the Spread of Nationalism (London: Verso, 1991), 26.

 

17.Benedict Anderson, Imagined Communities, 141.

 

18.Slavoj Zizek, Tarrying with the Negative: Kant, Hegel, and the Critique of Ideology, (Durham: Duke UP), 222. Zizek’s analysis of the “Thing” is based on Lacan’s The Ethics of Psychoanalysis, 1959-1960, The Seminar of Jacques Lacan, book 7, ed. Jacques-Allain Miller, trans. Dennis Porter (New York: Norton), 19-84.

 

19.In light of Kristeva’s discussion, Zizek’s analysis would be particularly useful for explaining the “mystical” form of nationalism, based on the secret notion of Volksgeist, the origins of which Kristeva traces, beyond German Romanticism, in the writings of Herder. Rather than positing one model of national identification, however, she insist on the specificity of various historical forms of nationalism–in particular, on the difference between organic Volksgeist rooted in blood and soil and far more contractual idea of nationality implied by Montesquieu’s esprit général. Nations without Nationalism, 30-33.

 

20.Anderson, 9.

 

21.That is why Homi Bhabha suggests, for instance, that the national imagination needs the pedagogical to produce the semblance of “organic solidity.”

 

22.Julia Kristeva, “Women’s Time,” trans. Alice Jardine and Harry Blake, The Kristeva Reader, ed. Toril Moi (New York: Columbia), 210.

 

23.Julia Kristeva, “Women’s Time,” 210.

 

24.See my discussion in “Kristeva and Levinas: Mourning, Ethics, and the Feminine,” Ethics, Politics, and Difference in Julia Kristeva’s Writing, 62-78.

 

25.Emmanuel Levinas, “The Trace of the Other,” trans. A. Lingis, Deconstruction in Context, ed. Mark Taylor (Chicago: U of Chicago P, 1986), 346.

 

26.Levinas, “The Trace of the Other,” 348.

 

27.Julia Kristeva, Tales of Love, trans. Leon Roudiez (New York: Columbia, 1987), 41-42.

 

28.Julia Kristeva, Tales of Love, 41-42.

 

29.Julia Kristeva, Powers of Horror: An Essay on Abjection (New York: Columbia UP, 1982), 8.

 

30.Tales of Love, 382.

 

31.Jean-Luc Nancy, The Inoperative Community, ed. Peter Connor, trans. Peter Connor et al. (Minneapolis: U of Minnesota P, 1991).

 

Arkady Plotnitsky

Robert Penn Warren Center for the Humanities
Vanderbilt University

 

Hegel’s philosophy and its impact can be mapped in a variety of ways, and they resist any unique or definitive mapping. One could argue, however, that the jucture of three concepts–consciousness, history, and economy–persists across, if not defines, Hegel’s work. Adam Smith’s political economy was a major influence on Hegel during his work on The Phenomenology of Spirit. No less significant was the very political economy surrounding the emergence or production (in either sense) of the book, which is both one of the greatest documents of and one of the greatest reflections on the rise of industrial and politico-economic modernity. From the Phenomenology on, economic thematics never left the horizon of Hegel’s thought, the emergence of which also coincides with the rise of economics as a science, which conjunction is, of course, hardly a coincidence. “Hegel’s standpoint,” Marx once said, “is that of modern political economy [Hegel steht auf dem Standpunkt der modernen Nationalökonomie].”¹ This is a profound insight into Hegel’s thought and work–his labor–and the conditions of their emergence. Both in terms of the historical conditions of these thoughts and work–their political economy (broadly conceived)–and in terms of the resulting philosophical system, one can speak of the fundamental, and fundamentally interactive, juncture of history, consciousness, and (political) economy in Hegel.² Economic thematics have had central significance in a number of key developments in modern and postmodern, in a word post-Hegelian, intellectual history–in Marx, Nietzsche, Freud, Heidegger, Bataille, Lacan, Althusser, Deleuze, Derrida, Irigaray, and others. From this perspective, one could even suggest that all post-Hegelian criticism and theory is fundamentally “economic”–post-Smithian. They are profoundly related to economic models, metaphors, and modes of inquiry; or conversely, and often interactively, to dislocations or deconstructions (here understood as constructive dislocations) of such “economies” as traditionally or classically conceived.

 

This essay explores the implications of the conjunction of consciousness, memory, history, and economy in Hegel, strategically centering this conjunction around the concept of economy and linking it to the economy and the economics of collecting. Taking advantage of the double meaning of both the German word “Sammlung” and the English word “collection” as signifying both accumulation and selection, and of the English signifier “recollection” as a translation of German Erinnerung, I consider the conjunction of selecting, accumulating (or conserving), and expending principles operative in Hegel’s work and the processes at stake there.³

 

Although most of Hegel’s texts may be invoked here, I shall refer most specifically to The Phenomenology of Spirit, particularly the last chapter, “Absolute Knowledge,” and the long closing paragraph of the book. This paragraph begins with the image of a gallery–“the gallery of images, endowed with all the riches of Spirit”–and ends with Hegel’s concept of history in one of its most condensed but also most powerful articulations. The concept of history as a collection emerges as a culmination of, interactively (and sometimes conflictually), both the closure or enclosure (which may here be distinguished from the “end”) of history and of Hegel’s book itself, and perhaps, as Derrida says, the (en)closure of the book as a structure, and, one might add, as an economy and a form of collecting. Hegel, Derrida says in Of Grammatology, “is the last philosopher of the book and the first thinker of writing“–two very different forms of economy and of collecting.⁴

 

I consider this economic configuration and the transformation of the key concepts involved in it via Bataille’s concept of general economy, which may be seen both, and often simultaneously, as the most radical extension and the most radical dislocation of the Hegelian economy. The relationships between Hegel’s and Bataille’s economic frameworks reflect a more general situation or a possibility of reading Hegel, which has played a significant role on the modern intellectual scene, from Nietzsche and Heidegger to Deleuze, Derrida and Irigaray, and which I consider here in terms of economies of collecting. This situation may be described as follows.

 

First, the Hegelian economy offers a paradigmatic classical economy of collecting or of “economy.” It does so by introducing both the metaphorical relationships between different forms of collecting (or other forms of organization) and the metonymic extensions and causalities that a given collection or organization necessarily entails. Such extensions and their economies–historical, cultural, and political–can in turn be configured in terms of collecting, but are not reducible to these terms, or indeed to any given terms.⁵ It follows, to a degree against Hegel, that no collection, or any other form of organization, can be fully self-contained. Second, the Hegelian economy (in this reading) carries within itself the seeds of the dislocation of the classical understanding of collecting or economy, including political economy, and entails a radical reinterpretation of both.

 

Accordingly, I shall argue that one can map the classical understanding and practice of collecting (and other classical theoretical and political “economies”) on the model or a class of models introduced by Hegel; and also that one can critically reorganize the classical field(s) of theory and practice by reorganizing the Hegelian program (in either sense), or, more precisely, by understanding how the latter can be reorganized.⁶ As a number of key recent approaches argue, this reorganization can in part be accomplished from “within” Hegel’s “own” text, to the degree that either denomination–“within” or “own”–or indeed the phrase “from within Hegel’s own text”–can apply in view of the reorganization at issue, which refigures (reorganizes) all these terms and the terms of their conjunction. One of the fundamental consequences of this reorganization is that the Hegelian field (or any other classical field), and even less so the reorganized critical (non-classical) field emerging in the process, cannot be fully contained within itself, or perhaps within anything, which would also imply a radical reorganization of (the field of) the concept of “ownerships” and “property”–textual, intellectual, and politico-economic.⁷ The “within-ness” (a certain “within-ness”) of Hegel’s program or text does not disappear. A certain “within” is an always possible and, at certain points, necessary articulation produced by a given reading. Such an inscription can be either classical or critical, or both, in part because classical inscriptions do not disappear or lose their value altogether, but must instead be resituated and redelimited in a refigured critical field. All such inscriptions, however, classical or critical, and their very possibility and necessity, become refigured in an irreducibly complex interplay of many an “inside” and many an “outside” (or “classical” and “critical,” or any other opposition of that type) that can exchange their roles at any point and, in certain cases, interminably pass into each other. Indeed any “inside” or “outside” becomes rigorously possible only under these conditions.⁸ The economy of stratification of Hegel’s text must be reorganized accordingly, and–which is my point here–it offers an extraordinarily rich (although, of course, not unique) model of the general economy (including in Bataille’s sense) of such a reorganization.

 

At one level, the Hegelian economy–the economy of the Hegelian Spirit, Geist–may and perhaps (at one level) must be read as that of the most discriminating spirit, the very spirit (in either sense) of discrimination–of collection as selection and selectivity. It is only through this (economy of) selectivity and selection that a fully containable organization becomes possible in Hegel–at the level of Spirit. The latter, it is worth stressing, must be distinguished from any human economy, individual or collective, even though Spirit, as understood by Hegel, enacts and accomplishes its labor only through participating collective humanity–the collectivity of actual human history [wirckliche Geschichte], conceived by Hegel as World History [Weltgeschichte]. The latter is governed by the same principle of selectivity and discrimination; or rather it is governed by the economy of Spirit which is governed by this principle. Spirit becomes an assembly–a collection (in process)–of ideas and figures for history, including those of history itself. These ideas and figures are, then, enacted in actual human history as the objective form of Spirit’s existence in the world.⁹ As Hegel writes: “The movement of carrying forward the form of its [Spirit’s] self-knowledge is the labor which it accomplishes as actual History.”¹⁰

 

The dynamics of the historical process (which Hegel’s term for history “Geschichte” primarily designates) as conceived by Hegel is, thus, reciprocal and interactive. Without this reciprocity, and without the joint labor of Spirit and humanity–and Nature–Spirit’s production, collection, and re-collection would not be possible. The economy of Spirit’s reciprocal interaction with Nature emerges with extraordinary power and brilliance in Hegel’s concluding elaborations on sacrifice in the Phenomenology (493). This economy is, however, laboriously configured and analyzed throughout the Phenomenology and other of Hegel’s major works, most extensively, of course, in “Philosophy of Nature” in the Encyclopedia. In view of this reciprocal or interactive economy the very question of Hegelian idealism may need to be reconsidered, and in some measure it has been in recent approaches to Hegel. A much more “materialist” Hegelian philosophy may emerge as a result. This new Hegelian “materialism,” however, would–and this may be the most significant point here–be quite different from the classical (and some more recent) Marxist materialism, which has wanted to appropriate Hegel (as a kind of early “Marx”) for quite some time, perhaps indeed since (and before) early Marx and Ludwig Feuerbach. This classical Marxist materialism, of which Fredric Jameson’s work can be offered here as a recent example, is, ironically, dialectical or (classically) Hegelian, in contrast to what may be called general-economic materialism of Nietzsche, Bataille, and Derrida, which is counter-dialectical.¹¹ Some contours of (a possibility of) such a counter-dialectical “Hegel” will be suggested later in this essay. To return for the moment to a more classical–or more classically Hegelian or Hegelianist–Hegel, however, the overall historico-political and politico-economic process is governed by Spirit’s selective productivity, organization, and Spirit’s memory and recollection [Erinnerung] and their unerring discrimination. “The goal [Ziel]” of this process, “Absolute Knowledge, or Spirit that knows itself as Spirit, has for its path the recollection [Erinnerung] of the Spirits as they are in themselves and as they accomplish the organization of their realm.”¹²

 

Coupled with consciousness and self-consciousness–finally as the absolute self-consciousness of Absolute Knowledge–this ideal memory, or this ideal of memory, becomes the model of history. The economy of Spirit is the ideal realization of the historical model developed by Hegel. History itself–Geschichte–as conceived of by Hegel is this, finally (in Absolute Knowledge), fully conscious and fully selfconscious, absolute memory of Spirit.¹³ As Hegel writes in the final sentence closing, but again not quite finishing, the book (or history):

 

Their preservation [i.e., the preservation of preceding historical Spirits], regarded from the side of their free existence appearing in the form of contingency, is History; but regarded from the side of their philosophically comprehended organization, it is the Science of Knowing in the sphere of appearance; the two together, as conceptually comprehended History, form alike the interiorization and the Calvary of absolute Spirit, the actuality, truth, and certainty of his throne, without which Spirit would be lifeless and alone.¹⁴

 

What Hegel calls here conceptually comprehended history [die begriffene Geschichte] is not a collection of historical “facts” (a concept that is profoundly ambiguous, if not altogether problematic, already for Hegel) but the collection–history and encyclopedia–of ideas and, crucially, of the relations between ideas. The same economy defines the later Encyclopedia, as encyclopedia or collection of ideas and, again, the relations between them, rather than facts or contents–the first and, it appears, the last project of that type. Both the Phenomenology and the Encyclopedia also, reciprocally, inscribe the history of these ideas and relations, as do all of Hegel’s major works. What Hegel calls “the Notion” or “the Concept” [das Begriff] or, in later works, the Idea [die Idee] designates this historico-theoretical collection and re-collection as a dynamic–Heraclitean–and multi-linear or manifold process. The Notion is a concept in the process of temporal and historical transformation that both unifies and differentiates along many lines, rather than a single abstract, static or dogmatic configuration conceived as a finished structure or conglomerate–collection–of ideas. The Hegelian collection–the history and (political) economy of Spirit–may be read as enacting an (en)closure, an (en)closure of itself and all other things within itself. But it has perhaps no end, is never finished. In this sense, contrary to a common (mis)reading, there may be no end of history for Hegel.¹⁵ One can think of this (en)closing economy on the model of some major museums, such as the Louvre and the British Museum, at a certain “late” point in their history, when a certain completion–a closure and enclosure–may be ascertained without presupposing a termination, either in terms of internal organization or in terms of external connections.

 

Such collections may also need to be seen as collections of collections, libraries of libraries, or economies of economies (with various organizing and dislocating economies operating at and between different levels). This double, or further iterated, structure is equally at work in the economy of the Hegelian Spirit and, at a certain level, in that of any collection or library–for example, those consisting of a single object, which concept becomes in turn provisional as a result. Collection, or collectivity, always comes “before” (meant here logically rather than ontologically) “single objects” of which it is composed.¹⁶ Every single object must be seen as a complex intersection of many “collections.” Some such “collections” are separate from and sometimes historically precede a given collection–a collection to which such an object may (be claimed to) belong in one way or another–and others are indissociable from, although not always identical to, this collection. It again follows that no object and no collection can ever be identical to itself, even at any given moment, let alone, as Hegel realized, in its historical becoming. The very concept of a single moment itself becomes provisional on both grounds, in the end, more radically provisional than any classical economies of temporality–classical “collections” of moments, such as the line or the continuum–would allow for. More generally, it follows that the complex comes (logically) before the simple, and all three concepts and the relationships among them must be refigured as the result. This refiguration is one of the key junctures of Derrida’s analysis, which may be seen (and has been seen by Derrida himself) as the analysis–a general economy–of the complex always coming before the simple, whereby the before is replaced by what Derrida calls “the strange structure of the supplement . . . by delayed reaction, a possibility produces that to which it is said to be added on.”¹⁷

 

While history [Geschichte] is, thus, irreducible, Science [Wissenschaft] or philosophy–in short, theory–is the fundamental principle and calculus of historical accounting and collecting in Hegel.¹⁸ Science or philosophy determines what counts, what must be selected, collected, or conserved and what, conversely, is to be discounted, discarded, or abandoned. One also can–and at certain points must–reverse the perspective and make history the calculus and accounting of theory or science. Both perspectives are clearly entailed by Hegel’s elaborations cited earlier. One can consider most museums and collections through this double economy–on the one hand, that of more or less causal or more or less arbitrary historical (for example, chronological) contingency, and, on the other, that of conceptual organization broadly conceived (via aesthetic, ideological, political, or other economies, and their interactions). Most museums and collections have always been and, for the most part, still are arranged according to this double economy. The classical ideal pursued by both philosophical (or, conversely, historical) projects and museums or collections is the unity–and, ideally, an unambiguous and unproblematic unity–of both. This unity, furthermore, is understood as a reflection of an organized, structured historical and cultural process–that is, precisely what Hegel calls History [Geschichte] as the history of spirit or spirituality. Hegel’s philosophy and writing may, thus, be seen as a paradigmatic program (in either sense)–a universal software–for configuring such interactions and historical mediation [Vermittlung] that is necessary in order to accommodate them. Such an economy and the synthesis of history and science (or ideology) it entails may be–and in Hegel’s case, certainly are–extraordinarily complex, especially in view of the historical or historico-political mediation they may entail, as they do in Hegel. For, while history and science are irreducibly intertwined and should, ideally, be united in Hegel, the play of symmetries and asymmetries (and hierarchies) between them are fluid, and often indeterminate or undecidable, allowing for either position and often necessitating continuous, if not interminable, oscillations between them.

 

This interplay may be conceived more classically within a Hegelian economy. Its more radical aspects, however, emerge once it becomes apparent that Hegel’s “software” entails another–by now, in the wake of Nietzsche, Heidegger, Bataille, Lacan, Deleuze, Derrida, and others, equally paradigmatic–“machine” or “counter-machine”–unperceived or at least insufficiently perceived by the first. This second “machine” makes the conception and the operation of the first Hegelian machine both possible within certain limits and impossible within the global limits envisioned by Hegel. The understanding of this second (hidden) “machine” requires what Bataille calls a general economy. I shall consider this “hidden”–counter-Hegelian or counter-Hegelian/Hegelian machine–presently. First, a few more (or more or less) Hegelian points should be stressed.

 

The Hegelian economy just described is defined by and defines the Hegelian dialectic and economy of the Aufhebung, which is based on the triple meaning of the German word itself–(selective) negation, conservation, and supersession. This economy becomes a collection, a museum of history, governed by the laws of dialectic and the Aufhebung. In the final paragraph of the Phenomenology, defining History as “the other [than Nature’s] side of [Spirit’s] Becoming . . . a conscious, self-mediating process–Spirit emptied out into Time,” Hegel invokes, indeed begins with, the image of a gallery, which is also a gallery of historical images: “This Becoming presents a slow moving succession of spirits, a gallery of images, . . . endowed with all the riches of Spirit[Geist]” (emphasis added).¹⁹ Collection may, thus, be seen as an initiating grounding metaphor for the Hegelian economy. Conversely, as I have indicated, collections in various fields, from micro-economies of private collections (be they those of coins, stamps, books, or whatever) to major museums (whatever they collect–for example, coins, stamps, or books) form economies (in every sense conceivable) over which Hegelianism reigns–which is not surprising, given how great this realm is and how much it has collected by now. In addition to actual collections and museums, a great many theories of collecting, including some very recent ones, are governed by this type of economy–economy of selective accumulation and the forms of consumptions (or expenditure) based on it.²⁰ I must bypass here many specific economic forces–acquisition, chance, exchange, arrangement and rearrangement of elements, and so forth–involved in practices and economies, private and public, of collecting, and structuring them both from within and from without–via, to paraphrase Althusser, their multifarious apparatuses, economic, ideological, political, cultural, or still other. The borderlines between all such “insides” and “outsides”–for example, between private and public–are irreducibly indeterminate and undecidable. The principles of collectability as selectivity and discrimination at issue here, however, and related classical forms of consumption and expenditure, govern most historico-politico-economic frameworks, including most accounts of the practices of collecting, and these practices themselves. Hegel’s philosophy may be seen as a kind of generative calculus or program, an Ur-Program–a universal conceptual software–for all such theories, which is not to say that it can be reduced to them.

 

Hegel’s is, arguably, the most complex and comprehensive classical economy defined by these principles, and, conceivably, the most complex and comprehensive classical economy undermining these principles. How classical, then, can it finally be, or, more precisely, to what extent can one read it classically, or only classically? The history of contemporary readings of Hegel appears to suggest that there may be no decidable or determinate answer to this question. Arguably the main reason for this undecidability or indeterminacy (which are not the same) is that, even if (only) against its own grain, the Hegelian economy irreducibly implies indiscriminate accumulation, unaccountable losses, unreserved–unprofitable and sometimes destructive–expenditure and waste. “The riches of Spirit” can neither be contained–as in a gallery, for example–by this Spirit itself, nor can they, or any actual gallery, be managed without loss or waste; the very concept of richness, or conversely of poverty, must be refigured accordingly. Hegel, as both Bataille and Derrida argue, “saw it without seeing it, showed it while concealing it,” even if it is read within an economy which remains that of consumption without or by suspending–forgetting, repressing, and so forth, but thus also reserving–that which Bataille and Derrida see as expenditure without reserve.²¹ I shall, then, consider now, proceeding via both Bataille and Derrida, how this “hidden” Hegelian/counter-Hegelian machine emerges from “within” the “classical” Hegelian machine (though unperceived by it), and why it cannot be circumvented by the classical Hegelian machine and indeed makes the latter possible and, crucially, indeed necessary within certain limits.

 

It is not only the many often magnificent images of expenditure, waste, and destruction (including those enacted by Spirit itself) permeating the Phenomenology and most of Hegel’s works that are important. (Some of this imagery is associated more often with Nietzsche and Bataille than with Hegel, who is, however, partly responsible for the genealogy of these images in Nietzsche and, along with Nietzsche himself, in Bataille.) More significantly, the Hegelian economy (including, by definition, that of the Aufhebung, in view of its negating aspects) depends, indeed is predicated, on loss and expenditure. This dependence, and the irreducibility of the unproductive expenditure, are a fundamental general consequence of Bataille’s general-economic analysis, and no system–Hegel’s, Hegelian, or other–can circumvent the unproductive expenditure within the processes it considers and remain a rigorous description and analysis of these processes. Conversely, a rigor of an analysis, such as Hegel’s, would introduce the possibilities and indeed necessities of general-economic efficacities (in Bataille’s sense), even sometimes by virtue of trying to circumvent them or to rethink them in classical terms, which is, as will be seen, rigorously impossible. Obviously (post-)Nietzschean, (post-)Freudian, (post-)Lacanian, (post-)Derridean economies of theoretical “repression” are often operative in such situations. The theoretical process at issue, whether in Hegel or elsewhere, is, however, not reducible to repression–whether to any one of these different economies of repression or to their combination.²²

 

As both Derrida and Bataille stress–as do most major readers of Hegel, such as Heidegger, Kojève, Hyppolite, Lacan, Blanchot, de Man, and others–the power of the negative may be the most crucial aspect of Hegel’s thought and writing. The conservative and productive aspects of the Hegelian economy remain crucial, and Hegel’s understanding of the economies of time and of history as constructive rather than as only destructive is central to his philosophy. The point here is not to suspend this economy but instead, to the degree that it becomes problematic, reinscribe it within a different economy of both consumption (or conservation) and expenditure, and conceivably also produce a different reading of Hegel or a different form of Hegelianism, or conversely a different form of departure from Hegel or Hegelianism.

 

The role of economies of expenditure, destruction, and death–of negativity–is crucial in Hegel. The economy of the history of Spirit is predicated on the economy of the negative–death and sacrifice–inscribed as a certain double negative which can no longer be read as the return to a positive. Certainly it cannot be read–for nothing in Hegel can ever be–as a return to the original positive of such a double negative.²³ “The self-knowing Spirit knows not only itself but also the negative of itself, or its limit [Grenze]: to know one’s limit is to know how to sacrifice oneself. . . .”²⁴ The Hegelian economy may be seen not even so much as an economy of conservation, consumption and gain, but as an economy defined by the ability to sustain and to survive enormous losses and turn them into gains, if “gain” is a word that can be used to describe this–in the deep, including Nietzschean, sense, tragic–economy. This tragic economy defines the experience (also in Hegel’s sense of experience [Erfahrung]) of Spirit, as at once the artist [Künstler], the collector, the curator, and the viewer of his gallery, slowly moving through a collection, whose immense material and spiritual wealth he must digest–and, perhaps imperceptibly to Hegel himself, he is also, and again simultaneously, a buyer and an auctioneer. At a certain level one must, in fact, always function in all these capacities simultaneously, whatever one does. At the end of the Phenomenology and its interminable last paragraph (perhaps deliberately suggesting the process it describes), this process is inscribed in the famous double economy–both spiral and Phoenix–the economy of death and rebirth. Hegel writes:

 

This Becoming presents a slow moving succession of Spirits, the gallery of images, each of which, endowed with all the riches of Spirit, moves thus slowly just because the Self has to penetrate and digest this entire wealth of its substance. As its fulfillment consists in perfectly knowing what it is, in knowing its substance, this knowing is its withdrawal into itself in which it abandons its outer existence and gives its existential shape over to recollection. Thus absorbed in itself, it is sunk in the night of self-consciousness; but in that night its vanished outer existence is preserved, and this transformed existence–the former one, but now reborn of the Spirit’s knowledge–is the new existence, a new world and a new shape of Spirit. In the immediacy of this new existence the Spirit has to start afresh to bring itself to maturity as if, for it, all that preceded were lost and it had learned nothing from the experience of the earlier Spirits. But recollection, the interiorization, of that experience, has preserved it and is the inner being, and in fact the higher form of the substance. So although this Spirit starts afresh and apparently from its own resources to bring itself to maturity, it is none the less on a higher level that it starts.²⁵

 

At stake here is obviously much more than an economy of collecting–or creative process or historical dynamics in general–even though the latter is, as we have seen, irreducible in Hegel, and even though this and related elaborations show how much is at stake and how high such stakes are in collecting. It may be suggested that what is at stake in this “economy” or “non-economy” is, by definition, more than anything–“infinitely” more, one could say, were the very concept of infinity not radically problematized as a result. The question, as will be seen presently, is how this excess of everything, including “everything-ness” itself, is configured. This economy is reiterated perhaps even more dramatically–or again tragically–in an even more famous passage in Hegel’s “Preface” on “tarrying with the negative.” That passage continuously attracts consideration, and continues to remain at the center of critical and philosophical attention on the contemporary intellectual scene.²⁶ Arguably the main reasons for its significance is that, of all Hegel’s passages, it appears to demonstrate most dramatically–or tragically–the power of negativity and, by implication, of expenditure in Hegel. Thus this passage again makes the Hegelian economy one primarily of sustaining and, however tragically, elevating and benefiting from immense, even (with qualifications just indicated) infinite losses. The resulting economy of expenditure-consumption and accumulation-collecting may be much closer to Nietzsche, Bataille, and Derrida than it may appear. Hegel writes:

 

this is the tremendous power of the negative; it is the energy of thought, of the pure “I”. Death, if that is what we want to call this non-actuality, is of all things the most dreadful, and to hold fast what is dead requires the greatest strength. Lacking strength, Beauty hates the Understanding for asking of her what it cannot do. But the life of Spirit is not the life that shrinks from death and keeps itself untouched by devastation, but rather the life that endures it and maintains itself in it. It wins its truth only when, in utter dismemberment, it finds itself. It is this power, not as something positive, which closes its eyes to the negative, as when we say something that is nothing or is false, and then, having done with it, turn away and pass on to something else; on the contrary, Spirit is this power only by looking the negative in the face, and tarrying with it. This tarrying with the negative is the magical power that converts it into being. This power is identical with what we earlier called the Subject, which by giving determinateness as existence in its own element supersedes abstract immediacy, i.e. the immediacy which barely is, and thus [this Subject] is authentic substance: that being or immediacy whose mediation is not outside of it but which is this mediation itself.²⁷

 

Hegelian mediation (and nothing for Hegel, not even immediacy, is, as is clear in this passage, interesting or even possible without mediation) is, thus, above all a mediation through the negative and an ability to convert the negative into a tragic affirmation. Nietzsche’s great phrase may well be most fitting here, although one can also (or simultaneously) read it as the positive power of Spirit.²⁸ This is, of course, a crucial and complex nuance, which, in the end, may define the difference or proximity between Hegel, on the one hand, and Nietzsche, Derrida, and Bataille on the other, or, in Bataille’s terms, the difference between the perspectives of restricted and general economy. The question, that is, becomes whether the negative, expenditure, death are still in the service of the positive, consumption/conservation, meaning, and truth, as they perhaps are in Hegel; or whether they are tragically affirmed and even celebrated as expenditure without reserve and unredeemable loss and waste of meaning, truth, and so forth. The difference, in short, is between meaningful and meaningless expenditure–and yet a meaningless expenditure without nihilism, that is, as Nietzsche puts it, affirming and celebrating rather than denying life under these tragic conditions. For one can still assign meaning–either positive or negative–to loss of meaning, either positively, as Hegel perhaps does, or negatively, nihilistically, by denying life, either of which would be short of the (general economic) perspective of Nietzsche, Bataille, and Derrida. Bataille’s whole meditation on general economy may be seen as that on this passage, leading him, however, to realization that “the energy of thought” at stake there, or that (excessive) energy which should be at stake there–cannot be meaningfully utilized. As will be seen presently, “[this] excessive energy can only be lost without the slightest aim, consequently without any meaning.”

 

Under all conditions, however, here as elsewhere, the point would be not to dismiss any of the possibilities just indicated or still other possibilities that may emerge in the processes at issue, for, at the very least, such positions or ideologies do have powerful practical effects. Instead, one the point is the necessity to refigure them within a richer and more interactive matrix or matrices. Both the productive and destructive aspects of the Hegelian economy may, in fact or in effect, well be more symmetrical than implied by the economy of Aufhebung as (or if read as) an ultimately conserving and productive economy. Or both aspects may be (re)configured as more, or more or less, symmetrical effects of another economy (which Bataille approaches in terms of general economy, understood as theory or “science”). This symmetry does not eliminate the possibility of overcoming the negative at certain points, including and especially via “tarrying with the negative,” or other local asymmetries. This symmetry would prohibit an economy that would be always–or finally–able to do so, as the Hegelian Spirit is claimed to be able to do. It may well be that “material” or “corporeal” (mortal) negativity finally always defeats us (although all such concepts as “material” and “corporeal” may in turn need to be radically refigured as a result). That is, although we may never know when or how, all collections are going be destroyed at some points–I mean now, radically destroyed, so that even memory of them would finally be erased, as George Herbert profoundly grasped it in his “Church Monuments”:

 

                    . . . What shall point out them, 
     When they shall bow, and kneel, and fall down flat
     To kiss those heaps, which know they have in trust?
                                   (14-16).29

 

This dissipation–this dis-collection and dis-recollection–may well include, as both Herbert and Hegel perhaps knew, that ultimate, and ultimately Hegelian, collection, which is our civilization. Or, as we know now and as Hegel perhaps did not know, it may also include that ultimately ultimate, and ultimately counter-Hegelian, collection, the collection of elementary particles, that is, our universe–if it is a collection in any sense, which is far from clear. In both Nietzschean and Heideggerian vein, Jean-François Lyotard responds to the possibility of this “absolute” (can one still use this term here?) in his discussion of “the death of the sun” in his “Can Thought Go on without a Body.”³⁰ The death of the sun, however, is a (very) small event on the scale of the universe, as Nietzsche pointedly and poignantly observes at the opening of his great, and now seemingly uncircumventable, early lecture “Über Wahreit und Lüge im außermoralischen Sinne” (On Truth and Falsity in their Extra-Moral Sense).

 

General economy is opposed by Bataille to classical or “restricted” economies, like that of Hegel’s philosophy or Marx’s political economy, which would aim or claim to contain irreducible indeterminacy, loss, and non-selective–excessive–accumulation within the systems they describe. General economy entails the fundamental difference between the classical (restricted-economic) and the counter-classical or postclassical (general-economic) understandings of the relationships between the economies of collecting and broader cultural economies, to which a given collection is metonymically connected. Restricted economies (theories) would make economies of collecting either fully conform to a given classical economy (process or theory) or place them fully outside such an economy. General economy would see these relationships as multiply and heterogeneously interactive–or interactively heterogeneous–sometimes as metaphorically mirroring each other, sometimes as metonymically connected, sometimes as disconnected (and connected to alternative systems), without ever allowing for a full Hegelian synthesis, assuming that Hegel himself in fact or in effect allows for it.³¹ As Bataille writes:

 

The science of relating the object of thought to sovereign moments in fact is only a general economy which envisages the meaning of these objects in relation to each other and finally in relation to the loss of meaning. The question of this general economy is situated on the level of political economy, but the science designated by this name is only a restricted economy–restricted to commercial values. In question is the essential problem for the science dealing with the use of wealth. The general economy, in the first place, makes apparent that excesses of energy are produced, which by definition cannot be utilized. The excessive energy can only be lost without the slightest aim, consequently without any meaning. This useless, senseless loss is sovereignty [emphasis added].³²

 

The connections between Bataille’s concept–or his economy–of general economy and Hegel are multileveled and complex. Some–such as its relation to Hegel’s dialectic of master and slave or those proceeding via Marx, as here–are more immediately apparent (what Bataille calls “sovereignity” here is expressly juxtaposed by him to, or is an ambivalent displacement of, the Hegelian mastery [Herrschaft], as well as a corresponding economy in Marx); others–such as those related to other dimensions of sovereignty and sacrifice–would require a more complex tracing. Given my limits here, I shall take a shortcut, via Derrida, which will also allow me to introduce Derrida’s own (general) economy through this context. As Derrida writes in Différance:

 

Here we are touching upon the point of greatest obscurity, on the very enigma of différance, on precisely that which divides its very concept by means of a strange cleavage. We must not hasten to decide. How are we to think simultaneously, on the one hand, différance as the economic detour which, in the element of the same, always aims at coming back to the pleasure or the presence that have been deferred by (conscious or unconscious) calculation, and, on the other hand, différance as the relation to an impossible presence, as expenditure without reserve, as the irreparable loss of presence, the irreversible usage of energy, that is, as the death instinct, and as the entirely other relationship that apparently interrupts every economy? It is evident–and this is the evident itself–that the economical and the noneconomical, the same and the entirely other, etc., cannot be thought together. If différance is unthinkable in this way, perhaps we should not hasten to make it evident, in the philosophical element of evidentiality which would make short works of dissipating the mirage and illogicalness of différance and would do so with the infallibility of calculations that we are well acquainted with, having precisely recognized their place, necessity, and function in the structure of différance. Elsewhere, in a reading of Bataille, I have attempted to indicate what might come of a rigorous and, in a new sense, “scientific” relating of the “restricted economy” that takes no part in expenditure without reserve, death, opening itself to nonmeaning, etc., to a general economy that takes into account the nonreserve, that keeps in reserve the nonreserve, if it can be put thus. I am speaking of a relationship between a différance that can make a profit on its investment and a différance that misses its profit, the investiture of presence that is pure and without loss here being confused with absolute loss, with death. Through such a relating of a restricted and a general economy the very project of philosophy, under the privileged heading of Hegelianism, is displaced and reinscribed. The Aufhebung—la relève–is constrained into writing itself otherwise. Or perhaps simply into writing itself. Or, better, into taking account of its consumption of writing.³³

 

This passage, too, may be seen as a translation–a translation-transformation–and is certainly a commentary or a general economic rereading of Hegel’s passage on “tarrying with the negative.” One should also point out the significance of the economic thematics and metaphorics in this passage, Derrida’s (general) economy–disassemblage and discollecting, or rather assemblage-disassemblage and collecting-discollecting–ofdifférance, and his theoretical matrix in general. As Derrida proceeds, his elaboration–his interminable (un)definition of différance–extends into (or by way of) an interesting political metaphor: “It [différance] differs from, and defers, itself: which doubtless means that it is woven of differences, and also that it sends out delegates, representatives, proxies; but without any chance that the giver or proxies might ‘exist,’ might be present, be ‘itself’ somewhere, and with even less chance that it might becomes consciousness.”³⁴ Without elaborating this point, it may be pointed out that this (general) economy would, at bottom, describe any political collectivity, which is, at bottom, always bottomless–abyssal–in this sense. Derrida’s metaphor, thus, is (perhaps uniquely) cogent here. The politics and economics, micro and macro, of collecting would, it follows, conform to the same economy; and it is this–by definition, general–economy that is my main concern at the moment. Though imperceptible to Hegel himself, this dislocating economy or co-economy is, thus, correlative to the Hegelian economy; or, more precisely, the (overtly posited) Hegelian economy is an effect of an efficacity, simultaneously economic and counter-economic (or, conceivably, neither) that produces both economies and their interactions. As I indicated earlier, this efficacity makes Hegel’s or Spirit’s collection and recollection–as memory and history without unaccountable and unprofitable losses–both possible and, finally, impossible. In Derrida’s words, such an efficacity, différance, “produces what it forbids, makes possible the very thing it makes impossible.”³⁵ It also makes possible different readings of Hegel, specifically from those which would read the Hegelian economy as that of absolute consumption or even a more qualified reading as suggested here; or, conversely, readings of, for example, Bataille’s economic theory or Derrida’s general economy as forms of Hegelianism, “Hegelianism without reserve.”

 

Whatever Hegel’s overt designs may have been, the Hegelian economy is closer to Andy Warhol’s collection of “junk,” consisting of indiscriminately accumulated products of modern or postmodern–“late”–capitalist consumption and unprofitable expenditure, although the latter aspect is somewhat less apparent in Warhol’s practice of collecting.³⁶ Warhol’s art has been linked to Hegel (by Arthur Danto, for example) along different lines–via the question of self-consciousness and Hegel’s notion of the death of art. The point is not discountable, and it can, I would argue, be made all the more interesting by relating to Warhol’s practices of collecting. The Warhol economy combines or interrelates his art and his collecting. It relates to the overall configuration or economy of artistic production in the industrial and postindustrial world, which, next to Duchamp, Warhol perhaps understood best, and which, next to Duchamp’s, his art indeed reflects with great selfconsciousness. This is why the question of selfconsciousness in Warhol’s art and his collecting are profoundly related, both metaphorically and metonymically. Their conjunction again profoundly reflects the metonymic or structural causality in Lacan and Althusser’s sense, which defines the capitalist economy and cultural system, and thus the cultural logic of all capitalism–early or late. Taking another shortcut here, one might say that, not unlike Warhol, Hegelian Geist is, again, simultaneously the artist, the viewer–the consumer (and the costumer)–the art collector and the junk or garbage collector, the buyer and the auctioneer. One of the profound ironies of Warhol’s collection is, of course, that it no longer exists, it was sold at an auction and thus, at least in part, returned to the junk economy. It is perhaps unavailable, unreconstitutable in spite of the obvious reproducibility of some of its objects–but not all and in the end, strictly speaking, none. One cannot authenticate them, however, even though the project of reconstituting the Warhol collection–and his spirit, his Ghost or Geist–by re-collecting all the items is conceivable. Such a project would be an interesting, if by now a bit tiresome, example of postmodernist cultural studies.

 

It is important, however, that Warhol’s collection can no more be seen as an absolutely indiscriminate accumulation or waste than can the Hegelian Spirit as fully avoiding or controlling waste, expenditure and excess. As I have stressed throughout this essay, arguable the most crucial point here is the fundamentally interactive character of all collecting, or of other economic processes which economies of collection metaphorically represent or to which they are metonymically connected. General economies and general economics (a possible alternative translation of Bataille’s”économie générale“) are always interactive in this sense. Such interactive economies and the economics of “collecting” that they imply would make a complete or completely definable collection impossible not only in practice (which would certainly be recognized by Hegel), but also in principle (a principle of which Hegel might not have been altogether unaware either). This impossibility applies not only globally–in the sense that it is in fact, in practice and in principle, impossible to complete a given collection–but also to any subset of a given collection, even to any single object, thus making the notion of a single item of a collection and, by implication, the notion of a single object of any kind impossible in full rigor. In this radical sense of both excessive–irreducible–accumulation and excessive–irreducible–loss, a complete collection is never possible, even if all given items, such as all paintings of a given painter, are assembled together. For one thing, such a completeness can never be assured: a new object can always be discovered and lead to rearrangements of the “whole,” or some items may prove to be forgeries. More significantly and more fundamentally, no given principle or set of principles can ever contain the intellectual, psychological, social,political, or monetary forces shaping a given collection or any given collectivity–theoretical, cultural, or political.

 

Let me return here, by way of conclusion, to my title. As it indicates, the overall economy just considered would apply at the level of language itself, fundamentally undermining the possibility of a purely philosophical (or otherwise fully containable) language. This ideal has governed the history of philosophy from Plato on, however complex such conceptions of philosophical language may be. Hegel’s text cannot contain–collect or re-collect–the field of its language and the possibilities indicated here by the grapheme “Re-,” in a contained plurality (or ambiguity, undecidability, indeterminacy, and so forth) exemplified by the (economy of the) Aufhebung–not even ideally, in principle, at any level, actual or ideal, let alone in practice. A variety of German graphemes must be used here, and in fact one needs other English graphemes as well. This multiplicity could not be contained even if one were to utilize every single “Re”-word available at the moment, let us say all those contained in all available dictionaries, German or English, although it also follows, of course, that this availability in turn cannot be taken for granted under these conditions, and is, in fact, never strictly determinable.³⁷

 

This iterability or dissemination is irreducible, and not only–and indeed not primarily–for practical reasons of potential magnitude of possibilities (or necessities) involved. “Iterability” and “dissemination,” as understood by Derrida, link indeterminacy and multiplicity in a complex interplay in which relative causalities or efficacities can be reversed: in some cases, potential multiplicities of determination reduce the power of determination at any given point; in other cases, the structural–built in–elements of chance increase the multiplicity of potential outcomes (and it may be shows that these two configurations, while overlapping or interactive in many cases, are not fully equivalent); in still other cases, more interactive and complex economies of efficacities and effects emerge.

 

Finally, this interplay would dissalow one to configure or determine such efficacities in any given form, however complex its articulation may be. No conceivable selection or even collection of terms, concepts, or even frameworks can absorb it. As such, it can be juxtaposed to or be seen as an ambivalent displacement of Hegelian controlled plurality, that of the Aufhebung or of the Phoenix economy discussed earlier–if once again they can be read strictly in this way, rather than closer to, if not quiteconverging with, the (general) economy suggested here. This dissemination cannot, thus, be seen as implying a full but hidden or unavailable plurality or plentitude. A very different conjunction of, jointly, insufficiency andexcess is at stake–an economy simultaneously collecting, un-collecting, and over-collecting (and, of course, under-collecting). The multiplicity, incompleteness, and randomness at stake here are structural, irreducible–that is, they cannot be seen as partial manifestations (due to some classically defined deficiency of knowledge) of completeness, unity, or causality which are not available–a collection whose full reserves are never seen or catalogued. This structural decataloging is not due to the fact that our resources of time, space, energy, or whatever might be necessary are inadequate for approaching an actual, but hidden, totality of plentitude. The insufficiency of that type does, of course, exist, too, and can be extremely powerful, often allowing one to make a similar theoretical point at this–classical–level. The unreserved economy at stake here, however, is more profound and fundamental than any classical economy of that type might suggest. For this unreserved economy disallows the existence of such a hidden totality or reserves unavailable to our account, just as (and indeed correlatively) it disallows the existence of any complete reserves, collections (or collectivities), or accounts, at any level, be they historical, theoretical, economic, or political. All relationships defining collecting (or history and economy), such as those between history and science as considered earlier, would have to be restructured accordingly.

 

The same economy would apply to reiterating, or re-etceterating, Hegel himself–his ultimately uncontainable, uncataloguable, uncollectible work, or works: while they do exist and must (it appears) have been written at some point, they cannot be fully located (present) either in a “text itself” (an expression no longer possible either) or in the conditions of their production (or/as reception), but must instead be seen as emerging in a complex interaction between both and, conceivably, within something that is neither. What would, from this perspective, constitute Hegel’s complete works or a collection of all his writings, even if one could be assured a possession of the extant manuscripts and editions, which is in fact impossible? There is a structural uncollectibility at stake here. Such a library of Hegel is closer to the library of Alexandria, always already burned, as it were. For the economy at stake here is, as I said, always–and indeed, in a deep sense, always already–tragic. One might even try to see it as a kind of Phoenix economy in reverse, something that, at the higher conceptual and material (including technological) levels, proceeds from resurrection to death, again in a kind of (post-) Hegelian double negative which does not return to the original positive. It may be something close to what Benjamin, conceivably also with Hegel in mind, envisions in his famous picture, via Klee’s work (in Benjamin’s collection), of the Angel of History, although the latter image has itself become by now just about as un-resurrectable intellectual cliche–not unlike a reproduction of a photograph of Klee’s painting, or of Benjamin himself (also quite ubiquitous, cliché-like, by now), painted over by an imitator of Warhol.

 

It also follows, however, that in this economy, destruction cannot be absolute either, and in turn is never assured, even if one tries to burn all the books, which has often been attempted, and not only in science fiction. To end with another of Benjamin’s titles–“unpacking my library”–we are always in transit, as Benjamin was on his way to America, without an assurance of arrival, even if one arrives geographically speaking. We are always unpacking, packing and repacking our libraries and galleries, individual and collective, of books and images, endowed with the riches and poverty of matter and spirit, or both or perhaps neither. One may need a very different un-nameable or un-writable, even if “writing” is taken in Derrida’s sense, to approach these “resources” and “reserves,” whose (un)economy may need as yet unheard of forms of philosophy and economics alike.

 

Notes

 

1. “Ökonomisch-philosophische Manuscripte (1944),” Marx/Engels Gesamtaufgabe, Erste Abteilung (Berlin: Marx-Engels Verlag, 1932), 3:157.

 

2.It may not be a unique defining juncture in Hegel, and it is no longer possible to speak in terms of unique or uniquely determining (or uniquely determined) junctures anywhere. It is difficult, however, to circumvent such terms in Hegel–which is about as much as one can say about anything called “fundamental.”

 

3.In addition to being a metaphor of market and management (from the Greek oikos and oikonomia, house and household), economy is, of course, also a metaphor from physics, a metaphor of energy, play of forces, and so forth, which cluster of metaphors also plays a significant role in Hegel’s work, for example, in “Force and the Understanding” [Kraft und Verstand] of the Phenomenology. Economy also designates science or other forms of account or the representation of a given economy as a process of the play of forces, as in “political economy” or “general economy” in Bataille, just as in the historical field, the word history may designate both–historical process and its representation–both of which may in turn be seen as economies (in the two senses just indicated). I have considered various aspects of the economy metaphor in Hegel and other figures to be discussed here, in Reconfigurations: Critical Theory and General Economy (Gainesville, Fl.: University Press of Florida, 1993).

 

4.Of Grammatology, trans. Gayatri C. Spivak (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1974), 26.

 

5.One might also think this dynamics in terms of Althusser’s concepts of the metonymic or structural causality, introduced, via Lacan, in Reading Capital and, according to Althusser, constituting Marx’s “immense theoretical revolution” (Reading Capital, tr. Ben Brewster [London: Verso, 1979], 182-94). My analysis here would imply, however, that this “immense theoretical revolution” (which is perhaps no less Althusser than Marx) should be seen as a (materialist) extension–or again an extension-dislocation–of the economy offered by Hegel, rather than, as Althusser argues, only in juxtaposition to it.

 

6.The term “critical reorganization” may well be preferable to “deconstruction” here, although most deconstructions that could be invoked here are in fact or in effect also reorganizations in this sense, sometimes, certainly in Derrida, explicitly and pointedly so.

 

7.The question of “property” (traversing near the totality of the semantic field of the term) played an especially significant role in Nietzsche, Heidegger, Bataille, and Derrida, and their relationships with Hegel (and each other). As will be seen in more detail later, it follows that the very possibility of a totality of any semantic field and the very denomination “semantic field,” too, become problematic as result.

 

8.Cf. Derrida’s discussion in Of Grammatology (30-73).

 

9. The status of this “then” becomes complicated and, finally, problematic in view of the irreducible role of “actual human history” in this process, and, it has often been argued, is never quite resolved by Hegel (either in the Phenomenology or elsewhere). What Derrida calls “supplementarity” and, therefore, a general-economic form of theorizing (to which Derrida’s supplementarity conforms) become, at the very least, necessary here. Whether and to what degree Hegel’s framework itself approaches supplementarity is in turn a complex and, conceivably, finally undecidable question. Leaving a further discussion of these issues for the later part of this essay, one might say here that in Hegel Spirit is always “ahead” of humanity within a certain reciprocal economy–as, one might suggest with caution, some human beings may sometimes be seen as “ahead” of a given group or collectivity, while still depending on this group.

 

10.Hegel’s Phenomenology of Spirit, trans. A.V. Miller (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1977), 488. All subsequent references are to this edition. The German edition used is Phänomenologie des Geistes, Werke im 20 Bänden (Frankfurt am Mein: Suhrkamp, 1986), vol. 3.

 

11.Cf. Fredric Jameson Late Marxism: Adorno, or, The Persistence of the Dialectic (London: Verso, 1990), 241. I have considered Jameson’s work in Reconfigurations (245-96).

 

12.Phenomenology, 493.

 

13.This memory, again, should not be confused with any form of human memory, individual or collective.

 

14.Phenomenology, 493; translation modified.

 

15.The question of the end of history, in Hegel and in general, have resurfaced recently in the context of the historico– geopolitical reconfiguration (the emphasis is, I think, due here) in the wake of the collapse of the Soviet Union and the (so-called) Communist Eastern Europe. Derrida’s discussion in Specters of Marx (New York: Routledge, 1994) is especially pertinent here.

 

16.Of course, the very (classical) concept of ontology becomes problematic under the conditions of general economy; and, to the degree that one can apply classical language here, the proposition just offered may be given a certain ontological sense as well, even though one can, loosely speaking, start a collection with a single object or add a single new object to a given collection. This way of speaking is very loose (although in practice often functional) because the very concept of “a single object” becomes highly provisional here; and indeed one may well question in what sense, if at all, one can still speak of “collection” under these conditions. Rhetorically and strategically, however, the proposition that a “collection” precedes “a single object” would retain its effectiveness, especially within the (en)closure of classical concepts.

 

17.Speech and Phenomena and other Essays on Husserl’s Theory of Signs, trans. David B. Allison (Evanston: Northwestern University Press, 1973), 89. For Derrida’s deconstruction of classical temporality see Speech and Phenomena and his “Ousia and Gramme” (in Margins), in the latter essay in the context of Hegel and Heidegger. The question itself, however, is central throughout Derrida’s work.

 

18. These metaphors have crucial significance for Hegel, in view of Newton’s or Leibniz’s calculus, on the one hand, and Adam Smith’s political economy, on the other.

 

19. Phenomenology, 492.

 

20.Thus, Susan Stuart’s discussion of collecting in On Longing: Narratives of the Miniature, the Gigantic, the Souvenir, the Collection (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1984) still largely conforms to this Hegelian economy, in spite of its materialist and (in a certain sense) deconstructive aspiration.

 

21.Although the concept of general economy recurs throughout Derrida’s texts, I refer here most specifically to Derrida’s essay on Bataille and Hegel “From Restricted to General Economy: A Hegelianism without Reserve,” Writing and Difference, trans. Alan Bass (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1979). The sentence just cited is from this essay (260).

 

22.Nor is it, I think, reducible to de Manian economy of “blindness and insight” (to the degree that the latter can be described only in these terms), which is significant for understanding the processes at issue here, and which must be seen as different from other economies just mentioned. The concepts of “repression” in all of these texts would require a lengthy analysis.

 

23.Systems where the double negation of an object A is not, in general, equal to A do exist even in mathematical logic, for example, in the intuitionistic mathematics of L.E.J. Brouwer and A. Heyting. While the double negations at issue here are, obviously, more complex, they would not allow one simply to dispense with classical logic, mathematical or philosophical, which must instead be refigured within new theoretical economies.

 

24.Phenomenology, 492.

 

25.Phenomenology, 492.

 

26.Most recently, Hegel’s passage served as the conceptual center of Slavoj Zizek’s, post-Lacanian, Tarrying with the Negative: Kant, Hegel and the Critique of Ideology (Durham: Duke University Press, 1993).

 

27.Phenomenology, 19.

 

28.Thus, see Hegel’s elaborations on Reason [Vernunft], which concept may understood via a conversion of a negative relation to otherness into a positive one (Phenomenology, 139).

 

29.An assembly of “church monuments” can in turn be seen as a collection. In many ways it offer a paradigmatic case of collection as monumentalization with significant metaphoric (and metonymic) potential and implications for our understanding of all collecting. Herbert’s poem, of course, itself comes from a collection (in either sense) called The Temple, which, too, designate an economy of Spirit, and may be considered from the perspective developed here, as can many other poetry collections, especially those which themselves deal–as, for example, do Shakespeare’s Sonnets–with the economies (productive or dislocating, or both) at issue. Herbert’s poem clearly refers to his own writing as well and to the economy of writing and reading–and history–in general, as monumentalization. As such the poem and its “rhetoric of temporality” offers a powerful allegory (also in de Man’s sense) of all the processes just invoked and of their interaction.

 

30.See “Can Thought Go on without a Body,” The Inhuman, trans. Geoffrey Bennington and Rachel Bowlby (Stanford, Ca.: Stanford University Press, 1991).

 

31.I have considered such relationships more generally under the heading of “complementarity,” conceived on the model of Niels Bohr’s interpretation of quantum mechanics, in In the Shadow of Hegel: Complementarity, History and the Unconscious (Gainesville, Fl.: University Press of Florida, 1993) and Complementarity: Anti-Epistemology after Bohr and Derrida (Durham: Duke University Press,1994).

 

32. “Méthode de Méditation,” Oeuvres Complètes (Paris: Gallimard, 1970–), 5:215-16.

 

33.Margins of Philosophy, trans. Alan Bass (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1982), 19.

 

34.Margins of Philosophy, 20-21.

 

35.Of Grammatology, 143.

 

36.There are other crucial “political economies” involved–such as those of sexuality and gender–which would require a separate analysis.

 

37.While a number of words available (at a given point) in any given language or in any combination of languages is finite (although again not necessarily determinate), and even if it were finite or determined, the number of possible combinations, any one of which may become necessary at some point in processes such as that described here, is potentially infinite. It is infinite because the number of sentences we may construct is potentially infinite, for example, in view of the fact that we can construct sentences with numerals ad infinitum–such as “one needs one word in order to approach the concept at issue,” “we need two words in order to approach the concept at issue,” etc. It is important to keep in mind that neither a presence nor an absence of any given word allows one to unequivocally determine a concept (such as that of “collection”) or reference. What Derrida calls “writing” is, in part, designed to approach this indeterminacy–this différance and this dissemination.

 

Kevin McNeilly

Department of English
University of British Columbia
mcneilly@unixg.ubc.ca

 

I wish to look at a particular postmodern achievement, the music of composer John Zorn, in order to assess both the nature of a political praxis and to “define” the postmodern pragmatically, in the practice of art rather than only in theory. Zorn’s music does something palpable to its listeners, or at least incites them to a form of action, of awakening; it activates the listener in a manner that a great deal of conventional and commercially-produced music, when it casts itself as soother or anaesthetic, does not. But Zorn achieves this affectivity, ironically, by exploiting and exploding both convention and commercial form.

 

Form itself, in so far as it is tied both to social production and aesthetic convention, provides a correlative for the dialectic of the social and aesthetic spheres, and thus offers an inroad into the problem of a postmodern praxis. Music, Jacques Attali asserts, manifests by its very nature as an “instrument of understanding,” a “new theoretical form” (Noise 4). Music, that is, as Attali understands it, can provide a viable, fully realized conjunction of the theoretical and the practical, a form of theorizing which coincides with a formal practice.¹ To grasp the practice of music, then, within a postmodern context, is in some sense to arrive at a theoretical position vis-a-vis the postmodern, especially–as the aesthetic delimitation of music as a sphere of cultural activity is broadened to encompass the theoretical–toward a decidedly political praxis (cf. Arac ix-x, xxx-xxxi). But where, for Attali, that broadening takes on a decidedly utopian character, the “newness” and “originality” of Zorn’s music, if we may speak in such terms, lie exactly in its self-conscious refusal to accept either the original or the new as valid categories of artistic expression, in either the compositional or the performative sphere. The politics of Zorn’s music, its affective thrust, emerges from within the formal manifestations of a parodic, technocratically-saturated postmodern musicality, and also delineates a significant political current running through postmodernism in general. In its parodies of genre and received form, as well as its antagonistic postures, Zorn’s music assumes a political force.

 

The most immediately audible characteristic of John Zorn’s music is its noisiness. Abrasive, loud, fast, unpleasant, disjunctive, Zorn’s musical textures are never sweet or satisfied in the conventional sense; one has only to hear the primal screams of Yamatsuka Eye (310 Kb .au file) on the first two recordings by Zorn’s Naked City band, the punk-jazz thrash of his Ornette Coleman tribute, Spy vs. Spy, or his slippery, choppy, clanging arrangements of works by Kurt Weill or Ennio Morricone (250 Kb .au file, arrangement of Morricone’s “The Good The Bad and the Ugly”), to realize that neither a bathetic Classical prettiness nor a pretentious Romantic resolution has any place in his work, except as an antagonism. Nor does his work admit the conventions of modern and contemporary chamber music unproblematically. A work for string quartet, Forbidden Fruit (346 Kb .au file), incorporates “turntables” played by Christian Marclay, in which random, distorted snatches of pre-recorded music cut across the already fragmented textures of the strings themselves. A work for chamber ensemble such as Cobra not only uses conventional orchestral instrumentation including harp, brass, woodwinds and percussion, but also incorporates electric guitar and bass, turntables, cheesy organ, and sampled sounds ranging from horse whinnies and duck calls to train whistles, telephone bells and industrial clanging. Zorn, while affirming his own position as a “classically-trained” composer, fuses the materials of the “classical” world with pop music, hardcore punk, heavy metal, jazz (free and traditional), television soundtracks, and sound effects (v. Woodward 35-6). His work is consistently eclectic, hybridized, and polysemous.

 

His music, in fact, comes to consist in noise itself, or rather, in the tensions between noises. As a self-declared product of the “info age,” Zorn taps into the diverse currents of sound and background emerging from the mass media–particularly television, radio and commercial recordings–that permeate contemporary life; all forms of sound, from white noise to Beethoven, from duck calls to bebop, become raw materials for the composer; musical sound, that is, need no longer be tempered or tonal in any preconceived manner (though tempered music, as well, may be used within composition as raw material on the same level as any other noise). Only the noise available to the social listener determines the limitations, if any, on composition. Music, then, as Jacques Attali posits, becomes simply “the organization of noise,” constituting “the audible waveband of the vibrations and signs that make up society” (Noise 4). Zorn, in like fashion, cites Boulez’s definition of composition as simply the “organization of sound” (Woodward 34).

 

But noise, for Zorn, is not simply haphazard or natural sound, the audible “background” that encroaches on a work such as Cage’s 4’33”, as the audience is forced by the tacit piano to listen to its own shufflings, or to the urban soundscapes that emerge through an open window. Such music, which Attali approves as the harbinger of a new age of composition and of listener-involvement in autonomous musical production, freed from the aesthetic and social restraints of the recording industry, Zorn calls the “dead, lifeless music” of “boring old farts,” of whom, for him, Cage is a leading example (Woodward 35). Rather, Zorn includes in his own palette pre-recorded music, quotations and generic parodies–all of which Attali, following Adorno, suggests are correlative to social control, to the consumption of mass replications and the “death of the original” (Noise 87, 89). Noise, for Zorn, is always impure, tainted, derivative and, in the Romantic sense of the term, unoriginal.

 

Attali sees the appearance of the phonograph record as a cementing of the relation between “music and money,” and of the deritualization of music and the limitations of the aesthetic powers of the composer-musician by his or her own technologies and tools:

 

An acoustician, a cybernetician, [the musician] is transcended by his tools. This constitutes a radical inversion of the innovator and the machine: instruments no longer serve to produce the desired sound forms, conceived in thought before written down, but to monitor unexpected forms. . . . [T]he modern composer . . . is now rarely anything more than a spectator of the music created by his computer. He is subjected to its failings, the supervisor of an uncontrolled development.

 

Music escapes from musicians. (115)

 

Attali’s utopian vision, of what he calls a new age of “composition,” involves a return to the original, liberated, primitive noise of the thinking, active individual, to a form of personal musical pleasure where the listener, in listening, becomes a composer, rewriting music as his or her own noise: noise, as music, is, Attali argues, to be “lived,” no longer stockpiled (133-5). Zorn removes himself, decidedly, from any such idealistic primitivism. Parody, simulation and replication, developed in increasingly volatile and fragmented forms, noisily inform–and deform–the lived experience of music. Rather than attempt to dispense with the musical commodity, to withdraw from a culture of simulation and replication, Zorn revels in that commodification itself, happily abdicating compositional control both to the technologies of repetition and to the improvisational wills of those who play “his” music. The “score” of Cobra, for instance, consists not of notated music per se but rather of a set of rules which players, as they interact during the performance, must follow. Zorn, just as Attali suggests of all composers in an age of repetition, is not interested in maintaining absolute creative control over the tonal, harmonic and rhythmic substance of his music; that control, instead, remains in the hands of his players. His music is not aleatory, in the sense that works by Boulez or Lutoslawski or Cage involve sets of “chance operations” that remain within the ego-dominated sweep of the composer’s will; Zorn, rather, abdicates the position of composer in all but name, preferring to become himself a performer or a player among other players, a participant in a collective noise-making which, despite their differences, resembles in practice Attali’s vision of compositional noise-making: listening, composing and living simultaneously in what Adorno would call a “non-identical identity,” a collective which does not obliterate the individual elements it collects.

 

Noise, in the widest possible sense, is thus central to Zorn’s aesthetic, especially if we approach that aesthetic with political interest. In a 1988 interview, Edward Strickland asks Zorn if the duck-calls in his early free improvisations–represented by Yankees (387 Kb .au file), his 1983 collective recording with Derek Bailey and George Lewis–are an attempt to get back to nature, a direction of which Attali would certainly approve. Zorn says no:

 

I just wanted some kind of raucous, ugly sound. . . . I don’t think they’re ugly. I find them beautiful. It’s like Thelonious Monk’s title “Ugly Beauty.” People used to think his playing was ugly, now it’s recognized as classic. (Strickland 138)

 

The abrasive raucousness, Zorn implies, of his duck calls and other paraphernalia, used on Yankees and in his early improvised trios (recorded on Locus Solus), is an attempt to alter how people hear, just as Monk’s playing changed the way listeners perceived how a melody functioned within an apparently discordant harmonic context. Noise, as sound out of its familiar context, is confrontational, affective and transformative. It has shock value, and defamiliarizes the listener who expects from music an easy fluency, a secure familiarity, or any sort of mollification. Noise, that is, politicizes the aural environment; Zorn’s music is difficult in the sense that Adorno finds Schoenberg’s music difficult–not because it is pretentious or obscure, but because it demands active participation from the listener (as well as from the players, who are themselves listeners). As organized sound, this music

 

demands from the very beginning active and concentrated participation, the most acute attention to simultaneous multiplicity, the renunciation of the customary crutches of a listening which always knows what to expect, the intensive perception of the unique and the specific, and the ability to grasp precisely the individual characteristics, often changing in the smallest space. . . . The more it gives to listeners, the less it offers them. It requires the listener spontaneously to compose its inner movement and demands of him [sic] not mere contemplation but praxis. (Prisms 149-50)

 

The political dimension of Zorn’s music, that is, involves the creation of a new form of attention, of listening.² Noise, for Zorn, shocks the listener into awareness, provokes just such a creative praxis.

 

But whereas Adorno’s Schoenberg and Attali’s Cage both defy the repetition inherent in commodification and in forms of social control, Zorn embraces that repetition, as he moves from noise per se to what he calls his “block” method of composition:

 

I think it’s an important thing for a musician to have an overview, something that remains consistent throughout your whole life. You have one basic idea, one basic way of looking at the world, one basic way of putting music together. I developed mine very early on–the idea of working with blocks. At first maybe the blocks were more like just blocks of sound . . . noisy improvisational statements, but eventually it came back to using genre as musical notes and moving these blocks of genre around. . . . (“Zorn on Zorn” 23)

 

Zorn’s noise, that is, manifests itself in two distinct, though contiguous, forms: the improvisational and the imitative, the creative and the derivative, the chaotic and the parodic. And it is the second of these aspects of noise, particularly as it emerges in chunks of genre-music, that comes increasingly to interest Zorn as his career progresses.

 

Genre has been taken, as Marjorie Perloff and others have pointed out, as anathema to postmodern aesthetic practice, particularly in its post-structuralist manifestations (Postmodern 3). The dissolution of generic barriers has, after all, been a paramount concern of many contemporary writers, painters and musicians. But, as Perloff rightly indicates, that dissolution in fact makes the concept of genericity even “more important,” since genre itself is situated at the point of departure for any such negative practice (4). Postmodern genre, she asserts, finally attempting to define that which refuses definition, is

 

     characterized by its appropriation of other 
     genres, both high and popular, by its longing 
     for a both/and situation rather than one of 
     either/or.  (8)

 

Her key example of such appropriation is John Cage, not the Cage of 4’33” but the Cage of Roaratorio (280 Kb .au file), his award-winning “play” for radio.

 

Cage’s “composition” is really a sixteen-track sound collage, based on a version of James Joyce’s Finnegans Wake processed into Cagean mesostics through a series of chance operations. In an effort to free himself, as he asserts in an interview published with the text of the piece, from melody, harmony, counterpoint and musical “theory” of any kind, to create a music which will turn “away from [codified, institutionalized] music itself,” Cage mixes together ambient sound, Irish traditional music, sound effects ranging from bells and thunderclaps to laughter and farting, and spoken words (Roaratorio 89). The finished product is a shifting, restless, decentred panorama of sound and human activity. But Zorn–for whom, as I have already indicated, Cage serves as an antitype, despite their many similarities of method and concern–does not wish to dispense with the trappings of “music itself” so much as to run music itself through his deconstructive compositional mill. Noise, that is, neither cuts across nor undoes genre, as Cage suggests it should in Silence (v. Perloff 216). Rather, genre becomes noise itself, another form of sound to be appropriated, used and abused.

 

Zorn’s Spillane (400 Kb .au file), like Cage’s Roaratorio, is a collage of sorts, based on text; the contrast between the two indicates not only the composers’ divergent aesthetics, but also their contrary political stances. Where Cage, for instance, appropriates and transforms a rather exclusive, “difficult” text of high modernism by James Joyce, Zorn uses a cut-and-paste parody of pulp detective fiction as the basis for his work. Cage’s work begins softly, with his own almost chant-like voice at a low, subtle level; Zorn’s piece begins with an earth-shattering scream. Where Cage’s collocated noises (musical and “found”) meld together into a shifting, hypnotic soundscape, Zorn’s blocks of genre both jar against each other and threaten to come apart from within, as each musician plays his or her set of “licks” and parodies, both in combination with and in opposition to the others. Cage’s piece is synchronous, deep, and–considering even the medley of constantly shifting sound–largely static; Zorn’s work, by contrast, is linear, immediate and highly dynamic. Zorn’s music is somewhat tied mimetically to its “subject,” as we travel disjunctively through the soundscape of Mike Hammer’s mind (200 Kb .au file); Cage refuses mimetic links altogether–as Perloff points out–preferring not simply to add appropriate sound effects to Joyce’s prose, but to provoke a sense of harmony in difference, through the production of “simultaneous layers of sound and meaning” (216). Again, where Cage wishes to dispense with accustomed musical sound altogether, in favour of synthetic new “field” of musical activity, Zorn is perfectly willing to maintain the trappings of soundtrack and sound effect, but he arranges those parodic reiterations of genre in a disjunctive, disturbing, confrontational manner. Cage’s is a politics of exclusion and abandonment, his music demanding a wilful participation which the comfortable, impatient, media-saturated listener is often unwilling to give. Zorn, on the other hand, offers the semblance of that comfort, simulates the attributes of popular culture, in order to confront and to engage that same listener, whose thirty-second attention span, so programmed by television advertising, can be accessed directly by thirty-second blocks of sound. Cage stands aloof from his audience, at a somewhat elitist distance, while Zorn unashamedly baits a hook with snatches of the familiar and the vulgar. In “Mass Society and Postmodern Fiction” (1959), Irving Howe complains that, as Jonathan Arac summarizes, “the post-modern was a weak successor to the vigorous glory of literary modernism, brought about because mass society had eroded the artist’s vital distance” (xii). Cage’s preference for Joyce, and Zorn’s for Mickey Spillane, suggestively reproduce just such a rift between high modern and postmodern artistic practices.

 

The notion of the musical “block” is taken up by Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari in A Thousand Plateaus, when they attempt to distinguish what they call “punctual” and “linear” or “multilinear” systems. The punctual, for Deleuze and Guattari, as cognitive structuration, is organized by coordinates, determined points; such systems, they write, “are arborescent, mnemonic, molar, structural; they are systems of territorialization or reterritorialization,” of determination and discrimination, of an absolute didacticism. One of their key examples of the punctual is the time-line, which, despite its apparent kinesis, represents closed historical scheme. Linear or multilinear systems, by contrast, are dismantling systems, and oppose themselves to the punctual:

 

Free the line, free the diagonal: every musician or painter has this intention. One elaborates a punctual system or a didactic representation, but with the aim of making it snap, of sending a tremor through it. A punctual system is most interesting when there is a musician, painter, writer, philosopher to oppose it, who even fabricates it in order to oppose it, like a springboard to jump from. History is made only by those who oppose history (not by those who insert themselves into it, or only reshape it). (295)

 

Their example of such a history-maker is Pierre Boulez, whom they see as a kind of radical historian–they may have in mind his forays as a conductor into the history of Western music, although their sense of nonpulsed and serial music here tends to point to Boulez’s own compositions as acts of history:

 

When Boulez casts himself in the role of the historian of music, he does so in order to show how a great musician, in a very different manner in each case, invents a kind of diagonal running between the harmonic vertical and the melodic horizon. And in each case it is a different diagonal, a different technique, a creation. Moving along this transversal line, which is really a line of deterritorialization, there is a sound block that no longer has a point of origin, since it is always and already in the middle of the line; and no longer has horizontal and vertical coordinates, since it creates its own coordinates; and no longer forms a localizable connection from one point to another [as in “punctual” systems], since it is in “nonpulsed time”: a deterritorialized rhythmic block that has abandoned points, coordinates and measure, like a drunken boat that melds with a line or draws a plane of consistency. Speeds and slownesses inject themselves into musical form, sometimes impelling it to proliferation, linear microproliferations, and sometimes to extinction, sonorous abolition, involution, or both at once. (296)

 

What Deleuze and Guattari describe here sounds more like free improvisation than Boulez’s meticulous compositions, but they nevertheless point to a disjunctive form of composition in non sequitur blocks which displays a surprising kinship to Zorn’s method. (Zorn himself practices the kind of proliferative free improvisation toward which Deleuze and Guattari gesture.) The act of freeing line or block, however, does not occur in the absolute dispersal of pulse, tonal centre or convention that Deleuze and Guattari find in Boulez’s serial compositions, not in Zorn. In fact, given that the writers want to maintain a “punctual” presence against which they can discover themselves musically free, or within which they can negotiate one of their deterritorializations, such absolute claims–with their a-historicizing move to liberation–are suspiciously reified. Rather than play out a complete liberation, that is, Zorn’s music negotiates the doubling of punctual and multilinear which Deleuze and Guattari initially suggest, reasserting–contingently, temporarily–familiar generic boundaries as it simultaneously seeks to extricate itself from closed system or form. Zorn’s music, in other words, follows that diagonal trajectory between the reified and the liberated, continually dismantling and reassembling–deterritorializing and reterritorializing, in Deleuze and Guattari’s terms–our terms of aural reference, inserting itself into the stream of a musical history only to dismantle immediately that comfortable historical sense. Whereas Boulez, in other words, removes himself from the ironic doublings of that diagonal–in a manner which seems to appeal to Deleuze and Guattari’s need for a complete liberation of sound and mind–Zorn, through his amalgam of popular idiom, genre and noise, revels in that irony.

 

Zorn’s method, as he has stated, is “filmic.” Many of the composers he admires–Ennio Morricone, Carl Stalling and Bernard Herrmann especially–work exclusively on soundtracks for popular movies and cartoons. The blocks of sound emerge in the context of developing shifting moods for soundtracks; Zorn’s recent Filmworks 1986-1990, for instance, assembles from three different films a series of blocks of diverse, genre-based compositions. But Zorn’s composition, as we have seen with Spillane and others, also involve genre-shifts within themselves. The use and abuse of quick blocks of genre to shock the accustomed listener dominates, for instance, Zorn’s arrangement of “Hard Plains Drifter” (564 Kb .au file), a composition, or rather series of compositions, by avant-garde guitarist Bill Frisell. The piece, played by Frisell’s instrumentally-mixed quartet (cello, electric guitar, electric bass, percussion), shifts abruptly over thirty-six blocks among twelve different keys (suggesting, peculiarly, a block-oriented serialism), numerous tempi and instrumental combinations (trios, duos, solos), “from r&b, to country & western, reggae, hardcore, free-form squalls, and Morricone western psychedelia” (Diliberto 18). At no point does Zorn’s arrangement attempt to abandon its generic or conventional musical ties: those ties, rather, are exploited and segmented, to the point where, while retaining their ironic, parodic thrust and remaining recognizable to the t.v.-and-radio-saturated ear, they throw the accustomed listener off balance; the listeners who know their pop-culture, that is, have their expectations jolted, scattered, smashed and re-arranged. Zorn’s work is never quite unrecognizable, “boring,” or estranging to such a listener, as Cage’s–for instance–may tend to be. Rather, the well-worn, commercially-exploited genres remain intact. Zorn himself exploits the expectations of a repetition-hungry consumer culture, turning those expectations, so to speak, on their ears. Zorn’s organization of noise consists not in the dismantling or disabling of genre by noise, but rather in the stream of cross-talk between noise and genre.

 

The use of genre within the context of a mass consumer audience thus gives Zorn’s music a socio-political character which the music of Cage can only attain, as Attali has indicated, negatively, by forcing the listener away from music per se (as an organ of institutional power) and toward the individual, to a new order of music. Zorn, by contrast, uses the “old” order, the status quo of popular culture, to shock his listeners into an awareness of their mired condition. Cage’s music, from Attali’s perspective, lays claim to a utopian thrust which Zorn’s work, unremittingly ironic as it is, will not accept. Composition, then, as the arrangement of sounds (generic, noisy or otherwise), does not necessarily offer us an authentic, contemplative access to “what is,” as Cage’s Zen-oriented pieces are somewhat pretentiously intended to do; rather, Zorn disrupts all forms of contemplation (especially the listener-passivity encouraged by electronic reproduction and anaesthetic stereo background), and calls instead for an active, deliberate, offensive engagement with the world, a praxis, as Adorno says.

 

Despite Zorn’s claims to dislike notation, his music is in fact meticulously structured both in its conception and in its execution. He does not, as Stockhausen has, force musicians unaccustomed to improvisation merely to think about “the vibrations of the stars” and to play what they feel. He composes, he says, for players he knows to be capable of stretching musically without much notated music; his model–surprisingly perhaps–as he repeats in various interviews, is Duke Ellington, whose music is “collaborative,” according to Zorn, as it melds the diverse, distinctive voices of Ellington’s orchestra into a “kind of filmic sweep” (Santoro 23). Zorn asserts that, when he composes for his “family” of players, he writes in such a way as not to limit the potentials of those players, while providing a structure within which they can work; the tension between noises–intentional and chaotic, parodic and expressive–which we have been examining in Zorn’s music is thus reproduced on a compositional level, as Zorn seeks to balance improvisational freedom with the parameters of a notated structure, a balance discovered, for that matter, within structurality itself.

 

I want, in conclusion, to examine the political implications of one of the most notorious of those structures, the game. Zorn’s game pieces, bearing titles derived from various sports and board-games like Lacrosse, Archery, Pool, and Cobra, involve complex and often difficult sets of rules to be followed by musicians and freedom. When asked if he has an “overall view” of a game piece he was composing in 1988, Zorn was typically cautious:

 

No. Not at all. The thing is not written in time, it’s from section to section and in that sense it’s being created spontaneously by the players in the group. . . . I have a general idea of what’s possible in the piece, the way somebody who writes the rules to baseball knows there’ll be so many innings and so many outs. But you don’t know how long an inning is going to last and how long the guy’s going to be at bat before he gets a hit. So there are a lot of variables, and it should be that way because these are improvisers and that’s what they do best. (Chant 25)

 

Zorn offers a set of rules, and lets the players complete the melodies, tempi, harmonies and transitions. His “composition,” in this sense, becomes–to borrow a term from Miles Davis–controlled freedom, or structured freedom, the contradiction-in-terms indicating a both/and rather than an either/or situation in performance.

 

Cage, again, provides an illustrative contrast to Zorn. Whereas Cage’s computer-generated mesostics move toward the obliteration of compositional intention almost entirely by establishing strict rules for the processing of phonemes and morphemes of language, as Cage himself indicates, for instance, in his introduction to I-VI, Zorn transfers compositional intention largely to the performer, such that he or she is permitted to function within a predetermined context of group interaction, whose only expressive constraints consist in that interaction. Cage, again, moves toward obliteration of the creative will, while Zorn engages that will differentially.

 

The “score” of Cobra (371 Kb .au file) illustrates this push toward engagement. It consists of a series of hand signals, each of which corresponds to a type of interaction ranging from quickly-traded bursts of sound to aggressive competitions. Any one of the players may choose at any time to change the direction of the piece and to alter the type of interaction; Zorn’s function as conductor is merely to relay that change to the rest of the players, through a hand signal, and to offer a downbeat. Players may also, individually or in groups, engage in “guerrilla tactics,” for which there exists a whole new set of signals, by which they attempt to wrest control of the group from the conductor and to conduct their own series of interactions (for a more complete description of the piece, see Strickland 134-37 or the sleeve notes to the HatART release of Cobra). The game itself is thus antagonistic and collaborative, at once reproducing the composer-conductor hierarchy of traditional “classical” music and subverting that hierarchy from within the “composition” itself. No two performances are the same, as the recent double-edition release of the piece indicates, but all performances exist within the same parameters, as collective communal works.

 

Zorn, by refusing the score from within the context of score-bound composition, thus creates, on stage in performance, a functional community, a group interaction in which the individual creative will cannot be subsumed by the collective whole in which it participates; confrontation and shock, while still present in the blocked genre-and-noise-based structure of the piece, give way strangely enough to a form of “utopian” promise, a promise which Zorn–always incredulous–has rather steadfastly refused to admit. But, unlike Attali’s utopia, Zorn’s community of creative will does not remove itself from the arena of technological replication; rather, it moves from within the economies of consumption and repetition that characterize the mass media and the mass-market to fracture and remake creativity itself. As Linda Hutcheon has asserted of postmodernist parody, a category in which we may include Zorn’s generic replication and mass-media noise making, it is “not essentially depthless, trivial kitsch,” a replay of empty forms to satisfy the hollow consumer strategies of the music industry, “but rather it can and does lead to a vision of interconnectedness” (Poetics 24). Cage has indicated that he too wanted to move toward a notion of the non-constraining, communal and participatory score, the score which serves not as an absolute but as a provisional “model” for performance:

 

That’s what I’d like. It’s a fascinating thing and suggests at least, if not a new field of music at least a new field of activity for people who are interested in sounds. (Roaratorio 91)

 

Ironically, Zorn, not Cage, has established just such a “new field,” but from within the very forms of consumer and political regulation which have threatened–according to both Attali and Adorno–to obliterate the creative will altogether. The praxis Zorn’s music encourages is not new, in the sense that the exhausted avant-garde of modernist practice requires that we “make it new.” Rather, that praxis, as Zorn’s music demonstrates, exists as potential within all fields of human activity, even those–especially those–which the mass audience, for its own anaesthetic comfort, has consistently managed to turn against itself. Zorn’s music, that is, turns its own form against itself, becoming what he calls a stimulating, uncomfortable, “ugly beauty,” and emerges remade, having reshaped the fundamental ways in which we listen, both to each other and to the world around us.

 

Notes

 

1. The direct correspondence between theorizing and music assumed by Attali may be illuminated by Adorno’s commentary on Mahler. Arguing against programmatic and thematic analyses of Mahler’s symphonies, Adorno asserts that:

 

Ideas that are treated, depicted or deliberately advanced by a work of art are not its ideas but its materials–even the “poetic ideas” whose hazy designations were intended to divest the program of its coarse materiality. . . . In [Mahler’s] work a purely musical residue stubbornly persists that can be interpreted in terms neither of processes nor of moods. It informs the gestures of his music. . . . Mahler can only be seen in perspective by moving still closer to him, by entering into the music and confronting the incommensurable presence that defies the stylistic categories of program and absolute music. . . . His symphonies assist such closeness by the compelling spirituality of their sensuous musical configurations. Instead of illustrating ideas, they are destined concretely to become the idea. (Mahler 3-4)

 

2.Discussing the filmic or “picaresque” shape of his compositions, his uses of blocks of sound and rapid-fire shifts from texture to texture, section to section, Zorn suggests that his music demands a similar attentiveness:

 

It’s made of separate moments that I compose completely regardless of the next, and then I pull them, cull them together. It’s put together in a style that causes questions to be asked rather than answered. It’s not the kind of music you can just put on and then have a party. It demands your attention. You sit down and listen to it or you don’t even put it on. (Strickland 128)

 

Works Cited

 

• Adorno, Theodor. Prisms. 1967. Trans. S. and S. Weber. Cambridge: MIT Press, 1981.
• —. Mahler: A Musical Physiognomy. 1971. Trans. E. Jephcott. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1992.
• Arac, Jonathan, ed. Postmodernism and Politics. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1986.
• Attali, Jacques. Noise. 1977. Trans. B. Massumi. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1985.
• Bailey, Derek, George Lewis and John Zorn. Yankees. Audio Recording. Celluloid OAO, 5006, 1983.
• Cage, John. Roaratorio. Ed. Klaus Schöning. Königstein: Athenäum, 1982.
• —. Roaratorio. Audio Recording. Athenäum, 3-7610-8185-5, 1982.
• —. Silence. Middletown: Wesleyan UP, 1961.
• —. I-VI. Cambridge: Harvard UP, 1990.
• Chant, Ben. “John Zorn–Game Plan.” Coda 221 (August 1988), 24-25.
• Deleuze, Gilles and Félix Guattari. A Thousand Plateaus. 1980. Trans. B. Massumi. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1987.
• Diliberto, John. “Bill Frisell: Guitars & Scatterations.” Downbeat 56.5 (May 1989), 16-19.
• Frisell, Bill. Before We Were Born. Audio Recording. Elektra/Nonesuch, 9 60843, 1989.
• Hutcheon, Linda. A Poetics of Postmodernism. New York: Routledge, 1988.
• McGowan, John. Postmodernism and Its Critics. Ithaca: Cornell UP, 1991.
• Perloff, Marjorie, ed. Postmodern Genres. Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 1988.
• Santoro, Gene. “John Zorn: Quick-Change Artist Makes Good.” Downbeat 55.4 (April 1988), 23-25.
• Strickland, Edward. American Composers: Dialogues on Contemporary Music. Bloomington: Indiana UP, 1991.
• Woodward, Josef. “Zornography: John Zorn.” Option (July/August 1987), 32-36.
• Zorn, John. Filmworks 1987-1990. Audio Recording. Elektra/Nonesuch, 9 79270, 1992.
• —. Spillane. Audio Recording. Elektra/Nonesuch, 9 79172, 1987.
• —. Cobra. Audio Recording. HatART, 60401/2, 1990.
• —. Spy Vs. Spy. Audio Recording. Elektra/Musician, 9 60844, 1989.
• —. Naked City. Audio Recording. Elektra/Nonesuch, 9 79238, 1989.
• —. Torture Garden/Naked City. Audio Recording. Shimmy Disc, S039, 1990.
• “Zorn on Zorn.” [Advertisement] Downbeat 59.3 (March 1992), 23.