The following responses were submitted by PMC readers using regular e-mail or the PMC Reader’s Report form. Not all letters received are published, and published letters may have been edited.

 

Copyright (c) 1998 by the authors, all rights reserved. This text may be used and shared in accordance with the fair-use provisions of U.S. copyright law, and it may be archived and redistributed in electronic form, provided that the editors are notified and no fee is charged for access. Archiving, redistribution, or republication of this text on other terms, in any medium, requires the consent of the authors and the notification of the publisher, the Johns Hopkins University Press.

 

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Reader’s Report on Simon Chesterman, “Ordering the New World: Violence and its Re/Presentation in the Gulf War and Beyond” (PMC 8.3)

 

In Simon Chesterman’s article, Ordering the New World…, I couldn’t help but have memories in the back of my mind come back to me. During the Gulf War, about a third of my unit was posted to ships to provide air defence to ships because the dingnies in the Canadian Navy are outdated and could not provide their own air defense at that Tea Social in the gulf, so my army unit was given the task. I truly believe the reason for Canada to participate in the war, at least in part, was that it didn’t want t o miss the comming out ball of the ’90s and feel left out by its more influencial neighbors–another example of the keeping up with Jonses Syndrom. The event that followed was nothing less than absurd.

 

I remember clearly the video cameras with their news crews in the hangar waiting for the soldiers to get off of the bus returning from ‘active’ duty in the gulf. I watched the wonderful spectacle that followed, almost wanting to take part in the produ ction myself. As the soldiers got off the bus and were interviewed one by one it seemed like they were talking a language I could not understand, but everyone around me, including my parents, could which left me a little baffled looking back in retrospec t. My generation, the tv generation that is, have intuitively developed the skill of being amateur spin doctors knowing exactly what the press wants to hear and happilly obligeing–for one must never speak the truth because people prefer to be conforted and lied to, it is just easier to accept.

 

My personal interactions with these returning people was much different that what was seen on the tube of course. I mostly heard stories of shopping trips and the difficulty of finding alcohol in the arab country of Bahrain. It goes without saying tha t when they had a Scud alert they were legitametly scared, but looking back there was no reason to be frightened they were further from the pesty Scuds than I was from the Great Hanshin Earthquake in Kobe,Japan in 1995.These war vetrans, as they are calle d, spent all their time safely in the rear ranks and never exposed to any real threat from the so called enemy. War has become savy. The news sets have become made for tv movie sets.

 

We take a reletively small event at its origin, then with a little help from the politicians with the press(always looking to increase their ratings) with a crowd looking for spectacle, we are able to produce great events out of non-events. Like the p hotographs of the Crimean War taken by Roger Fenton which have no nobody(no-bodies) in them we in the late 20th century have also been able to produce a war without any ‘real’casualties, or at least ones that to matter to us anyway.

 

These comments are from: Rene Bouchard
reneb@hotmail.com

 

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PMC Reader’s Report on Nicky Marsh, “‘Note on My Writing’: Poetics as Exegesis” (PMC 8.3)

 

Nicky Marsh beautifully puts her finger on what needs to be done now that language poetry is twenty years old: actual reading of specific texts and differentiation of individual poets. Her readings of Scalapino and Howe are really excellent. I hope many people read this review!

 

These comments are from: Marjorie Perloff
MPerloff@earthlink.net

 

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PMC Reader’s Report on Nicky Marsh, “‘Note on My Writing’: Poetics as Exegesis” (PMC 8.3)

 

More & more, I find reviews, especially reviews on so-called L-A-N-G-U-A-G-E poetry to be far more interesting, informative and entertaining than the poems themselves.

 

These comments are from: Lenny DellaRocca
dellarocca@earthlink.net

 

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PMC Reader’s Report on Nicky Marsh, “‘Note on My Writing’: Poetics as Exegesis” (PMC 8.3)

 

A lucid, engaging discussion about two of the best language poets. Although most of my work is more traditionally narrative in form, I have long admired Howe’s work. This review is a delight to find online.

 

These comments are from: Linda Lee Harper
lleeharper@aol.com

 

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PMC Reader’s Report on Scott DeShong, “Sylvia Plath, Emmanuel Levinas, and the Aesthetics of Pathos” (PMC 8.3)

 

I had had “Morning Song”, “Tulips” read to me in high school by a very important teacher. Hence, when I became aware of the plathian myth, doing the plathian thing, reading, the bigraphys’s, and particualry Birthday letter, I was struch by my inabilit y to like anything else, other than those poems. It is not that they have an amazing quality or perfection, as many critics say, but rather that capability to feel, or a particular quality of what you call pathis. I was amazed becuase you reflected on the se two poems. Of particular note, I hope you respond to this point, is the use of “And” in Plaths Poetry (sorry about formate..oops). And is always used when Plath says exactly how she feels This to me implies in every sense her pathos. Plath , for example says “and my heart…(in tulips) In morning song, she says (and now you try your handful of notes, their vowles like balloons) I know i have not busted any feats of great knowledge, but I have never heard anyboy talk about his point, I hope it is of some use… it was fantastic article.

 

These comments are from: Daniel Groenewald
danymail@altavista.ne

 

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Scott DeShong replies:

 

Thanks for your response to my article, and sorry for the long delay in replying to you; I haven’t been around this summer (and won’t be much for the rest of it, either). I understand your appreciation for Plath’s poems, although I must admit that I hadn’t considered her use of “and.” Before coming to terms with this usage, I’d have to study a number of poets to articulate comparisons between variations in their usage of the word. Perhaps what you’re observing has to do with a rhythmic or metric placement of the word by Plath, which helps her acheive a particular tone of voice that, as you read her, embodies pathos. Thanks again, with best wishes,

 

Scott DeShong

 

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PMC Reader’s Report on Adrian Miles, “Singin in the Rain: A Hypertextual Reading” (PMC 8.2)

 

This is a fascinating article. I want to point out one factor I didn’t see mentioned, at least in language I am familiar with–what the hell does diegetic mean anyway?–that those who create products, such as books or movies have always one major obsta cle to overcome in order to garner the audience’s hypnotic engagement (and thus engender “catharsis”). This factor is “believability”, or, at least, the suspension of disbelief. The frame, or “film-in-itself” is merely a narrative method to achieve, in th is case, a rather cozy, insulated environment for the story-telling. The writers have merely set up what they perhaps feared to be a sophisticated audience’s dismissal of smarm. The truest “reading” of any text, I think, has become one which deconstructs the commercial aim–target audience/present future venues, production cost, revenue prospects, etc.–of an commercial endeavor. Having said this, the article is excellent, and has given more “food for thawt” than just about anything I’ve read in the crit ique genre. Thanks!

 

These comments are from: johnny lite
lite@mailexcite.com

 

Joel Weishaus

Center for Southwest Research
University of New Mexico
reality@unm.edu

 

The following conversation took place over email. Along with discussing aspects of our respective biographies, we focus in on “Imaging Florida,” a project that Gregory Ulmer is working on with colleagues in the Florida Research Ensemble at the University of Florida. Imaging Florida is a collaborative Internet project, including a Web site and email listserv, for the design of a new role for the arts and education in community policy formation and problem solving. The project aims to explore: the analysis of a cross-section of attractions in Florida, leading to a poetics for world wide web design; the analysis of one on-going state of affairs recognized as a public problem in Florida; the design of a Web site that creates a new understanding of a community problem reconfigured as a virtual tourist attraction; collaboration with colleagues at other institutions across the levels of schooling to test the Web site as a resource for relating education to public policy formation. “Imaging Florida’s” web address is http://www.elf.ufl.edu.

 

Gregory L. Ulmer: What I would like us to do is to depart a bit from the conventional interview, and get a little more into a consultancy relationship. I conceive of this relationship not as two interviewers, nor as two interviewees (you are still interviewing me, so I have more responsibility in that regard). Rather, we would be writing in a rhizomatic way, as I understand that term. Deleuze’s example that I like best is wasp and orchid. This is the saprophytic (vs. parasitic) relation that I discussed in “The Object of Post-Criticism.” Meaning that you have your track and trajectory, and I have mine, and for some reason we have met at a crossroads, our tracks have converged just now.

 

We start writing back and forth: my goal is to explain a current project of mine, “Imaging Florida,” and your immediate goal is to help me do that, with the understanding that I don’t know what it is exactly. The interview is a collaboration: we both write our way together for a certain sequence of posts.

 

If this plan sounds OK, let me know, and I will start, assuming that you have asked me: “Tell me about your project called Imaging Florida.”

 

Joel Weishaus: You bring up “The Object of Post-Criticism,” which was my introduction to your writing. In it you quote John Cage: “art changes because science changes–changes in science give artists different understandings about how nature works.” It seems to me that this relationship between art and science is truer today than when Cage expressed it, some 35 years ago. Thus, from this site (and the way the word can play), tell me about the project you call Imaging Florida.

 

GLU: Imaging Florida is a contribution to a virtual organization called the emerAgency, which is an experimental consulting group. In trying to show you something about this organization I hope to figure out what it is myself. Its purpose is to improve the world, or if not improve the world, then at least to exist as itself, to come into being or into conversation if not into being. Some day, in the context of problem solving, someone will say: We have tried everything and nothing works very well. It is time to consult with the emerAgency.

 

One way to understand this organization is to consider its genealogy in applied grammatology (as Europeans say: the AMERICAN version). Why do I insist upon applying to practical states of affairs discipline materials that are conventionally associated with the “pure” arts and sciences? The reason must have something to do with my father. This feeling I have of needing to “pay for my space” (his motto) was inherited: a piece of North Dakota winter carried in my spirit like an inoperable bit of shrapnel from the wars of growing up.

 

My father, Walt, was born in 1916. After his mother (a German immigrant) died in the great flu epidemic of 1918-1919, Walt and his sister, Bernice, lived with their aunt for six years, until “Boss” (a nickname my grandfather was known by since he was four years old) remarried. Dad was raised Lutheran, but was a Presbyterian in his adult years, serving as an elder and lay minister. He was a veteran of the Depression and World War II. He owned his own business–sand and gravel, and concrete products–in a small town in eastern Montana, which he also served as representative to the state legislature for ten years, and county commissioner for another six. Then he died at age 67.

 

Walt exemplified the work ethic, self-sacrifice, public service, and a general righteousness. As much as I admired Dad’s integrity, the righteousness was a bit hard to take, and I assumed for a long time that after I left home, got an education, that I had put all that Protestant Republican asceticism behind me. After all, Walt (like so many other in our anti-intellectual culture) believed that teachers were those who couldn’t do anything; and that the arts were parasitical. I recognize now that my desire for an applied grammatology constitutes in part an attempt to prove to Dad that he was wrong about the arts. I know that his criteria were irrelevant to the arts; this irrelevance is just the point of contact or disjunction between what the emerAgency has to offer and practical states of affairs.

 

In short, the first principle of the new consultancy when confronting an intractable problem is: bring to bear irrelevant criteria.

 

JW: When it comes to the work-ethic, and self-sacrifice, you could just as well be talking about my father, who died a few years ago, in South Florida. He was an aircraft mechanic during World War II, then an automobile salesman for the balance of his working life.

 

Even the artists of those days, before the 1950s, had to be practical to survive. Many worked for the WPA. The nuts and bolts of Abstract Expressionism, that most socially irrelevant of schools, were forged in public art, only to revolt against its propagandistic themes. Yet there remained the tendency toward large artworks.

 

Does this tend toward what is presently perceived as an emerAgency in Florida, that the largest sector of public art is advertising–billboards and the like?

 

GLU: The emerAgency is concerned not only with the commercialization of the public sphere, but even more with the opening of the border between the public and private spheres that is one effect of the emergence of Entertainment as the principal institutionalization of electronic technology. To explore this aspect of the emerAgency I want to think about why such a project appeals to me in the first place. A thread running through much of my work has to do with creativity. After an early interest in writing creatively I got sidetracked into studying about the creative process. Now I am trying to connect that detour back into some kind of action.

 

The detour might have to do with my ambivalence toward the “world” that I felt obliged to improve. My remarks here are guided by the categories that showed up in my research into breakthrough inventors–their imaginations tended to be composite assemblages of cultural materials drawn from family experience, entertainment or popular culture materials, schooling background, and a particular community history. I am thinking of investigations by Holton or Gruber that characterize how innovators draw upon an image of wide scope–an aesthetic embodiment of their attunement with the world (what the philosophical tradition referred to as Stimmung).

 

My pedagogy aims at helping students notice, map, and enhance their own image of wide scope (their own learning style–with the term style marking the aesthetic quality of the thinking).

 

Given the heuretic principle that requires me to try out for myself whatever poetics my students are using, I have been exploring my own wide image. Perhaps I can get you to test this idea on yourself as well? You will recognize that the method of inquiry into Stimmung is what I have called mystorical. It starts with finding a memory associated with family (my memories of my father, for example, and I might have to come back to those again later). In the institution of Family we are introduced into our native language, and develop for a brief time an oral culture.

 

Very soon in our civilization the child begins to acquire an entertainment or popular culture as well, through television being present in the home. In analyzing my experience of entertainment discourse I recognize the ambivalence that I mentioned, toward having to pay for my space (as my father put it). To get an idea of what my high school experience was like, think of a synthesis of the films American Graffiti and The Last Picture Show. American Graffiti is an inventory of the mythology and urban legends of teen life. The figure I like best in that film is the “hood with a heart of gold,” but that is not who I was when I was that age. There was a split between my behavior, which conformed in nearly every respect with the norms of the 1950s, and my attitude or feeling about those demands.

 

The hood type identifies the alienation of my position, but The Last Picture Show gets at the emotional quality of this alienation. The one scene that best evokes the memory of my own alienation is the accident–when the mentally handicapped boy who was always sweeping the street is struck and killed by the cattle truck. This scene so hit me as a moment of recognition (in that Greek sense of anagnorisis) that I remembered it as being much longer. When I saw the film again after some time (on TV) I thought it was a bowdlerized version, since the scene is so short. It is just a brief shot, when the protagonist’s glance takes in the cattle packed into the semi trailer, their frothing snouts pressed against the slatted sides of the truck, on their way to the slaughterhouse. A very existential moment (life–an abattoir).

 

I investigated this feeling mystorically, using my (or my father’s) identification with Gary Cooper (noted in Heuretics). I continued this inquiry in a Web site project, working with High Noon rather than Beau Geste as I had in Heuretics. The result of this inquiry, called “Noon Star,” is posted on my Web site (http://web.nwe.ufl.edu/~gulmer/star/star1.html). I won’t go into it now other than to say that High Noon is about a hypocritical town–a town that does not support its sheriff in his showdown with the thugs who have come to kill him. I identified with Will Kane’s (Cooper’s) dilemma–the imperative to do his duty despite his disillusionment with his fellow citizens.

 

The dilemma–the divide between the demands of principle and those of the community or state–shows one of the categorical borders of the human subject; it is the border that Greek tragedy first mapped out. The relevance to the emerAgency project is this ambivalence of wanting to improve a world that might not deserve improvement.

 

JW: Actually, I was thinking about High Noon recently, when finishing the paratext for my recent Artist’s Book, Threading the Petrified Glyph. The text reads, “Almost noon, Sunday. Tree-mottled shadows spread over the pebbled pavement, as the sun begins to heat my back.” I associated this, and wrote, “Ex-Marshal, Will Kane, his new wife pleading with him for non-violence, must face four outlaws in the center of town, at high noon, as one by one, the townspeople excuse themselves from helping him. Thus, Gary Cooper plays the lone hero with no backup, in High Noon (1952).”

 

So that my thoughts, first, were of his pacifist wife, and that, even though he loves her, he must face these men. But maybe this had to do more with self-respect than with duty to community. After all, these men were primarily after him. As Sherman Paul says in his essay, “Poetry and Old Age,” “I think that perhaps fidelity to one’s own life is the only wisdom.” I would add: If this life has a wide scope.

 

When you speak in terms of “wanting to improve a world,” the last lines of William Bronk’s poem, “At Tikal,” come to mind:

 

to go to the far edge
apart and imagine, to wall whether in
or out. To build a kind of cage for the sake
of feeling the bars around us, to give
shape to a  world.
And oh, it is always a world and not the
world. (ll. 29-35)

 

Unlike the ancient Mayans, we have access to mountains of information, both verbal and visual, on the worlds of other cultures. We should, then, be able to envision a bigger world than our own. But can we?

 

GLU: We are experiencing an information explosion, certainly. There are books about everything, and if you live long enough you will discover that someone has written a book about your life. Not a biography, of course, but a book more in the style of “Know Your 3-Year-Old”–a generic report that nonetheless is uncannily close on most points. That I have come across so many books that document what I thought, felt, and said should not surprise me, since the theory I work with says that the greater part of thought takes place outside the individual, in the network of institutional behaviors and processes that organize society (the symbolic order). Identification (productive of the experience of being a self) at a deep level amounts to the taking up of a position already prepared in advance, but with the illusion that one has chosen to be a certain way (such is the effect of ideology).

 

Anyway, while thinking about the genealogy of my ambivalent desire to improve the world, I happened upon some books that were about the two books that most influenced me while I was in high school. Reading these studies cast some light on the generic character of my experience. I have mentioned already two of the institutions of the popcycle Family and Entertainment that interpellate the individual into an order. The third such institution is School, which interpellates us into literacy. The first book that had a really major impact on my thinking was The Ugly American. I read it as part of my preparations for a debate club speech competition.

 

I now understand more my response to this book after reading John Hellmann’s American Myth and the Legacy of Vietnam. It turns out that Ugly is one of the biggest sellers of that era (over 4 million copies sold), and that it anticipates and even shapes the policy vision of Kennedy’s New Frontier. Ugly was published in 1958, the year I started high school. The context for me was eastern Montana, a place that does not believe that the old frontier is done with. Jordan, where the militia were put under siege recently, is just north of Miles City, my home town. In my day it was the John Birch Society that was active in those parts. The Cold War was quite real to me and Lederer and Burdick helped me crystallize my feelings into an understanding. As I recall, the speech I gave imitated their jeremiad style, except that I called for saving Latin America from communism, whereas they were concerned with Asia. This influence lasted through my freshman year in college. I had planned to major in political science and economics with a minor in Spanish, to prepare me for my “mission.” Then I took an economics course.

 

One of the strongest moments of recognition for me in reading Hellmann’s account of my era was his description of the young American type, the American hero, the ideal (as opposed to the ugly Americans who had fallen away from this ideal). The modern version of the type (Hellmann explains) is actually captured in its essence in Graham Greene’s The Quiet American as one determined to do good, not to any individual person but to a country, a world. This hero is earnest and involved, but also ignorant and silly. In the mythology traced by Hellmann, the hero (whether in the more jaundiced version seen from the outside, or the true frontier hero on his errand into the wilderness) is contrasted with the ugly American who has fallen under the spell of European decadence and corruption, preferring the city over the wilderness, personal pleasure over self-sacrifice.

 

The moment of recognition–what made the recognition something like the anagnorisis of tragedy–was not just this belief on the part of the hero in the mission or destiny of America to improve the world, but also its antithesis–the French! What I had forgotten was that while I identified with the hero, my behavior actually imitated that of the ugly American. A Frenchman is cast as the embodiment of everything the American hero despises (in conflict with my own Francophilia). This place of the French in American mythology pinpoints my ambivalence, made concrete in the fact that the only other book to have an impact on me in high school comparable to The Ugly American was The Fall, by Camus. It still amazes me that I read The Fall back then. In my high school we did not have literature in our English classes until senior year, and then only for honors or college bound seniors. The teacher had a long list of books from which we were to choose one for an outside report. I did not read much at that time and did not recognize many of the names on the list, so I picked Camus at random. It was a revelation to me, my first encounter with anything that could be described as philosophical. The closest I had come to anything like the experience was the first time I read a work of science fiction (in middle school).

 

Again, I now have some perspective on that event, not only from the retrospect of having read a lot of existentialism specifically, but from a book edited by Shoshana Felman and Dori Laub, Testimony, that includes Felman’s discussion of The Fall in the context of Camus’s other work and his falling out with Sartre over the question of the concentration-camp universe. I wonder if my report I wrote for Mr. Boe’s class is preserved in the boxes of my stuff still in my mother’s garage in Miles City. I would love to see what I made of Camus in 1961-62. In terms of my genealogy, taking my cue from Felman’s reading, it had something to do with this portrayal of a missed encounter, a failure to act, to save the woman from suicide, and the reflection on the possibility of getting a second chance to complete this unfinished experience. Felman cites the concluding paragraphs:

 

'O young woman, throw yourself into the water again so that I may a second time have the chance of saving both of us!' A second time, eh, what a risky suggestion! But let's not worry. It's too late now. It will always be too late. Fortunately. (147)

 

This opposition between Leatherstocking and Jean-Baptiste traces the outline of my ambivalence; I live this aporia: I am stuck. Perhaps I am more of a skeptic than I realized–deferring action until I am sure what the consequences of my act will be. Lederer and Burdick’s jeremiad called for a generation of engineer saints. That character is too close to my father’s (who had a degree in civil engineering). In any case, what actually happened after college is that rather than going to Latin America to save it from the communists, I went to graduate school in Comparative Literature, seduced it would seem by European decadence, since my choice of fields was motivated in part by the desire to avoid reading American literature. To the extent that I recalled my desire to improve the world, the practical life-world, it was to be by means of the humanities. Unfortunately, I had no idea how this project might be accomplished. Now, at last, I am proposing the emerAgency as the vehicle for action–a hybrid, a syncretism of the opposite poles of my aporia.

 

JW: There is an information explosion, as you say; but whose information is it? To be in-formed, to shape oneself inwardly, is a particular and dangerous undertaking, feeding a homunculus, a “new man,” or “new woman.” What excitement! Until one, by degrees, forces open reality’s cover.

 

We’ve been tracking someone to a hill. It is dark, and the top of the hill (actually a mound) is obscured. I sense that it is a place of forbidden power. My partner (we are detectives) wants to continue, but I caution him that we will die up there.

 

Suddenly there is a ditch which three of us are digging. We find a yellow-tinted plastic windshield, which seems significant.

 

Then one of us discovers a round manhole cover. Beneath it is a deep chamber, into which two of us descend, while my dream-ego stays behind.

 

However, there are fleeting images and intonations that I actually went both to the top of the hill and to the bottom of the hole.

 

The book that surged my interest in things literary was Homer’s Odyssey, which I read on my own, after being introduced to it in a high school class. The king went off to war, and in his arrogance offends the very god on whom he was most dependent to return safely home! However, it is because of this that he has his adventure. When he finally returned home his son has become a young man, and his young wife is decades older. Was he too late? Not for himself; but maybe for others.

 

From this admittedly self-centered point of view, one from which we all begin, and end, our odyssey, how do we improve the world “by means of the humanities”? Or do the humanities embrace a larger agon than defined by our institutions?

 

GLU: Although I want to improve the world, I fear that I will only make things worse (to continue the paraphrase of John Cage).

 

Odysseus at least had a name for the forces at work in his life (the gods). Psychoanalysis supplies a different set of terms (the unconscious, the drive, desire). My experience is of an imperative: I do not know how, why, or in what way I might accomplish something with my life, but this ignorance never seemed very important. Instead there was this feeling of wanting or needing to say something, anything, it did not matter what. Was it perhaps not an initiative on my part but an emulation?

 

The earliest memory of wanting to imitate an incomprehensible outpouring of voice was when my father read me bedtime stories. The ability to look at a book and produce fascinating stories seemed like magic, a great power. Before I could read I pretended to be able to read. This trick fooled a few of my friends’ mothers, who marveled at my precociousness and asked me to read to their children (why? to model this behavior?). The first time this happened (as I remember it; we are talking about preschool years) I had a moment of panic, then the realization once I opened the book that the pictures were all I needed. Between the pictures as prompts and my memory of hearing the story, I was able to reproduce the basic plot line for my equally illiterate and captive audience.

 

The moment of emulation occurred early in high school when I got the idea that the ability to speak a foreign language was supremely desirable. From where did this idea come? In Miles City, Montana, I doubt if I ever encountered a role model for this kind of behavior. Some of the beet farmers in the area did import migrant workers from Mexico during harvest season, but I do not recall associating them with the people I intended to save from communism.

 

The next example to which I transferred this desire to fill the air with mysterious speech was in college when I changed my major to creative writing after hearing a reading by a real poet (Richard Hugo). In graduate school the equivalent event was reading theory: I wanted to be a theorist. In every case the pattern is similar: first I encounter the exemplar–the production of utterance that is amazingly beyond my own ability to produce and from a source whose nature is a mystery. The desire never settled with any particular content, mode, form, but always with the utterance of a sort not necessarily understood but whose significance was acknowledged.

 

When I think how much work and energy I have put into theory (the utterance I settled on) I have to wonder; it is as if a person who loved to cut ribbons went around building monumental hospitals, civic centers and the like just to be able to be at the opening ceremony. The psychoanalytic theory of the part-object is one version of an explanation (the voice as a part-object, naming that which cannot be assimilated into a subject’s narcissistic illusion of completeness). Language in this sense is the cause of my desire. Theory aside, the feeling of disproportion could relate to the belated realization that what I was after was not knowledge but (ahem) wisdom. Not the utterance after all but the wisdom of which I took the utterance as an index was the fetish. Not the stream of words itself nor the content and effect but the reserve that was their source, the reservoir, the fountain, the understanding that caused this flow that was what I desired.

 

It so happens that while my mind was engaged on its fool’s errand my body was taking care of matters on its own! “Better to be lucky than good,” my wrestling coach used to say (to me, at least). What happened was that some years ago I started to resemble a certain stereotype of the wise old man. My hair started turning silver and falling out in my early thirties, and I have had a beard since 1965. 1965 was the turning point when my body started going its own way. Until then I had fit the stereotype of the All-American boy (in the WASP “typage”). I spent that academic year in Spain, and when I returned home in August of 1966 my own mother did not recognize me, literally. When I got off the bus (cross country from New York) I walked up to my mother who was waiting for me and she pushed past me looking for her son. “Ma! It’s me!” I had become a bohemian. Or rather, I looked like what I thought bohemians looked like (as best a person from Montana could tell).

 

Still, I have had some trouble with my look. A few years ago I was to be met at an airport baggage carousel by a person responsible for driving me to a workshop on the mystory. It was for an Art College. I stood there for quite some time and then finally paged the party meeting Ulmer. A woman came up to the desk quite flustered. She had overlooked me since she was expecting an artist. Not long after that I was doing a weekend conference sponsored by a city arts project and they had put me up in housing normally reserved for artists in residence. No artist was in town at the time. I tried to get the gallery to notarize a statement confirming that Ulmer had been housed in artists’ quarters, to anchor this aspect of my identity. The principle was similar to Duchamp’s urinal–its sheer presence in the gallery made it art.

 

I place my hopes now in this accident of nature and culture that has cast me in a role in which this look may be functional. Method actors are expert in creating or finding physical gestures or expressions that then generate the emotion they need for the part. Perhaps looking wise might lead to wisdom, if not for me, then for those who are taken in by this illusion.

 

We all know that when Einstein did his great work he did not look like “Einstein.” But the link between his accomplishments and his celebrity image (the old man) is fixed in our mythology.

 

Lacanian analysis, however, warns against this kind of transference–allowing the subject who is supposed to know to stand in as a model, as a prop, for the ego of the patient. I will say more later (perhaps) about how I try to play across the type casting (even if education and therapy are different projects). For now, to complete the thought about this split between my mistaking knowledge for wisdom intellectually, and my body going for its stereotype of the wise look, I should say that I have shifted from hoping to utter anything important myself, to wanting to help students accomplish something creative in their lives. Not my creativity but the creativity of my students has become the mode of action for improving the world (or to beg the question).

 

JW: The year after you grew your beard, I sprouted mine. Since then I have only been without it once, when the American union boss in the Port of Yokohama wouldn’t let me ship out unless I was clean-shaven. Especially because they couldn’t readily grow facial hair, my Japanese friends took this as an incestuous twist on the Ugly American syndrome: Americans playing power games with each other. One’s beard then–the country trying to save face in Vietnam–to the union boss, was synonymous with flying the Jolly Roger.

 

Three years before, after leaving my last job in advertising–I had been a Junior Executive on Madison Avenue while still a teenager–I enrolled in UC Berkeley’s Department of Oriental Languages. But I didn’t stay long, as more and more of my time went to being Literary Editor of the school’s newspaper, which was in the fray of the Free Speech Movement and Anti-War protests. There I found the ire of rejected writers more threatening than facing police batons!

 

To be a poet was all I wanted. I remember the model that was prevalent at that time and location. Many of the poets whom Donald Allen anthologized in his classic, The New American Poetry, were, like the early rock bands, on the streets, in the coffee houses, bars, pool halls. It was the spirit of being a poet–living out of, and trusting in, one’s creativity, living without a net–that captured me. For example, in 1972, with the wind picking up, three of us briskly walked Bolinas’s fog-shrouded beach, Robert Creeley striding between Joanne Kyger and me, mumbling what was mostly inaudible. Yet I distinctly heard “Olson,” several times, over the wailing ocean. Was he transmitting something to us? A tradition, maybe?

 

A few years later I ran into Bob, and he said to me, “Remember that day on the beach?” As if something had happened!

 

In a country grown to respect not its artists but its entertainers (a threshold, I suggest, that needs to be re-marked), I often ask myself whether I made a terrible mistake. Have I wasted my life for the fetish of enthusiasm, a corban impossible to create? But of course it’s always been already too late. As Merleau-Ponty said, “We live the life we must live in order to do the work we must do.”

 

That you no longer hope to utter anything important seems to me to be not only after the fact, but in order to teach on the level you propose, heuretics, as you know, must be your fulcrum. What, then, is the nature of the creative actions, the eurekas you hope your students will accomplish with their lives?

 

GLU: Perhaps the lesson of our experience is the obvious point that to become something one must first desire it, and that this desire must be directly a part of education. My pedagogy is an attempt to model my eureka experience as a relay the students may use to get to their own similar experience. Eureka has to be learned, the same as anything else. I recognize in myself then at least two desires: to improve the world; to say something (something important or beautiful–or both). Presumably the two are not incompatible: I would say in a beautiful way how to improve the world! To accomplish this goal (but how much of this account is really a narrative–told in the past tense, with benefit of hindsight?) I entered the academy.

 

Thirty years have passed since I started graduate school (1967-1997), enough to make me wonder about the nature of time or my inability to experience it as such. It has something of the feel of The Fugitive, but with none of the drama: a “wrong man” story. In this story I am on the lam, hiding out, in disguise, except that I am not being pursued. If there is a list somewhere of the ten least wanted criminals, I am on it. The part of The Fugitive with which I identify has little to do actually with the criminal part of the story–the chase business–and everything to do with the doctor’s power to do good anonymously. Perhaps it is an image of a certain kind of alienation, this chain of random, anonymous acts by which the protagonist helps strangers with their problems and then moves on? The popularity of the series indicates that this desire is widely felt, and the people responsible for the cinema version missed the point of the series.

 

I have been underground (or at least ignoring the call to public service), grading papers, for thirty years, and also learning how to say something. I did not learn what to say, but how to say it, how to invent or create or discover a way to improve the world. I do not know how to improve the world myself, but I have a way to come up with a proposal to do so, which is why I say that my interest has shifted from my own utterance to that of my students. The problems associated with this discovery are, first, how to teach someone to use the creative method, and second, the nature of what is created (there is no guarantee of the outcome). About the teaching, I learned that I cannot simply tell students what the method is: they have to discover it for themselves. Not from scratch, of course, but I have to create an environment, a situation, in which the students have a Eureka experience.

 

The relation between me and my students is that of a donor to a hero in a folk tale. The teacher is not a mentor but a donor (to use the term from formalist and structuralist narrative theory back to Vladimir Propp). Perhaps in person I am still too much of a mentor for the students’ own good, but on-line a teacher needs to be a donor. A mentor is part of the ordinary world, but the donor is the helper figure the heroes meet in some way-station once they have entered the special world of the adventure. In this way-station (most often some kind of bar in American movies) the heroes learn the rules of the special world, and they encounter the donor who puts them to a series of tests to measure their worthiness for the coming confrontation with the villain, the obstacle, the force that resists their desires. The donor figure comes in many guises and its attitude may range from friendly through reluctance to hostility. If the heroes pass the tests they receive from the donor a magic device that later will be used to overcome the obstacles and acquire the elixir, the object of the quest. The art of teaching is in this process of giving the students the magic tool (the method of invention).

 

JW: Ah. The Grail is not Knowledge (Gnosis), but holds the elixir of Invention. Its value lies not in its battered integument, in its emptiness. When you’re in the Maverick Bar, and some stranger hands you an empty glass and says, “Blood of Christ,” you’ve met a donor. It’s the difference between invention and re-invention, which is downing the hemlock twice.

 

Based on Fritjof Capra’s book, The Turning Point, the screenplay also written by him, Mindwalk, is a dialogue between a reclusive physicist, an expatriate poet, and an ambitious politician, as they stroll around a medieval castle.

 

The physicist reveals the universe as it indeterminately plays on the subatomic level, a fetching view of the interconnectivity of all things. A world wide web is, after all, nature’s oldest trope.

 

The politician accepts this holism as fact, but he interrogates the physicist as to how these insights can pragmatically better the lives of his constituents. While the poet–his ex-speechwriter–is cynical, especially when it comes to political “solutions,” even as he is eloquent in his oneiric abstractions.

 

Two reclusive dreamers from, according to Plato, contending fields of endeavor, who have moved to relative anonymity; and a third protagonist, struggling to wed the chaos behind reality to the civics of his calling. A cause for EmerAgency?

 

GLU: The third party in our conversation, Joel, is no person but the symbolic order itself, represented by the institutional discourse within which our dialogue takes place. One goal of the emerAgency is to address this collective dimension, or to use the prosthesis of digital technologies to help us grasp this new location of thinking as our civilization moves into a new apparatus (the social machine of electracy). Most of my study of the oral apparatus has been concerned with Native American culture in general, and the shamanism of the Plains tribes in particular–a figure such as Black Elk for example. Literate people experience thought as located in our heads. The Ancient Greeks experienced thought in the chest or stomach. For Black Elk, serious thinking was associated with the wind, the four winds that gave voice to the spirit of the Grandfathers. In electracy the location of thought is moving again, in relation to a new subjectivation, a new experience of identity, so that thought now is happening outside our bodies once again, or in the relation of our bodies to the infrastructure. We have to invent a practice for the interactive, collaborative, collective capabilities of the Internet.

 

I ought to open a parenthesis here about Black Elk, to bring you up to date on a line of inquiry that I opened in Derrida at the Little Bighorn. Producing that mystory showed me that my superego (my personal Mount Rushmore, the authority figures who interpellated me or with whom I identified) consisted of Walt Ulmer, Gary Cooper, George Armstrong Custer, and Jacques Derrida. The mystory further produced an operator that could be used to loosen the binds of duty imposed by this composite authority.

 

The operator was the term ficelle, the personal message that appeared (using the paranoid critical method) on the battlefield map marking the site of the Last Stand with the letters naming the five companies that fell with Custer (F, I, C, E, and L). Ficelle among other things was a term Henry James used to name secondary characters whose function was to further the form of a novel. I interpreted the message as: look to the ficelles of your mystory (characters assigned a supporting role in the narrative of my superego). The ficelle of Custer, for example, is Chief Gall (in my mystory). The thread (another meaning of ficelle) Gall led eventually to Black Elk, whom I now think of as being from my home town, since he reported in his life story that he camped near the mouth of the Tongue River (the site of Miles City).

 

I did some research on Native American shamanism, then, especially that of the Plains, the Lakota–a line of research doubly motivated by the importance of shamanism in Applied Grammatology (in Beuys and Lacan). A feature that recurred in various accounts by individual healers was how early they were first called or contacted by the Spirits–often as early as age four or five. Wallace Black Elk, a 20th-century figure who was called at this early age, was thankful that he never attended school, since he had observed that formal schooling cut off his people from access to these spirit voices. Now the importance of this information for me is that it finally provides an interpretation for an odd event in my experience. A running joke in my family is my memory of what I now understand as a contact with the Spirits described by the two Black Elks (and many others). The summer of my fourth year, when we were still living in North Dakota.

 

I was in the backyard of our house, which was on the outskirts of town at that time, and two creatures appeared to me that I recognized as Shmoos. Shmoos, you know, the cartoon characters drawn by Al Capp. We stared at each other for some time: they just stood there, smiling happily, beaming, as Shmoos do. Finally I ran inside to tell my mother, insisted that she come outside to see. Nothing was there, of course.

 

My theoretically informed self knows that this event must be a screen memory. The relevance in our context is the surprise I got when I found out more about Shmoos (since I had no recollection of their role in the comic strip). According to one history, “Shmoos are the world’s most amiable creatures, supplying all man’s needs: They lay bottled grade-A milk and packaged fresh eggs; when broiled, they taste like sirloin steak and, when fried, like chicken. As in a fertility myth gone berserk, the Shmoos reproduced so prodigiously they threatened to wreck the economy.”

 

As one character smothered in Shmoos complains: “It’s the worst tragedy that ever hit hoomanity!! Bein’ overwhelmed by pure unadulterated goodness!!” I started school that fall and never received a visit from the Shmoos again. How should I take this unexpected completion of one of my oldest and oddest memories? Is it a warning about the dire consequences of my desire to improve the world?

 

In any case, the first project of the emerAgency, undertaken this year in my graduate seminar, was to develop a prototype for an electronic practice. The relay we used to guide the design was Greek tragedy. Tragedy is a transitional invention, part ritual and part writing (part oral and part literate) that helped the Greeks reimagine themselves as citizens of Athens rather than as members of separate tribes. Theater as a space focused the collective attention in a new way, and demonstrated the interconnection between individual folly and collective disaster–the two kinds of blindness (ATH, or ate). This relay (using a feature of the transition from orality to literacy to imagine what is happening in our own transition from literacy to electracy) suggests that our practice similarly could use the internet to focus collective attention on our contemporary version of ATH. What is our own understanding of the link between individual and collective blindness? How do we account for the persistence of error in our lifeworld even after centuries of adopting scientific method as the dominant mode of collective reason? In this context we might see that Hamlet acts in a scientific manner by refusing to act until he knew for sure what was the case (rather than just accepting the spirit world at face value, without questioning its claims).

 

There are several different schools of thought, no doubt, about why we find it impossible to avoid error and folly in our individual and collective experience. Until recently science remained committed to a belief in progress (perhaps this belief is still the official one), but such a view is difficult to sustain at this point in the late twentieth century. Religion holds on to its view that this world is an illusion, one way or another. The epistemology of critique, which is at least within the division of knowledge relevant to the emerAgency, seems to be somewhere in between these extremes, with its ideological account of illusion. The ideological explanation for folly and calamity (ATH) was at first that people did not know what they were doing. When the enlightenment method of criticism–exposing the scene of power behind the appearance of belief failed to heal the blindness, the reason given was cynicism–they knew what they were doing was an error, but they did it anyway. The theoretical position adopted by the emerAgency, finally, is that of poststructuralism, especially in its French version. Psychoanalysis is relevant in the context of our relay, in any case, since it is an updating of Greek tragedy (thinking of Freud’s retelling of Oedipus). The unconscious is a literate concept of ATH. One of the most interesting notions within French psychoanalysis for our purposes is Lacan’s concept of the extime–a neologism combining external and intimate, that is just what we need to name this relocation of thought into a multibodied infrastructure. Lacan used the figure of the moebius strip, among a variety of other topological shapes, to evoke the simultaneously inside-outside quality of experience.

 

The point of departure for the emerAgency practice is this theoretical account of the extimatic nature of experience. Again we are dealing with a literate remake of an ancient notion of correspondence between the macrocosm and microcosm: as above, so below. As you might expect, the modern correspondence is based on difference as a relationship rather than similarity, if that makes any sense. What is inside and what is outside, the border between the inside and the outside at the individual and collective levels across the categories of identity (me and not-me, self and other) is disjunctive, non-similar but systematically so (the legacy of literacy that reduced identity to the border of my physical body, to individualism). In any case, working as we are with the humanities, with the specialized discipline of arts and letters, the emerAgency recognizes in the cosmology of the extime the most basic quality of language understood in aesthetic terms. If a law, principle, or axiom could be generalized from a composite of statements made by artists about creativity, it might come down to a saying such as the outside is inside.

 

Wallace Stevens shows us a blackbird thirteen ways but the effect has little to do with birds and everything to do with what it feels like to be human. Such is the grounding insight of the emerAgency project for a new consultancy, in this match between the structure of a lyric figure and a theory of reality as extimatic.

 

JW: Can this also be enunciated as “ex-time”? The brain, remember, stripped of its processes, has no self-awareness. No inside; no outside. No-Mind, as Buddhists say. Weird that it should have evolved this way! And fortunate, as it feeds us the meaty conundrum on which humans have been dining, like vultures on road kill, for at least 100,000 years.

 

Steven Mithen (in The Prehistory of the Mind) points out how Supernatural Beings who announce themselves to humanity always have two things in common. They are different enough from us to be able to violate natural laws, while delineating themselves enough for us to be able to grasp their presence, even while sustaining a distal immutability. In other words, they can fall into time, into our perception, into the circumstances of tragedy (the rituals of, and the epics about), without their essence deserting the timeless realm from which they generate.

 

As you say, there is this dichotomy, one that is always already everywhere. Yet the border between inside and outside is not merely disjunctive, but eruptive. It is always moving, assessing, theoretically repositioning itself. It is always–as Deleuze, who leaped out, points out–becoming-us.

 

Mindful of this dynamic, and dropping, for a moment, into electracy’s current lingo, can you launch a specific avatar that emerAgency may encounter with reference to your imaging of Florida?

 

GLU: Imaging Florida is an experiment with the Copernican revolution in consulting proposed by the emerAgency. Conventional consulting, based on the positivist preconceptions about utility, addresses a middle dimension of problems: things are going wrong, how can we fix them. The history of these fixes is not impressive, with each new solution producing further problems, as if entropy itself were the “problem” consulting was trying to fix. A shorthand version of this view would point out that the Holocaust, after all, was a solution (the final solution). The point of evoking this context is not to discredit rational problem-solving as such, but to call attention to a feature of it that is never absent from the process, no matter in how benign a form. The Copernican revolution in consulting is to step back from this direct approach to problem-solving in public policy formation (for example, “throwing money” at a problem).

 

The new consultancy attempted in Imaging Florida proposes that instead of the idea that the consultants’ knowledge explains the problem, it is the case that the problem explains the consultant: a reversal of the hierarchy, similar to the shift of point of view from the geocentric to the heliocentric theory of the solar system. The phenomena look the same from either perspective, but the understanding of the situation is radically different between the two positions.

 

Here is the point of intervention for arts and letters. The entire modernist project in poetry, for example, beginning at least with Baudelaire, has worked with the premise that the outer material world may serve as a metaphor or figure for the internal or spiritual experience of a person. The tradition of correspondences is a principal part of the Western tradition in general, of course, all the way back to the Pythagorean music of the spheres. I could cite Walt Whitman here, but Rilke’s “Spanish Trilogy” comes to mind as just one example:

 

From me and every candle flickering
in the dimness of the many houses, Lord:
to make one Thing; from strangers, for I know
no one here, Lord, and from me, from me,
to make one Thing; from sleepers in these 
  houses,
from old men left alone at the asylum
who cough in bed, importantly, from children
drunk with sleep upon the breasts of 
  strangers,
from so much that is uncertain and from me,
from  me alone and from what I do not know,
to make the Thing, Lord Lord Lord, the Thing
which, earthly  and  cosmic, like a meteor
gathers within its heaviness no more than
the sum of flight: and weighs nothing but 
  arrival. (ll. 7-24)

 

Consultants who have not made one Thing out of themselves and the life situation they are attempting to understand will never know what they are doing (are blind, suffer ATH). This lyrical practice does not replace the empirical but supplements it, to produce a hybrid (the emplyrical).

 

The new consultants ask what disaster might reveal about us individually and collectively. What tragedy brings into intelligibility or at least into representation is that folly in individuals, mistakes, errors, magnified collectively, produce historical disaster. The timing of the remake of the Titanic disaster is significant for us, carrying as it does a lesson similar to that of the tower of Babel. Commentators point to the Titanic as exemplary for what it reveals about the limitations of human efforts to master nature and life itself. The theory guiding the emerAgency is that the problems addressed by conventional consulting are only one dimension of what in fact is a three dimensional phenomenon. Every problem coexists with a potential disaster (the limit of human power that marks the borders of the Real) and with the trauma that founds human identity. This way of characterizing identity formation as traumatic signals the psychoanalytic theory we are using (an explanation of which is beyond the scope of our conversation; the psychoanalytic metaphor for it is “castration” anxiety).

 

The upshot of this understanding of the tripartite character of problems is the recognition in our method that we ourselves are part of the problem, and our blindness (ATH) about the true nature of this participation accounts for why we are unable to make good on the Enlightenment goal of putting an end to error. Our method is to study problems with the same analytical care of conventional consultants, but with the motive of seeking in this information possible correspondences for the feeling we have about the world to find out our disposition, our attunement, to bring into understanding the state of mind, individual and collectively, that is complicit with the forces that resist us. We do not expect utilitarian consultants to take this reversal of the explanatory direction very seriously; it is aimed at education, the public schools, as a practice that might be able to bring institutionalized learning into the process of making public policy. One important reason why collectively we allow ourselves to cooperate so much with the forces of entropy is because the people responsible for it work anonymously. If the emplyrical study of disaster were a feature of the standard curriculum, a great many people in positions of authority would come under a new kind of scrutiny, not after the fact (what did you do in the war, Daddy?) but during the process.

 

At the heart of the pedagogy is a certain view of human motivation: a young person might be more interested in investigating the superfund cleanup in her community if she recognized the lyrical principle that the details about the dangers to the environment provided a complex expression of her own sense of being. I hesitate to call the kind of writing or production such a student might undertake “poetry” or “art,” but there is no doubt that these aesthetic practices must be combined with the empirical ones before we are able to grasp holistically the true condition of our problematic world.

 

A number of faculty and students at the University of Florida are now at work on Imaging Florida for the emerAgency. “Florida” here just means “wherever you are; in your own locale,” which is what Florida is for us. The Florida Research Ensemble is designing a prototype for a Web site that may be used by anyone as a point of departure for developing their own version of the new consultancy. The slogan we are field-testing is Problems B Us. We would like to hear from anyone interested in testing the effects of this point of view.

 

Works Cited

 

• Allen, Donald Merriam. The New American Poetry, 1945-1960. New York: Grove Press, Inc.; London: Evergreen Books Ltd., 1960.
• American Graffiti. Universal Pictures, 1973.
• Beau Geste. Paramount Pictures, 1939.
• Bronk, William. “At Tikal.” Light and Dark. New Rochelle, NY: Elizabeth Press, 1975.
• Camus, Albert. The Fall. New York: Vintage Books, 1956.
• Capra, Fritjof. Mindwalk. Paramount Pictures, 1990.
• —. The Turning Point: Science, Society, and the Rising Culture. New York: Simon and Schuster, 1982.
• Felman, Shoshana and Dori Laub. Testimony: Crises of Witnessing in Literature, Psychoanalysis, and History. New York: Routledge, 1992.
• The Fugitive. Warner Bros., 1993.
• Greene, Grahame. The Quiet American. New York: Viking Press, 1956.
• Hellmann, John. American Myth and the Legacy of Vietnam. New York: Columbia UP, 1986.
• High Noon. Dir. Fred Zinnemann. United Artists, 1952.
• The Last Picture Show. Columbia Pictures, 1971.
• Mithen, Steven. The Prehistory of the Mind. London: Thames & Hudson, 1996.
• Paul, Sherman. “Poetry and Old Age.” Hewing to Experience. Iowa City: U of Iowa P, 1989.
• Rilke, Rainer Maria. “Spanish Trilogy.” Selected Poetry of Rainer Maria rilke. Ed. and trans. Stephen Mitchell. New York: Random House, 1982.
• Ulmer, Gregory. “Derrida at the Little Bighorn.” Teletheory. New York: Routledge, 1989.
• —. Heuretics. Baltimore: The Johns Hopkins UP, 1994.
• —. “The Object of Post-Criticism.” The Anti-Aesthetic: Essays on Postmodern Culture. Ed. Hal Foster. Port Townsend, WA.: Bay Press, 1983.
• Weishaus, Joel. Threading the Petrified Glyph. Special Collections, Fine Arts Library, University of New Mexico.

 

 

Department of English
University of Virginia
kmc2f@server2.mail.Virginia.EDU

 

Theresa Smalec

Department of Performance Studies
New York University
tks201@is9.nyu.edu

 

Peggy Phelan, Mourning Sex: Performing Public Memories. London and New York: Routledge, 1997.

 
In Mourning Sex: Performing Public Memories, Peggy Phelan takes performance and performative writing as bases from which to probe the relationship between private and public grief, and particularly the question of whether there is political agency in public mourning for women. Her introduction makes it clear that she hopes to answer this question in the affirmative; “This Book’s Body” outlines the author’s hypothesis that certain forms of live drama respond to our postmodern society’s need to “rehearse for loss, and especially for death” (3). She begins with the broad propositions that we are currently ensnared in what D.A. Miller has called “morbidity culture,” and that “theatre and performance have especially potent lessons for those interested in reassessing our relations to mourning, grief, and loss” (3). Near the end of the chapter, however, Phelan engages in a detailed discussion of the socio-sexual barriers preventing Sophocles’ grief-stricken sisters, Antigone and Ismene, from honoring their bond to each other even as they mourn the loss of their brother. This section is pivotal in that it reflects her more specific project–namely, to explore various manifestations of “theatrical behavior” as political tools with which women might challenge the repressive conventions and disturbing omissions that presently vex their relations to a patriarchal culture’s sanctioned rites of bereavement.

 

Reflecting her primary interest in peoples’ embodied attempts to expand North American culture’s restrictive customs of grief, Phelan titles the book’s eight sections after different parts of the human anatomy. A short list of the unorthodox losses mourned by this volume includes “Bloody Nose,” a chapter concerned with the contradictory, even hostile relationship between legal and psychoanalytic notions of sexual injury; “Infected Eyes,” a scrutiny of Tom Joslin’s Silverlake Life which uses the gay artist’s video diary about living with and dying of AIDS as a vehicle through which to (re)view the psychic substitutions at the heart of cinematic and sexual difference; and “Shattered Skulls,” an essay combining straightforward commentary on Holbein’s famous painting, The Ambassadors, with a personal “fiction” told in the voice of a neurotic narrator.

 

The self-consciously unstable speaker in “Shattered Skulls” deftly enacts Phelan’s project not only to theorize, but also to dramatize–in writing–the psychic effects of trauma. Here, the textual page becomes a theatrical and therapeutic stage for a woman whose relation to the world has been jarred by several blows, including the brutal riots ensuing from the Rodney King verdict. As the chapter unfolds, readers find themselves caught up in a complex “acting out” of the disjointed yet fiercely overlapping nature of certain culturally troubling events:

 

Martin Luther King was assassinated for trying to live his dream. Maybe I wanted too much with you: maybe you were shot because you would not stay in "your place." A black man moving faster than they liked. Rodney King was beaten for moving too fast--speeding too fast from drugs, from a heavy accelerator, from the thud of a police stick. Martin Luther King. Rodney King. King Henry VIII executed Anne Boleyn because she could not reproduce sons and the Pope told him no divorce. Henry wanted a copy, a way to reproduce himself to maintain succession as King. That was his dream. (121)

 

This essay’s citation, amalgamation, and subsequent transformation of several historical traumas may be of interest to postmodern readers and performers on several grounds. The inventive distortions that Phelan effects here, however, strike me as troubling for reasons that I outline below. Moreover, the public performance of private grief staged in “Shattered Skulls” is reflective of the methodological approach of other key sections of Mourning Sex, in which Phelan seems to forfeit clarity of argument in order to achieve a certain performative force.

 

The speaker recalls as fragments, rather than as complete, culturally-specific events, an allusive series of names and incidents. Her nostalgic evocation of these well-known remnants of sorrow brings them into the present with a poignant sense of pertinence. Yet the narrator’s traumatized acts of re-membering function slowly to merge and confuse the roles of Martin Luther King, Rodney King, King Henry VIII, and other Kings throughout history:

 

Why did Luther want to shorten those commandments? Why did King want to dream out loud? Was King your peaceful Ambassador? King, Martin Luther. Martin Luther King, Junior. Hans Holbein the Younger. I hunger for you still. (121)

 

Phelan portrays the enigmatic triggering of an earlier trauma, as well as the warped, seemingly “irrational” associations that often haunt the one who remembers; the result of this performative playing on words is a disturbing sense of randomness. “Shattered Skulls” not only intermingles private and public traumas, but also several temporal and cultural specificities. This creative fusion and surrogation of certain figures of crisis serves to subsume the different social values that, through time, become fastened to particular names, thus securing them as the markers of distinctly weighted acts of violence. In short, it becomes increasingly hard to identify any one of these racial, sexual, and socio-economic traumas as more worthy of public grief and redress than the rest, since they all blur together as the narrative moves on.

 

Phelan’s narrator seems aware of the palimpsest of erasures that she forges: “Holbein painted The Ambassadors in 1533. It seems I’ve been staring at it ever since. I know too much about the painting. Kafka said he wrote to forget. Am I forgetting you? Painting you over?” (121). Nevertheless, this realization that she writes in order to retouch, alter, and thus survive a personal loss does not alter the way the narrative itself performs, and thus reveals, the violence of this “therapeutic” mis-remembering. The substantive differences between Rodney King and King Henry VIII are collapsed.

 

At one point in this challenging chapter, the speaker recalls the loss of her lover at the hands of a deranged neighbor; she incorporates this desolating, personal blow into the far more public memories of the outrage that erupted after the racist ruling in Rodney King’s case:

 

I was getting over you. I could tell. I finished things, started others. I hardly ever thought of Holbein's painting. It had become a "hollow bone" in my memory. But recently, since the police in Los Angeles were found not guilty of beating Rodney King, I started thinking about Martin Luther King and Martin Luther and the painting. I started dreaming of you and my professor friend in London. I wanted to be an ambassador for the new state. (124)

 

Desperate to restage, and thus come to terms with her own, little-known loss, Phelan’s narrator uses the notoriety of King’s injuries in order to mourn several more obscure yet equally hate-incited forms of shattering. Her appropriation of a black man’s trauma at the hands of America’s predominantly white legal system in order to make visible her own wounds reveals the complex structure and ambiguous power of trauma as a form of social agency; nevertheless, the metonymic logic underlying this piece of theatre, this “critical fiction” (18), suggests a provisional strategy by which women can make their private losses intelligible to a male-centered, mainstream audience. North American culture has, in general, come to avow the significance of the victimization endured by men such as Martin Luther King and Rodney King; meanwhile, the state’s shameful abuse of women like Susan Smith and Aileen Wornos still goes unmarked.

 

Departing from conventional scholarship’s clinical approach to trauma, the organs comprising Mourning Sex mark the author’s concern, at a dramatic level, with how queer (racially, sexually, and/or financially disenfranchised) subjects perform their bereavement: how they recover from loss. By enacting, through a medley of critical and creative prose, the gaps and distortions that often attend socially-unpalatable memories, Phelan shows how both live performance and performative writing may serve as political tools with which stigmatized groups can turn private pain, rage, and terror into collective discourses of healing. Significantly, she defines “trauma” as wounds to both the body and psyche. Furthermore, in proposing a way to redress these linked yet distinct forms of damage, she posits “rehearsal” as the material and mental work of repetition: restaging, revising, and even misrepresenting the past so as to cope with the damage incurred at an earlier time. Through this sophisticated approach to what acts of rehearsal can teach us about the mutable, partly reparable factors of time and remembrance, her book diverges usefully from a recent wave of studies on the relevance of theatre to grief. For once, the dramas of forgetfulness and of “getting it wrong” acquire a theory of value: “truth is what we can make from what we’ve missed” (7).

 

Chapter four contains a potent example of how postmodern subjects use the traces of an obscure past in order to claim legitimacy for their vested interests in the present. Here, Phelan probes the curious fact that one of the most dramatic plots in Renaissance theatre unfolded in London during the unlikely year of 1989: “In a six month dig in Southwark, archaeologists unearthed the startingly well preserved remains of the Rose Theatre, the first home of Christopher Marlowe’s dramatic plays” (73). The surprising twist to this discovery, however, is that it “was surrounded by the prospect of loss” (74). For, rather than bestowing the site with the customary honors of state-funded excavation and memorialization, the fate of the Rose was governed by heterosexist politics and capitalist economics.

 

As Phelan examines the public and private records attending the controversy, she argues that a central albeit tacit reason for the British government’s reluctance to salvage this particular playhouse lies in the decidedly queer racial/sexual interests of its champion dramatist: “The Rose was Marlowe’s stage, not Shakespeare’s. Marlowe wrote plays about a man who consorted with devils, about a homosexual King, about the persecution of a Jew; he also allegedly wrote ‘all they that love not tobacco and boys were fools’” (79). The rest of her essay examines the Rose as a deeply haunting and consistently mutating theatrical “body.” After positing this site as a crucible for multiple cultural anxieties, she endeavors to show how the invention of history “springs from a dense nexus of competing and often contradictory moral, nationalistic, economic and unconscious factors” (78).

 

Throughout Mourning Sex, the author struggles to write “with and toward a theatre of affect” (18). In practice, this emotive writing style makes for a daring mode of analysis. Most of Phelan’s essays unite linear, fiercely coherent critiques of disturbing cultural moments with the meandering, melodramatic, even hysterical narratives that bring these traumas to life in the minds and bodies of readers. “Whole Wounds: Bodies at the Vanishing Point” probes the potential for redemption in our postmodern age of despair by linking a concept derived from Renaissance painting, that of perspective, to current technologies of theatre. Here, she fosters performance theory’s dialogue with art history and theology by claiming that the cathartic value of theatre, like Caravaggio’s classical painting, The Incredulity of St. Thomas, hinges on witnessing: “Western theatre is itself predicated on the belief that there is an audience, an other willing to be cast into the role of the auditor” (31). Working with the problem of how to secure external response to injuries that are internal and often empirically unverifiable, this ground-breaking artist/critic goes on to uncover theatrical strategies that help women forge embodied form–hence credibility–for that which is no longer present.

 

Chapter two, “Immobile Legs, Stalled Words: Psychoanalysis and Moving Deaths,” couples the voice of a rigorous female academic with that of an injured dancer who once had an illustrious career as a member of the New York City Ballet. By retracing, literally and metaphorically, the mis-steps that marred both the dancer’s ties to her academy and the analyst/analysand relations informing the history of psychoanalysis, this stirring movement of voices acts out the “talking cure” that lies at the heart of Mourning Sex. Chapter five, “Bloody Nose,” explores the temporal nature of memory, and specifically sexual memory. Here, Phelan traces a pivotal distinction between legal and psychoanalytic notions of sexual injury, arguing that the liminal forum of the Anita Hill-Clarence Thomas hearings offers a fascinating stage on which to assess the political stakes of this contrast: “Precisely because they were not conducted in a court of law nor on a psychoanalytic couch, the hearings can illuminate how each system of understanding has both perils and possibilities for redressing sexual injury” (95).

 

Chapter seven marks what for me is the most problematic member of this insightful body of losses and injuries. Moving from public traumas to what Phelan cites, in her introduction, as a more personal one, “Failed Live(r)s: Whatever Happened to Her Public Grief?” enacts a performance of citation, repetition, and mimicry in which feminist scholarship, psychoanalysis, and performance appear as analogous, and analogously troubling, activities. One layer of the labyrinthine mourning staged in this section is an effort to reread and make sense of several academic women’s wounded identifications with the university and one another. Here, the identity of the performing and performative “I” of the narrative becomes most complex, most unreliable (and most troubling) as Phelan’s narrator incorporates, into her own text, the more troubling sections of essays written by three female scholars, one of whom the narrator claims to have treated in the intimate context of psychoanalysis. Chapter seven begins with a personal retrospective about a nun who taught the narrator, in high school, how to (mis)read Gerard Manley Hopkins’ poems of loss. The narrative moves from this seemingly autobiographical account to relay a “critical fiction” involving Rena Grant and Echo. Yet Phelan’s text does not mark this shift in narrative perspective; it never indicates that Phelan herself is not the same person as the analyst/narrator who recounts and interprets the women’s tales. This particular blurring of genres (personal retrospective and public performance) raises some distressing questions about the practical value of both performative writing and pyschoanlaysis as the essay moves on. She dubs her former patient “Echo” because this woman displayed an amazing ability to emulate the actions, thoughts, and physical gestures of those with whom she had contact:

 

In all respects save one, the patient I'd like to describe here appeared to be well adjusted and psychically robust... Her mimicry was responsible for much of her professional success as a critical writer, but it also led to personal unhappiness. In the course of the analysis, she began to mimic me so completely that I was forced to suspend our investigations. In the three years since, I have spent considerable time reflecting on her quite remarkable case. (132)

 

The effect of this unmarked movement from the autobiographical to fictional is disturbing: one is left feeling that one is privy to documents and insights too personal to be made public. Here, the public performance of grief becomes an invasion of privacy as the writers being diagnosed are either dead or rendered as anonymous patients.

 

Echo’s case is particularly vexing because her vulnerable writings seem to be used here without the woman’s knowledge or consent; as the essay unfolds, it seems the friendly and therapeutic relations between Echo and Phelan’s narrator no longer exist. The narrator draws attention to the instability in her role as therapist as she admits that psychoanalysis traditionally tries to remedy distress through a verbal mode of inquiry, namely the “talking cure.” Contrary to this approach, her own dealings with Echo were marred by a focus on what Echo (re)produced textually, rather than on what she actually said:

 

To an extraordinary degree her unconscious controlled her critical writing and thus early in the analysis we decided to use her critical writings as our "text." Under normal circumstances, I would not use a patient's work in this manner, but I believed it would save us time and allow us to isolate her relation to mimicry. (133)

 

Throughout “Failed Live(r)s,” Phelan’s narrator assumes the authoritative roles of the stable survivor and sane-minded analyst. In the course of re-reading her dead and live (albeit lost) colleagues’ critical essays, she scrutinizes their authors’ innermost feelings of guilt, inadequacy, and fraud. One of her most disturbing yet astute conclusions is that white academic women, as victims of patriarchy, masquerade “as” feminine: “As among those who contribute to and benefit from racism, they masquerade as non-complicit and individually benign–purely ‘white’” (140). Another compelling inference pertains to the nature of Echo’s grief for her dead colleague: the “failed liver,” Rena Grant. Echo’s need to mourn for (and possibly mimic) other white, female scholars is rooted not only in the loss of a friendship, but also the loss of a kind of partner in crime:

 

Recognizing their complicity with this system complicated Echo's and Grant's pleasure in their professional lives; further discovering that they saw each other's complicity led them to form a kind of hysterical identification with one another. Their shame and guilt gave them an odd kind of bond. (140)

 

Though intimate and at times rawly moving, the author defines (and perhaps renders as manageable) the private grief fueling this analysis in starkly clinical terms: “a case history of a patient called Echo who grieves over the death of her colleague, Rena Grant, a critic and assistant professor at the time of her death” (20).

 

The narrator’s extensive, pseudo-Freudian bid to cast herself as the accomplished interpreter of another’s neurosis is revealed as increasingly impoverished, as the roles of doctor and patient, as well as the symptoms of blindness and insight mapped by this script, grow increasingly blurred. The closing gambit to justify why she published such a highly allusive memorial seems as prone to guilty repressions and enabling distortions as the public negotiations of trauma assessed in the rest of the book. Even as she cites from Echo’s private and public manuscripts, Phelan’s narrator excludes certain passages; she too pieces together the past differently, in order to “forget” her own embarrassing misrecognitions and thus move on.

 

Keenly aware of the diverse and deeply conflicted investments that subjects of the present make in restaging the past, Mourning Sex speaks for rousing and somehow healing the memories of injury that linger in the cultural unconscious of contemporary Europe and North America. From Antigone to Anita Hill, from Renaissance plagues to the pandemic of AIDS, from theory to practice, this volume’s performative engagement with the losses that haunt postmodern culture is valuable reading for scholars and practitioners of theatre alike. The author succeeds in her bid to forge a different formal relation between the critical thinker and reader, and in her wish to suggest a different way of doing–of performing–critical scholarship. The multiple voices animated within Mourning Sex moved me; they stirred my grief and hope in ways that I did not expect from an “academic” text. Aspiring to extend Phelan’s (en)trails of mimicry, I end this review by citing and retouching a line: “I can still hear her voice with my partial ear” (151).

 

Todd M. Kuchta

Department of English
Indiana University
tkuchta@indiana.edu

 

Richard Dyer, White. London and New York: Routledge, 1997.

 

“White people create the dominant images of the world and don’t quite see that they thus construct the world in their image” (9). This premise drives Richard Dyer’s White, “a study of the representation of white people in Western culture” (xii), with particular emphasis on the media of photography and film. Dyer’s premise is also resonant of much recent work in the emergent field of “White Studies”–or what one of its practitioners, Mike Hill, has called “critical ethnography’s next-big-thing” (“What” 1). Though a nascent interest in whiteness goes at least as far back as James Baldwin and Ralph Ellison, the more recent genealogy of White Studies can be traced to the work of contemporary non-white cultural critics like bell hooks, Cornel West, and Stuart Hall.¹ Among the first sustained inquiries into the ubiquitous yet invisible character of whiteness, however, was Dyer’s own essay “White,” published in a 1988 issue of the British film journal Screen. That essay, which includes many of the ideas given fuller shape in his book, provided an innovative reading of the depiction of white characters in the films Simba, Jezebel, and Night of the Living Dead. According to Isaac Julien and Kobena Mercer, Dyer’s essay “inaugurate[d] a paradigmatic shift” in film and cultural studies “by precisely registering the re-orientation of ethnicity” called for by Stuart Hall (6). Perhaps more importantly, “White” offered the theoretical ground for interrogating whiteness in other areas of cultural inquiry. Often cited in work far removed from film studies, Dyer’s essay was a driving force behind white critique’s “first wave” (Hill, “Introduction” 2).

 

In the nine years between Dyer’s essay and book, there has been a proliferation of works addressing the production, representation, deconstruction, and transformation of white culture in literature, history, pedagogy, television, and film.² Overall, White benefits greatly from its engagement with the debates surrounding white critique. For example, Dyer takes issue with Toni Morrison’s Playing in the Dark and Edward Said’s Orientalism, both of which argue that white Western culture defined itself in contrast to its non-white others. “This function,” Dyer suggests, “is indeed characteristic of white culture, but it is not the whole story and may reinforce the notion that whiteness is only racial when it is ‘marked’ by the presence of the truly raced, that is, the non-white subject” (14). Unlike his essay, then, which emphasized the role of blackness in demarcating whiteness, Dyer’s study uses a wide range of visual texts–mostly films and film stills, but also magazine ads and illustrations, oil paintings, daguerreotypes, movie posters, and novel covers–to call attention to “whiteness qua whiteness,” for the purpose of “making whiteness strange” (4, emphasis mine). Yet Dyer also complicates monolithic understandings of whiteness which focus solely on race by providing nuanced readings of its articulation through gender and class. Moreover, he cogently frames these readings within insightful analyses of the historical, cultural, and technological conditions that have made whiteness the ostensible standard of power, reason, and beauty within Western codes of representation.

 

When bell hooks first suggested the possibility of white critique, she wanted “all those white folks who are giving blacks their take on blackness to let them know what’s going on with whiteness” (Yearning 54). For better or worse, hooks’s wish has come true. As Peter Erickson notes, “the exploration of white identity is increasingly the purview of whites themselves” (171), a tendency which E. Ann Kaplan suggests might keep whiteness “at the center where it has always been” (328). Dyer, himself white, is conscious of this danger, which he refers to as the “green light problem” (giving whites the go-ahead to remain focused on themselves); likewise, he recognizes in White Studies the risks of “me-too-ism” (whites can join in a multicultural world, even claim victimization and guilt) (10-11). But Dyer hardly threatens to succumb to these problems, given that the impulse behind his study is to deconstruct white hegemony. “The point of seeing the racing of whites is to dislodge them/us from the position of power… by undercutting the authority with which they/we speak and act in and on the world” (2).³ By seeking the abolition of whiteness and remaining within the agenda of white critique’s first wave, however, Dyer fails to distinguish between negative and positive manifestations of whiteness, implying that it must be deconstructed tout court rather than interrogated and transformed. Not only does this wholesale abolition of whiteness seem untenable (if white people remain, won’t some form of whiteness as well?), but it risks immobilizing whites themselves–those perhaps most capable of change, if only for the positions of power they inhabit in the world. What is to be done, Dyer leaves us wondering, once we see that with or without his clothes, the emperor is still white?

 

Dyer’s disrobing of whiteness, however, is lucid and deft. For him, whiteness is fraught with paradox. As a hue, white is both the combination of all colors and no color at all. As a racial designation, white describes people whose skin color is not literally white–and because “white” skin presumes the absence of ethnicity, whites rarely consider themselves racially marked. Since “whites are everywhere in representation… they seem not to be represented to themselves as whites” (3). Rather than its weakness, however, Dyer claims such paradoxes offer whiteness its representational power, inoculating it against stereotypes by suggesting that whites are both infinite in variety yet representative of humanity per se. “At the level of racial representation, in other words, whites are not of a certain race, they’re just the human race” (3). Unlike individuals of other ethnicities, a white person need never fear representing all whites. Moreover, the paradoxes of whiteness enable it “to be presented as an apparently attainable, flexible, varied category, while setting up an always movable criterion of inclusion, the ascribed whiteness of your skin” (57). But within the fluid boundaries of whiteness lies its ultimate contradiction: “Whiteness as ideal can never be attained, not only because white skin can never be hue white, but because ideally white is absence: to be really, absolutely white is to be nothing” (78).

 

Dyer’s recognition of the impossibility of pure whiteness not only unveils its mythic quality, but also emphasizes the paradoxical struggle between body and spirit which, for him, is central to the history of white representation. Dyer argues that Europeans constructed whiteness via Christianity, racial discourse, and imperialism as a spirit “that is in but not of the body” (14). While Christianity struggles to deny the body’s urges, for example, it emphasizes “the spirit that is ‘in’ the body” (16). Mary’s immaculate conception and Christ’s transcendence of his human appetites both reflect the Christian ideal of attaining the spirit by denying the body in which the spirit resides. As the dominant religion of Europe, Christianity’s ideal of bodily transcendence became synonymous with the ideal of whiteness itself, in turn shaping the European discourse on race throughout the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. Dyer argues that by applying both genealogical accounts of lineage and biological analyses of individual bodies to the study of other races, whites largely avoided biological self-analysis which might have rendered them, “like non-whites, no more than their bodies” (23). Only in the late nineteenth and twentieth centuries did whites attempt to justify their biological superiority–and then by recourse to blood and genes, which like spirit were hidden from plain sight.

 

As in Christianity, then, the European discourse on race imagined the invisible spirit which defined whiteness–its virtue, aspiration, intelligence, refinement–as something that “could both master and transcend the white body” even while inside it (23). This paradox of white embodiment is also evident among European and American imperialists who set out to remake the world in their own image, but passed themselves off as “subjects without properties,” making their own interests seem the natural order of things. Where others were “particular, marked, raced,” the white man was “without properties, unmarked, universal, just human” (38). Dyer contends that this position of apparent disinterest (“abstraction, distance, separation, objectivity”) has been more important to the construction of whiteness than racial distinctions themselves (38-39). Thus, like Christianity and the discourse of race, imperialism offered a terrain upon which to negotiate the contradictory character of white embodiment–that is, its drive to be truly disembodied.

 

While emphasizing race, Dyer’s genealogy of whiteness frequently turns to gender. Dyer argues, for example, that in epitomizing the ideal of bodily transcendence, Christ and Mary provide gendered models of white behavior. White women are held to Mary’s “passivity, expectancy, receptivity… [and] sacred readiness” in regard to motherhood, while Christ’s struggle between body and spirit projects suffering on white men “as the supreme expression of both spiritual and physical striving” (17). This ideal of transcendence is challenged, however, by the need to reproduce white bodies. As such, race and heterosexuality are inextricable–but sex itself, the very means of reproducing whiteness, involves a carnality associated with darkness, and hence with non-white others. European sexual roles thus projected racial difference upon the Christian contrast between body and spirit for both white males (who struggle like Christ to overcome their dark bodily urges) and white females (who, like Mary, are supposed to be pure white and without such urges in the first place).

 

In addition to gender analysis, Dyer also shows how the body-spirit paradox of whiteness has been central to the technology of photography and cinema. Reminiscent of John Berger’s claims that oil painting provided the visual medium par excellence for an emerging bourgeoisie, and Laura Mulvey’s argument that the cinematic apparatus reproduces the heterosexual male gaze, Dyer maintains that as media of light, photography and film were designed to depict the spirit of the white body, to make whites look ideal, bright, and in some cases, literally white. The white, often female face was not only the litmus test by which the proper coloring in photography and cinema was gauged, but also the benchmark when experimenting with new techniques and equipment. Though “photographing non-white people is typically construed as a problem,” Dyer shows that alternatives to “white-centric” technology have always been available. “It may be–certainly was–true that photo and film apparatuses have seemed to work better with light-skinned peoples, but that is because they were made that way, not because there was no other way” (89-90). However, since “the photographic media hold together translucence and materiality,” they offer the consummate means of representing the supposed ideals of whiteness: “it is the mix, in the very medi[a themselves], of light and substance that is central to the conception of white humanity” (115). At the same time, Dyer emphasizes the consistency with which men and the lower classes are depicted in darker, hard-edged tones than women and the upper classes, who are usually rendered in gauzy translucence. Though this finding is somewhat predictable, and Dyer’s overview of different lighting techniques risks tedium, the chapter provides a thorough and stunning corrective to the notion that the use of technology is neutral to matters of race.

 

All in all, then, Dyer skillfully illuminates the paradoxes of white embodiment within analyses of technology and cultural history that concern race, as well as gender and class. The cumulative strength of this framework is especially evident in his chapter on films starring white bodybuilders. The tendency to associate bodybuilding with whiteness originates, for Dyer, in the cultural genealogy of the sport’s modern iconography–a mix of Greek and Roman classicism, Californian health and leisure, comic book barbarianism, and crucifixion imagery. As in Christianity, racial discourse, and imperialism, the white man’s trained body displays the victory of spirit over flesh, or to be more precise, the spirit’s transformation of the flesh. “The built white body is not the body that white men are born with,” but rather “made possible by their natural mental superiority…. a product of the application of thought and planning” (164). Not surprisingly, then, “the built body and the imperial enterprise are analogous” (165). Dyer reads the Tarzan films and bodybuilder action movies like Stallone’s Rambo series as articulations of white masculinity that justify American foreign policy by equating the hero’s trained muscles with the spirit needed to discipline the “enfeebled or raw” body of colonial lands (165). Dyer concludes the chapter with an analysis of the popular cycle of Italian peplum films made between 1957-1965. The peplum, Dyer argues, celebrated the white man’s muscles at a historical moment when their value was diminished by Italy’s shift away from both manual labor and fascist ideology. Though explicit references to fascism are hostile in the peplum, Dyer argues that the films employ fascistic structures of feeling by providing the working class with mythical heroes they can both associate with and–like the American bodybuilder stars or il Duce himself–bow down to.

 

The 1984 British TV miniseries The Jewel in the Crown serves as Dyer’s case study for representations of female whiteness. Noting the centrality of women to narratives of imperial decline, Dyer links this story of the final days of British India to texts like A Passage to India and The Raj Quartet which blame the empire’s fall on a female presence. Though women are the central protagonists of Jewel, and female modes of address predominate throughout, women’s action repeatedly fails, and the series’ narrative organization creates a sense of torpor and fixity–all of which together emphasize the helplessness and impotence of white women in the face of historical change. While the chapter contributes to the book’s general concerns by distinguishing between male and female versions of whiteness, its lack of reference to the body-spirit dynamic leaves it somewhat out of touch with the rest of the study. Moreover, as in the chapter on technology, Dyer’s pace drops considerably here. Nevertheless, the chapter convincingly illustrates how Jewel, and by extension, other imperial narratives, allow white women to “take the blame, and provide the spectacle of moral suffering, for the loss of empire” (206).

 

This spectacle of suffering and loss is echoed by the recurrent association between whiteness and death that is the focus of Dyer’s final chapter. If the history of white representation is a recurrent struggle to become disembodied, then death is the extreme version of whiteness. Horror films like Dracula and Night of the Living Dead emphasize the terrors of extreme whiteness, and science fiction movies such as Alien and Blade Runner depict the extreme whiteness of androids as the unattainable–if not ultimately undesirable–height of human perfection. But certain films also temper their apparent critiques of extreme whiteness by recourse to ordinary whiteness. In Blade Runner, the bleached, Aryan features of replicants played by Daryl Hannah and Rutger Hauer contrast with the ordinary whiteness of Harrison Ford, the cop who “retires” them. Likewise, Falling Down, a parable of the death of the modern white male, juxtaposes the extreme whiteness of an angry Michael Douglas with the warmth and tenderness of Robert Duvall. Both Blade Runner and Falling Down thus recontain a dangerous whiteness gone overboard with exemplars of white commonness and invisibility. As such, extreme whiteness is a distraction from the hegemony of ordinary whiteness. “The combination of extreme whiteness with plain, unwhite whiteness means that white people can both lay claim to the spirit that aspires to the heights of humanity and yet supposedly speak and act disinterestedly as humanity’s most average and unremarkable representatives” (223). The death of extreme whiteness only keeps ordinary whiteness alive.

 

Dyer ultimately hopes that “if the white association with death is the logical outcome of the way in which whites have had power, then perhaps recognition of our deathliness may be the one thing that will make us relinquish it” (208). As he does repeatedly throughout his study, Dyer here emphasizes his desire for white critique to undermine white authority and dislodge whites from positions of power. But must all whiteness be bad, or incapable of good? AnnLouise Keating has noted the problematic tendency among some scholars to conflate whiteness and white people–a gesture which “implies that all human beings classified as ‘white’ automatically exhibit the traits associated with ‘whiteness’: they are, by nature, insidious, superior, empty, terrible, terrifying, and so on” (907). Dyer does not go quite so far. After all, he emphasizes the construction of whiteness, and his definition of it is far from reductive; moreover, by emphasizing its articulation through gender and class, Dyer challenges superficial conceptions of whiteness that focus on race alone.

 

At the same time, Dyer’s goal to eliminate whiteness altogether risks undermining the transformative power he seeks. Of course, white critique makes visible the power that even the most progressive and antiracist white people consciously or unconsciously exert upon the world simply by being white. It shows that asymmetrical relations of power obtain within Western culture regardless of intent. But this must not resign whites to complete inaction or renunciation of authority as such. Rather, White Studies must work in tandem with other forms of critique–racial as well as gender and class–to disengage that which inhibits equality from that which advances it. White Studies, in other words, must make whites more–not less–responsible for positive social (inter)action. As Peter Erickson suggests, “whiteness will not go away tomorrow; what we need is a theory and a practice that will make possible living with whiteness today” (185). Or as Henry Giroux puts it: “A critical analysis of whiteness should address its historical legacy and existing complicity with racist exclusion and oppression, but it is equally important that such an examination distinguish between whiteness as a racial practice that is antiracist and those aspects of whiteness that are racist” (“Racial” 310). Such a distinction is necessary, Giroux believes, in order to “challenge the conventional leftist analysis of whiteness as a space between guilt and denial, a space that offers limited forms of resistance and engagement” (“Racial” 313). Despite its clarity, coherence, and power, Dyer limits White to such a space–leaving whiteness of any kind in dire straits.

 

Notes

 

1. Baldwin’s Notes of a Native Son, particularly the essay “Stranger in the Village,” is often cited as an early inquiry into whiteness, as is Ellison’s “Change the Joke and Slip the Yoke,” first published in the Partisan Review in 1958 and later included in Shadow and Act (Fishkin 428). David Roediger has recently edited an anthology entitled Black on White, consisting of writings about white people by African Americans from the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. More recent calls to interrogate whiteness began in the late eighties and early nineties. In her 1990 book Yearning, for example, bell hooks claimed “a discourse on race that interrogates whiteness” could serve as an antidote to the problematic assumption that race is “always an issue of Otherness that is not white” (54). The same year, Cornel West wrote that “one cannot deconstruct the binary oppositional logic of images of Blackness without extending it to the contrary condition of… Whiteness itself” (212). During this time, Stuart Hall was in the midst of publishing a series of essays proposing to rehabilitate the term “ethnicity.” Like hooks and West, Hall’s goal was to emphasize the situated and highly disparate forms of all racial identities. This “new ethnicity” sought “the displacement of the ‘centered’ discourses of the West” by “putting into question its universalist character and transcendent claims to speak for everyone, while itself being everywhere and nowhere” (“New Ethnicities” 446). See also Hall, “Cultural Identity and Diaspora,” “Ethnicity and Difference,” and “Old and New Identities, Old and New Ethnicities.”

 

2. On the construction of whiteness in South African and American literature respectively, see Coetzee and Morrison; on its historical and cultural significance in nineteenth- and twentieth-century America, particularly for the working classes, see Ignatiev, Lott, and Roediger; on the relation between whiteness and gender, see Frankenberg and Ware; on the pedagogical advantages and problems of interrogating whiteness, see Giroux and Keating; for the dynamics of whiteness on late-eighties television, see Fiske; and on its relation to film, see Gaines, Kaplan, and, of course, Dyer.

 

3. Dyer’s claim echoes hooks’s famous essay on “Representations of Whiteness in the Black Imagination,” in which she claims that critiquing whiteness could “deconstruct practices of racism and make possible the dissociation of whiteness with terror in the black imagination,” so that “whiteness no longer signifies the right to dominate. It truly becomes a benevolent absence” (179). According to West, however, “a mere dismantling” of whiteness “will not do–for the very notion of a deconstructive social theory is oxymoronic” (212). These divergent agendas are reflected in Peter Erickson’s claim that there currently exist “two basic approaches to the issue of what form a political critique of white privilege should take.” While one seeks the abolition and erasure of whiteness, the other “imagines a redefinition or reconstitution, a transformation even, of whiteness, with the aim of establishing new, critical, white identities” which “at no point engage in a denial of whiteness” (184). This difference corresponds roughly, though not completely, to Mike Hill’s distinction between a first wave of white critique which emphasizes the “invisibility and impermanence” of whiteness, and a second wave which addresses “the epistemological stickiness and ontological wiggling immanent” in the work of white critics who must acknowledge their whiteness while attempting to distance themselves from it–without disavowing it (“Introduction” 2-3).

Works Cited

 

• Berger, John. Ways of Seeing. London: BBC and Penguin, 1972.
• Coetzee, J. M. White Writing: On the Culture of Letters in South Africa. New Haven and London: Yale UP, 1988.
• Dyer, Richard. “White.” Screen 29.4 (Autumn 1988): 44-64.
• —. White. London and New York: Routledge, 1997.
• Erickson, Peter. “Seeing White.” Transition 67 (Fall 1995): 166-85.
• Fishkin, Shelley Fisher. “Interrogating ‘Whiteness,’ Complicating ‘Blackness’: Remapping American Culture.” American Quarterly 47.3 (September 1995): 428-66.
• Fiske, John. Media Matters: Everyday Culture and Political Change. Minneapolis and London: U of Minnesota P, 1994.
• Frankenberg, Ruth. White Women, Race Matters: The Social Construction of Whiteness. Minneapolis: U of Minnesota P, 1994.
• Gaines, Jane. “White Privilege and Looking Relations: Race and Gender in Feminist Film Theory.” Screen 29.4 (Autumn 1988): 12-26.
• Giroux, Henry A. Fugitive Cultures: Race, Violence, and Youth. New York: Routledge, 1996.
• —. “Racial Politics and the Pedagogy of Whiteness.” Whiteness: A Critical Reader. Ed. Mike Hill. New York and London: New York UP, 1997. 294-315.
• Hall, Stuart. “Cultural Identity and Diaspora.” Identity, Community, Culture, Difference. Ed. Jonathan Rutherford. London: Lawrence and Wishart, 1990. 222-37.
• —. “Ethnicity: Identity and Difference.” Radical America 13 (June 1991): 9-20.
• —. “New Ethnicities.” 1988. Stuart Hall: Critical Dialogues in Cultural Studies. Ed. David Morley and Kuan-Hsing Chen. London and New York: Routledge, 1996. 441-49.
• —. “Old and New Identities, Old and New Ethnicities.” Culture, Globalization, and the World System. Binghamton: SUNY Press, 1991. 41-68.
• Hill, Mike. “Introduction: Vipers in Shangri-La.” Whiteness: A Critical Reader. Ed. Mike Hill. New York and London: New York UP, 1997. 1-18.
• —. “What Was (the White) Race? Memory, Categories, Change.” Postmodern Culture 7.2 (1997).
• hooks, bell. “Representations of Whiteness in the Black Imagination.” Black Looks: Race and Representation. Boston: South End Press, 1992. 165-78.
• —. Yearning: Race, Gender, and Cultural Politics. Boston: South End Press, 1990.
• Ignatiev, Noel. How the Irish Became White. New York and London: Routledge, 1995.
• Julien, Isaac, and Kobena Mercer. “Introduction: De Margin and De Centre.” Screen 29.4 (Autumn 1988): 2-10.
• Kaplan, E. Ann. “The ‘Look’ Returned: Knowledge Production and Constructions of ‘Whiteness’ in Humanities Scholarship and Independent Film.” Whiteness: A Critical Reader. Ed. Mike Hill. New York and London: New York UP, 1997. 316-28.
• Keating, AnnLouise. “Interrogating ‘Whiteness,’ (De)Constructing ‘Race.’” College English 57.8 (December 1995): 901-18.
• Lott, Eric. Love and Theft: Blackface Minstrelsy and the American Working Class. New York: Oxford UP, 1993.
• Morrison, Toni. Playing in the Dark: Whiteness and the Literary Imagination. New York: Vintage, 1993.
• Mulvey, Laura. Visual and Other Pleasures. Bloomington: Indiana UP, 1989.
• Roediger, David R., ed. Black on White: Black Writers on What It Means To Be White. New York: Schocken, 1998.
• —. Towards the Abolition of Whiteness. London: Verso, 1994.
• —. The Wages of Whiteness: Race and the Making of the American Working Class. London: Verso, 1991.
• Said, Edward. Orientalism. New York: Vintage, 1979.
• Ware, Vron. Beyond the Pale: White Women, Racism, and History. London: Verso, 1992.
• West, Cornel. “The New Cultural Politics of Difference.” October 53 (Summer 1990). Rpt. in The Cultural Studies Reader. Ed. Simon During. London and New York: Routledge, 1993. 203-17.

 

James S. Hurley

Department of English
University of Richmond
jhurley@richmond.edu

 

Slavoj Zizek, The Plague of Fantasies. London: Verso, 1997.

 

Richard Rorty has for the last several years been advising intellectuals on the left to “start talking about greed and selfishness rather than about bourgeois ideology, about starvation wages and layoffs rather than about the commodification of labor, and about differential per-pupil expenditure on schools and differential access to health care rather than about the division of society into classes” (229). All of those old Marxist buzz-phrases on the back-end of Rorty’s parallelisms are, he argues, the unfortunate baggage of the revolutionary romanticism attached to Marx-Leninism, and speak, more than anything else, to a delusional self-importance on the part of leftists who have wanted to cast themselves as heroic players on the world-historical stage. For Rorty, this kind of discourse was never very good at achieving what it ostensibly wanted to in the first place; now that Marxism has been universally discredited, this discourse is less useful and more masturbatory than ever. But do progressive critics and theorists really have to make Rorty’s severe amputational choice? And indeed, might such a choice finally be less a pragmatic, smell-the-coffee adjustment to present-day political realities, enabling the left to further its goals more effectively, than it is the carrying out of a sort of Solomonic chop, sundered progressive baby going out with the bloody bath water?

 

Slavoj Zizek insists on speaking in much of the Marxist language Rorty repudiates. Beginning with his 1989 book The Sublime Object of Ideology, Zizek has produced a large and remarkable body of work, arguing (among other things) that in order for the left really to address the kinds of social inequities that Rorty enumerates, it must take into account the ways in which capitalism and its current political support system (a.k.a. “liberal democracy”) attempt to maintain their smooth functioning by constructing self-naturalizing horizons of belief and practice. Whereas thinkers such as Rorty and Jürgen Habermas pin their egalitarian social/political hopes on a view of language as a relatively unproblematic instrument that merely needs to be put to the right (which is to say, left) uses,¹ Zizek, following Jacques Lacan, sees language as necessarily partial, occlusive, deformed by some “pathological twist.” These deformations and blockages are for Zizek ideological, are indeed the very logic and structure of ideology, in that they obscure the antagonisms and contradictions that systems of power both require and yet cannot truly acknowledge if they are to operate successfully.

 

Zizek’s most recent book, The Plague of Fantasies, takes its title from a line in Petrarch, and refers, as Zizek puts it, to “images which blur one’s clear reasoning”; this plague, he says, “is brought to its extreme in today’s audiovisual media” (1). According to Zizek, his new book “approaches systematically, from a Lacanian viewpoint, the presuppositions of this ‘plague of fantasies’” (1), but I suspect that we encounter in this last claim some of the impish wit that is part of what makes his work so enjoyable. Zizek has said elsewhere that his books operate along the lines of CD-ROMs: “click here, go there, use this fragment, that story or scene.”² This dislocative approach was evident in even his earliest work; in his more recent books, however–those following 1993’s Tarrying with the Negative–Zizek’s mode of theorizing has grown increasingly urgent and frenetic, the collage-like argumentational strategies of the earlier books becoming in the later well-nigh kaleidoscopic. In The Plague of Fantasies, this freneticism and urgency take their most pronounced form to date; his argumentational zigzags and narratological discontinuities here become positively vertiginous, to the point where the text effectively forestalls accurate or even adequate summary, snaking away from all attempts at a synoptic grasp. If this book is systematic, it is so according to a rather eccentric systemic logic. In reviewing Plague of Fantasies, then, I don’t want to offer a strict explication of the text’s highly intricate theoretical apparatus (although this very intricacy means that some explication is in order); rather, I wish to place its theoretical insights in the context of the urgency I’ve described above, whose concomitant is the text’s seeming self-discombobulation. Plague of Fantasies, I will argue, shows Zizek in something of a theoretical deadlock: he unfolds in this text a theory of the workings of postmodern ideology that is often breathtaking in its scope and acuity; but his theory also constructs for itself what may be its own greatest stumbling block, causing it to fall into a logic uncomfortably close to that of the ideology he critiques.

 

Within Plague of Fantasies’ argumentational vortex, I want to isolate three points to which Zizek recurs in various and entangling ways, momentarily disentangling them here for purposes of clarity. First, the collapse of the Stalinist Eastern bloc has brought with it the apparently across-the-board disabling of Marxism as a viable geopolitical force. Zizek suggests that this has eliminated for the capitalist West its only competing, full-scale politico-economic model of modernization, leaving it instead with a number of less monolithic adversaries it can characterize as atavistically “premodern”–the multiple fundamentalisms, nationalisms, “tribalisms,” and their metonymically associated “terrorist” groups and movements–and thus demonize as wholly external forces of irrationality. The supposedly bounded liberal-democratic “inside” of the capitalist socius is then in contrast presented as a space of unambiguous progress, pragmatic reason, and “common sense”–as a “non-ideological” or “post-ideological” zone. It should go without saying that for Zizek this zone is as ideological as ever (if not more so).

 

Second, accompanying this collapse of Marxism as active geopolitical presence and the concomitant move in the West to a post-ideological self-representation has been the implicit or explicit abandonment of ideology as a tool for cultural analysis by progressive Western critics (especially those in Anglo-American humanities departments). In place of ideology critique, many left cultural critics have turned to one or another spin on Gramsci’s notion of hegemony (e.g., Laclau and Mouffe; the legatees of the Birmingham school) or Foucault’s of micropolitics (as in much queer theory, somatic theory, etc.). In Zizek’s view, these are modes of critique that, however well intentioned, finally work in the service of capitalist liberal democracy rather than in opposition to it.

 

Finally, this ostensibly post-ideological moment is also, for Zizek, a charged economico-technological one in which new mediatic spaces and practices such as the Internet enable the Symbolic Order–i.e., ideology–to inscribe itself isotopically on and in subjects’ most intimate bodily zones and deepest libidinal recesses. But this facilitation of the Symbolic Order’s full colonization of the subject opens up a paradoxical problem, in that these postmodern technologies also bring the subject into dangerously close proximity to objet a, the “sublime object” that is ideology’s phantasmatic place-holder, thus threatening to collapse the distance between the subject and the sublime object that ideology requires in order to maintain itself as a frame within which the subject’s psychosocial fantasies are organized and managed.

 

Of these three points, it is the first that is most familiar to us from Zizek’s other work (this is one of the reasons he so often returns to the military conflicts in the Balkans as a tribalistic fantasy for the West), and it is the third that he addresses at greatest length in Plague of Fantasies. But it is the second that is most surprising, and perhaps finally most pivotal, in that Zizek, while never a neo-Gramscian, has typically (and often voluntarily) been associated with the post-Marxism whose great avatars are Laclau and Mouffe.³ In his recent work, however, Zizek has been increasingly prone to talk in a theoretical language largely alien to post-Marxism, a language of “totality,” “late capitalism,” and “class antagonism” which seems much more consonant with that of, say, Fredric Jameson than it does with that of Laclau, Mouffe, Tony Bennett, Michele Barrett, et al. Indeed, in Plague of Fantasies, Zizek emphasizes late capitalism’s status as “global system,” and its predication on economic struggle–and the need for left critics in general to do likewise–with a frequency and specificity we have not seen matched in his earlier work,⁴ and it is worth looking at his treatment of this problematic at some length. Zizek writes that,

 

according to Hegel, the inherent structural dynamic of civil society necessarily gives rise to a class which is excluded from its benefits (work, personal dignity, etc.)--a class deprived of elementary human rights, and therefore also exempt from duties towards society, an element within civil society which negates its universal principle, a kind of "non-Reason inherent in Reason itself"--in short, its symptom. Do we not witness the same phenomenon in today's growth of the underclass which is excluded, sometimes even for generations, from the benefits of liberal-democratic affluent society? Today's "exceptions" (the homeless, the ghettoized, the permanent unemployed) are the symptom of the late-capitalist universal system, the permanent reminder of how the immanent logic of late capitalism works. (127)

 

Zizek goes on to say that capitalist liberal democracy addresses its own structurally necessary inequities by positing patently insufficient solutions: in the United States, for example, conservatives typically claim that such gross inequities would be abolished through the assumption by these social “exceptions” of greater responsibility for themselves and through stronger adherence to “traditional values”; liberals, for their part, argue that such inequities would be remedied through appropriate welfare-statist moves. Both “solutions,” of course, are doomed to fail and thus guaranteed to maintain these economic imbalances, in that, whatever their superficial differences, both look to the symptom rather than to “the inherent structural dynamic” itself. Moreover, Zizek sees left coalition politics, its radical ambitions notwithstanding, as informed by this same logic:

 

it is not simply that, because of the empirical complexity of the [socio-economic] situation, all particular progressive fights will never be united, that "wrong" chains of equivalences will always occur (say, the enchainment of the fight for African-American ethnic identity with patriarchal and homophobic attitudes), but rather that occurrences of "wrong" enchainments are grounded in the very structuring principle of today's progressive politics of establishing "chains of equivalences": the very domain of the multitude of particular struggles, with their continuously shifting displacements and condensations, is sustained by the "repression" of the key role of economic struggle. The leftist politics of the "chains of equivalences" among the plurality of struggles is strictly correlative to the abandonment of capitalism as a global economic system--that is, to the tacit acceptance of capitalist economic relations and liberal-democratic politics as the unquestioned framework of our social life. (128)

 

These comments have a striking, literal centrality to Zizek’s text that underscores their significance, appearing at almost precisely Plague of Fantasies’ mid-point, and they give us, I think, a clue to the synoptic difficulty of Zizek’s later work, and to that of Plague of Fantasies in particular. Like Jameson, whose theorizations often similarly resist summary, Zizek is attempting to think the global system of postmodern capitalism even as it necessarily outruns and outflanks his thinking (we meet here, of course, our old friend, cognitive mapping and its discontents), but he is doing so in a way that takes the system’s elusiveness into account by writing it, in a kind of invisible ink, into his own theoretical dislocations and interstices. This is to say that we can view the nearly hypomanic discursive and argumentational approach of Plague of Fantasies as a strategy that mimetically internalizes what Zizek wants to see as the absent cause–i.e., the Real–in the structure of late capitalist societies: the totality of late capital itself.

 

Indeed, looked at even more specifically in terms of their placement in the text, the passages I’ve quoted above take on greater importance still: They introduce Zizek’s chapter on cyberspace, in which he charts the effects on postmodern subjectivities of the new technologies of postmodernity, and directly follow his chapter “Fetishism and its Vicissitudes,” in which he examines the historically distinct workings of commodity fetishism in the postmodern moment. They then act as a hinge between–and, I would argue, theoretico-political frame for–Zizek’s most sustained discussions of late capitalism’s vastly expanded reification of contemporary life, and of the material instrumentalities–the hardware and the software–that have facilitated that reification.

 

In “Fetishism and its Vicissitudes,” Zizek returns to and then significantly extends some territory he has covered in previous works. Postmodernity, he argues, is a moment of “cynical reason” in which subjects no longer believe the official line delivered by society’s authorizing institutions; it is now taken for granted that governments routinely dissemble and that advertisers perpetrate shams. But this disbelief does not bring with it a freeing from or resistance to ideology. Instead subjects respond according to the fetishistic logic of disavowal: “I know what I’m doing is meaningless, but I do it nonetheless.” Zizek argues that postmodern ideology’s crucial mystifying move is its own “demystification”–that ideology paradoxically maintains its misrecognizing force over subjects by exposing its own operations. In one of the book’s most concise yet far-reaching sentences he writes, “The central paradox (and perhaps the most succinct definition) of postmodernity is that the very process of production, the laying-bare of its mechanism, functions as the fetish which conceals the crucial dimension of the form, that is of the social mode of production” (102). Zizek addresses here a number of contemporary cultural phenomena, such as self-lampooning advertisements that call attention to their own hyperbole, and the “bloopers” and “behind-the-scenes” television shows that reveal the artifice of culture-industry productions, the laying-bare of such mechanisms in no way endangering the commodity status of the advertised product or the movie or TV show whose seams and imperfections have been opened to view. What happens in these cases, according to Zizek, is a kind of double disavowal: the disavowal by the cynical postmodern subject I’ve mentioned above, but also a disavowal by the Symbolic Order, by ideology itself. Zizek follows Lacan, of course, in seeing the Symbolic Order’s existence as predicated on a castrating cut which forever separates it from the Real; however, the Symbolic Order arrogates authority to itself by bandaging this cut with the objet petit a, the “sublime object” which “hold[s] the place of some structural impossibility, while simultaneously disavowing this impossibility” (76). In revealing its own processes of production, the Symbolic Order, like Dirk Diggler at the end of Boogie Nights, in effect whips it out–the Symbolic Order demonstrates that it isn’t castrated, that it does possess the phallus (“I have nothing to hide! Come and watch the messy procreative reality that is at work in the production of the commodity!”). But again like Boogie Nights’ Dirk (although we should now say Mark Wahlberg), the phallus flaunted here is a fake, a prosthesis, another sublime object set into place to occlude ideology’s unsymbolizable Real, the total system itself.⁵ As Zizek writes, “the postmodern transparency of the process of production is false in so far as it obfuscates the immaterial virtual order which runs the show” (103).

 

Zizek’s language here–“immaterial virtual order”–immediately begs some serious materialist questions: how can an ostensibly Marxist theory of ideology have as its linchpin something virtual and immaterial? Is not this total system a vast, fantastically complicated, yet finally and irreducibly material network of economic mechanisms and political switch-points?⁶ One of Zizek’s most important moves in Plague of Fantasies is to go some way towards answering such questions. The Real for Zizek is immaterial in the sense that it is inaccessible to and thus unknowable by the Symbolic–the Symbolic can only “virtualize” the Real, can only posit an inadequate simulacrum of it. And the Real is transhistorical in that it has a purely “formal” existence apart from and parallel to any symbolization, whatever its historical site. Crucial to keep in mind, however, is that the Real does not pre-exist the Symbolic, but comes into being at the same time as the Symbolic: the subject does not leave upon entry into the Symbolic some discrete psychic space that had been and continues to be the Real; rather, the subject leaves a space that upon entry into the Symbolic retroactively becomes the Real. We can then think of the Real as both transhistorical and historically contingent, that is to say, as something that inevitably exists as long as the Symbolic Order does, but that exists differently for different Symbolic Orders–each historically specific articulation of the Symbolic brings into being its own historically specific Real. Zizek points to exactly this in Plague of Fantasies, and moreover points to the historical specificity of our own current, “post-ideological” Real when he writes that

 

[o]ne of the commonplaces of the contemporary 'post-ideological' attitude is that today, we have more or less outgrown divisive political fictions (of class struggle, etc.) and reached political maturity, which enables us to focus on real problems (ecology, economic growth, etc.) relieved of their ideological ballast.... One could... claim that what the 'post-ideological' attitude of the sober, pragmatic approach to reality excludes as 'old ideological fictions' of class antagonisms, as the domain of 'political passions' which no longer have any place in today's rational social administration, is the historical Real itself. (163)

 

There are then two valences to this charged, idealist terminology upon which Zizek’s discussion hangs. The order which runs the show is virtual because in its ideological casting of itself it follows the logic of the fetish, constructing a fantasy frame that “possiblizes” an impossible structure. And it is further virtual in that the sheer immensity of this order as global system overwhelms attempts to accurately trace or even adequately imagine its operations–to return to Jameson’s term, it defies cognitive mapping–so that it can only be thought or imaged (Jameson would say allegorized) as impoverishing simulacrum or, alternatively, amorphous, God-like force.⁷

 

But in his chapter “Cyberspace, Or, The Unbearable Closure of Being,” Zizek develops a third valence for this terminology, suggesting that, through its deployment of the new technologies of postmodernity, this order realizes the oxymoron of being actually virtual–that these technologies materialize virtuality. Zizek is quick to acknowledge the benefits offered by cybertechnologies: they create new modalities for the performing of certain tasks, facilitate the enjoyment of powerful pleasures, etc. But against postmodern celebrants of the liberatory potential of cyberspace, Zizek urges that we take a “conservative” position towards it; cyberspace, he argues, is an unheimlich place in which we should resist making ourselves too readily at home. This is so not because virtual reality differs radically from social reality, but because virtual reality carries the phantasmatic logic of social reality to its extreme (in this way cyberspace is literally unheimlich, simultaneously familiar and unfamiliar). For Zizek, cyberspace “radicalizes the gap” that is constitutive of subjectivity, externally materializing in the VR universe the subject’s ego, which in the Lacanian formulation functions for the subject as an intrapsychic alterity, the ego existing as the “self” from which the subject is internally split. VR’s radicalization/externalization of this gap replicates and displaces the subject’s ego–with all of its apparent Cartesian self-consistency–into the symbolic regime outside the subject proper, producing a kind of doppelgänger effect: the subject at once has a detachable, surrogate self, able to engage in all manner of activities unavailable to the subject in the non-virtual world; but the freeing-up of this externalized alter-ego has the consequence of locating agency outside the subject itself, in this way situating the subject so that it is vulnerable to control or manipulation from its own exteriorized self, this a result of the exteriorized self’s vulnerability to manipulation or control within the virtual universe. As Zizek puts it, “Since my cyberspace agent is an external program which acts on my behalf, decides what information I will see and read, and so on, it is easy to imagine the paranoiac possibility of another computer program controlling and directing my agent unbeknownst to me–if this happens, I am, as it were, dominated from within; my own ego is no longer mine” (142).

 

Cyberspace thus presents a heightened version of what Zizek sees as a key tendential shift characterizing the logic and life-world of postmodernity: the greatly increased handing-over of the subject’s “self” to the Symbolic Order, which virtualizes/realizes that self in the subject’s stead. Zizek argues that what is often viewed as the most emancipating aspect of postmodern technologies–their seemingly bi-lateral, interactive relation with the subject–must also be seen as the very opposite: the liberating interactivity subjects experience with postmodern technologies is at the same time a troubling “interpassivity.” The ability of postmodern technologies to construct and mobilize a surrogate self for the subject means that even as the subject is “active” in ways previously unimaginable, its capacity to “passively enjoy” its widened field of experiences resides in this surrogate self, in the Symbolic Order–the Symbolic Order finally “enjoys” for and in place of the subject. In an example that will resonate with any serious movie fan, Zizek describes a common dilemma: there is never enough time to watch all the movies one tapes off of cable television; week after week the movie-lover tapes more films than he or she can possibly see, to the point that stacks of unwatched videos come to fill the movie-lover’s living space (and yet the taping continues). But these stacks of unviewed tapes are themselves a source of enjoyment, in that the film fan takes satisfaction in his/her mere possession of and proximity to this largely unseen archive of movie classics. For Zizek, the true locus of enjoyment here is in the VCR itself, stand-in for the Symbolic Order, which has “watched” the films for a subject who is too busy to do so. The consequences drawn from this apparently inconsequential sliver of postmodern life are crucial. “In the case of interpassivity,” writes Zizek, “I am passive through the other–that is, I accede to the other the passive aspect (of enjoying), while I can remain actively engaged (I can continue to work in the evening while the VCR passively enjoys for me…)…. [T]he so-called threat of the new media lies in the fact that they deprive us of our passivity, of our authentic passive experience, and thus prepare us for… mindless frenetic activity” (115, 122, original emphasis).

 

When boosters of cyberspace enthuse over its radical unburdening of the subject through the interactive technologies coming soon to a virtual universe near you, they obscure this forfeiture and relocation of the subject’s self, agency, and enjoyment. In so doing they are complicit with (or are unabashedly promoting) postmodern capitalism’s ideological self-projection as an absolutely open space of interchange among identically able and valued subjects, as a socio-economic order undarkened by conflicts or blockages; cyberspace becomes, in this rendering, the model–the attainable ideal–for what Bill Gates has called “friction-free capitalism.” Zizek cites this phrase from Gates to great effect, extrapolating from it a devastating critique of the ideological operations it embeds and enacts:

 

the "friction" we get rid of in the fantasy of "friction-free capitalism" does not only refer to the reality of material obstacles which sustain any exchange process but, above all, to the Real of the traumatic social antagonisms, power relations, and so on which brand the space of social exchange with a pathological twist. In his Grundrisse manuscript, Marx pointed out how the very material mechanism of a nineteenth-century industrial production site directly materializes the capitalist relationship of domination (the worker as a mere appendix subordinated to the machinery which is owned by the capitalist); mutatis mutandis, the very same goes for cyberspace: in the social conditions of late capitalism, the very materiality of cyberspace automatically generates the illusory abstract space of "friction-free" exchange in which the particularity of the participants' social position is obliterated. (156)

 

Zizek presents a gloomy prospect here of a massive phantasmatic externalization of an always already phantasmatic subjectivity, a shift from an intra-virtualized subjectivity to an extra-virtualized one that is effectively bereft of self-hood or agency. The Gatesian promise of postmodern capitalism would seem for Zizek to leave just the faintest trace of subjectivity, subjectivity existing, if at all, as a virtual image of a virtual image, a simulacral remnant kept in place only to maintain the smooth running of the system.⁸

 

Zizek, however, concludes this chapter on cyberspace–which is “officially” Plague of Fantasies’ final chapter (three appendices follow)–by posing a surprisingly hopeful question. “Perhaps,” he asks,

 

radical virtualization--the fact that the whole of reality will soon be "digitalized," transcribed, redoubled in the "Big Other" of cyberspace--will somehow redeem "real life," opening it up to a new perception, just as Hegel already had the presentiment that the end of art (as the "sensible appearing of the Idea"), which occurs when the Idea withdraws from the sensible medium into its more direct conceptual expression, simultaneously liberates sensibility from the constraints of Idea? (164)

 

In order to understand this unexpectedly optimistic note, we might keep in mind the Nietzschean/Derridean axiom that “truths are fictions whose fictionality has been forgotten.”⁹ For Zizek, we are in the transitional moment of “forgetting” the virtuality of cyberspace: the continuing novelty of cyberspace reminds us of its virtual status; but users’ growing familarity with cyberspace, and the promotional discourses of its celebrants and gatekeepers, threaten to routinize it to the point that its self-evident virtuality will recede–virtual reality will come to seem as commonplace and “natural” as social reality. When Zizek argues that our attitude toward cyberspace should be conservative, it is because we are currently in a position in which we can observe a Symbolic Order in its making; by focusing on the nascency and incompletion of the virtual universe, we sustain our own awareness of its phantasmatic constructedness. And by seeing the virtual universe as a Symbolic Order that is in process, not yet fully set into place, we can read virtual reality back onto our own social reality, and see that it, too, is a Symbolic Order that shares this same virtual logic, but a Symbolic Order whose virtuality has been heretofore forgotten.

 

This virtualization of the Symbolic, though, poses its own hazards, for if on the one hand it can show the fictionality (i.e., ideological constructedness) of social reality, and point subjects to the historical Real post-ideological ideology represses, on the other it can move subjects into overclose proximity to the formal Real, the unsymbolizable swirl of pulsions that subjectivity must foreclose if it is to remain ontologically consistent. For Zizek, the key dilemma of postmodernity might be expressed as follows: the ongoing virtualization of reality allows subjects to see the sublime object as arbitrary ideological place-holder bearing no intrinsic value or meaning; but having lost the object which kept the Symbolic Order intact, the potential is then opened up for the subject to fully accede to the Real–a “hole” now appears in the fabric of the subject’s reality that threatens to precipitate its whole-cloth unraveling. Postmodern subjects therefore find themselves in a situation that is simultaneously promising and imperiling. Promising, in that subjects have the foregrounded possibility of negotiating an appropriate distance from the sublime object and the Real it occludes, one that will allow them to see the ideological contours of their social reality, and thus allow them to intervene in that reality in ways they otherwise could not, but that will also permit accession to the virtuality of their own subjectivity, to the truth of self-hood being its orchestration through a fantasy frame. Imperiling, because at the same time, subjects stand a heightened chance for the disintegration of subjectivity, the virtualization of their reality causing the fantasy frame that sustains them as subjects to collapse, leaving them in the incoherent and paralyzing space of the Real.

 

Zizek argues that the question of the subject’s appropriate position in relation to Symbolic versus Real is finally one of ethical choice. In the final section of Plague of Fantasies, the appendix entitled, “The Unconscious Law: Beyond an Ethics of the Good,” Zizek, in order to establish the conceptual framework and psychic economy within which such a choice must take place, turns to Kant’s theory of radical evil and Hegel’s “corrective” reading of that theory. In what is, to the best of my recall, the most compressed twenty-eight pages in his corpus, Zizek relentlessly reads Kant and Hegel against each other, augmenting this reading with brief side-trips into Pascal, Arendt, Lacan, Deleuze, Laclau, and even John Silber. I will not attempt, in this limited space, to unpack Zizek’s argument in “The Unconscious Law,” (although I will return to the tortuousness of its articulation, in that here we see the “urgency” and “freneticism” I’ve remarked in this text taken to near-scarifying extreme), except to note that it hinges on where for Kant and Hegel the line between subject and object should be drawn, where it is that the Law thus resides, and what is therefore the subject’s proper relation to the Law. Although it is an appendix, and therefore implicitly given a “semi-autonomous” status in relation to the main body of the text, in which is ostensibly contained Zizek’s argument per se, “The Unconscious Law” is where he comes closest to attempting to resolve the multiple dilemmas, paradoxes, and contradictions he has unspooled throughout Plague of Fantasies. But despite its obligatory examination of the Holocaust and the evil of the ideology that produced it, this appendix plays out largely at the level of the individual subject. That is to say that while the pressing issues for postmodernity Zizek addresses in Plague of Fantasies are structural and even global in nature (class struggle, capitalism as total system, the ideological configuring of cyberspace, postmodernity’s cynical transparency, hegemony as model for social critique, etc.) he moves at the book’s conclusion to a privativistic theoretical space: the subject’s ethical self-positioning in relation to Symbolic and Real–and thus to the virtual order running the postmodern show–becomes here a kind of higher-stakes lifestyle choice.

 

My objection to this final move in Plague of Fantasies is not that Zizek insists on addressing the ways in which ideological forces operate at the level of the intrapsychic; Zizek’s tracing of these operations is in fact one of the appeals of his theory, providing a component that is missing from, say, Foucault’s theory of power, in which the subject’s interior life is elided almost entirely. What bothers me about this move, and in this it is rather typical of Zizek’s work, is its implication that it is ultimately the intrapsychic where the ideological action is, including, presumably, the action that can problematize and constructively modify ideology’s interpellative precepts. In reframing the larger structural questions he has so frequently and provocatively raised in Plague of Fantasies in terms of the individual subject’s ethical choice, Zizek achieves a position at the end of the book that is, curiously, a kind of “Lacanized” existentialism: what is imperative for the subject is a self-constitutive choice in the face of a spiritually impoverished and politically disempowering life-world; but unlike the autonomous, self-identical subjectivity that is the Sartrean ideal, the Zizekian subject’s self-constitution results from an act of willing self-destitution, an acceptance of the primordial splitting that is subjectivity’s necessary condition of existence. In the context of the dropping from Zizek’s discussion of the “global” issues he has raised, the famous Lacanian symbol for this split subjectivity–$–seems, unfortunately, all too appropriate: Zizek’s theorization of postmodern subjectivity may finally accord even better with the privatizing logic of postmodern capitalism and liberal democracy than does the neo-Gramscian model of left-alliance politics he criticizes.

 

But as problematic and disappointing as this position may be, Plague of Fantasies, through its very formal (dis)organization, complicates our seeing it as Zizek’s final and finalizing word. I return again to the extraordinary compression I’ve noted in this appendix: one of the reasons it is so dense is that Zizek insists, to an almost feverish degree, on rephrasing, reframing, and repositioning virtually every point in his argument; favorite Zizekian tropes that are by now familiar to us from earlier works–“that is to say,” “in other words,” “to put this another way,” “to put this in yet another way”–are piled atop each other here until they reach, like the bowling-shoe monolith in The Big Lebowski, higher than the eye can see. It is in “The Unconscious Law” that Zizek seems most driven in this book to get his theory precisely right–and where getting it right proves most elusive. In this respect, the operational logic of “The Unconscious Law” parallels that of the Symbolic Order itself as Zizek has so often described it, the Symbolic perpetually scrambling to get to the Real, but forever doomed to under- or overshoot it. The Real that Zizek is missing in the argumentational fury of this appendix is the one he has pointed to earlier in the book, the post-ideological Real of capitalism’s totality and class antagonism. This is a Real that works with especially disruptive force here, as though exacting payback from Zizek for his privatizing theoretical turn.

 

Ernesto Laclau has recently written that “the end of the Cold War has also been the end of the globalizing ideologies that had dominated the critical arena since 1945. These ideologies, however, have not been replaced by others that play the same structural function; instead their collapse has been accompanied by a general decline of ideological politics” (1). That such a claim can come from one of the seminal left thinkers of our time speaks to the urgent necessity of Zizek’s ongoing project: whether or not we want to accept all of his theoretical specifics, I think we must pay close attention to his charting of the presence and force of postmodernity’s “ideological politics”–Zizek consistently provides remarkable insight into the ways in which liberal democracy is working to naturalize itself, effacing in the process its own corrosive economic energies, and forestalling our ability to imagine social and political alternatives. But I also think we must take Zizek’s insights further than he does, unfolding them from the level of the intrapsychic, where in Plague of Fantasies they come to a rest, and out onto the social; however well-aimed is his criticism that left-coalitionism is trapped in the logic of “capitalist economic relations and liberal-democratic politics,” at least left-coalitionism is a politics. This is not something we can readily say about the theory Zizek offers in its stead. Although this is obviously not the place where such an unfolding can be properly considered, it does seem to me that we might think of ways of joining Zizek’s theory of ideology, with its focus on postmodern capitalism’s historically particular Real, to contemporary theorizations of hegemony. This would mean, of course, that theories of hegemony would have to engage more directly with late capitalism’s globalizing dynamics–that, in other words, hegemony would be thought in terms less neo- and more Gramscian, taking better into account “the necessary reciprocity between structure and superstructures, a reciprocity which is nothing other than the real dialectical process” (Gramsci 366).

 

Notes

 

1. I am, for purposes of brevity, being somewhat reductive here when I refer to Habermas’s “view of language as a relatively unproblematic instrument,” and overly generous to Rorty when I associate him with the left.

 

2. See Lovink, http://www.ctheory.com/a37-society_fan.html.

 

3. Laclau, for example, wrote the preface to Sublime Object of Ideology; Zizek the appendix to Laclau’s New Reflections on the Revolution of Our Time.

 

4. I am excluding here Zizek’s introduction to the collection he edited, Mapping Ideologies, a brief but remarkable piece that explicitly adumbrates a number of the concerns I have been tracing above.

 

5. Zizek writes that “Crucial for the fetish-object is that it emerges at the intersection of the two lacks: the subject’s own lack as well as the lack of his big Other…. [W]ithin the symbolic order… the positivity of an object occurs not when the lack is filled, but, on the contrary, when two lacks overlap. The fetish functions simultaneously as the representative of the Other’s inaccessible depth and as its exact opposite, as the stand-in for that which the Other itself lacks (‘mother’s phallus’)” (Zizek, The Plague of Fantasies 103).

 

6. Although they haven’t couched the problematic in precisely these terms, critics such as Mark Seltzer and Judith Butler have asked similar questions of Zizek’s use of the Lacanian psychic topology as model for the workings of ideology, suggesting that Zizek’s theory, as Seltzer puts it, “stalls” on what is finally its non-material, transhistorical assumptions. As I will argue below, Zizek’s theory does indeed stall on itself, but not quite for these reasons. (See Butler 187-222 and Seltzer 175-6.)

 

7. These two alternatives are often merged into each other, of course. An example would be The X Files, in which power of a preternatural order of magnitude is attributed to, as an article in The New York Times Magazine has recently put it, “nameless middle-aged men who not only manipulate our Government but also in effect run the solar system from a mysterious, dark-paneled club on West 46th Street (it looks a lot like the Council on Foreign Relations, actually)…” (McGrath 58).

 

8. A general objection we can raise about Zizek’s theorization of the subject–that it is inattentive to specificities of, for starters, class, gender, and race–seems to come into especial prominence here; Zizek writes as though cyberspace opens itself up equally to all subjects, rather than giving privileged access to the better-educated, relatively affluent computer users/owners who are in fact its denizens (in this Zizek inadvertently rehearses Gates’s own “friction-free” ideology). While I obviously think this objection is merited, I also think we can see the implications of Zizek’s claims about the virtualization of subjectivity as going beyond the immediate boundaries of the cyber universe per se. Journalist William Greider, for example, reports the following scene involving workers in a Malaysian electronics plant owned by Motorola:

 

Once inside [the operations room], the women in space suits began the exacting daily routines of manufacturing semiconductor chips. They worked in a realm of submicrons, attaching leads too small to be seen without the aid of electronic monitors. Watching the women through an observation window, Bartelson [the American manager of the plant] remarked, "She doesn't really do it. The machine does it." (Greider 83)

 

9. This pithy line is Jonathan Culler’s (181).

Works Cited

 

• Butler, Judith. Bodies that Matter: On the Discursive Limits of “Sex.” New York and London: Routledge, 1993.
• Culler, Jonathan. On Deconstruction. Ithaca: Cornell UP, 1982.
• Gramsci, Antonio. Selections from the Prison Notebooks. Trans. Quintin Hoare and Geoffrey Nowell Smith. New York: International Publishers, 1971.
• Greider, William. One World, Ready or Not: The Manic Logic of Global Capitalism. New York: Touchstone, 1997.
• Laclau, Ernesto. “Introduction.” The Making of Political Identities. Ed. Ernesto Laclau. London: Verso, 1994. 1-8.
• Lovink, Geert. “Civil Society, Fanaticism, and Digital Reality: A Conversation with Slavoj Zizek.” C-Theory Feb. 21, 1996. http://www.ctheory.com/a37-society_fan.htm.
• McGrath, Charles. “It Just Looks Paranoid.” The New York Times Magazine June 14, 1998: 56-9.
• Rorty, Richard. Truth and Progress: Philosophical Papers, Volume 3. Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 1998.
• Seltzer, Mark. Serial Killers: Death and Life in America’s Wound Culture. New York and London: Routledge, 1998.
• Zizek, Slavoj. “Introduction: The Spectre of Ideology.” Mapping Ideology. Ed. Slavoj Zizek. London: Verso, 1994. 1-33.
• —. The Plague of Fantasies. London: Verso, 1997.

 

Robert Elliot Fox

Department of English
Southern Illinois University
bfox@siu.edu

 

The Norton Anthology of African American Literature.Henry Louis Gates, Jr. and Nellie Y. McKay, general editors. New York: W. W. Norton, 1997. Includes an audio companion compact disc with 21 selections.

 

Call and Response: The Riverside Anthology of the African American Literary Tradition. Patricia Liggins Hill, general editor. Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1998. Includes an audio companion compact disc with 26 selections.

 

The publication of these two massive anthologies–each is over 2,000 pages long–is a milestone in the history of African American Studies and testifies to the significance and strength of the African American tradition of literature.

 

Many of us long have been aware of the Norton anthology project, initiated by Henry Louis Gates, Jr., which was in the works for a decade and was eagerly, even impatiently, awaited by those who recognized the importance of the venture. I first learned of the Riverside project, however, when I received an advertising flier about the book early in 1997. Though there inevitably is a good deal of overlap in terms of authors and works, it would be wrong to see the existence of these two anthologies as a case of redundancy. (Indeed, these are not the only African American literature anthologies currently available, but they are, by a longshot, the most formidable.) Certain ongoing skirmishes notwithstanding, by now there is widespread agreement on the merits of many of the works chosen or proposed for inclusion in the African American literary canon, but there is not the same sort of consensus regarding the inner dynamics of that canon, the logics of its unfolding, its possible unifying principles. We have here two lengthy takes on the very important and surely controversial topic of what we might term the shape (and the shaping forces) of the canon.

 

For those who wish to keep score, the Norton anthology contains the work of 120 writers, of whom 52 are women. The Riverside anthology features over 150 authors, including more than 70 women. There will be (there already have been) complaints about the exclusion or inclusion of particular authors or works, a controversy of tastes, temperaments and allegiances that no anthology or anthology-makers can hope to avoid. (I’ll toss a few cowries of my own into this debate later in this review.) But this is a battleground for critics and partisans. Strictly from a pedagogical perspective, there’s little to detain us, since the two collections are, on the whole, so extremely rich. In any event, time constraints in courses in which these texts are likely to be utilized unavoidably require a good deal of selectivity, and many teachers will want to supplement any sweeping anthology with additional materials of their own choosing, so debates over what’s in and what’s out in the end have more to do with the politics of canon formation than they have to do with the practical business of conducting a course.

 

The Norton anthology is organized rather straightforwardly into seven periods: The Vernacular Tradition; The Literature of Slavery and Freedom: 1746-1865; Literature of the Reconstruction to the New Negro Renaissance: 1865-1919; Harlem Renaissance: 1919-1940; Realism, Naturalism, Modernism: 1940-1960; The Black Arts Movement: 1960-1970; Literature Since 1970.

 

The Riverside anthology is divided into six major periods of “African American History and Culture”: 1619-1808, 1808-1865, 1865-1915, 1915-1945, 1945-1960, 1960 to the Present. In keeping with the volume’s title, the internal organization of each of these divisions reflects the call and response patterns that the editors see as characterizing, not just black performance modes, but the evolution of African American tradition itself. For example, the second period has the heading, “Tell Ole Pharaoh, Let My People Go,” and is structured around a “Southern Folk Call for Resistance” and a “Northern Literary Response: Rights for Blacks, Rights for Women,” while the last section, dealing with literature since 1960, is called “Cross Road Blues,” and is structured around a “Folk Call for Social Revolution and Political Strategy” and a “Call for Critical Debate,” answered by “Voices of the New Black Renaissance, Women’s Voice’s of Self-Definition, Voices of the New Wave.” (Those wishing to view the entire list of contents for this anthology should go to the Houghton Mifflin Web site at

 

http://www.hmco.com/cgi-bin/college/catalog_1999_4/
college.cgi?FNC=GetTitleDesc_Atitle_html_241.0.)

 

The musical allusions in the section titles in the Riverside anthology recall the musical phrases, taken from what he calls the sorrow songs, which W.E.B. DuBois sets at the head of each chapter of his monumental text The Souls of Black Folk (three chapters of which are to be found in the Riverside, whereas the work is included in its entirety in the Norton anthology). These quotes from the spirituals serve as a powerful reminder of the extent to which oral/aural expression animates black aesthetics and is embodied in the tradition of black writing. The Norton anthology gathers its vernacular selections (spirituals, gospel, rap, etc.) together at the beginning, before the literature sections. The Riverside, too, puts a variety of vernacular materials at the front of the book, including some African examples; but in addition, the Riverside situates vernacular elements throughout the text, so that, for example, blues lyrics, worksongs, etc. precede the Harlem Renaissance writers, and contemporary folktales and rap lyrics (including a rap from John Edgar Wideman’s novel Philadelphia Fire [1990]) lead off the section dealing with the contemporary period. The black vernacular tradition in its fullness has had much to do with the freedom of black writing, and with the depths of our understanding as readers of the greater African American cultural text of which black literary texts are but one mode of expression, and the Riverside anthology does a better job of highlighting these crucial intersections.

 

In the opinion of Vince Passaro, who reviewed it along with Gates’s Colored People and Thirteen Ways of Looking at a Black Man, one transgression of the Norton anthology is that “the theme of ‘the vernacular tradition’ [is] abused in service of a favorite social theory of contemporary academics: a denial of the efficacy of actual individual authorship and a new definition of literature as a form of cultural production, the result of ‘call and response’ between speaker and listener, the expression of whole communities” (73-4). (One can only imagine Passaro’s reaction to the Riverside anthology!) Passaro goes on to say, “I, for one, have always preferred the late Harold Brodkey’s definition of literature, pure and explicit in its hegemonic tendencies: ‘I speak, you listen’” (74). Given the extent to which African Americans were for so long forced to attend silently to their putative masters’ voices, one certainly could sympathize with any black author who finally demanded an opportunity to be heard uninterruptedly (it’s “our turn,” as Ishmael Reed once avowed); yet deep within the black vernacular tradition, the notion of “I speak, you participate” is not an academic theory but an actuality. Furthermore, the extent to which early African American texts were necessarily representative texts made them, their individual authorship notwithstanding, expressions “of whole communities.” This is a circumstance the Black Arts Movement sought to underscore and also to exploit, though its chief polemicists erred in the prescriptiveness of their approach and in their unwillingness to take sufficiently into account the changed condition of “the changing same” one century down the road from slavery.

 

Passaro informs us that The Norton Anthology of African American Literature became the fastest-selling of Norton’s numerous anthologies, with more than 30,000 sold in the first month of publication. (I tried to get sales figures for the Riverside anthology from the publisher, Houghton Mifflin, but was informed, not too surprisingly, that this information was “proprietary.”) One reason for the terrific success of the Norton, in Passaro’s judgment, is that African American studies is “the most popular academic subject of our time” (70-71). If this is true (and it is an assertion that could be debated), such a triumph did not come easily. To begin with, African American literature entered the academy in the 1960s as a result of the struggle to implement Black Studies in America’s colleges and universities. But the victories achieved in these battles were never total. As Nellie McKay reminds us in her guest column in the May 1998 issue of PMLA, “From the mid-1970s through the mid-1980s, adversaries dismissed African American literature as a fad, warned interested white graduate students away from the courses, and discouraged and sometimes even refused to supervise Ph.D. dissertations that focused on black writers” (361). Nevertheless, Passaro is correct in his claim that African American studies has been “enormously influential” within the U.S. academy and in “the culture at large” (70). This is true in part because Black Studies blew down the doors, so to speak, that kept academia largely monocultural (not long ago, we would have said “white,” but whiteness, too, now has its studies, which are beginning to reveal its complexity as they unravel its construction).

 

Anthologies of African American literature have a genealogy that predates the Civil War. In an interview with Nicholas A. Basbanes, Gates notes that altogether there have been “perhaps as many as 160 anthologies of African American literature.” Those interested in a detailed survey of the most significant of these texts should consult Keneth Kinnamon’s informative article, “Anthologies of African-American Literature from 1845 to 1994,” in Callaloo 20.2 (1997). Although he begins by examining two collections from the nineteenth century, Kinnamon argues that the “pioneer general anthology in the field” is the Anthology of American Negro Literature (1929) compiled by V. F. Calverton, “a white Marxist critic” (461). But “[n]o single work has had greater influence in establishing the canon of African-American literature” than The Negro Caravan (1941), edited by Sterling A. Brown, Arthur P. Davis, and Ulysses Lee, a text Kinnamon refers to as “a true classic” (462). In a related essay in the same issue of Callaloo, “Arthur P. Davis: Forging the Way for the Formation of the Canon,” Jennifer Jordan writes that Davis, Brown and Lee “were engaged in a war to establish a literary tradition and to prevent its perversion by either cultural provincialism or racist distortion” (450). Many things occurred over the intervening half century that prevented the African American literary tradition from becoming established in a safe and settled manner, some of the most significant being desegregation and the more or less simultaneous advent of black power/cultural nationalism, Black Studies, and the Black Arts Movement. This is why, in a discussion which he and co-editor Nellie McKay had with David Gergen on The NewsHour on Public Television on March 7, 1997, Gates emphasized that “we are re-assembling the tradition” (my emphasis), thus underscoring the fluid and dialogical nature of both “the tradition” and the effort to claim it, shape it, understand it.

 

McKay, in her PMLA piece, also refers to The Negro Caravan as “splendid,” and goes on to cite Kinnamon’s own Black Writers of America (1972), co-edited with Richard Barksdale, as “[a]mong the best of the comprehensive texts,” arguing that it “has only been superseded in importance by the new anthologies of the 1990s” (367). Kinnamon himself states that Black Writers of America “has sold well over 70,000 copies” (“Anthologies” 464), presumably a respectable figure; but contrasting this number of 70,000 sold over a quarter of a century with the 30,000 copies of the Norton anthology sold in one month (the latest figures I have are 50,000 copies in print by early 1998), one gains some sense of the heightened “charge” that has gathered around the field of African American letters and the broader discipline of Africana studies (which includes Africa and the Caribbean). Nobel prizes for literature awarded to Wole Soyinka (Nigeria) in 1986, Derek Walcott (St. Lucia) in 1992, and Toni Morrison (United States) in 1993 have been acknowledgements of the superlative degree of achievement of authors across the African continuum. (It might have been expected that the first black author to win a Nobel prize would be an American, given the “press” of American influence on the global scene and the importance of the black presence in America, but there is more than poetic justice in the fact that, coincidentally or not, the order of the awards followed the historical trajectory of the black experience, from Africa to the Caribbean to the United States.) At the same time, these awards (and others, including various Pulitzers, National Book Awards, and MacArthurs) clearly have helped to elevate the stock of black writing to a heretofore unprecedented level.

 

The individual most responsible for helping to bring African American Studies more into the foreground of public consciousness is the aforementioned Henry Louis Gates, Jr., who, between the time he first conceived the Norton anthology project and its actual appearance more than ten years later, has seen his own intellectual stock skyrocket dramatically, from ivory tower stardom to international eminence. Gates has brought an entrepreneurial energy and zeal to the field of African American studies (Cheryl Bentsen, author of the controversial profile of Gates in the April 1998 issue of Boston magazine, titled “Head Negro in Charge,” calls him “[a]rguably the foremost intellectual entrepreneur in the world”) but he has always combined it with terrific natural insight and brilliant scholarship. Gates’s agenda is foundational and comprehensive. As he put it in his May 1997 interview with Harvey Blume in The Boston Book Review, “We need to consolidate and codify the intellectual attainments of our people–encyclopedias, dictionaries, concordances, bibliographies, works of scholarship–so that they stand next to the attainments of other people. That, at least, is how I interpret my role.”

 

One obvious result of Gates’s celebrity and corresponding clout is that the Norton anthology has been guaranteed plenty of publicity, while the Riverside anthology apparently has had very little. The Norton also has been far more widely reviewed. I did find a review of both books in the Spring 1998 issue of the journal Crosscurrents that had good things to say about each of them, though the author, Alfred E. Prettyman, concluded that “for now I’ll probably refer to the Riverside anthology more often.” His preference for the Riverside is significant because, given the lopsidedness of the attention being paid to these texts, it is likely that the Norton will become the anthology of choice by default. This possibility concerns me, not because I have any serious problems with the Norton, but because I think it is a very good thing that there be competition and continued struggle in the canon formation arena, and having two collections with differing approaches to the unfolding of the African American literary tradition helps to facilitate this.

 

Despite the Norton’s unquestionable success in the market and despite Gates’s eminence–or possibly because of these factors–the anthology has not been received with complete deference by all critics. Passaro, for instance, believes that the Norton exhibits “a suffusion of editorial sentimentality and weak politics” (72). In fact, a number of reviewers have judged the Norton to be conservative in its content and presentation. This is interesting, since there are some who still would see the making of an African American canon–or any “minority” canon, for that matter–as a radical undertaking. Others may view it primarily as a commerical enterprise designed to exploit a “moment” of multicultural fervor. In any event, a canon formation project is necessarily conservative in the best sense of the term, since it is an effort to consolidate and preserve “the best” works and to delineate (contain) a tradition. A number of the complaints about the Norton seem predicated on a notion that an African American literary canon is required to be politically combative, a documentary of suffering and resistance–which for a long time was the dominant perception and expectation of black writing. Approaching it from such an angle, one might argue that the Riverside anthology is more “militant” than the Norton, though I think it is more accurate to read it as just paying closer attention to that old bugaboo of New Criticism, context.

 

In the Spring 1998 issue of Wasafiri, Julian Murphet takes issue with what he calls “Gates’ tone… of implacable certainty” that “this is it” (49), the African American canon for our time. (Note that what is being referred to here is not the canon, period, but the canon as it is, or ought to be, now. Extricating the canon from eternity by recognizing the politics and the temporality of its formation has only intensified the debate over whose interests the canon should serve; thus the canon of the moment may be the focus of more contention than the very idea of a canon itself.) Given the extent of their effort and expertise, Gates and his co-editors are entitled to feel reasonably confident that they have put together a workable canon, whether or not it proves durable over the long haul; still, one guesses that none of them displays the kind of “implacable certainty” of definitiveness that Harold Bloom (a notorious basher of “minority” canons) exhibited with regard to his own single-handed version of The Western Canon.

 

Murphet bemoans the fact that Richard Wright’s Native Son is not found in the Norton, “whereas ‘minor’ writers like Charles Johnson and David Bradley are amply represented” (49). (Native Son isn’t to be found in the Riverside, either. There, Wright is represented by a single selection, “Long Black Song,” which also is included in the Norton; but the Norton has, in addition, Wright’s important “Blueprint for Negro Writing,” two chapters from his autobiography Black Boy, the story “The Man Who Lived Underground,” and “The Ethics of Living Jim Crow.”) Despite the quotation marks around the word, I certainly wouldn’t consider National Book Award winner and recent MacArthur Fellow Charles Johnson to be a minor writer, nor would I put him in exactly the same bag as David Bradley, who has written one very good book (The Chaneysville Incident, excerpted in the Norton) and one pedestrian one (South Street). But designating Native Son as “the greatest black novel of the twentieth century” gives us a strong clue to Murphet’s ideological allegiances. My choice for the Great African American Novel would be Invisible Man (whose prologue is included in the Riverside; the prologue, first chapter, and the epilogue are in the Norton), which should offer a clue to my own allegiances. (Another way to designate these differences is to propose that Murphet is aligned with Franz Fanon, while I’m aligned with Albert Murray [for those unfamiliar with the latter, see The Omni-Americans (1970) and Conversations with Albert Murray (1997)].) One suspects Murphet would be comfortable with a book like Addison Gayle, Jr.’s The Way of the New World: The Black Novel in America (1976), a product of the Black Arts Movement (so wondrously inciteful and so frequently wrongheaded), which argues that the “true” trajectory of African American fiction is (politically, but not especially aesthetically) a “revolutionary” one. In Gayle’s book, Ellison is little more than a (mishandled) footnote; yet though he has been reviled by Marxists as well as BAMers (with Larry Neal’s famous recantation and subsequent embrace of Ellison providing a most instructive exception [see “Ellison’s Zoot Suit” in Visions of a Liberated Future]), Ellison’s profound cultural/spiritual depth has always trumped more reductive pronouncements about what shall constitute “the people’s” “authentic” voice.

 

Murphet makes another questionable gesture when he asks what it means to put W.E.B. DuBois “in the same volume with such lamentable stylists as Terry McMillan and Gloria Naylor” (49). DuBois emphatically is a towering figure, and if he is the standard by which we measure who is major, then most people are going to appear to be minor, and our anthology (and perhaps our canon) is going to be a much leaner one. But to compare two present day fiction writers with DuBois, who did produce creative work but whose true greatness for the most part lies elsewhere, isn’t very kosher; and in my estimation, the differences between McMillan, whose work has more surface than depth, and Naylor, a novelist of much greater gravity, are far more substantial than the distinctions that could be drawn between Johnson and Bradley, both of whom are serious writers, but whose bodies of work do differ widely in their formidability. Here we have a failure to draw fine discriminations between writers who happen to be on a critic’s hit-list. (For the record, Bradley doesn’t appear in the Riverside collection. McMillan, Naylor and Johnson all do, though the selections from their work are different from those that appear in the Norton.)

 

How inclusive need a canon be? In the May 12, 1997 issue of The Nation, Kevin Meehan provides a list of fifty African American writers who are not included in the Norton anthology. Some of these are important: Alexander Crummell, Martin R. Delany, J. Saunders Redding, Henry Dumas, Gayl Jones (all but Redding are included in the Riverside anthology); others are quite obscure: B. K. Bruce, John Matheus, Cecil Blue (the Riverside includes Bruce). Altogether, eighteen of the authors Meehan cites as missing from the Norton are in the Riverside. One writer Meehan doesn’t mention who is not in the Norton but who has a story included in the Riverside anthology is William Melvin Kelley, who wrote some of the most interesting and innovative black fiction of the 1960s. (At the same time, Meehan notes the absence of Frank Yerby, whose work primarily lies outside the tradition of African American letters.) Obviously, every anthology project of serious scope requires an often painful exercise of selectivity, and there are times, too, when permissions can’t be obtained for works one badly wants. But Meehan scores a point when he observes that “often it is the voices left out of the canon-making text that have been most responsible… for generally doing the most to create conditions that make possible the emergence of a document like The Norton Anthology of African American Literature” (46).

 

In the end, even the best anthology is a convenience, a portable version of a discipline, a tradition, that in its fullness inevitably possesses a great deal of baggage. Within that baggage, for those willing to search deeper, are to be found, along with much dross, various overlooked riches, instructive “mysteries,” tangled threads waiting to be unknotted. Nevertheless, I’m happy these anthologies exist. Even if, from the most rigorous perspective, they are not sufficient unto themselves, they are badly needed. They should not be our only tools, but they can serve as very useful ones.

 

With the exception of the so-called new literatures, most canonical anthologies seem based on an assumption of the greatness of previous writings to which we are perpetually appending footnotes and an occasional new monument. But if Gates is correct in his conviction that the Golden Age of black writing is in the present, not the past, then there are certain to be some dramatic displacements and reconfigurations in the future with regard to the African American literary canon. With the publication of these two anthologies we are witnessing not the battle’s conclusion, but the bringing on of the first really heavy artillery.

Works Cited

 

• Basbanes, Nicholas A. “Henry Louis Gates Jr. Plumbs African-American Heritage.” george jr. Feb. 1998. http://www.georgejr.com/feb98/gates.html.
• Bentsen, Cheryl. “Head Negro in Charge.” Boston Apr. 1998. http://www.bostonmagazine.com/highlights/gates.shtml
• Bloom, Harold. The Western Canon. NY: Harcourt Brace, 1994.
• Blume, Harvey. “Applying the Corrective: Henry Louis Gates, Jr.” The Boston Book Review May 1997. http://www.bookwire.com/bbr/bbrinterviews.article$2970.
• Gayle, Addison Jr. The Way of the New World: The Black Novel in America. Garden City, NY: Anchor Press, 1975.
• Jordan, Jennifer. “Arthur P. Davis: Forging the Way for the Formation of the Canon.” Callaloo 20.2 (1997): 450-460.
• Kinnamon, Keneth. “Anthologies of African-American Literature from 1845 to 1994. Callaloo 20.2 (1997): 461-481.
• McKay, Nellie. “Naming the Problem That Led to the Question ‘Who Shall Teach African American Literature?’: or, Are We Ready to Disband the Wheatley Court?” PMLA (May 1998): 359-69.
• Meehan, Kevin. “Spiking Canons.” The Nation 12 May 1997: 42-44, 46.
• Murphet, Julian. Wasafiri Spring 1998: 48-49.
• Murray, Albert. Conversations with Albert Murray. Ed. Roberta S. Maguire. Jackson: UP of Mississippi, 1997.
• —. The Omni-Americans. New York: Outerbridge & Dienstfrey, 1970.
• Neal, Larry. “Ellison’s Zoot Suit.” Visions of a Liberated Future. Ed. Michael Scwhartz. New York: Thunder’s Mouth, 1989: 30-56
• The NewsHour. PBS. 7 March 1997.
• Pasaro, Vince. “Black Letters on a White Page.” Harper’s July 1997: 70-75.
• Prettyman, Alfred E. “Ways to African American Literature.” Crosscurrents (Spring 1998). http://www.crosscurrents.org/bookss98b.htm#prettyman.

 

Rita Barnard

Comparative Literature and Literary Theory
University of Pennsylvania
rbarnard@dept.english.upenn.edu

 

Jeremy Cronin, Even the Dead: Poems, Parables, and a Jeremiad.Cape Town: David Philip, 1997.

 

Sarah Nuttall and Carli Coetzee, eds. Negotiating the Past: The Making of Memory in South Africa. Oxford UP, 1998.

 

In 1995, American Vogue published a fashion article cum travelogue under the rubric “South Africa Now.” Offered as a celebration of the country’s recent democratic elections, it featured the Somali supermodel Iman and her husband David Bowie visiting sites in and around Cape Town–dressed, of course, in fabulously expensive designer clothes. The article opens impressively, with a picture of Iman shaking hands with Nelson Mandela (“an historic meeting,” we are told). This dignified image is followed by a series of joyous fashion pics: Iman dancing on the streets of Guguletu township in a Jil Sander suit and Mandela T-shirt, posing at a Cape Town high school in a Gucci skirt, kissing on the beach in a Chanel ballgown, and striding past bright graffiti in a Gaultier frock. Facing this last image, we encounter–and perhaps we should have seen something like this coming–a shot of Archbishop Tutu working out on his treadmill, looking both sporty and meditative in a Duke University sweatsuit. The article ends with a black-and-white photograph of a zebra running along a deserted roadway towards a mountainous horizon: an emblem, clearly, of the multiracial nation, moving towards what Vogue calls “an exciting future.”

 

The article displays (with considerable panache) a mythic and newly consumable South Africa. The “now” announced in its title effects, as it were, an erasure of the whole history of violence and injustice. In these images the Cape becomes an austral playground, where the past is redeemed by the click of a fashion photographer’s shutter. The sites, the icons and the grass-roots agents of the anti-apartheid struggle–so often a war waged by school children–all become colorfully exotic, chic, even cute: suitable background for the antics of multicultural celebrities. The differences in the experiences and achievements of the photos’ various subjects–president, cleric, fashion model, and rock star–are visually irrelevant: Mandela, Tutu, Iman, and Bowie are all equated as Beautiful People in a world of pure appearances. The nation itself is magically transformed–figured as an elegant thing of nature, instantly unified in its coat of harmonious black-and-white stripes.¹

 

Vogue‘s visual indulgence in the “South African miracle” is neither unique nor really reprehensible: there was, after all, much reason to celebrate in 1994 and to take considerable aesthetic pleasure, after years of seeing the Old Crocodile and his cronies in office, in a president who was not only a man of moral stature, but of a certain physical grace. Four years down the line, however, a fixation on “Madiba magic” and an exclusive concern with “now” and the “future” seem somewhat more problematic. With the ANC’s apparent adoption of all the orthodoxies of globalization, it has come to seem as though the hard-fought liberation struggle was only about winning a larger share of the pie (for some) and achieving a redeemed visibility in the global public sphere. The past and its lessons too often appear to have been forgotten. Even the Truth and Reconciliation Commission’s task of exhuming the grim secrets of the apartheid régime has occasionally generated what the poet Ingrid de Kok terms “a rhetoric of amnesia”: its work has been associated, even by the commissioners themselves, with “a clean break,” a “new chapter,” “getting the past out of the way,” and so forth.²

 

It is against this rhetoric of amnesia that Jeremy Cronin’s long-awaited second collection of poetry, Even the Dead: Poems, Parables, and a Jeremiad, is pitched. The collection is offered as wake-up call (“Art is the struggle to stay awake” [40] is one of its memorable lines). In the “jeremiad” of the title, Cronin mercilessly and sometimes wittily diagnoses the nation’s pervasive amnesia; he laments the country’s entry into the postmodern world:

 

It's amnesia when the SATV launches itself into  
  the new South 
Africa and lands
     In Las Vegas
          (Ongoing, chronic, paradigmatic 
             amnesia)
...............................................

CNN is globalized amnesia

The Gulf War--lobotomised amnesia

Santa Barbara, the Bold and the Beautiful, 
  Restless Years--the 
milk of amnesia
...............................................

There is upwardly mobile amnesia
     Affirmative action amnesia
          Black economic empowerment, the world 
	    owes 
me one, Dr Motlana, give a slice of it amnesia
     (syntagmatic amnesia--an elite for the 
       whole)

There is winning-nation amnesia
     It puts in Olympic bids

     It summits Everest and forgets to name all 
       but one
     Of the sherpas who carried us up. (42-43)

 

But in other poems, Cronin recalls the ideals, the language, the anxieties, and even the dramatis personaeof the liberation struggle. The stalwart Slovo is paid humorous homage in “Joe Slovo’s Favorite Joke”; and in “Poem for Mandela” the “crunched-up / One-time boxer’s knuckles” (30)–the great man’s hands, marked by personal history and experience–are brought to mind, rather than his all-too-photogenic media icon’s face.

 

The title of this collection is taken from Walter Benjamin’s “Theses on the Philosophy of History”:

 

There is a secret agreement between past generations and the present one. Our coming was expected on earth. Like every generation that preceded us, we have been endowed with a form of Messianic power, a power to which the past has a claim. That claim cannot be settled cheaply. (39)

 

Benjamin here dramatically infuses what one might think of as the dusty task of the historian with a peculiar, messianic revolutionary mysticism: a sentiment that might surprise some, coming from a Communist Party official like Cronin. But in this case it should not. Cronin’s celebrated first collection, Inside (written while he was a political prisoner from 1976-1983), was animated by a revolutionary nationalism rather a revolutionary messianism; but it nevertheless contained many poems in which the poet reaches out to find a “secret agreement” with figures from the past, with his father, with his grandparents, with the novelist Olive Schreiner, and with more distant and imagined ancestors: KhoiSan warriors and cave painters–aboriginal figures of resistance and creativity. Traces of such poetic commerce between the “past generations and the present one” still remain in Even the Dead; but, in some instances, these negotiations are satirically transformed. In a series of ironic epitaphs, Cronin salutes the recently deceased: various contemporary political types who have lost their sense of community and connection with their compatriots. One of the sharpest epitaphs reads:

 

For a recently Departed Soul from the new Patriotic Bourgeoisie
Hey, man, don't weep
I can't take your call presently
As I'm upwardly mobile

Please leave your prayer
After the beep (35)

 

This is obviously a poem about forgetting; but it is also a poem that remembers a revolutionary ancestor: Franz Fanon, whose cautionary chapter on the problem of the patriotic bourgeoisie, “The Pitfalls of National Consciousness,” is alluded to in the poem’s title.

 

Another reminder of the claims of the past is offered in the disturbing and impressive poem “Running Towards Us.” Dated 1986-1997, the poem strives to bridge the temporal gap between the anti-apartheid struggle and the present. It recalls an incident witnessed in the aftermath of the brutal fighting at the Crossroads squatter camp in 1986: a failed execution, viewed from a distance across a strip of empty veld. The poet and his companions look on in horror as people pour gasoline over an apparently dead or wounded man, and as they unhurriedly bring sticks and tires to fuel the flames. All of a sudden, the man gets up and, still soaked in fuel, runs towards the watchers. In the poem’s final lines, this figure is transformed into a troubling emblem of the recent past:

 

He is running towards us. Into our exile. Into the return of exiles. Running towards the negotiated settlement. Towards the democratic elections. He is running, sore, into the new South Africa. Into our rainbow nation, in desperation, one shoe on, one shoe off. Into our midst. Running. (4)

 

This image of this nightmarish compatriot–a victim, betrayer, who knows?–may be set against Vogue‘s reassuring image of the zebra running towards the scenic horizon. It raises profound and unsettling questions about how the “rainbow nation” will accomodate the memories of the traumatized and often morally dubious citizens. The costly claims of the past, Cronin suggests, will not be dodged.

 

 

Even the Dead will inevitably be compared to Inside (perhaps the most celebrated collection of poetry to come out of South Africa in the last two decades), and many will find the slim new volume lacking–lacking, at least, in the quality of stirring lyricism which marked the most celebrated of Cronin’s prison poems. Compared to poems like “Plato’s Cave” or “To learn how to speak,” or even the more narrative “Walking on Air,” the new work sounds distinctly prosy, as in the following lines from “Running Towards Us”:

 

In those three days the apartheid police and army have destroyed an entire shanty-town, unleasing black vigilates (witdoeke), victims themselves turned perpetrators, to perform much of the dirty work. (2)

 

It is as though the contextualizing information (which in Insidewas provided in effective mini-essays interspersed among the various sets of poems) has now moved into the bodies of the poems themselves. Cronin (who is, among other things, an excellent literary critic) offers a justification of sorts for this change in one of the opening poems:

 

Between, let's say, May 1984 and May 1986
(Speaking from my own limited, personal 
  experience of course)
There was a shift out there
From lyric to epic. (1)

 

But one cannot help wondering whether the reportorial and pedagogical quality of the lines I cited may not in some measure derive from Cronin’s work as the public spokesman for a political party. Poems like “Running Towards Us” seem to be projected beyond the circle of committed comrades–beyond the solidarity of “our people’s unbreakable resolve,” that is invoked in Inside–to what Lewis Nkosi has called the “cross-border” reader: the reader outside the group, for whom things have to be explained and defined.³

 

This is not to say that Even the Dead is without power or integrity. On the contrary: the volume introduces fresh poetic modes (fragment, aphorism, collage, parable, and mock epitaphs) suitable for a complicated time–a historical moment in which the earlier poems’ proleptic invocations of revolutionary nationalism might well seem dated, in which such poems would serve an official, rather than their former performative and incantatory function. Yet it is clear that for Cronin the revolutionary struggle is not won, and cannot be equated with the victories of the patriotic bourgeoisie. The last word in the volume is therefore again Walter Benjamin’s:

 

In every era the attempt must be made anew to wrest tradition away from a conformism that is about to overwhelm it.... Only that historian will have the gift of fanning some sparks of hope in the past who is firmly convinced that even the dead will not be safe from the enemy if he wins. And this enemy has not ceased to be victorious. (44, Cronin's emphasis)

 

This quotation would make an appropriate epigraph for Negotiating the Past: The Making of Memory in South Africa, edited by Sarah Nuttall and Carli Coetzee. This new collection of essays on the problematic politics of national remembrance includes contributions from an array of South African academics, three of whom are also acclaimed creative writers (Njabulo Ndebele, Andre Brink, and the younger poet, Ingrid de Kok). In their introduction the editors present their collection of essays in dramatic fashion as standing at an important threshold in South African history: a moment defined equally by the adoption of a new constitution (a forward-looking document, concerned to ensure a future of freedom and equality) and by the work of the Truth and Reconciliation Committee (a backward-looking project, concerned with the excavation of apartheid’s most heinous crimes). The contents are arranged under four headings: the first section (“Truth, Memory, and Narrative”) includes essays on the meaning and practice of the Truth and Reconciliation Committee (the TRC); the second section (“The Remembered Self”) explores personal narrative in contemporary South Africa: it highlights the tension between individual memories and the shapes imposed on such recollections by various genres, ranging from autobiography to oral history. The third section (“Museums, Memorials, and Public Memory”) considers various projects and institutions that have attempted to intervene in the reshaping of public recollection and national history. The final section (“Inscribing the Past”) explores a set of documents and discursive forms (advertising, linguistics and language policy, and the new constitution itself) that are likely to have an ongoing and determining effect on the nation’s sense of its past.

 

The timeliness and political importance of the issues raised in Negotiating the Past seems particularly apparent when one sets the volume in dialogue with Cronin’s Even the Dead. Most closely akin in spirit to Cronin’s satiric diagnosis of South African society is Eve Bertelsen’s essay, “Ads and amnesia: black advertising in the new South Africa.” Bertelsen notes the disappointment felt by many South Africans at the ANC’s rapid embrace of the late-capitalist free market and an official policy of privatization. This volte face, she argues, requires from the population an equally rapid “unremembering” of the ideals and values that animated the anti-apartheid struggle.⁴ Her essay suggests that the ideological work required to induce this amnesia–to effect a redeployment of the promises and ideals of the mass democratic movement–is essentially being performed for the government by the institution of advertising, especially advertising directed at black South Africans. Her point is well made by a number of outrageous examples. A 1994 ad for Bonnita milk, for instance, depicted an opened milk carton, spilling a white cross against a black background. The slogan, worthy of inclusion in Cronin’s jeremiad, read as follows: “Why cry over spilt milk, when we can build a healthy nation? The past is just that… past. It’s the future that’s important” (226-27). Thus apartheid’s history, as Bertelsen notes, is written off with a reassuring cliché: consumer goods will effectively mop up such insignificant slips and spills as have occurred. This strategic unremembering allows for revolutionary concepts like “freedom” to be redefined in the interests of the market. The point is readily made in a slogan for the clothing company Foschini: “You’ve won your freedom. Now use it. Get a Foschini’s credit card today” (233).

 

Most of the essays in Negotiating the Past, however, are concerned not so much with what Bertelson calls the “key dynamic of forgetting” as with the complicated dynamics of memory, the ongoing process of making tradition to which Cronin draws our attention. In her essay on recent South African autobiography, Sarah Nuttall describes two modes of remembering, especially remembering in the wake of trauma. The first is a traditional mode, in which memory brings consolation: it operates by imposing a narrative continuity and redemptive interpretation on catastrophic experience in order to provide a sense of wholeness and healing. The second is a modernist mode, which she associates with Walter Benjamin: it operates by eschewing consolation, by insisting that the shattering effects of trauma can only be respected by preserving–in their fragmentary state–the irredeemable shards of historical catastophe. It is fair to say that the entire collection oscillates between the two modes of memory outlined here. There is, it seems to me, a divide of sorts between the fiction writers writers Ndebele and Brink (who tend to validate the work of the imagination and narrative as well as the revelatory work of the TRC) and the academics of various stripes (who tend, on the whole, to be suspicious of totalizing narratives and to worry about the erasures that the dominant modes of truth-telling might impose). The split is not a radical one, for neither Brink nor Ndebele believe naively that the Truth Commission will reveal a whole truth or that narratives are necessarily seamless. But still, one senses a certain faith in narration in Ndebele’s call for the “revelation of meaning through the imaginative combination of [the] facts” (21) and Brink’s insistence that the inquiries of the TRC be “extended… in the imaginings of literature” (30) that seems to be lacking, say, in the reflections of Gary Minkley and Ciraj Rassool, who fret over the way in which South African oral historians have folded the personal memories of their interviewees into narratives of national liberation.

 

The anthropologist Steven Robins’s essay, “The Silence in my Father’s House: Memory, Nationalism, and Narratives of the Body,” though somewhat experimental in its use of personal materials, may serve here as representative, in that it reflects in some detail on both of the modes of memory described above. Like Rassool and Minkley, Robins is suspicious of master narratives. A descendent of Holocaust victims, he is well aware of the danger of nationalist reclamations of victimization, such as the Zionist reading of the history of the Holocaust and the Afrikaner’s reading of the history of the concentration camps in the Boer War. The work of the TRC, he points out, has not yet settled into a coherent narrative of any sort. The dirty secrets, the memories of dismembered and abused bodies, were experienced by the nation in a fragmentary way: the victims’ “rivers of tears” were relayed night after night in grisly installments and soundbites. But Robins wonders, as do several of the other contributors, whether the spectacular sufferings revealed in this testimony might not in the end serve to displace the memory of the more banal sufferings of ordinary folks. A vivid anecdote suggests that this kind of displacement may already be taking place. Robins describes the way in which the gruesome testimony of Evelyn Maloko before the TRC–an account of how her sister, Maki Skosana, was necklaced and tortured as an informer by an angry mob–was presented to the nation. In the televised report of the testimony, Maloko’s description of her sister’s mutilated remains was cut short by the call of one of the commissioners for a minute of silence to salute Maki’s heroism and martyrdom.⁵ In this version of the event, Robins argues, the individual’s painful and choking recollection is cut short and the complicated circumstances and motivations surrounding the death of a possible betrayer are subsumed into a seamless and consoling narrative of national sacrifice and eventual triumph. The troubling figure of Maki Skosana calls to mind the ambiguous figure of the petrol-soaked runner in the scruffy veld at Crossroads. The violent past, as both Cronin and Robins suggest, will not–without distortion–settle into a triumphalist, “winning-nation” narrative.

 

At the end of his essay Robins remains unsettled about whether an “abused memory” is better than no memory at all; and the only solution he offers is the personal testimony (the dominant genre, perhaps, of this moment in South African culture) of how he learnt to live with the fragments of his family’s traumatic Holocaust experience: by recognizing its very fragmentary character, the silences of his father, as an authentic mode of memory. But this “insoluble solution,” as he calls it, may finally be no solution at all–at least not one that South African politicians or museum curators will find easy to live with. A telling case in point here is the controversial exhibition entitled “Miscast: Negotiating KhoiSan History and Material Culture,” held at the South African National Gallery in April 1996 (an event to which several essays, including two fine pieces by Martin Hall and Patricia Davison, refer). The intention of the show was precisely to raise questions about the representation of these aboriginal inhabitants of the Cape (as timeless though sadly extinct examples of the primitive or as objects of disinterested scientific curiosity) and to bring the actual history of genocide to which they were subjected back into view. The exhibition, Davison notes, contained “harrowing images and artefacts of human suffering” (158). At its center, for instance, was a ring of scattered body casts–severed heads, fragmented body parts, and naked torsos–around a grim brick cenotaph and a pyramid of rifles. It was one, might say, a ruinous, Benjaminian memorial.⁶ But while whites, as Robins notes, experienced “Miscast” as similar in its emotional effect to the work of the TRC, KhoiSan activists missed the exhibition’s ironic intent: they read the dismembered bodies not as a ironic allegory–as authentically mournful fragments–but literally, as an continuation of colonial violence (159). Needless to say, the fact that the curator, Pippa Skotnes, was a white woman, was not lost on these protestors. The whole exhibition thus raised questions about how memory is constructed, and by whom.

 

If Negotiating the Past offers any resolution of the tension between the two modes of memory it describes–both problematic, as we have seen–it is only a metaphorical one: Ingrid de Kok’s image of the “cracked heirloom,” painstakingly glued together, an image of unity, certainly, but a unity that does not hide away the broken shards of grief and loss. But while De Kok’s essay does attempt to offer examples of this kind of memorial (most notably the District Six Museum in Cape Town, which commemorates the old mixed-race township, razed under the Groups Areas Act), it still remains to be seen how often and how readily her complicated metaphor will prove translatable into practice. Coetzee and Nuttall’s volume, for its part, is perhaps less of a unity than one might like to see. While it does include some discussion of the importance of coherent narratives of consolation and healing, its form leans towards the fragmentary and the discontinuous. This is perhaps inevitably the case with an essay collection, but the sense of discontinuity is here increased by the fact that the essays are drawn from an unsually wide range of disciplines and are highly uneven in quality (several are quite unmemorable as academic performances). The introductory essay (probably deliberately) offers no strong synthetic argument; but it (probably inadvertently) points to one of the collection’s signal weaknesses. Emphasizing the importance of landscape and place in the construction of memory, the editors mention mining as the practice which most signally destroyed people’s connection to their ancestors, their mnemonic connection to the land. This collection of essays, unfortunately, never goes near South Africa’s mines: in all the articles concerned with the sites of memory, the key examples are without exception located in the former Cape Province.⁷ (Moreover, with the exception of Ndebele, all the contributors are Cape Town-based.) This distinct regional bias is regrettable and occasionally raises uncomfortable questions. E.g., was it really because of “almost incredible political amnesia” (12), as the editors claim, that the Cape “Coloureds” voted for the National Party in the 1994 election–or was the vote, at least in part, based on a regionalism unseen by these commentators, because shared?

 

Negotiating the Past is then in certain respects disappointing; yet it is saved by its compelling subject matter and timeliness, by its frank admission that the processes of memory are complex and ongoing, and by its generous sense of the multiple forms in which memory may reside: histories, stories, testimony, films, exhibitions, objects, bodies, places, etc. In this last respect it opens up possibilities for interdisciplinary work and suggests something of the richness of contemporary South Africa as a site for critical cultural studies.

 

Notes

 

1. The use of the zebra as an emblem for the South African nation in fact dates back to the early 1970s, when it was invented by the apartheid government’s combative foreign minister, R. W. (Pik) Botha; it was frequently recycled thereafter, especially in the government’s anti-sanctions campaign in the mid-1980s. The Vogue photograph, insofar as it works iconically, is thus a visual updating (or, more positively, a reappropriation) of an apartheid era cliché. For a discussion of another instance of the zebra image, see my essay, “The Final Safari: On Nature, Myth and the Literature of the Emergency,” in Derek Attridge and Rosemary Jolly, eds., Writing South Africa: Literature Apartheid, and Democracy, 1970-1995 (Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 1998): 123.

 

2. “Getting the past out of the way” was the phrase used by Danie Schutte, the leader of the National Party’s justice committee (qtd. in De Kok, “Cracked Heirlooms = Memory on Exhibition,” in Nutall and Coetze 59).

 

3. Cronin, “To learn how to speak…,” Inside (London: Jonathan Cape, 1987), 64; Nkosi, “Constructing the ‘Cross-Border’ Reader,” in Elleke Boehmer, Laura Chrisman, and Kenneth Parker, eds., Altered State? Writing and South Africa (Sydney: Dangaroo Press, 1994).

 

4. The term “unremembering”–emphasizing the fact that we are dealing here with an active process–is favored by the linguist Sinfree Makoni, another contributor to Negotiating the Past (244).

 

5. Robins does not mention the fact that the apartheid government put Maki Skosana’s story to much more sinister uses than the Truth Commissioner could possibly be said to have done. The brutal circumstances of her death were televised both at home and abroad, causing considerable damage to the image of the liberation movement. Subsequent testimony at the TRC indicated the involvement of Eugene de Kock and the Vlakplaas assassins in the events leading up to this outburst of collective fury, thus complicating questions of guilt even further.

 

6. At one point visitors were even forced to walk over images of KhoiSan people: an installation reminiscent of Benjamin’s notion of the culture as a triumphal parade in which victors of history trample over the vanquished.

 

7. Davison mentions in passing the site museum at Tswaing north of Pretoria and the restoration of the stone-walled capital at Thulamela in the northern part of the Kruger National Park.

Works Cited

 

• Barnard, Rita. “The Final Safari: On Nature, Myth and the Literature of the Emergency,” in Derek Attridge and Rosemary Jolly, eds., Writing South Africa: Literature Apartheid, and Democracy, 1970-1995. Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 1998. 123-140.
• Benjamin, Walter. “Theses on the Philosophy of History.” Illuminations: Essays and Reflections. New York: Schocken, 1969. 253-264.
• Cronin, Jeremy. Inside. London: Jonathan Cape, 1987.
• Nkosi, Lewis. “Constructing the `Cross-Border’ Reader.” Eds. Elleke Boehmer, Laura Chrisman, and Kenneth Parker, Altered State? Writing and South Africa. Sydney: Dangaroo Press, 1994.
• “South Africa Now.” Vogue June 1995. 159-179.

 

Evgeny Pavlov

Department of Comparative Literature
Princeton University
evpavlov@princeton.edu

Translator’s Preface

 

“All this is familiar; still it needs to be repeated. In its very essence the decorative grid of the Chinese interior is inexhaustible. Repetitions do not exist as long as there is time. Thus non-coincidence, deviation, residue, all requiring a different approach” (“Syn/Opsis/Tax” 5). These words of the Russian poet Arkadii Dragomoshchenko (iguana@comset.spb.ru) that open what may very well be considered his poetic manifesto¹ would also make an excellent epigraph to the text that follows here. It has been five years since his work was introduced to PMC readers in the 1993 Symposium on Russian Postmodernism (PMC 3:2).² The brief essay in the present issue is in many ways a repetition of what was then said by and about him. Yet the non-coincidence is apparent. Five years ago Russian postmodern poetry was too much of a conceptual curiosity to be dealt with entirely on its own terms. In 1992, after a bilingual reading by Arkadii in Charles Bernstein’s poetics seminar at SUNY-Buffalo, where he was then a visiting fellow and I a graduate student, I remember being asked how his work sounded to a Russian ear–whether its ostensible affinity with American Language poetry did not make for a certain foreignness, constructedness, a certain out-of-the-test-tube quality.³ At the time, I was unsure. His poetry was certainly most unlike anything I had ever heard or read in my native tongue. As Barrett Watten put it in his contribution to the PMC symposium, Dragomoshchenko’s poetry “rips a hole in the lyrical fabric of [Russian] tradition’s… authority” by resolutely breaking with the “overdeterminations of sound and sense that have provided the standard for Russian verse” (Watten 2). The question of influence, of tradition and innovation, of “lineages and cultural formations” (Perloff 13) thus suggested itself before any other. It was an obvious one. It remains to be explored further.

 

Today, however, new lines of questioning can also be pursued, or at least invoked. Now that “the momentum that has brought the [“Third Wave” of Russian literature] brilliantly crashing on our shore” (Perloff 13) has somewhat subsided, other approaches seem possible. One of them is to imagine what it would be like to view post-Soviet poetry as something other than a representational practice specific to a given context, and thus, as something not always already determined by, or reducible to, a habitual set of national attributes current at a given moment. This possibility is not easily recognized simply because it appears to have few immediate uses.

 

Consider the history of Dragomoshchenko’s essay “On the Superfluous.” The piece was commissioned by a small British journal as a commentary on the contemporary state of poetry in Russia. Yet the text Arkadii wrote and asked me to translate was flatly rejected as it contained no actual information about the specifics of the poetry scene. The editor was in fact puzzled and, I think, slightly insulted. He was clearly expecting a straightforward report on the latest poetic trends but instead received a dense paratactic rumination that mentioned Russia only in passing and was mostly concerned with poetry as “something superfluous” to what we generally talk about when we talk about poetry. In other words, Dragomoshchenko’s reflections offered a view of poetry and its scene that was not centered on any particular historical, political, cultural, or literary developments, links or connections other than those poetry itself projects “in its constant self-questioning.” The view of poetry presented in his essay was, to be sure, poetic. For that very reason it was deemed redundant, gratuitous, self-indulgent–superfluous, as it were.

 

Which, of course, illustrates Arkadii’s point only too well, even though one cannot but sympathize with the British editor’s frustration. Dragomoshchenko’s own frustration, however, is also understandable given the context out of which he is writing–the context on whose framing we always rely so heavily in our discussions of Russian poetry. What happened to poetry in that context is succinctly described in the first two paragraphs of “On the Superfluous.” But the framing and the framed keep changing places. Poetry, Dragomoshchenko insists, is “always something else;” it is “that state of language which in its workings constantly exceeds the actual order of truth” (“Syn/Opsis/Tax” 7). It exceeds its context as easily as it exceeds its poet.

 

Without asking the poet anything, they ask, is it possible to ask about that to which no answer is possible; not asking, they ask: does such a question exist, whose absence gives birth to the same irresistible anxiety which quite naturally excites doubt about many things, and first about the fascination of the paternalistic relations between the holder of truth and its user... And what answer might it be, this pearl, locked around its shell? ("Syn/Opsis/Tax" 7)

 

“On the Superfluous” does not provide an answer to that impossible question; it fails to describe contemporary Russian poetry or its scene. What it does describe, however, is a “four-dimensional landscape of an impeccable action” where every step is in the right direction, where “having begun in one thing,” one finishes “in another without having moved at all” (Xenia 66).

 

Translator’s Notes

 

1. “Syn/Opsis/Tax” (Konspekt-kontekst in the original) is the author’s preface to Description, his first collection of poems translated into English. It also opens his prose volume Phosphor and is included in The Third Wave: The New Russian Poetry. The complete Russian-language archive of Dragomoshchenko’s works is located at www.vavilon.ru/texts/dragomo0.html.

 

2. A text-only version of the Septmember 1993 issue of Postmodern Culture, including the Symposium on Russian Postmodernism, is available at http://www.iath.virginia.edu/pmc/text-only/issue.193/contents.193.html. The full hypertext version of this issue is available at http://muse.jhu.edu/journals/postmodern_culture/toc/pmcv003.html#v003.2 (Please note that only paid subscribers to PMC at Johns Hopkins’ Project MUSE have access to this site. Information on subscribing to Project MUSE is available at http://muse.jhu.edu/ordering.)

 

3. Dragomoshchenko’s long-time friendship, engagement, and collaboration with Language poets, first and foremost Lyn Hejinian, whose brilliant translations of his work brought him wide recognition in the West, partially explain why the initial American response to his poetry was so comparative. Marjorie Perloff’s contribution to the 1993 PMC symposium, for example, focuses, more than anything else, on Dragomoshchenko’s position vis-à-vis his American counterparts.

 

4. I wish to thank Amy Billone for invaluable help with editing this translation.

 

5. Konstantin Vaginov (1899-1934), a member of the Leningrad literary group OBERIU, whose work is still largely untranslated into English. The quote is from Trudy i dni Svistonova (Labors and Days of Svistonov), a metafictional novel that constructs complex allegorical figurations of Russia’s literary modernity. On some echoes of OBERIU poetics and philosophy in Dragomoshchenko’s work, see Molnar.

 

6. Protection against the undead used by the philosophy student Khoma Brut, main character of Nikolai Gogol’s Viy.

 

Works Cited

 

• Dragomoshchenko, Arkadii. Description. Trans. Lyn Hejinian and Elena Balashova. Los Angeles: Sun and Moon, 1990.
• —. “Syn/Opsis/Tax.” Trans. Lyn Hejinian and Elena Balashova. Poetics Journal 9 (June 1991): 5-10.
• —. Xenia. Trans. Lyn Hejinian and Elena Balashova. Los Angeles: Sun and Moon, 1994.
• —. Phosphor. St. Petersburg: Severo-zapad, 1994.
• Etkind, Alexander. Eros of the Impossible: The History of Psychoanalysis in Russia. Trans. Noah and Maria Rubins. Boulder, CO: Westview Press, 1997.
• Johnson, Kent and Stephen M. Ashby, eds. The Third Wave: The New Russian Poetry. Ann Arbor: U of Michigan P, 1992.
• Molnar, Michael. “The Vagaries of Description: the Poetry of Arkadii Dragomoshchenko.” Essays in Poetics 14:1 (April 1989): 76-98.
• Perloff, Marjorie. “Russian Postmodernism: An Oxymoron?” Postmodern Culture 3:2 (January 1993).
• Watten, Barrett. “Post-Soviet Subjectivity in Arkadii Dragomoshchenko and Ilya Kabakov.” Postmodern Culture 3:2 (January 1993).

 

Kevin McGuirk

Department of English
University of Waterloo
kmcguirk@watarts.uwatxerloo.ca

 

             I'm glad the emphasis these days
is off dying beautifully and more on light-minded 
  living with 
the real things--soap, spray-ons, soda, paper 
  towels, etc.
            (Ammons, Sphere 55)

It was when my little brother, who was two and 
a half years younger than I, died at eighteen 
months.  My mother some days later found his 
footprint in the yard and tried to build 
something over it to keep the wind from 
blowing it away.  That's the most powerful 
image I've ever known.
            (Ammons, in interview, Walsh 117)

 
This essay is about a problem in the work of A.R. Ammons, a problem worth study because it also concerns the reading of the postmodern in poetry. The problem is this: what are we to make of the contemporary lyric’s continuing advertisement of presence when postmodernism elsewhere celebrates surface, difference, and alterity? In Ammons’s writings, these conflicting and incommensurable epistemologies and ontologies engage one another, creating a space for thinking about this problem even if, or rather because, Ammons himself leaves the issue undecided. From the mid-60s to the early ’70s, after Ammons published a number of mid-length poems outlining a poetics of process–“Corsons Inlet” is the best-known–the body of his poetry divides between what John Ashbery called in his review of the Collected Poems (1972) a “swarming profusion” (59) of lyrics and a half dozen long poems culminating in Sphere: the Form of a Motion (1974). Ammons is an obsessively dialectical thinker, so the handiest way to account for this divide is to say that the two modes are complementary, much as high/low, center/periphery, one/many are complementary figures of thought throughout his work. But interesting continuities and discontinuities are revealed when we line up these modes, which I’ll call post-romantic lyric and postmodern long poem, not against Ammons’s own thematics but against various discourses of postwar culture, including the poetic. To begin with, while discussions of postmodernism in poetry have typically exercised an opposition between the lyric and varieties of “anti-absorptive” modes (life/long poem, “poet’s prose,” collage, etc.), Ammons has been working both sides of the opposition without any apparent sense of inappropriateness or debility.¹ His critics, however, (led by Bloom and Vendler) have busied themselves almost entirely with the lyrics and a set of traditional questions associated with poetry (crisis of the self, mind-nature relations, poetic language), while a few isolatos (Wolfe, Jarraway) have belatedly addressed the different operational procedures of the longer poems. Though he won the National Book Award for Garbage in 1993, Ammons criticism hasn’t been conspicuous lately because, I suspect, his celebrity of the ’70s identified him with an early postmodernism that seems safely humanistic compared to subsequent developments in both the theory and practice of the postmodern.² As I read it, literary critics of the ’70s could find in the lyrics a reflection of their own ambivalence between a will to idealization, precariously articulated in lyric epiphanies, and an emerging imperative to politicize, deconstruct, or otherwise materialize privilege of all kinds. His lyrics embodied a growing tension within criticism between “experience” and “discourse.³

 

I begin by looking at the lyrics in relation to a persistent bias in American poetics against formal and epistemological closure in favour of open-ended longer poems, proposing that Ammons’s proliferating lyrics ultimately constitute a kind of ongoing environment, a long poem rather than a collection of “works.” The lyrics typically entertain then deny the lure of epiphanic closure that defines post-romantic lyric, promoting a repeated unmaking rather than the development of a body of work. I go on to consider affinities between the long poems and popular modes examined not in literary criticism but in some recent work in cultural studies. I refer to what Margaret Morse calls an “ontology of everyday distraction” (193) epitomized by television, and banality, a term whose deployment in cultural studies has been examined by Meaghan Morris. Whether the contemporary long poem feeds off or into the mainstream of postwar popular culture, the literally ambi-valent term banality speaks to much postmodern poetic practice in its various transactions with the newly interesting phenomenon of noise.⁴ Cybernetics, the science of information as a signal-to-noise ratio, speaks to postmodern epistemologies, Ammons’s own thinking, and the growth of media environments in the postwar U.S., and I draw on it to address the problem of presence. The interest of Ammons’s writing of this period, then, is not just literary, or even literary-theoretical, but broadly cultural. I conclude by setting these terms against those of a later elegy, with its centering and re-membering procedures.

 

The difference I’m concerned with might be further defined on one side by an aesthetic practice of the self based on privileged, inward experience, and on the other by a more discursive and exteriorizing mode. It’s the difference between classical values like contemplation, subjective depth or verticality (metaphor), transcendental knowing–with poetry serving as a defense of subjectivity against objective circumstance (Koethe 72, 75)–and postmodern “values” like distraction, horizontality (metonymy), and materialist understanding.⁵ This suggests that something more than generic difference defines the terrain of Ammons’s work. If the “manyness” of his lyrics produces a long poem manqué, then the divide lies not between the long poems and lyrics but between those together on the one hand and the autotelic “works”–the anthology pieces, the major poems that have won Ammons’s place in what Jed Rasula calls “the poetry wax museum”–on the other.⁶ But maybe Rasula’s phrase is too reductive applied here. In thinking about the noise of the long poems, and of the postmodern long poem generally, their rejection of gestures towards depth and containment of meaning, I’m brought up short by the gesture of the poet’s mother on the death of his younger brother, and by his own delayed poem of grief, “Easter Morning” (1981). The problem, again, is this: to preserve or restore the imprint of lost others (including the natural world) we have built lyric poems;⁷ but the lyric poem, which is by definition anti-banal since it is structured by privileged moments, appears to have been disqualified as a vehicle of the postmodern. So what do we do that is both poetic and postmodern with grief like the poet’s mother’s or the poet’s own?⁸

 

Substance and motion

 

We might advance the task of articulating the difference in Ammons’s work, this generic divide–comparing, say, “Dark Song” (“Sorrow how… deep / it is”),⁹ a lyric singled out by Denis Donoghue for approval, and certain blandly speculative passages of the very lengthy “Hibernaculum”–by suggesting that it is like the difference “between regret and assay” (Lyotard 80). If Ammons’s poetry manifests a traditionally lyric self regardless of whether one views him as a postmodern and American epistemologist–centrifugal rather then centripetal in his discursive movements, decentered and relational in his forms (“riding horseback between / the obscure beginning and the unformulated conclusion” [“Essay” 35]), a poet pursuing logics shared with television–“Easter Morning” (SP 106-08). The poet returns to his homeplace to “stand on the stump / of a child…. whether myself or my brother,” a deep subjectivity constituted through the work of elegy. This return finds some resonance in the popcult-romanticism of the recovery movement, with its portrait of the “inner child” and its project to recover wholeness for the self cut off from itself in childhood.¹⁰ In this context, regret is clearly the term of retrospection and centering (lyric), assay the term of onwardness and expansion (long poem). Regret demands psychologistic understanding; it proposes metaphorical relations with otherness, a selfhood structured by a correspondence between the living, in-process social self and an authentic deep self. Assay is the mode of a fluid, unmoored subject, constructed from the multiple and shifting discourses accumulated through its life “experience.” Its self-structuring relations are metonymic, proposing contiguities rather than identities. The subject has access to no correspondent, transcendently present other, within or without.

 

Ammons has made motion his master trope, a concept linked neatly with assay, with ’60s “open” form and quasi-organic notions of process, epistemologies of relational knowledge like cybernetics, as well as the ontology of distraction Morse identifies with TV. Kenneth Burke’s observation that “a key strategy in Western materialism has been the reduction of consciousness to ‘motion’” (506) is suggestive here. He links motion with science (correlations and processes) and substance with human relations (“the ‘is’ of being” [505]). For any discourse observing the implications of such a strategy, depth–the dimension of subjectivity addressed both in the recovery movement and in the elegy–is a certain casualty. Yet the condition of postmodernity includes both a defining gesture and its retraction: both the travels of the virtual subject in the information age (the latest phase of Western materialism) and the drama of the inner child that reconstitutes romantic pathos.¹¹

 

Ammons’s brother’s death at eighteen months, when Ammons was four years old, is the signal biographical event in his work, though it appears only twice in the whole ouevre: first in the later pages of Sphere when he compares “the long, empty, freezing gulfs of / darkness” with the gulf that opened “when / the younger brother sickened and then moved no more” (72-73), and finally in “Easter Morning.” I would claim that this event organizes the swarming profusion of his work around something like a repressed content, so that a negative psychodrama can be read throughout.¹² While Ammons’s materialist strategies (“what is saving” [Sphere 34, 41] is transposed to “can we make a home of motion” [76]) are productive of many, as Ammons himself would say, “interesting” configurings of the relations of mind and nature, they do not account for the deep subjectivity produced by the special form of regret called grief. It is as if neither the force of motion, nor the imperatives of a postmodern epistemology, can de-realize the stubborn substance of self, the “child” arrested in unresolved grief.

 

Lyric?

 

At one point in “Hibernaculum,” Ammons itemizes the cost of a recent repair job on his car, noting that “one thing interesting / is that Ned’s Corners Station is at 909 Hanshaw Road / and I’m at 606 Hanshaw Road: that’s configuration” (75). Helen Vendler complains of this passage: “Only if you think it is, is it configuration, and for all Ammons’s jauntiness, he carries this Wordsworthian notion of everything adding up to an extreme” (Vendler 75). As her further remarks on the exemplary sanity of Wordsworth indicate,¹³ configuration for her is unreflexively psychologistic and conventionally romantic: the subject is the deep centre to which all experience is referred. Hence, her privileging of Ammons’s lyrics.

 

Cary Wolfe offers a brilliant counter-reading of Ammons’s long poems in relation to information theory, but he relies on a simplistic representation of Ammons as an anti-lyric writer who has moved beyond the “talking wind and mountains” of the “early” poems, a glancing allusion that seems a willful distortion. When Ammons makes mountains talk he’s obviously playing an ironic game, not naively committing a pathetic fallacy:

 

I was going along a dusty highroad
when the mountain
across the way
turned me to its silence:
oh I said how come
I don't know your
massive symmetry and rest:
nevertheless, said the mountain,
would you want
to be
lodged here with
a changeless prospect, risen
to an unalterable view:
so I went on
counting my numberless fingers. (SP 55)

 

This lyric is practically an allegory of Wolfe’s own argument that Ammons works with a new organic which “opens outward, is centrifugal rather than the centripetal ‘innate’ form of Coleridge” (80). The lyrics, then, do not propose to “add up,” to use Vendler’s phrase (that is metaphor’s job). Indeed, when the poet begins to count, he discovers that his fingers are “numberless”: numberless are the indices, or counters, for a world the configurations of which are numberless.

 

Any (lyric) investment in singular meaning, then, is quickly withdrawn to keep poetic discourse truly current. As a gesture in language, each lyric is a kind of violation that threatens both reality, language, and performer with stasis by proposing a literal carrying-over (meta-phor) from one to the other. Thus not recovery, but “abandonment,” Ammons declares,

 

is the only terrible health and a return to 
   bits, re-trials 
of lofty configurations ("Essay" 32-33)

 

What is salient about Ammons’s lyrics is not the climb to unitary perspective, but the act of withdrawal and unmaking: he posits only a center where “nothing at all gets, / nothing gets / caught at all” (“Center” SP 52). Lyric, then, may be conceptualized as a trial: an assay compatible with the longer “assayistic” poems.

 

Motion?

 

I want to complicate this claim by considering a few notions from Stephen Fredman’s books on “poet’s prose” and the “grounding” of American poetry. Lyric has never been well-theorized in American poetics, and Fredman’s brief for poetries evolving on the margins of verse culture, and indeed of verse itself, does not take up genre as a category of reading. Fredman elaborates the ways in which American poets, lacking the cultural grounding European writing took for granted, have been compelled to write into the open, on the one hand, and to practice various provisional, idiosyncratic, and paradoxical authorizing activities in the place of that grounding, on the other. These remain, however, compensations for the defining act of American poetry, which is abandonment.¹⁴ Not to abandon, it is implied, produces a groundedness something like “false consciousness,” or something like mere regret: the refusal both of abandonment and of the peculiar grounding activities described by Fredman.

 

Lyric makes a strange object for these tendencies. With modernity, lyric lost its rhetorical ground in occasion (see Bender and Wellberry), establishing a primary deixis in the empty “I” of the poet, a “shifter,” which is void of specific referential content. And it is perhaps because of this groundlessness and the pathos of that defining but empty “I” that post-romantic lyric has actively and anxiously presumed and affirmed “presence” as normative, repressing its rhetorical character and severing its connection to positive cultural work in favour of retrospective, “regretful” inward vision.

 

This begins to explain why writing like Ammons’s, which would seem to be in a line with the poets read in Fredman’s books in its ambivalent, nervous committment to abandonment, is absent from such studies. The difference from those poets springs in part from the choice of a master concept, motion, that is, on the one hand, radically physical, and on the other, entirely abstract and metaphorical. In other words, oscillating between the concrete and the abstract, Ammons eschews easy affirmations of presence but also the more difficult, mediate, rhetorical activity of culture. In deploying a concept like motion, which comes from the vocabulary of physics, Ammons cannot produce complex, rhetorical frameworks for cultural practice. The problem is displayed most clearly in “Cascadilla Falls.” “Thinking” the motions of the universe (“800 mph earth spin, the 190-million-mile yearly / displacement around the sun, / the overriding / grand / haul / of the galaxy”) “into” the merest “handsized stone” which he picks up by the creek, the poet experiences by proxy the vertiginous effects of a universe in motion, effects which leave him “shelterless.” So, he concludes,

 

I turned
to the sky and stood still:
oh 
I do 
not know where I am going
that I can live my life 
by this single creek.  (SP 62)

 

In the dedication to the long poem Sphere, Ammons suggests that nature offers correspondences to the words “tree” and “rock” but not to the human word “longing” (5): the world is not present to desire. The dialectic represented in “Cascadilla Falls is between absolute motion that destabilizes the psyche, and the stabilizing, self-constructing gesture of apostrophe, a rhetorical move typical of post-romantic lyric that grounds the empty “I” by setting it in relationship with some naturalized concrete externality (the sky).¹⁵

 

Given such poles as the only possible “grounds,” the lyric can be nothing more than a trial, turning and turning from a ground rejected as false to a vertiginous groundlessness and back to a momentary ground; from violation to abandonment to “re-trials of lofty configuration.” Without a ground, unable to posit the last word of a metaphor that breaks across linguistic barriers, the poet writes assay after assay, each a gesture of assertion and abandonment at once. The problem is that such a pattern may amount to mere turning and turning–lyric as tropism. In the long poem “Essay on Poetics,” Ammons calls the procedure that makes “whole” lyrics repeatable a “mechanism,” since “wholeness… is a condition of existence” (30-31), not essence (Wolfe 81). Does such a procedure simply produce, in Meaghan Morris’s paraphrase of Baudrillard, a “vast banality machine” (21)? Here we come to a crux in Ammons’s practice: once you reject essence, and you accept mechanism, you court the banality of the mass producing machine. Turning and turning may simply massage and exacerbate the essential pathos and alienation of the lyric poem’s “I.”

 

Romantic lyric is a naive or even paranoid investment strategy based on a theory of scarcity, not plenitude, of meaning. With his long poems–pure expenditure–Ammons appears to reject that model; when capital’s kept out of circulation, there’s no cash flow. Yet he keeps going back to the bank, only to withdraw with his left hand every investment in lyric meaning made with his right–to keep meaning current. What’s the point of that currency? Motion? The lyric “work” is a sound investment, bound to increase the capital of a poetic career (as the anthologies suggest). But “Easter Morning” shouldn’t be accounted for as simply capital (psychic or poetic), ballast against a wave of paranoia. It appears in the economy of Ammons’s poetry as a singular confrontation with the existential scarcity proposed by death. One might speculate that this return of depth, like the return of the repressed, is inevitable in such an insistently dispersed and impersonal poetics as Ammons has pursued. But how can grief, with its powerful subjectivizing force, be articulated within Ammons’s hyper-dynamic of grounding and abandonment?

 

Banality

 

I want to start to answer this question with another question. Does Ammons qualify as what Morris calls “a distracted media baby” of the postliterate world? More questions follow. Can a media baby be a lyric poet? Can banality be “poetic”? “I’m glad,” Ammons confides in Sphere,

 

             the emphasis these days 
is off dying beautifully and more on 
   light-minded living with 
the real things--soap, spray-ons, soda, paper 
   towels, etc.

 

–though, he adds, “I expect to die in terror” (55). In “Hibernaculum” he discovers an exemplum in what “somebody said” “the other night on Hee-Haw” (101). Ammons exploits postmodern vernaculars not for images for poetry, in Yeats’s phrase, but demonstrations of knowledge and value. More to my point, though, is the ontology of the form of television–the epitome, for Morse, of a new “ontology of distraction.” TV presentation is segmented, but moves so rapidly that it leaves the impression of flow rather than step by step movement. In motion, the distracted subject, surfing channels, or simply following shifts between program and commercial, takes in data from various planes of representation as his horizon of sensory comprehension expands, contracts, leaps, dawdles, etc. The colon is the dominant form of punctuation in all Ammons’s poetry, but in the longer poems the absence of marked points of rest enacts and typifies the ontology of the work.¹⁶ The poems shift rapidly in their attentions, breaking at any colon without the kinds of formal signaling (stanza break) normative in post-romantic texts. The horizon of attention expands and contracts at the poet’s whim, or at points of distraction, his attention caught by something else. It’s clear that Ammons’s longer poems elaborate an ontology of everyday distraction, rather than, say, classic and humanistic value like contemplation. Ammons might well be aiming to refit poetry for the list that forms Morse’s subtitle: “The Freeway, the Mall, [Poetry], and Television.” For TV as for poetry, “the problem is,” in Ammons’s words, “how / to keep shape and flow” (“Summer Session” 17).

 

Speaking more generally, the long poem aspires to exist in a manner much like that of what we call the media, changing all its absorbed contents into second-order phenomena. Wolfe’s essay on Ammons is important in its elaboration of Ammons’s use of cybernetics, particularly in his poems’ treatment of nature not as primary otherness but as information. Cybernetics describes a relational and formal universe; meaning is differential, existing in the spaces between objects, or between words and words, or words and referents. Such a relation constitutes a redundancy. Information then is not substantial. “All that is not information, not redundancy, not form and not restraints–is noise, the only possible source of new patterns” (Bateson 410). If, according to a cybernetic model, meaning depends on a signal-to-noise ratio, in the modern context what becomes important in art is not the elimination of stray material (noise) in the process of shaping the art-object; instead, it is art’s repeated transactions with noise, the only source of the new. In these terms, the contrasting assumption of romantic lyric poetic is that meaning is immanent within an arrangement of signals. When Vendler, a lyric critic, suggests in reference to Ammons’s long poems that “Never has there been a poetry so sublimely above the possible appetite of its potential readers” (76), this is to say, there’s too much noise. In Poe’s romantic view, the long makes no sense because it’s mostly noise; only its lyrical moments–moments with very high signal-to-noise ratio–can properly be called poetry. Letting in low-level material, the accidental, the misfits, and moving without apparent narrative intention breaks the repetitive signal of the anti-banal lyric, and poetry cedes itself to the entropic tendency in discourse towards banality.¹⁷

 

As Meaghan Morris notes, “banality” is a classic term of dismissal for popular forms, which has recently has taken on an odd double valence or literal ambivalence in some recent writing in cultural studies. Such ambivalence is crucial to the experience of reading postmodern long poems generally, and particulary a striking feature of Ammons’s work. Its anti-absorptive qualities, interestingly, come not from radical formal strategies employed, for example, by Language writers, but from the banality and seeming disorder or noisiness of its progress. The poems seem merely to accumulate. The banal is the common, the everyday: on the one hand, the wellspring both of post-romantic poetic value and of political value for cultural studies; on the other, merely the dull and ubiquitous, the disorganized–noise. In Ammons I think it’s important to understand banality as a kind of stylistic limit-point, much like periphery stands metonymically for the limit-point of thought. Both are played dialectically off centres. Both contribute to an environment of surfeit, of an excess of bytes of information. The poem, then, is a media rather than a linear progression, a totality or sphere lying alongside the other totality called the world. Given that the world is, for Ammons, a kind of popular (banal, common) culture, we read the poem, like the world, like TV, not from start to conclusion, but cut in and out at various indeterminate places, distractedly or purposefully.

 

Such dispersed, formal, and uninsistent epistemologies offer advantages over humanist ones–most obviously their mimesis of contemporary forms of noise and banality–but they beg the question of how to comprehend the insistent, focused experience of a beloved other’s death. In a recent issue of Cultural Critique on “The Politics of Systems,” Wolfe argues for the adequacy of cybernetics as a posthumanist epistemology, basing his position mainly on the second-order cybernetics of Varela and Maturana. But the final emphasis of his discussion is a trenchant critique of those writers’ humanistic plea for an ethic of love. Wolfe reads this plea as a call for ethics to do the work of politics and a disavowal of the “internal limit” of the subject psychoanalytically conceived, a disavowal born of “the need to repress the Thing at the heart of the subject” (65). The Thing in the modern west, Wolfe notes, is the animal. Death, our limit, I would add, is the sign of our animal nature. This argument, I think, has some bearing on the practice of elegy.

 

Elegy

 

Wolfe quotes Zizek on “this internal impossibility of the Other, of the ‘substance.’ The subject,” Zizek writes,

 

is a paradoxical entity which is so to speak its own negative, i.e. which persists only insofar as its full realization is blocked--the fully realized subject would be no longer subject but substance." (qtd. in Wolfe 64-65)

 

What drives post-romantic elegy, if not most post-romantic culture, is the desire for substance, for substantial union with nature, self, other–a crossing over, achieved symbolically through metaphor. But the elegiac subject is contradictory: it’s the poignancy of encountering the blockage and longing to overcome it that produces its peculiar character. Varela’s invocation of Buddhist compassion, situated beyond desire, is, for one thing, a gesture against the continuing waste of romantic selfhood trapped in that stasis. (If this is transcendence, it’s a paradoxical one since its goal, having nothing to do with a romantic crisis of the self but with continuing biological co-existence, is entirely pragmatic.)

 

In Zizek’s terms, what cybernetics proposes is difference at every level as a proliferated form of blockage. There is no place of oneness to get to; indeed, there is no “inside” and “outside,” self and other, only differentiation. This seems, however, inadequate to address the grief arising from the death of an other since it brackets not only what is experienced as singular and focused, but also the centering and holding force of romantic subjectivity more generally. Varela’s gesture, like Ammons’s elegy, might in fact be an inevitable eruption of the informal in cybernetics’ formalized universe, a gesture determined not by theorized intellection but by the notion of subjectivity most readily available to its maker. Indeed, in Ammons’s case, romantic subjectivity kicks in as the poetic default mode in the face of a crisis his poetics cannot account for.¹⁸

 

Elegy, unlike merely elegiac lyric, of which “Dark Song” is an example, responds to an occasion. (Generically, the elegist confronts the limit of the occasion, and produces a subjectivity in relation to it). Death, then, offers a paradoxical occasion to modern poets, the one event that cannot be gainsaid by western technology, epistemology, or aesthetics. “Easter Morning” is not just an elegy, however, but a poem of the “adult child.” Ammons returns to the spot where his brother died and where, he suggests, some aspect of his own emotional development was arrested. It is a return above all to his childhood place and a return to a life enmeshed in familial and communal rites and relations, material that’s absent from his typical work.¹⁹ “I have a life,” he begins, “that did not become,”

 

that turned aside and stopped,
astonished:
I hold it in me like a pregnancy or
as on my lap a child
not to grow or grow old but dwell on

 

As we discover, if Ammons returns to an actual ground, the family culture there is literally dead since they are “all in the graveyard, / assembled, done for, the world they / used to wield, have trouble and joy / in, gone.” And in the absence of human collectivity, of a “world,” he is compelled to enact a different, lyric form of mourning. Here the formal play of the long poems and proliferating lyrics gives way to a conventional lyric discourse of re-membering:

 

it is to his grave I most
frequently return and return
to ask what is wrong, what was
to see it all by
the light of a different necessity
but the grave will not heal
..................................
the child in me that could not become
was not ready for others to go,
to go on into change, blessings and
horrors, but stands there by the road
where the mishap occurred

 

The stalled deep self so remote from most of Ammons’s work is precisely what he has been unable to abandon and what he regrets. If Ammons comes home to address this resistance of the re-membering subject, is it then the case that “abandonment” is not, after all, the “only terrible health”? If the poetry is a displaced form of subjectivation, a means to integrate all that’s given into a world of meaning, his brother’s death and his own arrested self are hidden correlates of his own subjectivity because they cannot fit into the “objective” world he has discursively created. The arrested inner child is projected as the stubborn substance of self, the positive to which the adult subject is Zizek’s paradoxical negative.

 

“Easter Morning” is striking, singular–and it is poetically terminal because the re-membered world serves Ammons as a metaphorical passage back out to the parallel world of objective natural forms, not a cultural or familial enstructuring he has to negotiate. Curiously, it’s also more psychologistic: catharsis is transposed by an aesthetic practice of the self using nature as a transcendent, metaphorical double of that self. The poem clarifies the relations of the dual inner child, “myself or my brother,” leaving the home space for inhabitation by the dead. But it “abandons” only by investing the self metaphorically in enduring natural (permanent not provisional) forms like the flight paths of birds the poet observes this Easter morning: the birds move apart, then together, promising reconciliation for himself and his brother:

 

      it was a sight of bountiful
majesty and integrity: the having
patterns and routes, breaking
from them to explore other patterns or
better ways to routes, and then the
return

 

The elegy defends the subject against objective circumstances (Koethe) by positing something greater (more bountiful, majestic, and integrated) than those circumstances with which the self is then identified–by revealing, in other words, a correspondence, a substance for the human word, “longing.” understanding rather than a means to cultural engagement. In poetry, the right metaphor makes it all “add up.”

 

Ammons’s poetry proposes two healths, two fatalities: the fatality of death (and the solace of the elegiac “work”); and “the only terrible health” of banality, which is, in Baudrillard’s sense, a continuing fatality. In the first, the object is the subject’s mirror; it has a certain fatefulness about it, the “inevitability” of the art work: it’s an end, even when, like “Corsons Inlet,” like “Easter Morning,” it declares continuance. In the second, the object is not the subject’s mirror and so the poet must abandon both the object and the poem of the object. The long poem cuts and extends. The lyric as repeatable trial, unlike the lyric as “work,” evades lyric fatality; it’s not a stay against confusion but a moving target, a subject conducting evasive maneuvers. “Easter Morning” promises to resolve the problem of the whole work, but it does so only by being incommensurable with it.

 

Notes

 

I would like to acknowledge the support of a post-doctoral fellowship from the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada, which helped me get this essay in motion several years ago.

 

1. A signal instance of such discussion is Marjorie Perloff’s essay, “Postmodernism and the Impasse of Lyric,” which endorses postmodernism in poetry in explictly anti-lyric terms. “Postmodernism in poetry,” she writes,

 

begins in the urge to return those materials so rigidly excluded--political, ethical, historical, philosophical--to the domain of poetry, which is to say that the Romantic lyric, the poem as expression of a moment of absolute insight, of emotion crystallized into timeless patterns, gives way to a poetry that can, once again, accommodate narrative and didacticism, the serious and the comic, verse and prose. (180-81)

 

More recently, Hank Lazer noted in a review-essay on a clutch of critical books (1990) that the thrust of postmodern criticism would appear to demand the elimination or the radical refiguring of the lyric.

 

The issue of what postmodernism in poetry is remains, of course, a complex one. I should make clear from the outset that I do not address the apparent gulf between postmodernism as it’s discussed in academic circles and postmodernism as it’s discussed in “the writing community”–meaning a group of writers, usually identified as poets, from Jackson Mac Low to Ron Silliman. In this essay, I’m interested neither in a postmodernist program, nor in the ways in which a poet’s articulated postmodernism (such as Silliman’s) relates to that poet’s work. Rather, I’m interested in the ways in which Ammons work registers or exemplifies features of a more general discursive field that includes popular culture, cultural studies, (now) mainstream theories of the postmodern, post-romantic lyric poetry, and academic literary criticism, as well as poetic departures from humanistic representationalism–especially of the self in lyric. Unlike many postmodern writers, Ammons remains a lyric poet; his commitment to a materialist poetics is not radical. See for example, Patrick Deane on Ammons’s early long poem “Tape for the Turn of the Year” (1965), which starts as a materialist exercise (writing a poem on a roll of adding machine tape) and ends by making of the material a figure for a transcendent condition. What I set out here, then, is Ammons’s undecideable relation to two orientations, an undecideability often present in mainstream discussions of the postmodern, and absent from discussions by avant-garde writers committed to materialist, anti-humanist procedures. (This difference may explain in part why there’s almost no dialogue across the gulf and indeed why only writers and critics conversant with the work of Mac Low et al. appear to be aware of the gulf–though the increasing visibility of Language writing will increase awareness on the side of the mainstream).

 

2. See, for example, Charles Altieri’s early essay on “immanentist” poetics in Boundary 2, later revised as the introduction to Enlarging the Temple (1978).

 

3. I’m invoking Altieri’s formulation in his 1980 essay on poetry and poetics of the ’70s, “From Experience to Discourse.”

 

4. Since the ’60s noise has been theorized in discourses drawing on cybernetics, but also in works as various as Jacques Attali’s Noise: the Political Economy of Music and Public Enemy’s rap “Bring the Noise.”

 

5. Iain Chambers describes the difference helpfully in slightly different terms:

 

Official culture, preserved in art galleries, museums, and university courses, demands cultivated tastes and a formally imparted knowledge. It demands moments of attention that are separated from the run of daily life. Popular culture, meanwhile, mobilizes the tactile, the incidental, the transitory, the expendable; the visceral. It does not involve an abstract aesthetic research amongst privileged objects of attention, but invokes mobile orders or sense, taste and desire. Popular culture is not appreciated through the apparatus of contemplation; but as Walter Benjamin once put it, through 'distracted reception.' The 'public is an examiner, but an absent-minded one.' (12)

 

See Benjamin’s “The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction.”

 

6. I would include here “Corsons Inlet,” “The City Limits,” “The Arc Inside and Out,” “For Harold Bloom,” and “Easter Morning.”

 

7. As Jan Zwicky puts it, “Lyric springs from the desire to recapture the intuited wholeness of the non-linguistic world, to heal the slash in the mind that is the capacity for language.” The recognition of the impossibility of that fulfillment “is the source of lyric’s poignancy” (230).

 

8. In 1985 Peter Sacks summarized the obstacles placed before elegy in the postmodern context:

 

Although the paradoxical "presence" in language of absent things has been renewed with unprecedented force in recent years, this renewal has been marked by a disconcerting tendency to deprive literature of much of that combination of strength and pathos so characteristically stressed by Wordsworth. For recent critics have not only undermined assumptions about the presentational powers of language, they have diminished the subjective pathos that attends those absences which the use of language may seek to redress or appease. (xi)

 

9.

Sorrow how high it is
that no wall holds it
back: deep

it is that no dam undermines
it: wide that it
comes on as up a strand

multiple and relentless:
the young that are
beautiful must die: the

old, departing,
can confer
nothing.  (Corsons Inlet 9)

 

10. See Jed Rasula’s interesting discussion of the coincident dominance of the workshop lyric and emergence in the late 1970s of various self-help theories and associations, including the notion of the “inner child” (421-25).

 

11. On this contradiction see Andrew Ross’s related discussion, “New Age Technoculture”:

 

There is a world of difference between the sort of holistic, or completist sense of identity espoused in New Age, and the sort of fragmentary identity that intellectual fractions in this society have become accustomed to talking about.... And I agree that the liberatory fantasies of many postmodern theorists... have little in common with the utopian fantasies of groups with less cultural capital--fantasies that are solidly tied to the hunger for completion, or self-transcendence. (554)

 

There’s little in common between Ammons’s positions as well. His work should be generally characterized as postmodern: it rejects the romantic project to “save the phenomenon” called the self. If it is to sustain a human subject this must be done according to materialist (or “scientific”) criteria rather than humanist accounts of experience. “What is saving,” he asks in Sphere (34, 41), then transposes the question to a materialist register: “can we make a home of motion” (76). But he oscillates between the two formulations; questions of motion frequently get transposed back into the “saving” mode which is, I think, the default mode for post-romantic poetry.

 

12. Ammons alludes to his brother’s death in various interviews, but see especially the statement, “`I Couldn’t Wait to Say the Word’” (1982), collected in Set in Motion. He notes that after his brother’s death,

 

I must have felt guilty for living and also endangered, as the only one left to be next. Mourning the loss of life, in life and in death, has been the undercurrent of much of my verse and accounts for tone of constraint that my attempts at wit, prolixity, and transcendence merely underscore. (35)

 

13. “In Wordsworth,” Vendler writes, “it sounds rather saner”:

 

                        How strange, that all
The terrors, pains, and early miseries,
Regrets, vexations, lassitudes interfused
Within my mind, should e'er have born a part,
And that a needful part, in making up
The calm existence that is mine when I
Am worthy of myself?  (Vendler 75)

 

14. Fredman takes this term from an essay by Stanley Cavell on Emerson and Thoreau though he doesn’t cite the resonant concluding passage in which Cavell contrasts Heidegger’s notion of poetic “dwelling” with the ideology implicit in the work of the Americans:

 

The substantive disagreement with Heidegger, shared by Emerson and Thoreau, is that the achievement of the human requires not inhabitation and settlement but abandonment, leaving. Then everything depends upon your realization of abandonment. For the significance of leaving lies in its discovery that you have settled something, that you have felt enthusiastically what there is to abandon yourself to, that you can treat the others there are as those to whom the inhabitation of the world can now be left. (138)

 

The enthusiasm of abandonment is the antidote to the despair of groundlessness. It ensures the work of assay.

 

15. In poetry, the crisis of subjectivity appears in the ungrounded poet’s attempts to constitute himself according to his own lights resulting in a neurotic oscillation between power and pathos. Positing tradition is a complex form of resistance to the vertigo realized by romanticism and conventionally resisted by apostrophe. Eliot’s famous insistence on impersonality is a polemical refusal of this dialectic (a dialectic which later became characteristically American), a refusal supported by the (European) tradition he projected through his career. Tradition functions like a scientific paradigm that allows “normal science” to be carried on; it “saves the phenomena”–poetry–and allows normal poetry (and criticism) to be carried on.

 

16. Wolfe explains this difference usefully in terms of the difference between analogue and digital representation.

 

17. Nature in this scheme suffers a kind of de-realization–no longer the transcendent medium for romantic disourse, not a metaphorical site whose remove from language enables poetic metaphor-making–becoming a series or web of changing relations which we know only as information. It, too, depending on our own knowledge and interpetive abilities, maintains a signal-to-noise ratio; but all encounters are contextualized by noise. Knowledge is not a matter of making other same, but a temporalized process or exchange taking place in a context that is partially known (signal) and partially not-known (noise). The long poem, ongoing, seems the only mode adequate to representing or participating in a cybernetic universe.

 

It is essential to note that a full account of cybernetics would demonstrate its links with practical strategies of government and industry. As its etymology indicates, cybernetics is about steering, about control. Specifically, it proposes strategies for maintaining control in open environments. I don’t have scope to show how a poem like Sphere diverges from “Essay on Poetics” as a cybernetic poem/system. Enough to say here that it finally emphasizes steering as it proceeds from the “sexual basis of all things” (first line of the poem) and local and mortal contexts to the motion of planet earth through the universe, ending with a rather totalizing anti-banal epiphany: “we’re ourselves: we’re sailing.” In its deliberate attempt to “be” a sphere the poem confuses being and representing, thus it ends on a point above rather than in the world, imagining a totality rather than ceaselessly producing one. Problems arise in Sphere for two reasons. First, cybernetic steering reaches a kind of outer limit of systems, and looks back at totality: the earth viewed as a metaphor for “human life,” a figure of extreme pathos: the earth as the inner child of humanity. Second, the void encountered beyond the earth-system recalls for Ammons the more personal void created by his brother’s death, an absolute event that refuses to “turn” along with the troping/turning of Motion. See McGuirk, “A.R. Ammons and the Whole Earth” for a more complete discussion of these questions. Cultural Critique 37 (Fall 1997): 131-58.

 

18. It might be said simply, that grief produces depth. A locus for this is Joyce’s “The Dead,” in which Gretta’s greater depth and superiority of character are significantly linked to her grief for Michael Furey. Her grief is the correlate of her deep self, hidden from Gabriel till the final scene of the story because it has not been assimilated into the world of meaning in which she lives. Its effect is to produce this subterranean world.

 

19. John Bradshaw, one of the best-know recovery theorists, writes in Homecoming: Reclaiming and Championing Your Inner Child (1990) that mourning

 

is the only way to heal the hole in the cup of your soul. Since we cannot go back in time and be children and get our needs met from our very own parents, we must grieve the loss of our childhood self and our childhood dependency needs. (211-12)

Works Cited

 

• Altieri, Charles. Enlarging the Temple: New Directions in American Poetry During the 1960’s. Lewisburg, Pa.: Bucknell UP, 1979.
• —. “From Experience to Discourse: American Poetry and Poetics in the Seventies.” Contemporary Literature 21.2 (Spring 1980): 191-224.
• —. “From Symbolist Thought to Immanence: The Ground of Postmodern Poetics.” boundary 21.3 (Spring 1973): 605-42.
• Ammons, A.R. Corson’s Inlet. Ithaca: Cornell UP, 1965.
• —. “Essay on Poetics.” Selected Longer Poems. New York: Norton, 1980. 30-54.
• —. “Extremes and Moderations.” Selected Longer Poems 55-66.
• —. “Hibernaculum.” Selected Longer Poems 67-104.
• —. Selected Poems: Expanded Edition. New York: Norton, 1986.
• —. Set in Motion: Essays, Interviews, & Dialogues. Ed. Zofia Burr. Ann Arbor: U of Michigan P, 1996.
• —. Sphere: the Form of a Motion. New York: Norton, 1974.
• —. “Summer Session.” Selected Longer Poems 16-29.
• Ashbery, John. “In the American Grain.” Bloom 57-62.
• Attali, Jacques. Noise: The Political Economy of Music. 1977. Trans. Brian Massumi. Minneapolis: U of Minnesota P, 1985.
• Bateson, Gregory. Steps to an Ecology of Mind. New York: Ballantine, 1972.
• Bender, John and David E. Wellbery. “Rhetoricality: On the Modernist Return of Rhetoric.” The Ends of Rhetoric: History, Theory, Practice. Eds. Bender and Wellbery. Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard UP, 1990. 3-39.
• Benjamin, Walter. “The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction.” Illuminations. New York: Schocken, 1968. 217-51.
• Bernstein, Charles. “Artifice of Absorption.” A Poetics. Cambridge: Harvard UP, 1992. 9-89.
• Bloom, Harold, ed. A.R. Ammons. New York: Chelsea House, 1986.
• Bradshaw, John. Homecoming: Reclaiming and Championing Your Inner Child. New York: Bantam, 1990.
• Burke, Kenneth. A Grammar of Motives. 1945. Berkeley: U of California P, 1969. 503-17.
• Cavell, Stanley. “Thinking of Emerson.” 1978. The Senses of Walden. Expanded edition. Chicago: Chicago UP, 1981. 123-38.
• Chambers, Iain. Popular Culture: The Metropolitan Experience. London: Methuen, 1986.
• Deane, Patrick. “Justified Radicalism: A.R. Ammons with a Glance at John Cage.” PLL 28.2 (Spring 1992): 206-22.
• Donoghue, Dennis. “More Poetry than Poems.” The New York Times Book Review 6 Sept. 1981: 5.
• Fredman, Stephen. The Grounding of American Poetry: Charles Olson and the Emersonian Tradition. New York: Cambridge UP, 1993.
• —. Poet’s Prose: The Crisis in American Verse. 1983. 2nd ed. New York: Cambridge UP, 1990.
• Jarraway, David R. “Ammons Beside Himself: Poetics of the `Bleak Periphery.’” Arizona Quarterly 49.4 (Winter 1993): 99-116.
• Koethe, John. “Contrary Impulses: The Tension between Poetry and Theory.” Critical Inquiry 18 (Autumn 1991): 64-75.
• Lazer, Hank. “The Politics of Form and Poetry’s Other Subjects: Reading Contemporary American Poetry.” American Literary History 2 (Fall 1990): 503-27.
• Lyotard, Jean-Francois. The Postmodern Condition: A Report on Knowledge. 1979. Trans. Geoff Bennington and Brian Massumi. Minneapolis: U of Minnesota P, 1984.
• Mellencamp, Patricia, ed. Logics of Television: Essays in Cultural Criticism. Bloomington: Indiana UP, 1990.
• Morse, Margaret. “An Ontology of Everyday Distraction: The Freeway, the Mall, and Television.” Mellencamp 193-221.
• Morris, Meaghan. “Banality in Cultural Studies.” Mellencamp 14-43.
• Perloff, Marjorie. “Postmodernism and the Impasse of Lyric.” The Dance of the Intellect: Studies in the Poetry of the Pound Tradition. New York: Cambridge UP, 1985. 172-200.
• Rasula, Jed. The American Poetry Wax Museum: Reality Effects, 1940-1990. Urbana, Ill.: NCTE, 1996.
• Ross, Andrew. “New Age Technoculture.” Cultural Studies. Eds. Lawrence Grossberg et al. London: Routledge, 1992. 531-55.
• Sacks, Peter. The English Elegy: Studies in the Genre from Spenser to Yeats. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins UP, 1985.
• Vendler, Helen. “Ammons.” Bloom 73-80.
• Walsh, William. “An Interview with A.R. Ammons.” Michigan Quarterly Review. 28.1 (Winter 1989): 105-17.
• Wolfe, Cary. “In Search of Post-Humanist Theory: The Second-Order Cybernetics of Maturana and Varela.” Cultural Critique (Spring 1995): 33-70.
• —. “Symbol Plural: The Later Long Poems of A.R. Ammons.” Contemporary Literature 30.1 (Spring 1989): 78-94.
• Zwicky, Jan. Lyric Philosophy. Toronto: U of Toronto P, 1992.

 

Benjamin Friedlander

Department of English
State University of New York at Buffalo
bef@acsu.buffalo.edu

 

Why does a poet write a statement of poetics? What can readers learn from reading such statements? Rather than answer directly, I would like to turn my attention to “Wild Form”¹ by Ron Silliman, a brief essay (1200 words) currently available on-line at SUNY-Buffalo’s Electronic Poetry Center.

 

Silliman’s title comes from a letter Jack Kerouac wrote to John Clellon Holmes, cited by Michael Davidson in The San Francisco Renaissance. A portion of this letter stands as the epigraph to Silliman’s essay:

 

What I'm beginning to discover now is something beyond the novel and beyond the arbitrary confines of the story... into realms of revealed Picture... wild form, man, wild form. Wild form's the only form holds what I have to say--my mind is exploding to say something about every image and every memory.... I have an irrational lust to set down everything I know.

 

Strangely, while Silliman does discuss, briefly, Kerouac’s phrase “revealed Picture,” he never again refers to the term “Wild Form.” Instead, shearing away the ragged word “Wild,” he focuses on “form as such,” beginning his account with the following statement:

 

Form is of interest only to the extent that it empowers liberation.

 

There are thus two openings to the essay–the epigraph from Kerouac (which gives a basis for the title), and Silliman’s own definition (which narrows the focus from “wild form” to “form as such”). In what follows, I want to address the connection between these two openings, in order to show how writers demonstrate as well as state their aims–in order to show, that is, the important role formal pattern and characteristic gestures play in the writing of poetics.

 

Silliman’s first paragraph, a single sentence, is direct and clear:

 

Form is of interest only to the extent that it empowers liberation.

 

Later statements elaborate on this notion. “Form is social,” we read, and also, “The purpose of the poem… is to change the world.” To some extent, these ideas echo Kerouac, who expresses a desire to escape “the arbitrary confines of the story.” Kerouac’s interest in form, like Silliman’s, is liberation, “an irrational lust to set down everything I know.” For Kerouac, however, at least as quoted in the epigraph, liberation occurs through the practice of writing–is aesthetic liberation. Silliman, though he never says so directly, appears to mean political liberation. Playing on a famous phrase of Marx, he enjoins poetry “to change the world.”² Focusing on form as a social rather than an aesthetic phenomenon, he defines the poet as an agent of social change–a definition made plainer in Silliman’s 1989 response to Jean Baudrillard, “What Do Cyborgs Want?”:

 

The question confronting poetry is not what is the best poem, nor even the best poetry, but what are the social roles of the poem and how can these be raised to the level of consciousness so that the power relations upon which poetry itself is constituted become perceptible and vulnerable to challenge. (36)

 

As a consequence of these intimations, the undefined connection between Silliman’s epigraph and first sentence partly resolves into an unspoken connection between two forms of liberation–one centered on writing as aesthetic object, the other on writing as socio-political act.

 

Adapting Silliman’s later comment on Louis Zukofsky, we might say that he begins the essay by offering two distinct interpretations of the meaning of the word liberation–liberation as “suggestion of possibility” (art), and liberation as “horizon or limit” (politics). Of course, in adapting this distinction between “suggestion of possibility” and “horizon or limit” to the opening of Silliman’s essay, I’ve overturned the priority Silliman himself assigns these terms. For Silliman, “suggestion of possibility” is clearly preferable to “horizon or limit,” at least as regards the work of Louis Zukofsky. As we shall see, however, this overturning of received hierarchies of value is one of Silliman’s most characteristic rhetorical effects. Indeed, more than a mere effect, this process of transformation is itself a value–perhaps the one underlying value of Silliman’s work.

 

For Kerouac, “form” is linked to discovery; the “irrational lust to set down everything I know” leads to a new and freer approach to writing. Only this new approach, Kerouac declares, will be able to “hold” what his “mind” is now “exploding to say.” The paradoxical combination of freedom (“exploding”) and boundedness (“holds”) results in a somewhat oxymoronic coinage,” wild form,” italicized by Kerouac as if to emphasize the improbability of the linkage. Improbable or not, however, the doubleness is essential. Assisted by “wild form,” the author would journey “beyond the arbitrary confines” of art into “realms of revealed Picture.” Writing (placed under the rubric of “Wild Form”) becomes both verb (journey) and noun (realm). Silliman’s definition likewise shows two aspects. For Silliman too, writing is both noun and verb, object and act. Placing writing under the rubric of “form as such,” Silliman notes:

 

The term form is often misused. What people often mean by it is not form as such--structure that proves generative and inherent--but pattern, exoskeletal reiteration.

 

Form is at once inherent “structure” (object), and a force that “proves generative” (act). But a shift has occurred; if Kerouac’s goal is discovery, Silliman’s is growth. The metaphor of realm and journey has given way to a subtle organicism. At the same time, the person who takes the journey, the discoverer, has disappeared, and has been replaced in a ghostly manner by the work itself. In other words, in Silliman’s poetics it is not the artist who “proves generative,” but the artist’s work. The artist exploding to speak has now become a form that speaks by exploding.

 

Silliman’s first sentence asserts a causal link between “Form” and “liberation”: the one is said to further the aims of the other. How? This we aren’t told. Nor are we told if different kinds of form are required for different kinds of liberation. But then, the essay doesn’t speak of liberation in the plural; the distinction between political and aesthetic freedom–freedom in the world and freedom in writing–is at best implicit. Nonetheless, toward the end of his essay, in a passage of peculiar intricacy, Silliman does allude to this difference between aesthetics and politics– an allusion set off in quotation marks, disguised as a self-rebuke. Without actually addressing liberation, focusing instead on form (form which “empowers” liberation), he declares:

 

The relation of the poem to the world is not simply accumulative, any more than it is reflective or expressive. The perfection of new forms as interventions to nature. The purpose of the poem, like that of any act, is to change the world.

 

"The sort of person who could confuse the fibonacci number system with class struggle." Rather conjoin, to contrast, contest, and compare.

 

The intricacy of the passage is partly due to its odd construction–five sentences incorporating an unattributed quote and a transition between two paragraphs. Who speaks the quoted sentence? Why is it cited? And how do the two paragraphs relate to one another? Does the space between them indicate a shift in focus? Or is this paragraph break a graphic iteration of the uncertain connection between “poem” and “world”?

 

The fulcrum of the passage is Silliman’s assertion that “The purpose of the poem… is to change the world.” On either side of that assertion we are offered two opposing opinions, almost as if two see-saws were balanced on the opposite ends of a third. On one side of the fulcrum, addressing a famous dictum by William Carlos Williams, Silliman writes:

 

WCW: "The perfection of new forms as additions to nature." This axiom, which I once felt close to in my own writing, seems too passive to me now. The relation of the poem to the world is not simply accumulative.... The perfection of new forms as interventions to nature.

 

This is see-saw one, “accumulation” vs. “intervention.” On the other side of the fulcrum, describing see-saw two (“confuse” vs. “conjoin“), Silliman addresses the dictum of someone unknown:

 

"The sort of person who could confuse the fibonacci number system with class struggle." Rather conjoin, to contrast, contest, and compare.

 

The symmetry is especially important because it helps to establish a link between the two paragraphs; allows us to read the two paragraphs as a single utterance. Ignoring the symmetry, the two paragraphs are simply two separate chains of assertions; taken together, they constitute a form (Figure A).

 

                      Theory
                  (see-saw three)
                         .
                         .          "intervention"
                         .           (see-saw one,
                         .              upside)
                         .      ---
                         . ---
                     --- .
                ---      .
"accumulation"           .
 (see-saw one,           .
   downside)             .
                         .
                     (fulcrum)
                         .
                         .           "conjoin"
                         .            (see-saw two,
                         .               upside)
                         .       ---
                         . ---
                     --- .
                ---      .
  "confuse"              .
(see-saw two,            .
  downside)              .
                         .
                      Practice
                   (see-saw three)

                      Figure A

 

I noted before that Kerouac’s metaphor of journey becomes, in Silliman’s poetics, a subtle organicism. On first reading, therefore, it might seem that Silliman is becoming inconsistent. Superficially, “accumulation” appears the more “generative” option; “intervention,” by contrast, recalls Kerouac’s movement “beyond… arbitrary confines.” But the inconsistency is only apparent. The original definition reads:

 

The term form is often misused. What people often mean by it is not form as such--structure that proves generative and inherent--but pattern, exoskeletal reiteration.

 

Accumulation–what William Carlos Williams calls “additions to nature”–appears “generative” but in fact is mere “reiteration”; is “exoskeletal,” not “inherent.” Somehow, then, the “inherent” form “proves generative,” not as “accumulation,” but as an “intervention.” On see-saw one, Silliman is counterposing two distinct notions of nature and form. There, on that side, he places “pattern,” “exoskeletal reiteration,” “accumulation”; here, on this side, “structure”–“inherent” and “generative”–and “intervention.” Describing the passage in this way, of course, as a kind of see-saw, we are responding to Silliman’s representations about nature and form as precisely that–representations, a form of debate in which argument as such gives way to contrasting chains of words. In this context, moreover, it is worth noting the political connotations of two of these words: “Intervention” suggests political intervention; “accumulation” suggests accumulation of capital.

 

Let us now look at the other side of the fulcrum, the second see-saw:

 

"The sort of person who could confuse the fibonacci number system with class struggle." Rather conjoin, to contrast, contest, and compare.

 

At issue here is the connection between art and politics–between the fibonacci number system (used by Silliman to compose his long poem Tjanting) and class struggle. Silliman has discussed this matter in an interview with Tom Beckett, published in 1985 in The Difficulties:

 

With Tjanting, it took me more than eight months to go from my first rough sketches of what a piece built on the concept of the Fibonacci number series might look like to the composition of a two-word first sentence….

 

What factors enter into a decision to use a given procedure?

 

...Again to use Tjanting as case in point, the original impulse there was a question that had been recurring to me for at least 5 years: what would class struggle look like, viewed as a form? (35)

 

As Silliman goes on to note, the Fibonacci number series is a sequence in which “each term is the sum of the two previous terms: 1, 1, 2, 3, 5, 8, 13, 21, 34,” and so on ad infinitum (35). Because Silliman proposed in Tjanting to write a poem shaped, dialectically, as a sequence of alternating, opposed paragraphs, “the most important aspect of the Fibonacci series turned out to be… the fact that it begins with two ones” (36).³ That quirk, along with the fact that the numbers increase asymmetrically, “not only permitted the parallel articulation of two sequences of paragraphs, but also determined that their development would be uneven, punning back to the general theory of class struggle” (36). In Tjanting, the number of sentences in each paragraph matches in sequence the numbers of the Fibonacci series; beginning with two one-sentence paragraphs (“Not this” and “What then?”), the poem proceeds through to two final paragraphs of 2,584 and 4,181 sentences each. The sense of alternation and opposition is maintained by a mathematically plotted repetition of sentences–the repetitions “rewritten so as to reveal their constructedness, their artificiality as elements of meaning, their otherness” (36). As the poem proceeds and the paragraphs grow longer, the repeated sentences all but disappear, ghostly echoes of history giving circumspect coherence to a world of rapidly exploding language.

 

According to Silliman’s comments in his Difficulties interview, the relationship between art and politics in Tjanting is principally a matter of analogy–or more accurately, representation. The poem (Tjanting) is an attempt to show what one particular aesthetic form (the Fibonacci number series) “might look like” as text; the aesthetic form is in turn an attempt to show what one particular political content (class struggle) “would… look like, viewed as a form.” The phrase “look like” is important: we are dealing here with analogies, with mimetological constructs. Whether one really does resemble the other is of secondary importance. The emphasis, fundamentally, is on the general schematic correlation Silliman proposes to explore between aesthetic form and political content. The goal of the project, its “original impulse,” is speculative: to put into play one particular representation of the relationship between art and politics. The resulting work (Tjanting) may well fail to bear out the assumptions underlying the proposed schema. This doesn’t mean, however, that the underlying “impulse” is faulty. Nor does it mean, necessarily, that the work itself is without interest. The real question, therefore, is not the reliability of the specific representation (“fibonacci” as “class struggle”) but the usefulness of the general correlation proposed between art and politics. In “Wild Form,” the quoted remark (“‘The sort of person who could confuse…’”) is focused on the specific mode of representation enacted in Tjanting, but Silliman is quick to appreciate the applicability of this rebuke to his schema’s underlying assumptions. Indeed, while the humor of the rebuke lies in its implausibility (no one would ever confuse “fibonacci” and “class struggle”), the sting derives from a less literal reading: that Silliman is confused about the difference between aesthetics and politics; that the poem Tjanting papers-over a nonrelation between political content and aesthetic form. Silliman’s inclusion of the rebuke–and his rejoinder–is therefore an important clue to his views on the connection between the two kinds of liberation (aesthetic, political) alluded to in his essay’s opening. In a sense, the see-saw between “confuse” and “conflate” represents in miniature a kind of politico-aesthetic disputation. Its subject: the relation or nonrelation between the freedom of writing and the writing of freedom.

 

Silliman’s rejoinder takes the form of a substitution. “Confuse” becomes “conjoin,” and then (in a chain of substitutions) “contrast,” “contest,” and “compare.” Taking this “form,” the rejoinder illustrates one of Silliman’s central ideas: that the poem is an “act” and that the poem’s goal is “change.” Elaborating on this notion, I would say that the poem, for Silliman, being principally an act, is only secondarily a statement. This is Silliman’s most important difference from Kerouac, who describes himself to John Clellon Holmes as “exploding to say something,” “to set down everything I know.” Charged with the crime of confusion, Silliman’s response is better described as a counter-action than a counter-statement. True to the poem’s purpose as act, he changes the word.

 

Such a response may not satisfy the one who makes the rebuke (the original charge, after all, was Silliman’s ostensibly illegitimate substitution of “fibonacci” for “class struggle”); the response is nonetheless a consistent extension of Silliman’s form (a chain of possible substitutions entered into an ever-widening context) from the realm of art into the world contextualizing art. Like “Wild Form” as a whole, the rejoinder is a moment of polemic. For despite the welter of definitions and asides, Silliman’s “Wild Form” is less an accumulation of positions than an intervention in the world where positions accumulate.

 

Earlier in “Wild Form,” having discussed the importance of context, form’s “situational specificity,” Silliman makes brief reference to another literary intervention, another moment of polemic:

 

Here we discover in part the confusion that caused the first battle of the San Francisco poetry wars to become so intense: the meaning of Robert Duncan’s “problem” with Barrett Watten’s schematic representation of Zukofsky’s form differed from that of David Levi Strauss….

 

But there have always been two possible readings of Zukofsky--Zukofsky as suggestion of possibility and Zukofsky as horizon or limit.

 

Despite the importance Silliman ascribes to this moment in contemporary literary history–he calls it the first battle of a war–he offers no narrative account of what transpired and no summation of the positions taken by the various combatants. For the moment, therefore, let us look at this passage solely as a formal pattern, a structural model for discussing poetry’s intervention in the world. Viewed solely as a model, the similarity of this structure to the pattern of Silliman’s discussion of Tjanting becomes evident. As before, we see a set of see-saws (“Duncan” and “Strauss” vs. “Watten,” “suggestion of possibility” vs. “horizon or limit”) set into motion on the opposite ends of another fulcrum. Again, the cue is confusion–the word Silliman cites in rebuke to himself in the passage concerning fibonacci and class struggle. There, the confusion is due, ostensibly, to Silliman’s innovative conception of form–a conception which creatively seeks to link aesthetic form and political content. In the passage concerning “the first battle of the San Francisco Poetry Wars,” the confusion also has something to do with form–more specifically, the representation of form, “Barrett Watten’s schematic representation of Zukofsky’s form,” a representation problematic for two different poets for two different reasons. (The earlier confusion also has to do with representation–Silliman’s use of fibonacci to represent class struggle.) In the conflict between Duncan/Strauss and Watten we therefore discover a polemic analogous to that between Silliman and the unnamed critic who faults Tjanting‘s discontinuous leap from art into politics.

 

What to make of this symmetrical set of references to confusion? And what of the parallel Silliman draws between the two controversial notions of form (Silliman’s and Watten’s)? A closer look at the second passage as a whole only amplifies the mystery:

 

The meaning of any second generation is always the reification of the past, even if only to stabilize a sense of the present in order to render it less threatening and chaotic.

 

Here we discover in part the confusion that caused the first battle of the San Francisco poetry wars to become so intense: the meaning of Robert Duncan’s “problem” with Barrett Watten’s schematic representation of Zukofsky’s form differed from that of David Levi Strauss. While both Duncan and Levi Strauss were committed to a fundamentalist reduction of Zukofsky’s work, their relationship to the sacred text was substantially different.

 

But there have always been two possible readings of Zukofsky--Zukofsky as suggestion of possibility and Zukofsky as horizon or limit.

 

We begin with an assertion about the “meaning of any second generation.” Since Silliman’s definition of form privileges the “generative,” we might expect “second generation” to stand as proof of success. But success, apparently, leads ineluctably to stabilization, to “reification” (a kind of “exoskeletal reiteration”), to frightened retreat. The “meaning” of success is “always” failure. In this dialectical formulation “we discover,” writes Silliman, “the confusion that caused the… poetry wars to become so intense.” But do we? What has the difference between Robert Duncan and David Levi Strauss got to do with the “meaning” of each’s “‘problem’” with Barrett Watten? And what has this “‘problem’” to do with the “two possible readings of Zukofsky”? More to the point, where exactly does the confusion lie? Whose confusion? About what?

 

Both Duncan and Strauss, writes Silliman, “were committed to a fundamentalist reduction of Zukofsky’s work,” yet “their relationship to the sacred text was substantially different.” Since Silliman describes both poets (Duncan and Strauss) as readers of Zukofsky, it’s difficult to see how their “substantially different” forms of reading bear out the earlier claim about the difference between first and second generation. With regard to Zukofsky, wouldn’t both poets be “second” generation? Wouldn’t Watten too? (Further, is “reification” the same thing as “fundamentalist reduction”? What about Watten’s “schematic representation”?) Complicating our reading of this passage is Silliman’s decision not to make explicit his generational distinctions, or even his understanding of the word “generation.” Presumably, he means to say that Zukofsky (b. 1904), Duncan (b. 1919), and Watten (b. 1948) are all equally innovators, and thus all equally members of a “first” generation; Strauss (b. 1954) would consequently stand as the lone example of “second.” Stated in this manner, it becomes clear that Silliman’s use of the word “generation” is itself a reification; in the end, what substantiates his distinction between “first” and “second” is not an empirical relation (like that between older and younger poet, originator and elaborator, master and apprentice), but rather, the nature of a poet’s accommodation to a “threatening and chaotic” present. Generation as such is irrelevant. The latecomers are those whose attunement to the present falls under the heading of “reification of the past”–those whose strategy of intervention takes the form of stabilization.

 

“To reify” means, among other things, to render abstractions in concrete terms–a process of transformation which inevitably tends toward distortion. To be sure, the result of this process isn’t simply distortion; nor is this distortion an entirely useless phenomenon. As Silliman’s own attempt to render “class struggle” as “fibonacci” indicates, the process of reification–even when ending in “confusion”–often leads to the discovery of entirely new abstractions. The problem, apparently, with “reification of the past” is not so much the distortion which results from rendering abstract concepts concrete as the fact that this process is focused on the past. Of course, as Silliman himself notes, this “reification of the past” is itself a form of focus on the present–an attempt “to stabilize a sense of the present in order to render it less threatening and chaotic.” Viewed from this perspective, the difference between “first” and “second” generation–no longer an empirical designation–is not even a matter of whether or not a given poet remains fixed on the past or present. In the end, the principal basis for assigning a poet to one generation or another is the value ascribed to that fixity by the one who does the assigning. By declaring a poet engaged in “reification of the past”–even if this “reification” is a strategy of relation to the present–Silliman defines the poet, ipso facto, as the member of a “second” generation. Presumably, by declaring this same poet attuned to the present–even if this attunement remains a strategy of relation to the past–Silliman would be able to raise him or her to the status of “first.” The difficulty we have getting a handle on this definition may be partly due to a slight misstatement in Silliman’s original formulation:

 

The meaning of any second generation is always the reification of the past, even if only to stabilize a sense of the present in order to render it less threatening and chaotic.

 

The qualification “even if” suggests that stabilization is a reasonable basis for reification–a form of self-preservation against threat and chaos–but reading this passage within the context of “Wild Form” as a whole, it’s clear that this reasonable desire for stability is precisely the problem. In Kerouac’s terms, stabilization of the present means settling for “the arbitrary confines of the story” rather than risking a journey through threat and chaos into “realms of revealed Picture.” For Silliman, the intelligibility of “story” is decidedly “second”; “first” comes apparent “confusion,” “threatening and chaotic,” what Kerouac calls “wild.”⁴

 

According to Silliman, both Duncan and Strauss, despite their shared “‘problem’” with Watten’s “schematic representation of Zukofsky’s form,” each maintained a “substantially different” relation to “the sacred text.” Further, he tells us that this difference helps to explain why “the first battle of the San Francisco poetry wars” became “so intense.” The suggestion is that the war was fought between Duncan and Strauss over Watten’s Zukofsky, but this is not the case. What Silliman calls “the first battle” is in fact a compression of two separate conflicts: the earlier was instigated by Duncan and waged against Watten over Zukofsky (1978); the later was begun by Strauss and waged by Watten’s and Duncan’s friends over a recapitulation of the Duncan/Watten episode of 1978 (1984).⁵ Collapsing these two occasions into one, the serial nature of Duncan’s and Strauss’s problems with Watten falls away. That is, in Silliman’s account the actual object of aggression (“Barrett Watten’s schematic representation of Zukofsky’s form”) drops from the picture, replaced by the difference between Duncan and Strauss.

 

The nature of this substantial difference between Duncan and Strauss remains unclear. Unclear also is the importance of this difference for Silliman’s essay as a whole. Here again is the relevant passage:

 

[T]he meaning of Robert Duncan’s “problem” with Barrett Watten… differed from that of David Levi Strauss. While both Duncan and Levi Strauss were committed to a fundamentalist reduction of Zukofsky’s work, their relationship to the sacred text was substantially different.

 

But there have always been two possible readings of Zukofsky--Zukofsky as suggestion of possibility and Zukofsky as horizon or limit.

 

Reading these lines in ignorance of the so-called “first battle of the San Francisco poetry wars,” one might easily assume that the “two possible readings of Zukofsky” Silliman has in mind are Duncan’s and Strauss’s. Knowing some of the history involved makes it likely, of course, that Silliman associates Watten (who wrote the introduction to Tjanting) with the first type of reading (“Zukofsky as suggestion of possibility”), and Duncan and Strauss (each “committed to a fundamentalist reduction”) with the second (“Zukofsky as horizon or limit”).⁶ Why Watten’s “schematic representation” should correspond to “possibility” nonetheless remains unclear–unclear because, as noted above, Silliman never develops a characterization of Watten’s reading; Watten has fallen away, as has the promise of explaining the “intensity” of the war which erupted around his reading. The problem, apparently, is the inapplicability of Silliman’s binary constructions (of which there are two: the first involving generation, the second involving styles of reading) to his three-fold example, his three readers of Zukofsky (Duncan, Watten, and Strauss).

 

Silliman proposes in this passage to explain why a battle became “intense.” He proposes also to help us discover an important confusion. Unfortunately, if we follow Silliman through in these two proposals, we discover a different sort of confusion altogether–one that is strangely reminiscent of the rebuke Silliman cites with regard to Tjanting, the claim that he has confused “fibonacci” and “class struggle.” In both instances, Silliman conflates two incommensurate terms of debate. In the case of “fibonacci” and “class struggle,” the terms are incommensurate because they derive from the supposedly discrete worlds of art and politics. Here, in the case of “the first battle of the San Francisco poetry wars,” the incommensurability between the two parts of the argument (reading, generation) derives instead from a slippage, a shift in Silliman’s attention from the unexplained “problem” between Duncan/Strauss and Watten, to the unexplained difference between Duncan and Strauss. More accurately, of course, the former case discusses a slippage while the latter enacts one; the analogy, qua analogy, nonetheless holds. In the case of “the first battle of the San Francisco poetry wars,” Silliman’s argument moves (Figure B) in a manner structurally analogous to that of the passage where he discusses “fibonacci” and “class struggle”–as a set of see-saws, each balanced on the opposite ends of yet another see-saw. (If the third see-saw were to then become the first see-saw in a new set, the structure would assume the classic Marxist form of historical progress.) The chief difference between the two cases lies in the nature of the underlying relation, the third see-saw. In Figure A, this third see-saw marks out a relationship between theory (see-saw one) and practice (see-saw two). In Figure B, the purpose of the third see-saw remains unintelligible. Earlier, in commenting on the unattributed critique of Tjanting, I noted that Silliman’s general insight about the correlation of aesthetic form and political content retains intellectual force quite apart from the success or failure of any specific text. Another way of putting this would be to say that the architectural plan remains sound even if the building erected on that plan’s basis fails to meet code. The two passages sketched in Figures A and B bear this contention out, if indirectly, by utilizing the same formal pattern in successful and unsuccessful manners, respectively.⁷

 

                          ?
                   (see-saw three)
                          .
                          .              Watten
                          .           (see-saw one,
                          .              upside)
                          .      ---
                          . ---
                      --- .
                 ---      .
Duncan/Strauss            .
 (see-saw one,            .
   downside)              .
                          .
                          .
                      (fulcrum)
                          .
                          .               Duncan
                          .            (see-saw two,
                          .               upside)
                          .       ---
                          . ---
                      --- .
                  ---     .
    Strauss               .
 (see-saw two,            .
   downside)              .
                          .
                   (see-saw three)
                          ?

                       Figure B

 

Let us now return to the unexplained matter of Silliman’s double opening, the discontinuity between Silliman’s epigraph (from Kerouac) and his first lines (which replace Kerouac’s definition of form with Silliman’s own). The oblique oddness of this opening resolves into two questions: On one hand, why cite Kerouac if Kerouac’s definition of form is faulty? On the other hand, why alter the definition if Kerouac’s intuitions remain fundamentally correct? The answer to this pair of questions lies in the underlying meaning of Silliman’s characteristic gesture–a transformation of meaning enacted through conscious and unconscious slippage, through the overturning of received hierarchies of value, through the construction of chains of substitution. To accept Kerouac’s definition of “Wild Form” without alteration would be tantamount to a self-suppression of this gesture–would mean, in Kerouac’s own terms, remaining stuck in “the arbitrary confines of the story” instead of risking the journey “into realms of revealed Picture.” In order for Silliman’s appreciation of Kerouac to remain true to the source, to be a journey, he must follow his own insights beyond the now “arbitrary confines” of Kerouac’s discovery, “Wild Form.” This Silliman does by immediately shifting the focus from aesthetics to politics, from the freedom of writing to the writing of freedom. At the same time, following the characteristic path of his own thought, Silliman subjects his own insights to a process of transformation in which the ultimate meaning of his statement remains in doubt.

 

Silliman’s characteristic gesture is to avoid the risk of stabilizing his own position by setting in motion a see-saw of contrasting stances (his own and another’s) and then abandoning the see-saw in toto for a second see-saw whose relation to the first remains largely unspoken. For this reason, however intelligible Silliman’s writing may be sentence by sentence, the text as a whole aspires to a state beyond intelligibility, a paratactic state of signification in which the relations between sentences bear much of the burden of meaning. Is Silliman successful in this aspiration? Probably not. The particular positions adopted along the way–on see-saw one and see-saw two–tend to linger in memory, resisting the text’s overall resistance to stabilization, falling prey, at last, to the arbitrary confines of intelligibility. Sometimes, too, parataxis fails to lend coherence and the text falls prey to mere confusion. Still, the effort involved is remarkable, and retains intellectual force on a global scale despite the local failure of this or that attempt at transformation.

 

I began this essay by asking why poets write statements of poetics. An answer particular to Silliman might begin by asserting that the very phrase “Statement of Poetics” embodies a contradiction, that statements offer refuge from the risk of confusion, while poetics offer refuge from the risk of intelligibility. Yoking the two aims together suggests something like a desire to confront–and so transcend–the contradiction outright. Silliman’s succinct articulation of this desire in Tjanting–the twin, repeated sentences “Not this. What then?”–provides the structural model for this movement of transcendence:

 

Not this.

 

What then?

 

I started over & over. Not this.

 

Last week I wrote “the muscles in my palm so sore from halving the rump roast I cld barely grip the pen.” What then? This morning my lip is blisterd.

 

Of about to within which. Again & again I began. The gray light of day fills the yellow room in a way wch is somber. Not this. Hot grease had spilld on the stove top.

 

Nor that either. Last week I wrote “the muscle at thumb’s root so taut from carving that beef I thought it wld cramp.” Not so. What then? Wld I begin? This morning my lip is tender, disfigurd. I sat in an old chair out behind the anise. I cld have gone about this some other way.

 

Wld it be different with a different pen? Of about to within which what. Poppies grew out of the pile of old broken-up cement. I began again & again. These clouds are not apt to burn off. The yellow room has a sober hue. Each sentence accounts for its place. Not this. Old chairs in the back yard rotting from winter. Grease on the stove top sizzled & spat. It's the same, only different. Ammonia's odor hangs in the air. Not not this. (11-12)

 

In these first seven paragraphs of Tjanting (corresponding to the 1, 1, 2, 3, 5, 8 and 13 of the Fibonacci series), Silliman’s oblique observations and repetitions seem to share very little, both formally and in their content, with the pointed pronouncements of “Wild Form.” Note, however, the conjunction of writing and meat-cutting, a conjunction which proposes the “carving” of a “beef” (i.e., polemic) as Silliman’s model for the composition of poetry. Note too the Duncan-like contractions of “blisterd,” “spilld” and “disfigurd,” a poetic allusion which highlights just the sort of generational debt Silliman explores more prosaically in “Wild Form.” “It’s the same, only different.” Like the rewritten sentences of Tjanting–mathematically plotted repetitions aspiring in their totality to a condition beyond that of mere form: aspiring, that is, to a condition of “class struggle”–so too the underlying see-saw structure of “Wild Form,” a characteristic formal pattern which reveals more vividly than Silliman’s direct statements the transcendent aspirations animating his work as a whole.

 

A text that moves forward–in the manner of Silliman’s “Not this. What then?”–with an eye toward escaping its own “arbitrary confines” is like a see-saw on a see-saw, always in motion, unable to keep balance except by setting more see-saws in motion on the further ends of newly discovered fulcrums. Caught between confusion and intelligibility, such a text will speak most authoritatively–in Silliman’s terms, “empower liberation” most directly–in its underlying formal patterns. To read such a text will therefore require, first and foremost, a careful attending to these formal patterns, a decipherment of their meaning and a weighing of their efficacy. This is what Silliman has in mind when he notes that the structure of his work, however obscure, is not “hidden,” but rather “available through the process of reading the text.” Visual and musical patterns such as those which structure the sonnet are discernible to the eye and ear; not so the numerically plotted repetitions of Tjanting, and not so the triple see-saw form of “Wild Form.” The discovery of Tjanting‘s form and the form of “Wild Form” is only possible through a reading of the text. Further, to read those texts without attending to their underlying structures would be to miss the point entirely. As Silliman himself notes at the end of the essay “Of Theory, to Practice”:

 

Every mode of poem is the manifestation of some set of assumptions. It's no more foolish to be conscious of them--and their implications extending into the daily life of the real world--than it is to actually have some idea how to drive before getting behind the wheel of a car. (The New Sentence 62)

 

In order to understand what the poet is driving at, one needs to know what and how he or she is driving–an appropriately automotive metaphor given the genealogy of Silliman’s thinking in the work of Kerouac.

 

Notes

 

1. All quotations lacking specific page numbers refer to this electronic text.

 

2. See, e.g., the last of Marx’s “Theses on Feuerbach”: “The philosophers have only interpreted the world, in various ways; the point, however, is to change it” (145).

 

3. I say that the poem is shaped dialectically, but insofar as Tjanting‘s interchange of ideas occurs formally and not as a mode of argumentation, it is far from certain whether the resulting work is itself dialectical. Borrowing a motif from deconstruction, it may be more accurate to describe Silliman’s poetic adaptations of Marxist-Hegelian structures as a “quasi-dialectic.” (See, e.g., Geoffrey Bennington’s comments on “the prefix ‘quasi-‘ or the adverb ‘quasiment’” in Jacques Derrida [268].) Silliman himself has spoken of poetic structure as a matter of “syllogistic flow,” but here too there is a lingering analogical reference to class struggle (and thus dialectical materialism) as Silliman’s notion of “syllogistic movement” is based on the work of Ferruccio Rossi-Landi, whose “Linguistics and Economics argues that language-use arises from the need to divide labor in the community, and that the elaboration of language-systems and of labor production, up to and including all social production, follow parallel paths” (The New Sentence, 178, 90, 78). My reliance in the present essay on the metaphorical term “see-saw” is thus partly a consequence of my dissatisfaction with both “dialectics” and “syllogism” as descriptions of the logic underlying Silliman’s critical and poetic writings.

 

4. This theoretical privileging of confusion over intelligibility is hinted at in “The Chinese Notebooks,” a Wittgensteinian investigation from the 1970s where Silliman asks, in entry no. 123, “What is the creative role of confusion in any work?” (The Age of Huts 55). “Wild Form” suggests an answer to this question, namely, that confusion is a calculated risk essential to the work’s function as a journey of discovery beyond the so-called “arbitrary confines” of any given set of ideas or ideology.

 

5. After a brief respite, a second “battle” erupted in 1985. Watten was once again the focus of antagonism, but this time the instigator was Tom Clark. For an account of the 1984 events, see De Villo Sloan, “‘Crude Mechanical Access’ or ‘Crude Personism’: A Chronicle of One San Francisco Bay Area Poetry War.” Nils Ya analyzes the 1978 confrontation in I Am a Child: Poetry after Bruce Andrews and Robert Duncan.

 

6. See, e.g., “Negative Solidarity: Revisionism and ‘New American’ Poetics,” where Silliman speaks of the “vociferous and hostile… reaction” to Language Poetry by writers “associated within or relatively close to the older New American project” (171). In a footnote, he specifically names Duncan and Strauss, including them in a list of critics “who commented upon ‘language poetry’ in terms that echo Norman Podhoretz’ dismissal of the ‘Know-Nothing Bohemians’” (176 n. 10). For a brief response, see David Levi Strauss, “A Note on Us & Them.”

 

7. I say “successful” and “unsuccessful,” but insofar as Silliman, at strategic moments, privileges confusion over intelligibility, the valuations I apply to these two instances of argumentation might well be reversed. In this respect, entry number 120 in “The Chinese Notebooks” provides a useful reminder of the central issue at stake in my reading of “Wild Form”: “Only esthetic consistency constitutes content…. Applied to writing one arrives at the possibility of a ‘meaningful’ poetry as the sum of ‘meaningless’ poems” (The Age of Huts 55).

Works Cited

 

• Bennington, Geoffrey and Jacques Derrida. Jacques Derrida. Trans. Geoffrey Bennington. Chicago: U of Chicago P, 1993.
• Davidson, Michael. The San Francisco Renaissance: Poetics and Community at Mid-Century. Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 1989.
• Marx, Karl. “Theses on Feuerbach.” The Marx-Engels Reader. Ed. Robert C. Tucker. New York: W.W. Norton, 1978.
• Silliman, Ron. The Age of Huts. New York: Roof Books, 1986.
• —. “Interview” [with Tom Beckett]. The Difficulties 2:2 (1985): 34-46.
• —. “Negative Solidarity: Revisionism and ‘New American’ Poetics.” Sulfur 22 (Spring 1988): 169-76.
• —. The New Sentence. New York: Roof Books, 1987.
• —. Tjanting. Berkeley: The Figures, 1981.
• —. “What Do Cyborgs Want? (Paris, Suburb of the Twentieth Century).” Jean Baudrillard: The Disappearance of Art and Politics. Ed. William Stearns and William Chaloupka. New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1992.
• —. “Wild Form.” Electronic Poetry Center. http://wings.buffalo.edu/epc/authors/silliman/wildform.
• Sloan, De Villo. “‘Crude Mechanical Access’ or ‘Crude Personism’: A Chronicle of One San Francisco Bay Area Poetry War.” Sagetrieb 4:2-3 (Fall-Winter 1985): 241- 54.
• Strauss, David Levi. “A Note on Us & Them.” Temblor 9 (1989): 121.
• Ya, Nils. “I Am a Child.” I Am a Child: Poetry after Bruce Andrews and Robert Duncan. Ed. William R. Howe and Benjamin Friedlander. Buffalo: Tailspin Press, 1994. 43-57.

 

Alec McHoul

Media Communication and Culture
Murdoch University
mchoul@central.murdoch.edu.au

“Norbert’s Crossing”
©1997, Alec McHoul

 

It may very well be a good thing for humanity to have the machine remove from it the need of menial and disagreeable tasks. I do not know.

 

–Norbert Wiener, 1947 (27)

Steed: I’m playing it as a journalist, getting gen on “automation in modern society,” “will the machine supplant man?”–or woman, for that matter.

 

Peel: And will it?

 

Steed: Not if I have anything to do with it.

 

–“The Cybernauts,” 1965

And, finally, whether it has essential limits or not, the entire field covered by the cybernetic program will be the field of writing. If the theory of cybernetics is by itself to oust all metaphysical concepts–including the concepts of the soul, of life, of value, of choice, of memory–which until recently served to separate the machine from man, it must conserve the notion of writing, trace, grammë or grapheme, until its own historico-metaphysical character is also exposed.

 

–Jacques Derrida, 1967 (9)

“You me.” The stranger used Cobb’s own tight little smile on him. “I’m a mechanical copy of your body.”

 

The face seemed right and there was even the scar from the heart transplant. The only difference between them was how alert and healthy the copy looked. Call him Cobb Anderson2. Cobb2 didn’t drink. Cobb envied him. He hadn’t had a completely sober day since he had the operation and left his wife.

 

--Rudy Rucker, 1982 (5)¹

 

They are all more or less agreed then–all, perhaps, except Wiener, and he should know. The cyber (or more correctly, as we shall see, the kybern) is the figure that, rightly or wrongly, has come to stand for the end of the humanistic ideal of man. The only disagreement is over whether this figure is good (Rucker) or bad (Steed) or, indeed, whether such a judgment need be made at all (Derrida). The meaning of the cyber appears secure, then; its ethics uncertain. Is it possible that these are connected; that the uncertain ethics stems from a false security about the meaning of the term? If so, this can open on to two related questions about the term and its values: cybern~etymology and cybern~ethics.

 

In this essay, then, I will be attempting to follow on from the grounds established in an earlier paper in Postmodern Culture, “Cyberbeing and ~space,”² and so to mobilise a Heideggerian method (an etymology) in order to begin to open up an altered understanding of the technological domain of the cyber and, in particular, its ethics. As Heidegger shows throughout his work, early and late, it is only our modern (that is, Cartesian and post-Cartesian) assumption that language is a mere representation of beings (for example of “objects,” “nature,” or “culture”) that holds us back from seeing how the very language we speak and write is the dwelling place of our fundamental connection to Being as such. In language, for Heidegger, the fundamental event of appropriation (Ereignis), the letting-belong-together of man and Being, occurs. Language, in this view, is not the world in code, mediating “objects” to man-as-“subject,” but the house of Being wherein man also dwells as the only possible guardian of Being.³ If Heidegger’s counter-representationalist argument is correct (and this is something I have examined in more detail elsewhere),⁴ then taking an etymological path is no merely arcane or technical (for example, semantic, linguistic or lexicographical) measure. Still less is it a game with words. Instead, it should be a journey of thinking towards what most concerns us, as Heidegger says, “in its essence.”

 

But to say that this present investigation tries to open upon the cyber “in its essence” does not entail an essentialism in the crude sense. Rather, and the importance of this will become clearer as we proceed, Heidegger’s term for “essence,” das Wesen, is meant to emphasize “the verbal sense of wesen as ‘governing’ or ‘effecting,’ while retaining the fundamental reference to ‘presencing’”.⁵ Accordingly, a counter-representational attention to the details of cyber-language (to how, for example, the cyber is fundamentally implicated in the very idea of governing just mentioned by Heidegger and his English editor) ought to take us towards the Wesen (or, as I prefer to say, after Deleuze and Spinoza, the ethos) of all things cybernetic. And it ought to do so in a way (or via a way or path) that steers us around the currently fraught questions of the mere morality of the cyber. Wherever we look today, that is, whether in popular or in more scholarly accounts of cybernetics, it is a rare text that does not (as our initial epigrams indicate) raise the issue of whether the field and the objects it contains are Good or Evil for something called “humanity.” This, as Heidegger would say, can only reduce an otherwise important field of inquiry to “idle chatter.” In its place (or more strictly, in a quite different place altogether) I want at least to begin to open–and this is my only goal in this essay–the possibility of a glimpse into the ethos of the cyber in strictly non-moral terms.

 

In such Heideggerian-Nietzschean terms, as we will see, the power of the cyber is much more fundamental than just a question of the morality of a few quite recent technological changes (such as computers and robots); it has to do with the very question of our ethos, today, as Dasein. As Joan Stambaugh realised as early as 1969, “Technology isn’t just something man has acquired as an accessory. Right now it is what he is” (13). It is the ethos of this “is” that this essay tries, albeit sketchily, to realise.

 

Making~beings

 

The main point of this investigation is, then, to find an ethics for the cyber. Essentially, it must be an ethics for something only very slightly other than–perhaps more than, perhaps less than–the human: an ethics for some of the things that we have given ourselves over to–to a slight extent and with particular relevance to our current historical moment. But still, the “giving over,” no matter how slight, is crucial. That is, for a long time, we, as a particular kind of being, as Dasein, were equipmental; we were the ones who manipulated equipment.⁶ And we made the world precisely through our manipulations of equipment, perhaps so much so that we subsequently mistook our makings for entities beyond our grasp. That has certainly been our predominant attitude towards history: the array of things outside us that appear to determine our being but which, in fact, are our makings.

 

And that, I venture, is a bad mistake. It’s a mistake because it rethinks our own artefacts as natural. And it’s bad because it overly delimits our future capacity for making as techne. It sometimes even makes the giving-over of our makings seem almost naturally bad. But, in fact, that giving over might be revalued as something we have done all along, from the most ancient of times. Even more to the point, the giving over or deferral may have been our strength in the first place. That is, in being equipmental, we deferred to things outside and beyond us: the fishing hook, the steam turbine, the computer. This giving-controlling, this making-and-being-made-by, may then be critical to the very constitution of Dasein itself.

 

As the central condition of our being, we are the only things that can make the things that also make us. We are, always already, feedback-like in this respect. But then we mistakenly bring the things we have made (art, economies, technologies, and so on) into such a peculiar position that they can take on the character of “objectess” or “otherness.” In Marxist terms, we are those who essentially and utterly “alienate” ourselves from what we make. In deferring to our products we differ from them.

 

In the Marxist tradition, this looks like a mistake in history (the history of capitalism), such that we have to correct the error and either forge or return to some purer state in which our differences from what we make are utterly deleted. But instead of this compelling (if unsatisfiable) thought, we may have to say that this is what beings of our ontological kind have always done, without fail: bring things forth that, on their achievement of “objective” status, appear, compellingly, to control us, to govern us, to steer us, to replace our “souls,” or whatever it is we hold most dear as the mythical foundations of our being. But we are in fact the ones who bring about these myths, the very gods and devils we would live without, if only we lived more “authentically.” So if we are actually constituted such that our difference from what we make (art, myth, culture, history, and the rest) cannot be deleted or bypassed, such that there is no possibility of “purely human” or “pre-technological” production, then another story altogether has to be told. A recent chapter in this story concerns all things cyber.

 

The crucial question of the cyber is this: why is it that we tug ourselves back to an authenticity that predates (so the many stories go) our giving over (our deferral) to our own creations when, in fact, what makes us “authentic” (if anything does, and if the word “authentic” is to have any meaning) is precisely our utterly unique capacity to give over, to differ and defer?⁷ If this is the case, then the cyber-instance of giving-making and making-giving (such that there is no real priority between these) is just one instance of what it is we are and do–once we realise that what we are and what we do (with equipment) are not distinguishable in any compelling way.

 

Cyber-entities are, in this basic sense, no different from primitive or industrial equipments. But the way they operate in relation to us (and this is the only way they can operate) also has its own distinct inflexion. That inflexion, however, is not necessarily new. Its roots are deep and have to do with much earlier forms of the making of technologies of control, and the giving over of those same technologies to what the technologies themselves create.

 

Imagine this: a fishing hook is designed to catch a known fish on a particular stretch of coastline. It’s designed to fit under a particular lip formation, to pull a particular weight, and so on. After being used in this way for a while, it also starts to bring in a different species, a species unknown to the hook’s designers. Is that new kind of fish an aberration, a monster? Or is it a boon? We can never say in advance. All we know is that the hook-makers built differently than they knew–neither better nor worse, until the fuller story unfolds.

 

Our current technological metaphor for this same, and enduring, process is the cyber. We could have taken many word formations to capture this–but it turns out that some events around 1947 or 1948 led “cyber” to become the predominant term.⁸ That was itself an accident, as our four epigrams show: an effect of a technology of words working back into our ways of everyday life, and so producing more than was first bargained for. Still, we are stuck, more or less, with that term, the “cyber.” What is this new metaphor?

 

Cybern~et~ics

 

The current variety of words that begin with “cyber-” derive from the Greek word kybernetes, a steersman. In its turn, this noun is formed from the verb kybernao, to steer. Latin takes up the Greek kybernetes quite straightforwardly as gubernator, again a steersman–and hence the rare or archaic use of “gubernator” in English (meaning a governor) and its variants, “gubernation” and “gubernatorial,” a term that can still occasionally be heard in American English today.

 

This is related to a metaphorical sense in which the original Greek word itself could refer to a governor (of a city, for example). He is the one who, as it were, steers the city, takes it along its path. This tells us something about both cybernetics and governance. Cybernetics is always imbued with a sense of command, making things happen from a control-point at a distance, in the domain of otherness. It’s about the giving over of control to an entity for which (or whom) that control function is its primary purpose. And governance is always, and equally, imbricated in remoteness and the machinic. All governance is, by this definition, at a distance. If it were not, it would simply rejoin the action that it governed, making it indistinguishable from what is governed. The two come together in that unique space where distance and control, the human-complex and the machine-simplex, come into new configurations. The space of the cyber is both the most enabling and exciting region of conditions (in terms of human technological development) and the most restricting and reduplicative region (in terms of the almost eternal ends of the machine). The distinction depends on a very old question perhaps: who pays the ferryman? And, in passing perhaps, we should also note that in addition to this strict etymology and its spawn, there is also a more obscure and distant tangent to explore: for there is the slightly related Latin word gubernaculum, used in medical and biological English to mean the cord that holds the testicles together in the scrotum.

 

So “cybernet-ic” can refer to anything that is steersman-like. But, at the same time, it carries with it a double and possibly contradictory sense of both governing and being governed. And it may have barely discernible connotations of the reproductive organs. The ethics of the cyber therefore conflates a number of basic questions: Is the steersman governor or governed? Is it positively (re)productive or negatively demonic? Or else, is it in command or commanded? Is the governor self-appointed or elected? Does it self-reproduce utterly, or is even its self-reproductive capacity ultimately a product of what produces it?

 

Returning to etymology for now, though, the term “cyber” is always a truncation of a broader term. And it’s normally used to expand other truncated terms so as to make words like “cybernetics,” “cybernation,” “cyberspace,” “cyborg” (“cyber” + “organism”), “cybernaut,” “cyberpunk,” “cyberia” and so on. So it’s an abbreviation that adds itself to other abbreviations to concoct a variety of hybrids. Or perhaps, borrowing from biology again, we should say “cybrids”; for cybrids, unlike hybrids, borrow different parts of the genome from each of their parent plants and are, in this sense even more radically intra-differentiated than mere hybrids.⁹

 

Most dictionaries and textbooks, however, agree that the fullest and most original form, in English, is “cybernetics,” a term coined by Norbert Wiener in 1947 from “cybern-” (kybernao?) and “-etics.” In Wiener’s sense, which we will return to later, the term referred to a discipline that would study the kinds of control systems that use feedback so as to generate automatic processes. Since then, it has taken on much broader definitions ranging from computing in general to the study of any systems of control, organisation and regulation, and particularly to those systems that use self-control, self-organisation, and self-regulation. It is this capacity that apparently gives such systems at least one feature in common with living biological systems. Hence, by extension, they are sometimes thought to have intelligence, to learn, develop, and grow. In this broader sense, then, cybern-etics might be said to model itself on gen-etics.

 

As a form of study or a method of investigation, cybern-etics is an “etics” (as in both “genetics” and “phonetics”). “Etic” (as opposed to “emic”) studies engage their objects from the outside. Hence there is, contrastively, a “phonemics,” if not a “genemics.” Etic investigations do not ask how what it is they study understand themselves. Rather they ask how they can be analysed from outside. To use another distinction, they are nomothetic rather than ideographic. So most sciences, by definition, are etic–for the simple reason that the things they study are not normally considered able to understand themselves.

 

“Cybernetics,” then, is the investigation of steering from a position other than that of the steersman himself (or perhaps the steering gear itself). And yet, it also seems, in popular conceptions of the cyber, that almost everything is given over to the steering technologies themselves. What is it to stand outside this conglomeration?–to do meta-cybernetics as the “the giving over of our governance and steering to another of our own making”? Might this be cybernethics? But we are getting ahead of ourselves.

 

Returning again to etymology, we truncate the Greek term kybernao by taking the kyber double-syllable on its own. The reason why we get cybernetics as a discipline is the practical, technological attempt to find an other-than-us that steers and guides. The pilot determines our path–but it may be that we nevertheless give the orders regarding the termini–the start and finish points. On this view, the kybernetes merely takes us between those determined points. But what are they? What is particular and unique to the path of cyber-technology?

 

Elsewhere, I have begun to describe cyberbeing (and ~space) as a relatively unique figuration of the equipmental being of everydayness.¹⁰ The argument there runs roughly as follows. In so far as Dasein (our ontological condition as beings of a quite particular kind) is constituted by an as-structure–that is, in so far as it understands as (in the counter-mentalistic sense of grasping-as, or holding-as, having-to-hand-as)–we are also able to imagine a less definite and embodied form of an as-if-structure. This would be the virtual inflexion of the as-structure’s actual. In the space of the as-if, we would only virtually grasp or hold or orient to. Such a space would be particular to all imaginary makings: the literary, the meditative, the artistic, and so on. Importantly, the cyber is not strictly limited to the domain of the as-if. It is not purely virtual. Rather, it is constituted by a movement or a motion that navigates (very quickly, almost instantaneously) between the “as” (our everyday capacity for being ) and the “as if” (our imaginary capacity). It is actual-virtual: not in synthesis or combination, but in terms of motion and movement. It hovers or flickers between these termini.

 

Steering, or being cyber, then, is the movement or motion between these points. But another variation on the etymology of “cybernetic” comes into play here. To this point, for the most part, we have thought of it as “cybern-” (from the verb kybernao) and “-etic.” However, we have also seen that it’s possible to imagine the term as beginning instead with the noun, kybernetes, and to configure it as “cybernet-” and “-ic.” Then, in superadding the “ic,” to the “cybernet,” we appear to re-engage a peculiarly English suffix. This is the Anglo-Saxon “-lic” which approximates to the Modern English word (or suffix) “(-)like.” In fact, in Anglo-Saxon, “-lic” is important enough to be declined–hence “-licost” is “-likest” or “most like,” as in “fugle gelicost“: most like a bird or very bird-like.¹¹ The “-ic” is already a marker of simulation; of something being like another thing. (In the above case a ship is described as bird-like-est.) And who can say whether it gains or loses power from the comparison? The “-ic” says that what the cyber is steersman-lic.

 

Today we use the suffix “ish” to express almost (but not quite) the same modality or metaphoric relation. But this newer locution seems to diminish what arises from the metaphorical connection. (Cf. “goodish,” “Marxish,” “feminish,” and so forth.) Why is such a connection almost always viewed negatively? Nothing in its own constitution seems to merit this. What is the ultimately authentic that allows the authentic-ish (“like,” “as”) to become a less valuable way of moving? For if we are right in estimating the termini and trajectories of the cyber’s movements, the “as” or “like” is essential to it, just as it is essential to all inflexions of Dasein, for which everything begins with grasping as rather than with simple and mere grasping. So it is no wonder that cyber-phenomena are among today’s candidates for the ultra-inauthentic: not only do they openly wear the “as,” “like,” or “ish-ness” of everyday coping, they supplement this with a further tendentiousness, the as-if terminus. And, at the same time, as hybrids between other forms of prior equipmentality (engineering, the chemistry of silicon, and binary mathematics), they include such things as artificial limbs, self-programming computers, “virtual” reality devices and remote-controlled vehicles for exploring the surfaces of other planets.

 

“Cybernetics,” then, is a truncated form of the Greek, but the truncation always carries with it (a) the name of a discipline, an “etics,” that must, therefore, work from the outside, and (b) a “like-ness,” a form of analogy. An exterior discipline of necessary like-ness. So cybernetics is a discipline formed on a metaphor–or else the cyber-forms are metaphors that lead to a discipline. Or else both.

 

As such cybern-et-ics is the discipline that asks about how being human gives itself over to a steering that is not “its own”: and has never been purely its own. We (as such) were always other-wise: in other ways. It is therefore, essentially, the discipline of the prosthetic, the supplemental, the equipmental. It looks at whatever we use to extend ourselves, to get from here to there–trafficking, for example. It investigates how we use the steersman–with all of the contradictions that such a project(ion) implies. For is it not the case that the steersman takes us? Yes, true, but we also instruct the steersman in the matter of where it is we want to go. In this case, all we leave to the kybernetes is the path. And still, the path is not unimportant.¹²

 

In this way, we give over our path of, say, thinking, to the kybernetes–perhaps in return for a better guarantee of our arrival. Though it’s always a risk. Because of the risk, giving over the path makes some people (like Steed) feel uncomfortable. It makes them feel dispossessed of their own destiny, their own (re)productive capacities. They feel as if they are not being steersmen in their own right, having given up this capacity to a demonic force. So it can make them feel what many have felt in (what they think of as) the “grip” of technology–out of control, unable to steer for themselves. It’s as if they have become an other’s equipment. But there is ultimately no “other” that has equipment.

 

So can we give over our entire equipmental being to the cyber? Isn’t it rather that we only give over the means of travelling between the points we pre-specify to it? The kybernetes, on this reading, is a travel agent. And why would this kind of steering be different from, say, looking up an index in a book in order to find a certain passage, as opposed to reading the whole book in order to find it? The index, in this very ordinary case, is a kind of steersman. It helps us reach our destination; but it does not determine the destination. The same applies with more force to electronic search facilities. Or to raise a more technologically apposite example, think of net surfing: we set out to search for something but are led elsewhere along the way, perhaps never arriving at the point we originally set out to find. Is the net itself in control of this? Is it not, rather, that we make a decision at each turn?

 

If so, then everything we call a technology (from the fishing hook to the supercomputer) only aids the end or project (Entwurf) that we make of ourselves (and by which we make/create ourselves).¹³ The mistake is to think that the end/project is (and always has been) ours alone–in some purely “human” state; that it was never “assisted” by (or dependent on) technologies. And are technologies anything more than our own previously-generated ends, our completions, former completions now enlisted towards further completions still?¹⁴

 

As soon as there is an end (a human end), there is already a technology for making it, realising it. And, of course, any technology can be made from previous ends re-realised as means. To be human is, among other things, to have an end; and that end is a project to be realised by equipment. And then, “other” things have to be brought to bear to realise that end. But they could never be “other” in any essential sense. This has never not been true for human beings. We were never purely free of equipment.

 

In this way of looking at things, the kybernetes is by no means a strange or new figure. It is by no means a sudden technological flash. It has always been there–steering–as soon as any thing ever used any other thing; as soon as it had equipment. And we are probably the only things that ever had steering equipment.

 

To be sure, there are changes in what the equipment is–from memorising to writing things down; from writing-down to printing; from printing to computing; from computing to the more recent cyber-forms. But these do not change the fundamentals of our being. Those remain more or less the same. The basic components–readiness-to-hand (equipmentality), presence-to-hand (equipment condensed into “nature” or “objectivity”), Dasein (ourselves)–remain the same–but in, as it happens, currently altered configurations. So we rarely simply steer, rather we tend to organise the steering. What else, what other kind of being, could be like this?

 

We give over the routine management of movement to pieces of wood (rudders and oars), to pieces of metal (ailerons), to pieces of plastic and rubber (steering wheels and tyres), to pieces of paper (indexes), to pieces of silicon (search engines). There is nothing strange or different about this. Our difference from nature (a classification that we have also invented, as it turns out) is that we, unlike our imaginary idea of “pure” nature, are always and utterly the makers of our steering devices. We were never not steered by the devices that we invented for steering (and, to mention a minor example, philosophy is only one such device). The cyber, then, is nothing new. As soon as there is substance or material (hyle), there is a technique for handling it.

 

The cyber, in this sense, is very old. 1947 seems a very recent date for its discovery, its uncovering. But that recency is only one more testament to our inability to reflect on what we have made as what we have made. This is comparable with the incredibly late arrival of the first self-propelling vehicle: the bicycle. We almost want to ask, “How could we have been so uninventive for so long?”

 

The notion of the cyber, we could argue, is a better metaphor for our way of being than many so far. It’s better than the idea of the “polis” as our natural environment. It’s better than the idea of our having non-material “forms” beyond (and determining) our mortal existence. It’s better than the idea of a pool of the unconscious that every conscious entity must follow (or dip into). It’s better than the idea that we are the mere effects of the economic formations that obtain during our lives. It’s better than what goes by the name of “identity politics.” By comparison, these ideas are almost nothing or close to nonsense. For how could we ever have been non-technological? And why are the “humanities” constantly involved in the search for an authenticity outside technologies? We would have died on a remote beach a long time ago without this capacity. Without it, those particular and ultra-recent technologies known collectively as “the humanities” could never have emerged to make such a peculiarly critical demand.

 

To be technological is the same thing as to appoint, find or make a steering device. The cybern-et-(l)ic is by no means the antithesis of the “human.” What we (perhaps for some odd reason of anthropologistic purity) call “the human” has always been what it is because of its unique capacity to make other things work for it: such things as, for example, steering devices.

 

The only difference today is that we can make things act like this–like a steerer (cybernet-lic). What we don’t see yet is that this relatively new ability (the double motion towards and from the “as if”) is not the whole of our present condition. For now, and perhaps for a long time, we will be in the condition of flick(er)ing, hovering, switching, between the old reliable helmsman called “As” and the slightly newer one called “As if.” The differences between the two, though, are minimal. Still, we must expect quibbles from the appointed guardians of “culture.”

 

Cybern~ethics

 

Our etymology to this point has been general rather than historically specific. It has tried to steer around the field (or waters) of the cyber-in-general rather than confining itself to cybernetics in the narrow sense. But what was the historical impetus for this etymological derivation, as it turned out, in the particular event of Norbert Wiener’s in(ter)vention? Wiener writes:

 

We have decided to call the entire field of control and communication theory, whether in the machine or in the animal, by the name Cybernetics, which we form from the Greek               or steersman. In choosing this term, we wish to recognize that the first significant paper on feedback mechanisms is an article on governors, which was published by Clark Maxwell in 1868, and that governor is derived from a Latin corruption of
         . We also wish to refer to the fact that the steering engines of a ship are indeed one of the earliest and best-developed forms of feedback mechanisms. ¹⁵

 

There are a number of interesting features of this almost originary moment–“almost” because Wiener himself gives the first date of use as 1947, the year in which he wrote his “Introduction” to Cybernetics, the year before the publication of the book containing this definition; and also because there is always the ghost or demon of Maxwell haunting and perhaps even governing this new arrival. The first noticeable feature is Wiener’s original spelling (probably a mis-spelling) in which the initial is substituted by . This may be insignificant; but it may also mark the first sign of the steersman as the chi, the physical symbol of magnetic susceptibility, hence marking the attraction of cyber technologies. Otherwise–though Charon, another chi-character, must not be ruled out in this context either–it may mark the chiasma (crossing over) as the primary act of the steersman; both in the sense of crossing over a stretch of water and of crossing over from “as” to “as if” or from human to machine, and vice versa. It might also indicate the rhetorical figure of the chiasmus in which contrasting phrases cross over one another: “Do not steer in order to arrive, but arrive in order to steer.” And finally, Wiener’s substitution of the aspirated “k” (chi) for the unaspirated form (kappa), may be among the reasons for us referring today to the “cyber” rather than the more correct, if harsher, “kyber.”

 

The second, and for us most important, feature is that, as Wiener plans it, cybernetics is not simply a matter of dealing with communication and control as such. Rather, the discipline of cybernetics (as cybern-etics) will only deal with what, in the field of communication and control is cybernet-ic, steersman-like. Here the two possible derivations that we considered above cross over. And the feature of the steersman that is in question, that comes, as it were, to narrow the field, to say what kind of sub-discipline of communication studies cybernetics will be, is the steersman’s practice. That is, cybernetics will study what the actions of the steerer, the governor, and so on have in common. And the common feature of their practices is that they all involve feedback mechanisms.

 

We could put this another way. Wiener identifies the steering engines in a ship as an instance of feedback mechanisms. But this is equally true of more primitive equipment such as the tiller. As the steersman stands in the stern, overlooking the crew, his decisions as to how to move the tiller depend on the conditions he sees and feels around him. And those conditions have come about not simply from a brute environment (the sea, the topology, the weather, and so on), but also from the previous steering activities of the helmsman himself. He has governed the ship into any present state of governability. In this sense, even the tiller arrangement is a feedback mechanism. The steering is dependent on a feeling of the sea as it presents itself at a given moment in the very process of steering.

 

Accordingly, what is crucial to the field of cybernetics–what marks out its distinct objects–is the feedback that produces recursion. State s’ becomes state s” by virtue of an operation which (in either an identical or a modified form) is reapplied to s” to generate s”’, and so on. In this case, the act of steering oneself is a case of governing and being governed, reflexively, in the same instant. There is no strict active-passive distinction in a situation of feedback, recursion, or re-iteration. This is part of the usual definition of a reflexive verb. The cybernetic is, then, in its brutest form, the field of self-governance.

 

This is what cybernetic machines have in common with cybernetic organisms (and all organisms, on this, Wiener’s, definition, must be cybernetic in so far as they are self-governing in their self-propulsion): they govern themselves (and are governed) reflexively. And here the term “reflexive” (as in “reflexive verb”) is intended to capture all the properties of self-re-iteration, feedback, recursivity, and self-governing self-propulsion. This, we might say, is the ethos of organisms. And, with the advent of cybernetic machines, we now have to say that there are some machines that share this ethos.

 

If we look at matters in this way, we begin to see that the various public moralities about the cyber are utterly misplaced. I mean, for example, cyberphobic reactions (such as Steed’s) to the idea that machines might replace people or their functions–a deep and abiding fear of a necessary equipmentality, supplementality, or prosthesis. While we can hear this lament everywhere today, one lasting monument to it is E.M. Forster’s short story, “The Machine Stops.”¹⁶ Here, the machine comes to remove that most apparently human need, to see the sky. In cyberphobic texts, it is either this, the relation of the organism to nature, or else its relation to an inner psyche or soul, or both, that is apparently removed by the machine. The same reception has greeted handwriting, the printing press, street lighting, television, and now, among other things, computers.

 

On the other hand, the public morality of cyberphilia (such as Rucker’s) simply reverses these values. We can find this in such places as the stories of H.G. Wells, Wired magazine or in thousands of sites on the Internet. In this idealistic inversion of cyberphobia, all things cyber are thought to enhance natural or psychological human capacities: the sky becomes clearer as it is digitised, the workings of the mind become more open and available as they become “artificial,” and so on and so forth. The picture is well known today.

 

Both these positions mistake precisely what we have called the very ethos of organisms: reflexivity. This, as we have seen, is neither a natural nor a mental capacity. That is, it is not constituted out of a relation between the organism and nature, or a relation between it and its putative department of internal affairs (the ghost in the machine, perhaps). Rather the ethos is the self-organising and self-governing self-propulsion that is reflexivity in our sense of this term.

 

Now, if this is the ethos of organisms and also of cyber-phenomena, then it is here that we will find their ethics. As Deleuze, after Spinoza, has pointed out, ethics (as opposed to mere morality or moral judgmentalism) is a matter of ethology (27, 125). It is a matter of what a body can do; its affects. That is, it is not as if a body acted and then, upon a later consultation of its internal states, its “intentions,” it decided whether or not the action was good or bad. And, a fortiori, the ethical cannot be a matter of absolute values of Good and Evil. These pertain only to moralisms such as cyberphobia and cyberphilia themselves. Cybern-ethics, then, does not come super-added to cyber-bodies. What a self-organising/self-governing/self-propelling (that is reflexive) body does is its ethos, its ethics. What is good for a body is whatever it does to enhance its powers of self-organising and self-governing self-propulsion. The good is an increase in reflexivity. And the bad, again following Deleuze-Spinoza, is whatever it is that a body does that decreases its reflexive capacity. All of this has to do with the field of bodily movement or motion–hence ethology.

 

Moreover, as Deleuze points out on several occasions, Spinoza’s ethology is extremely close to that of Nietzsche, who also separated the “bad” Good and Evil of morality from the “good” good and bad of ethics. To this extent, cybernethics may also point to the centrality of power(s) as the capacity or capacities of Dasein to self-regulate. All of this is redolent not only of Nietzsche’s will to power, especially as it is mediated by Heidegger’s reading of that concept–as the principle of Nietzsche’s new ethical re-valuation–but also of Foucault’s uptake of Nietzsche and his view of ethics as arts or techniques of the self.¹⁷ And while this connection opens up another field of inquiry in its own right, what might concern us here is the interesting possibility of deriving a non-moral ethics of power that is co-extensive with the cyber as Dasein‘s fundamental equipmentality, regardless of the specific technologies that it so happens, at any given historical point, to use as concrete manifestations of that fundamental equipmentality. I have taken this question up elsewhere in another series of articles on Heidegger, culture, and technology.¹⁸

 

And finally, a particular property of human reflexive organisms is that they are, in the strictest sense, accountably reflexive. An increase in reflexivity, in our case, is an increase in accountability. As a human reflexive organism (dare I say, “as Dasein“?), I display in and as my own motion how it is that that motion is to be taken by others. This is how the “social order” so crucial to human self-organisation is possible. Or rather, this is what social order, fundamentally, is. A good instance is mentioned by Wes Sharrock:

 

Social order is easy to find because it's put there to be found. When you go about your actions [...] you do them so that (or in ways that) other people can see what you're doing. You do your actions to have them recognized as the actions that they are. When you stand at the bus stop, you stand in such a way that you can be seen to be waiting for a bus. People across the street can see what you're doing, according to where and how you're standing.... [Y]ou're standing at a bus stop and somebody comes and stands next to you and they stand in such a way that eventually you can see that these people are standing in a line and that one person's the first and another is the second, and some person's at the end. People stand around at bus stops in ways they can be seen to be waiting for a bus. (4)

 

That is, human social order is not just self-organising; it is not just cybernetic. It is also, and utterly, in the business of displaying its self-organisation. That is, it is accountable. The way I stand by a particular pole, perhaps under a particular shelter, so that what I’m doing is visible to everyone as “waiting for a bus” (rather than, say, loitering) is an instance of accountability. With or without words, I am, in the very doing of waiting for a bus, accounting for what I’m doing as waiting for a bus (as opposed to, for example, using the bus shelter to keep out of the rain for a while). The verbal form of this accounting is only one such kind of accountability–though it is, by and large, how we do it.

 

Sharrock’s point cannot be over-emphasised: it is not as if there is the movement, motion, or action and then the accounting (organised, for example, intentionally). Rather the two–the specific properties of human self-organising organisms–and the self-organisation that is called, in general, “society”–are indistinguishable. This is what is particular to us, to our ethos. It is unique to our ethical positioning that we are accountable in this sense. And, as a matter of sheer principle, there is no reason why cybernetic machines should not have (though they presently do not have, as a matter of fact) exactly this ethics. The question would be: when will a prosthetic device put itself in motion in such a way that anyone (including any other cybernetic machine) will be able recognise what it is doing because it has designed its motion to be (not only self-governing but also) accountably that (self-governed) action? A cybernetic machine can build, say, a car. When will it do so accountably–such that what it is doing is indeed building a car but, above all, such that it is doing so in such a way that it displays its motions as designed to be specifically that action for anyone to see?

 

It will be at that point that a sheer coincidence of cybernetic properties held in common by some machines and all organisms (including human organisms) will have become an ethical identity between cybernetic machines and ourselves. That, if ever, is how the Turing test will be passed.

 

Way~markers

 

Where we have arrived along our path of thinking is not at a final destination. Not by a long chalk yet. In fact only a few steps have been taken. All we have seen is that beginning with the “usual story” of man and technology–the idea that technology is “what man makes” and his plans for so-making–we started with only part of the picture. As we ventured just a little further into the details of that story, we began to notice it to be fraught with troubles; troubles with no easy solutions. But something of a new understanding of cyber-technologies did occasionally present itself along these culs-de-sac, albeit as a fleeting glimpse. We can only guess what this may be once further pursued. At least, however, we now have a blurry outline of our alternative: that the ethics of today’s technological world is different from, and more than, simply a series of “critical intellectual” worries about machine morality. Rather, that ethics is an ethos: as much an ethos of man and Being as of technology.

 

Is it possible, then, that we have been, despite our sense of a journey, back home in language, the house of Being, all along? Perhaps. But if so, we may have recognised some of those who dwell there: man, Being, and the appropriative event (Ereignis) that lets them belong there together. So at least we know this much: it is to the relations between these inhabitants that we must look to find the essence of technology. No amount of chatter about machines and their relations will get us there. As Heidegger puts it: “Today, the computer calculates thousands of relationships in one second. Despite their technical uses, they are inessential.” Now we know that this “inessential” is far from being a form of technophobia. For, aptly summarising any journey this essay may have taken into thoughts of a more essential ethos of technology, he also says the following:

 

Technology, conceived in the broadest sense and in its manifold manifestations, is taken for the plan which man projects, the plan which finally compels man to decide whether he will become the servant of his plan or will remain its master. (Identity and Difference 41)

 

By this conception of the totality of the technological world, we reduce everything... to man, and at best come to the point of calling for an ethics of the technological world. Caught up in this conception, we confirm our own opinion that technology is of man's making alone. We fail to hear the claim of Being which speaks the essence of technology. (Identity and Difference 34)

 

Notes

 

Thanks to Karen M. Strom for the Greek symbols. Her symbol fonts can be downloaded from the Symbols Bonanza Web site

 

1. The critical text, here, might be “The Cybernauts,” an Avengers episode that is possibly the first popularisation of the “cyber” as an inhuman and anti-human force. It precedes Dr Who‘s cybermen by a year.

 

2. A text-only version of “Cyberbeing and ~space” is available at http://www.iath.virginia.edu/pmc/text-only/issue.997/mchoul.997. The full hypertext version of the article is available at http://muse.jhu.edu/journals/postmodern_culture/v008/8.1mchoul.html (Please note that only paid subscribers to PMC at Johns Hopkins’ Project MUSE have access to this site. Information on subscribing to Project MUSE is available at http://muse.jhu.edu/ordering.)

 

3. On language as the house of Being, see Martin Heidegger, “The Way to Language,” 111-136. The phrase is repeated in Identity and Difference and brought into conjunction with the “event of appropriation” (Ereignis).

 

4. This is in a book called Culture and Representation, currently under consideration by Cassell, London, with a view to publication in 1999. Electronic copies are available on request from mchoul@murdoch.edu.au.

 

5. See David Farrell Krell’s footnote on das Wesen in Martin Heidegger, Nietzsche Vol. IV: Nihilism (140).

 

6. Here and throughout this essay, I work with a number of basic concepts derived from Heideggerian philosophy. Most of these stem from Division I of Being and Time. In particular, my reading of Heidegger is most influenced by the “pragmatic” Heideggerians. See, for example, Mark Okrent, Heidegger’s Pragmatism: Understanding, Being, and the Critique of Metaphysics.

 

7. “Authenticity” might be read, here, as “own-ness,” the collective capacity for self-organisation of/as equipment.

 

8. A few sources suggest that the term “cybernetics” may first have been used by Ampëre in the early 19th century to refer to the scientific control of society.

 

9. Chambers dictionary has the following entry for “cybrid”: “(biol) n a cell, plant, etc. possessing the nuclear genome of one plant with at least some part of the chloroplastal or mitochondrial genome of the other, as opposed to a hybrid in which some parts of both parental nuclear genomes are present.” A more technical definition is: “Cybrid (Bunn et al. 1974)–the fusion product of an enucleated cytoplast with an intact (nucleated) cell (–> protoplast). In cybridization, the nuclear genome of one parent is combined with the organelles of a second parent. Sendai virus or polyethylene glycol may be used as fusing agents” (Reiger et al.). The bracketed reference is to “Bunn CL, Wallace DC, Einstadt JM (1974) Proc Natl Acad Sci USA 71: 1681.”

 

10. See “Cyberbeing and ~space,” paragraphs 1-23.

 

11. The words “fugle gelicost” are used in line 218 of the Anglo-Saxon epic poem Beowulf to describe the hero’s ship as it sails.

 

12. What this may show–although the matter obviously requires closer investigation–is that the logic of the supplement (in Derrida) and the logic of governmentality (in Foucault) are conceptually related. It is also possible that their conceptual relation stems from their common relation to Heidegger and his thinking of equipmentality.

 

13. Entwurf is the term Heidegger uses in many of his works for “projection.” The full ramifications of this for our understanding of cyber-technologies, the digital and the virtual are explored in Phil Roe’s forthcoming Ph.D. thesis, “Of Hologrammatology: The Politics of Virtual Writing.”

 

14. One possible symptom of the error in question is that we have now come to use words like “perfect” and “perfection” to refer to an utterly ideal state of being. But strictly, what is perfect is simply completed, over and done with (cf. the perfect tense).

 

15. See Wiener 11-12. Wiener’s reference to the Maxwell paper is as follows: “Maxwell, J.C., Proc. Roy. Soc. (London), 16, 270-283, (1868).”

 

16. Although the story itself is earlier, this popular collection was first published in 1947, the same year, as it happens, that Wiener coined the term “cybernetics.”

 

17. See Heidegger, Nietzsche Volume III: The Will to Power as Knowledge and Metaphysics; Foucault, Power/Knowledge: Selected Interviews and Other Writings 1972-1977; and Foucault, The Use of Pleasure: The History of Sexuality Volume Two.

 

18. See my “The Being of Culture,” to appear in Continuum: A Journal of Media and Culture; “‘The Twisted Handiwork of Egypt’: Heidegger’s Question Concerning Culture,” submitted to Epochë; “Five Theses on Culture,” submitted to Research in Phenomenology; “Revolution • Resolution • Pathmaking • Technology,” submitted to Tekhema: Journal of Philosphy and Technology. Drafts of these essays are available on request from mchoul@murdoch.edu.au.

Works Cited

 

• “The Cybernauts.” By Philip Levene. Dir. Sidney Hayers. The Avengers. ABC Television Limited. 1965.
• Deleuze, Gilles. Spinoza: Practical Philosophy. Trans. R. Hurley, San Francisco: City Lights Books, 1988.
• Derrida, Jacques. Of Grammatology. 1967. Trans. G.C. Spivak. Baltimore: The Johns Hopkins UP, 1974.
• Forster, E.M. “The Machine Stops.” Collected Short Stories. London: Penguin, 1954. 109-146.
• Foucault, Michel. Power/Knowledge: Selected Interviews and Other Writings 1972-1977. London: Harvester Press, 1980.
• —. The Use of Pleasure: The History of Sexuality Volume Two. 1984. London: Viking, 1986,
• Heidegger, Martin. Being and Time. Trans. J. Macquarrie and E. Robinson. Oxford: Blackwell, 1962.
• —. Identity and Difference. Ed. Joan Stambaugh. New York: Harper and Row, 1969.
• —. Nietzsche Volume III: The Will to Power as Knowledge and Metaphysics, Ed. D. Farrell Krell. San Francisco: Harper and Row, 1987.
• —. Nietzsche Vol. IV: Nihilism. Ed. D. Farrell Krell. San Francisco: Harper and Row, 1982.
• —. “The Way to Language.” On the Way to Language. Trans. P. D. Hertz. San Francisco: Harper and Row, 1971.
• McHoul, Alec. “Cyberbeing and ~space.” Postmodern Culture 8.1 (1997). http://www.iath.virginia.edu/pmc.
• Okrent, Mark. Heidegger’s Pragmatism: Understanding, Being, and the Critique of Metaphysics. Ithaca: Cornell UP, 1988.
• Rieger, R., A. Michaelis and M. M. Green. Glossary of Genetics: Classical and Molecular. 5th edition. Berlin: Springer-Verlag, 1991.
• Roe, Phil. “Of Hologrammatology: The Politics of Virtual Writing.” Diss. Murdoch U, forthcoming 1998.
• Rucker, Rudy. “Software.” Live Robots. 1982. New York: Avon 1994.
• Sharrock, Wes. “Ethnographic Work.” The Discourse Analysis Research Group Newsletter 11.1 (1995): 3-8.
• Joan Stambaugh. “Introduction.” Identity and Difference. By Martin Heidegger. New York: Harper and Row, 1969. 7-18.
• Wiener, Norbert. Cybernetics: Or Control and Communication in the Animal and the Machine. Cambridge: MIT P, 1961.

 

Bishnupriya Ghosh

Department of English
Utah State University
bishnu@cc.usu.edu

 

What seems an eternity ago, Kwame Appiah argued that the “post” in post-colonial was a theoretical space-clearing gesture.¹ His critique of the use of neotraditional artifacts in a globalized late capitalist economy has been addressed, extended, and reframed by almost all major postcolonial critics from the early 1990s. Vijay Mishra and Bob Hodge, among others, suggest that the postmodern emerges as a western strategy of absorbing, organizing, and consuming all “othernesses” (“native,” “ethnic,” “non-western”) that once signaled the fall of modernist epistemologies.² In their view, the postcolonial actually precedesthe postmodern, but functioning within a global cultural economy–a bazaar for non-western artifacts–the category panders to the needs of that global market, producing ever more reified versions of “other” worlds. Amid the clamor of these debates on the correlations and intersections between the postcolonial and the postmodern, departments made way; niches and nests were set up to accommodate the field, and badges of diversity were donned. And then the inevitable: a market for postcolonial texts providing a sampling of a world honed to the fashionable emphases on postmodern hybrids (on the left) and on globalized cultures or villages (on the right).

 

In this essay, I attempt to envision an interventionist postcolonial pedagogy through the advocacy of an international cultural studies, a praxis that would position classroom knowledge and skills within the demands and constraints of transnational cultural economies. While my own position in the First World academy, complete with its institutional and economic ramifications, clearly enables even this occasion to speak, here I am less preoccupied with theorizing the politics of my self-location. My primary focus will be the pedagogic imperative: a teacher’s analysis of the practices and objects that demarcate postcolonial studies, a field well-suited to “preparing” students in the American academy for their future, and almost inevitable, participation in global exchanges. But as a postcolonial critic, given the complex and contentious issues in the field, I feel that it is crucial to first chart out the theoretical space that frames and constitutes the kinds of praxes envisioned here.

 

Certainly, much of the contemporary soul-searching by postcolonial intellectuals living and teaching in First World locations has circulated around the question: does the institutionalization of the postcolonial evacuate it as a form of resistance to continuing western imperialism? Carol Breckenridge and Peter van der Veer, in an anthology devoted to the problem of knowledge-construction in postcolonial studies, characterize the “growing awareness of the role of academic disciplines in the reproduction of patterns of domination” as the central “predicament” of the postcolonial intellectual (1). A more vigorous critique based on a reading of global markets in the postmodern era is undertaken by Arif Dirlik in his attempt to locate the itinerary of the postcolonial in First World epistemologies and institutions.³ Delving into the postmodernity of critical discourse itself, Dirlik suggests that the emergence of the category “postcolonial” should be understood as a First World response to the conceptual needs generated by the rapid transformations of a world capitalist order; in the changing relationships within the world market, “Third World” intellectuals “arrived” in the First World academy, and serviced that First World through their various forms of crisis-management. As early as 1988, Gayatri Spivak had moved toward a similar reading of the economy of postcolonial studies, by suggesting that First World intellectuals do not recognize to what extent the U.S. academy is sustained by the manipulation of Third World labor: “it is possible to suggest to the so-called ‘Third World’ that it produces the wealth and the possibility of cultural self-representation of the ‘First World’” (“Practical Politics” 96). My point here is that these conversations should find articulation beyond scholarly exchanges: that is, the questions of value and labor (raised by Spivak and Dirlik) as they overdetermine epistemological necessities (the very “need” to learn about the postcolonies) should become a crucial part of any course in postcolonial studies, so that students can reflect on the conditions that make possible the very objects they study, the practices they undertake, and their teacher’s position as an authority.

 

But this can only be achieved if postcolonial theorists can bracket their angst and hunker down to make decisions and compromises on what kinds of political responsibilities one can bring into discussion or contention in the classroom. Such pedagogic matters have elicited some critical attention in recent years. For instance, Gauri Viswanathan, best known for her exemplary work on English Studies in India, Masks of Conquest, captures the field of pedagogic problems in postcolonial studies in the following comment:

 

Of course, the easiest way of diluting the radical force of a text is to co-opt it into the mainstream curriculum, and to some extent the steady inclusion of so-called minority literatures in the mainstream English literature curriculum has reduced their oppositional force. But I see no reason to be negative about the inclusion of multicultural literature if it has forced the field of "English" to rethink its accepted parameters. "English literature" is increasingly being rewritten as "Literature in English," and the change is a healthy one. It deterritorializes the national implications of English literature, and it refocuses attention on language rather than the nation as the creative principle of literature. I'm wary of having "postcolonial literature" in English departments without defining what postcolonial literature is in the first place. "Literature in English" is a much more satisfactory term for me, at least if such literature is studied across cultures and territorial boundaries. ("Pedagogical Alternatives" 57-58)

 

Viswanathan’s comments foreground the problematic inherent in choosing representative postcolonial texts, and the choices raise a host of questions: what is the purchase of the “postcolonial” in the American academy? How is literary value assigned to these texts? In my view, such queries dovetail into the larger task of understanding the objects and practices of the classroom in terms of transnational epistemologies and systems of production, consumption and distribution, and then envisioning a transnational public sphere within which one must speak, write, and act. This is suggested in the hope that the insistence on transnationality would imbue students in the First World with a political responsibility not only to their own national public sphere, but to the greater circuits which determine and are determined by their actions.

 

An International Cultural Studies: Public Spheres, Mass Media, Praxis

 

In the following section, I propose an international model of cultural studies that could reinstate the political value of the postcolonial in transnational public spheres. In a seminal moment, Stuart Hall identified cultural studies as a response to “social and cultural change in postwar Britain”:

 

An attempt to address the manifest break-up of traditional culture, especially traditional class cultures, it set about registering the impact of new forms of affluence and consumer society on the very hierarchical and pyramidal structure of British society. Trying to come to terms with the fluidity and undermining impact of mass media and of an emerging mass society on this old European class society, it registered the cultural impact of the long-delayed entry of the United Kingdom into the modern world. (12)

 

Here Hall marks cultural studies as a response to a changing public sphere, a practice committed to examining and charting the ensemble of symbolic practices in that sphere. Tracing a history of cultural studies, Hall locates its beginnings in the Leavisite project of “tending the health” of a “national culture” (13); but cultural studies takes upon itself the task of “unmasking” the “unstated presuppositions of the humanist traditions,” its “regulative” cultural role (15). My arguments in this essay draw on Hall’s vision of demystifying the literary, and of charting the cultural spheres that shape all forms of political praxis. The postcolonial as praxis in a globalizing world can only be theorized in terms of an internationalized cultural studies.< sup>4

 

In an essay that seeks to document a shift in conceptions of civil spheres, from the modernist location of that sphere as a corollary to the nation-state to the postmodern challenge to the territorialization and rationalization of this space, Nicholas Garnham argues for the centrality of the mass media to this debate. The role of formulating cultural and social identities unlinked to nation-states questions the possible co-existence of several democratic polities (255). Garnham argues that the reconceptualization of public spheres within which global citizenships are envisaged is the only democratic option left in the contemporary world. This reconceptualization involves sustained education in the circuits and role of the mass media. Teaching the market and reinstating the relationship of the postcolonial to transnational public spheres depend upon cultural analyses of the mass media.

 

It is not enough, then, to be self-reflexive about the formulation of the literary, but to re-situate literature’s regulative function by placing it in the context of popular public discursive realms. More often than not, the seams and sutures between academic and the public discourses remain hidden, partly to preserve the sacrosanct apolity of academia. In 1992, The Chicago Cultural Studies Group described the clash between the two discursive realms in the following way:

 

Under the weight of such seemingly endless diversity of empirical concerns, multiculturalism as a social movement gets its critical purchase because it intrinsically challenges established norms, and can link together identity struggles with a common rhetoric of difference and resistance. In distinction, cultural studies as a critical movement proposes to reorder the world of expert knowledge, recasting method and pedagogy as elements of public culture. When newspapers and magazines amalgamate multiculturalism and cultural studies as a two-pronged drive to install political correctness, these utopian projects are the sprawling trouble-makers the media describe. (531)

 

Postcolonial discourse, as a part of the larger work of identity politics that opens intellectuals to the non-academic realm, has ever been in danger of being a kind of “academic neocolonialism” that bypasses central public discourses of resistance in the post-colony. Vinay Dharwadker, for instance, has criticized the Subaltern Studies group for failing to include within its corpus any work by the “subalterns” in question; part of this omission lies in the focus on texts in English. Thus the group virtually ignores, for instance, the self-analytic discourse produced by six million Dalit speakers of Marathi who have an independent body of work (Chicago Cultural Studies Group 541-42). The inwardness of academic discourse, then, precisely removes the critical potential of postcolonial theory from public discourses. George Yúdice takes a similar stance in criticizing “multicultural” rhetoric for having little effect on the identity politics of the public sphere:

 

While it is true that identity politics and its dominant ideology--multiculturalism--have achieved a relative democratization of some institutions (some school systems and universities, museums and exhibition spaces, certain foundations, and even certain business settings, as demonstrated by the adoption of "corporate multiculturalism"), the fact is that these openings have not had the slightest impact on the conduct of macropolitics of the economy, foreign relations, the armed forces, scientific research, and so on. Such an impact is made even more difficult by the weak linkages among "identity groups." ("Cultural Studies" 58).

 

In many ways it was the Satanic Verses debacle that shocked postcolonial academics into confronting the strength of popular discourses over cultural productions–particularly, the production of “authors” in conflicting discourses of nationality, citizenship, property, and selfhood. One contemporary example of the “scripting” of postcolonial authors is the case of Taslima Nasreen, a Bangladeshi author whose escape to the West became an international incident in Europe in 1994, and a national embarrassment for Bangladesh. Early in those events, she was nicknamed “the female Rushdie” on an NPR Show, “All Things Considered”; very few of the commentaries on her work in the West (and she has been available in translation) focus on the novel Lajja for which she had a fatwa issued against her. Her status as a victim of Islamic religious intolerance has dominated all conversations on Nasreen. Descriptions of her escape present the West as coolly rational–the free democratic spheres of speech and action–and the Third world as a chaotic tropical realm: for instance, an article in the Financial Times, titled “Safe from Screams of Intolerance,” tells of Nasreen’s escape from the “steamy streets of Dhaka” to her new hideout in “cool Swedish forests” (29). In an essay on the “Nasreen Affair,” I argue that Third World authors are often consumed as “subalterns” in a historical script shared by the reading publics in the First and Third Worlds; authors have becomes free-floating signifiers who are placed within pre-existent Western scripts of freedom, progress and the expression of individuality.⁵

 

In an issue of Socialist Review on South Asian postcolonial theory and writing, Inderpal Grewal (1994) reinforces the argument that the scripting of authors depends on the public discourses that interpellate our interpretation of literary texts.⁶ Grewal criticizes the canonization of authors such as Bharati Mukherjee, whose fiction reiterates the discourse of freedom from (Eastern) oppression so essential for the consolidation of Euro-American feminist liberatory agendas. Mukherjee’s work is typically taught as immigrant literature and women’s literature; her narrative of escape from India, a place of tradition and backwardness, finds reverberations in the American rhetoric of citizenship and the New World. The back cover of Jasmine includes a blurb from The Baltimore Sun that bears witness to the text’s popularity: “Poignant… heart-rending…. This is the story of the transformation of an Indian village girl, whose grandmother wants to marry her off at 11, into an American woman who finally thinks for herself” (59). The spurious connections between Euro-American feminism and colonial modernity makes it possible for such a text, argues Grewal, to gain “literary value” over texts such as Meena Alexander’s Nampally Road, a work trenchant in its criticism of the nightmare of immigrant existence. Perhaps it is important to read authors like Mukherjee–on whom there is a volume of critical essays–in context of her production as author so that her “insider’s knowledge” may be framed by the public sphere in which she is consumed. In the “Introduction” to the essays on Mukherjee, the editor, Emmanuel Nelson, in fact ascribes Mukherjee’s importance in part to her celebration of her new immigrant status: “What is fascinating, however, is Mukherjee’s determined rejection of the emotional paralysis of exile and her enthusiastic affirmation of the immigrant condition…” (x). Such frames for authors reinforce dominant ideologies of freedom and escape scripted in First World-Third World exchanges.

 

In the recent volume dedicated to configuring an international cultural studies, On Edge: The Crisis of Contemporary Latin American Culture, George Yúdice raises some important questions regarding the relationship of cultural analysis to the reconception of an effective public sphere. He suggests the conception of “transnational public spheres” where the needs and dimensions of societies across nations may be discussed together. With reference to Gramsci, Yúdice characterizes the civil sphere as an “ensemble of symbolic practices” where a “discursive consensus” is struck and an image of a socius is constituted therein; but, Yúdice asks, under powerful deterritorializations can a socius be possible (51)? One has to imagine transnational public spheres where issues such as urban violence, poverty, labor forces, and so forth are discussed with the possibility of consensus; cultural studies can contribute to this exchange of symbolic data by recording, analyzing, and criticizing that data (63). Certainly, such a model of transnational analysis and exchange becomes particularly relevant in articulating the practices that constitute the “literary text,” its use and value as postcolonial literature read within the American academy.

 

In the same volume, the editors, Henry Schwarz and Richard Dienst, preoccupy themselves with the penetration of public spheres by electronic media and reproduction. A globalizing media creates a mass of cultural transmissions (financial, military, institutional) that cognitively “map” or order the world in a certain way. Others, such as George Yúdice, Kumkum Sangari, and Meenakshi Mukherjee, critique the new political and cultural terrains constituted by the global media: they insist on reading the postcolonial in context of civil spheres completely saturated with mass electronic reproduction, originating in the First World and harnessed to the logics of transnational capital.⁷ Mukherjee notes that, in the case of India, the cultural amnesia generated by the infiltration of STAR TV, MTV, and CNN into homes, obliterates local and regional cultures unless they are brought back as “planned authenticities” (2,608); a globalized media interpenetrating the so-far state-run Doordarshan (television) beams messages of conspicuous consumption to remote villages, and people in the survival sector dream of washing machines and microwaves.

 

But this scenario is not as apocalyptic as it sounds: Dienst and Schwarz, for instance, theorize resistance–a key issue in postcolonial theory–in terms of “countertransmissions” drawn from “diverse imaginary resources” that “interrupt” these “circuits of control”; cross-cultural analysis involves the record and examination of these interruptions and reformulations of mass media transmissions harnessed to dominant political and financial interests. This perception of “countertransmissions” can be deployed to reconstitute the “postcolonial” as resistance, a challenge to dominant ideologies transacted across public spheres; but without looking at the globalizing force and circuits of mass media and electronic reproductions originating in the First World the counteractivity of the postcolonial cannot be harnessed for decolonizing political effects. An international conception of cultural studies is necessary for cultural studies not to be completely removed from notions of political solidarity (its initial impetus)–not to be “Cocacolonized” in Yúdice’s terms (52)–and for postcolonial literature to be politically effective.

 

I emphasize a cultural studies praxis for teaching postcolonial literature because for postcolonial critics, participating in and attempting to resist a homogenizing global cultural economy, mass-produced images that create global imaginaries are a problem. Gauri Viswanathan (1996) points to the fact that communities outside academia–her example consists of South Asian communities in the United States–often collude with Western representations, uncritically Orientalizing themselves in the media and celebrating things that are a part of the history of domination:

 

There is so little communication between these communities, one so critical and the others so complicit. The latter continue to represent themselves through film and journalistic media as the exotic East; one instance of this is travel ads. To what extent does the failure of communication between these groups, in fact, nullify the critical activity South Asian academics are producing? (qtd. in Katrak 157).

 

This failure of communication was earlier noted in Ketu Katrak’s work on postcolonial women’s texts, where she argued that postcolonial theorists and critics, unlike writers, often fail to engage seriously with the “many urgent issues in their societies” (157). In fact the epigraph to her essay is culled from Wole Soyinka’s diatribe against criticism that produces, with “remorseless exclusivity” and “incestuous productivity,” limited “academic, bourgeois-situated literature” (qtd. in Katrak 157). Such allegations are particularly pertinent to my argument for re-locating postcolonial literature in terms of other cultural transmissions in transnational public spheres.

 

One only needs to look at recent films such as Kamasutra or Indian MTV’s version of “Indianess” (marketable ethnic clothes, artifacts, erotic temple architecture, etc.) to know that Indians play a great part in exoticizing themselves. An example to which we can all relate is perhaps the popularity of the goddess Kali in Western countercultures, as the fount of unrestrained female energy and sexuality. A student recently gave me an excerpt from a story by David James Duncan, from River Teeth, titled “Kali Personal.” The narrative frame describes the arrival of a personal ad from an anonymous sender from Calcutta, India, mailed to a Seattle daily; the envelope containing the ad allegedly smelt “funky,” and included fifteen thousand Indian rupees. The rest of the tale recounts the editor’s bizarre experience with the ad (which included barbecuing the rupees); it finally was stolen and ended up on rock concert posters and phone poles. The ad reads something like this: “Single Asian female; ageless; nonprofessional; new to america; searching for virile, confident, ambitious young males of any caste, color or physical description to whom to bare my perfect breasts and shining body and give ecstacies that leave you gasping for more. I never lie. From the moment you see me, you will burn for me…” (A smattering of Sanskrit in the two-page-long erotica lends colorful authenticity.) (39). This is a particularly interesting example because several feminist, and particularly lesbian South Asian communities, actually use Kali’s symbolic value in a very similar way. Advertisements in lesbian popular journals in Britain and Los Angeles that construct female sexual energy in the name of Kali also record such passages. My point here is that we must teach such mass and popular cultural texts alongside our postcolonial novels, prose, and poetry so that the “communication” that Viswanathan talks of–the interchange between the mass-produced transmissions and their concomitant counter-transmissions–can begin at the level of pedagogy. This would reinstate the postcolonial as a counter-hegemonic strategy aimed both at demystification and the historical recording of counter-transmissions.

 

As a prerequisite to a postcolonial cultural studies praxis that prepares the ground for students to locate themselves in a transnational public sphere, I emphasize “teaching the market” (to spin off of Gerald Graff’s exhortation to “teach the debate” in the classroom) in postcolonial objects and practices. In the balance of this essay, I will outline the ways in which the postcolonial critic can situate texts, courses, requirements, and university policies within a larger understanding of transnational exchanges.

 

Teaching the Market: Academia, Pedagogy, Literary Markets, and Value

 

Academia and the publishing industries of both the First and Third Worlds constitute the economy that most directly affects our choice of postcolonial objects and practices. This is a nexus that includes teachers, university administrators, critics, writers, publishers, distributors, advertisers, journal editors, and others who are responsible for regulating academic resources–for publication, research time, conferences, curriculum, and so forth–and for formulating pedagogic policy. As Dirlik and so many others have pointed out, the academy fulfills an economic need: we prepare students to participate/partake in a global economy by introducing them to “better” understanding of contemporary cultures, politics, and history. I attempt to chart the different aspects of the “market” that one can logistically include in discussions stretching over ten to sixteen weeks.

 

In examining Third World publishing and distribution, and its relation to the industrial production and consumption of texts, Philip Altbach notes the centrality of the economic motivations for the continuing dependence on First World publishing and critical facilities (454). Others, such as Ali Mazrui, argue for larger stakes: that the history of this market dependency lies in colonial systems of education, charting for African universities what Viswanathan did for Indian colonial education. Mazrui argues that the impact of colonial education in Africa has created postcolonial universities designed to “transform the African self into a neo-Western other” (334). He details the cultural dependency of postcolonial African universities (such as universities at Ibadan, Ghana at Legon, Dakar, and the old Makerere in Uganda)–their language of instruction, library holdings, faculty, curricular structure, and pedagogic requirements–which perceive themselves often as “extensions” of major European universities (334). Mazrui’s point is that it is not so much academic dependency that is worrisome, but the fact that the “cultural self” is at stake, as it is increasingly organized into a neo-colonial object. Investigations such as these suggest that the category of postcolonial literature should not be operable without adequate attention to the spheres of knowledge transaction (First and Third World universities and publishing industries) and the related questions of cultural dependency. For it is the shared transnational public spheres within which the problems and possibilities of the postcolonial take shape; it is here that postcolonial cultural artifacts are produced, distributed, and consumed.

 

Altbach and Mazrui provide important insights into the transnational structures of publishing industries and education systems; both draw our attention to the historical distributions of economic and cultural power. Certainly, the visibility of certain postcolonial objects in the First World has much to do with the cultural capital of the ex-colonial West. In demystifying systems of rewards and punishments, Graham Huggan examines the neocolonialism of literary prizes–the Booker prize, in particular–that offer symbolic sanctions (he quotes Bourdieu) to postcolonial writers. Huggan’s point is that literature is not the locus of immanent value” but “a site of contestation between different discursive regimes” (412); if one adds po stcoloniality to this, the condition implies a “contradiction between anti-colonial ideologies and neo-colonial market schemes” (413). Offering a history of the Booker McConnell company, a corporation that profited from the harshest of colonial regimes in the 1830s, Huggan goes to lengths to show how the Booker awards still attempt to contain postcolonial resistance or cultural critique by promoting English as a common or shared fund. This liberal view “avoids confronting structural differences in conditions of literary production and consumption across the English-speaking world” (417). Analyses such as Huggan’s work on the assigning of literary value are valuable components of teaching the market for postcolonial texts. In teaching a postcolonial literary text one could start from the point of consumption–the contrasting reception-contexts for a single work, the gaps, tensions and commonalities would prove instructive in understanding the global market structures–and then move to a history of production and distribution.

 

The Booker prize example points to an important dimension to teaching the market: the feedback effect of the “world market” in postcolonial literatures, as most recently evidenced in the hullabaloo over Arundhati Roy’s God of Small Things, coinciding as it did with the celebrations of India’s fifty years of independence. In the Indian newspapers and journals, money was the first item of interest: every article that appeared in those first few weeks commented on the 3.5 lakh (88,000) copies worldwide, earning Rs.5 crore ($1,250,000). A blurb in India Today, October 27th, 1997, summed things up well: “Arundhati Roy opens up the global market for Indian writing in English” (23). This was followed by a description: “Slim-hipped Roy, her carelessly curled hair cascading over her face, her nose-ring twinkling with naughtiness, and her language flapping with originality, excited the stodgy English literary establishment” (23). On the one hand, this loaded sentence echoes gestures of exoticization extended to South Asian women in the West, and on the other, reads Roy as a manipulator of the market–someone who triumphs over the “stodgy English establishment.” Other articles gloated: “Where is the British Novel now?” (says a reporter for the Calcutta daily, The Statesman). He continues: “If the Booker is a mirror in which contemporary literary culture may glimpse a reflection of its own worth, then one ought to look elsewhere–to the USA or India. I once again congratulate Roy for winning; but where are the new British writers?” (1). Again, a double-edged sentence in which the anti-colonial nonetheless reflects a culture that continues to look at itself, via satellite as it were, through British and American ratification.

 

The question of constructing the cultural object as literary, or the awarding of literary value, becomes an important part of teaching the market. This has a special valence in context of colonial constructions of other literatures which was the core of many Orientalist projects: for instance, Gauri Viswanathan examines the ideological fabric of such Orientalist constructions in Masks of Conquest, while Vinay Dharwadkar explores the European legacies behind the cataloging of Indian literatures–“Sanskrit literature which has a strong philological base, was characterized as a part of ancient and classical India, in opposition to other “modern vernacular literatures” (168).

 

It is an easy move from including popular discourses on particular postcolonial texts to the subsequent introduction of epistemological debates. Theoretical discourses that are self-reflexive about their own cultural and epistemological dependencies are integral complements to teaching the market. For example, if one’s subject is the global cultural economy, one can fold in George Yúdice’s critiques (1992) of the Western appropriations of Latin American cultural forms as examples of postmodernism. Yúdice advocates a better understanding of postmodernisms operating in postcolonial contexts: he finds the occurrence of the experiences and aesthetics in Latin America that Western critics group under the term postmodern long before the visibility of the Euro-American varieties, arguing that the heterogenous character of Latin American social and cultural formations made it possible for these “discontinuous, alternative, and hybrid forms to emerge” with ease (2). Kumkum Sangari (1987) makes a similar argument, articulating the danger of reading context-specific postcolonial cultural forms as variants of Western postmodernism: for instance, she proposes that, in the hybrid syncretic of Latin American life, “magic realism” must be understood as a “strategy for living” and not a “formal literary reflex”; non-mimetic or marvelous ways of seeing have a social relevance to Gabriel Garcia Márquez’s world, and this non-mimetism is not the same as the anti-mimetism of Western postmodernism (164).

 

In fact, the acknowledged failures of critical theory can be cautionary tales for students learning to map a global cultural economy. Since the mid-eighties, postcolonial theorists have been coming to terms with the postcolonial as a rubric; many seem unified in their commitment to rescuing the category “postcolonial” from becoming a historical abstraction that overlooks contemporary power axes (Mishra & Hodge, 1991; Deepika Bahri, 1996; Anne McClintock, 1992; Ella Shohat, 1992; Arif Dirlik, 1994; Gayatri Spivak, 1993, etc.). Certainly, the “postcolonial” skews temporality by reducing everything that came before the colonial period into the blandly utopian “precolonial”; only artifacts that contain whiffs of colonial contamination are subject to avid scrutiny. Anne McClintock, in cataloging the issues elided in contemporary formulations of the term, writes: “If the theory promises a decentering of history in hybridity, syncreticism, multi-dimensional time, and so forth, the singularity of the term effects a re-centering of global history around the single rubric of European time” (86). Arif Dirlik, citing McClintock, argues in the same vein: that postcolonial studies has generated a “universalizing historicism” that “projects globally what are but local experiences” (345). The temporal and spatial problematics of the term are further emphasized and rethought in Santiago Colás’s work on postcolonialism in the Latin American context: “What can the term postcolonial contribute to an understanding of the culture of Latin America?” Citing Edward Said’s articulation of the “heart” of decolonization as the slow recovery of territory after World War II, Colás notes that “8 million square miles and 29 million inhabitants of Latin America were decolonized by 1826 (with the signal exceptions of Cuba and Puerto Rico). Postcolonial critics and theorists have failed to examine the difference of Latin America” (383); then, using Slavoj Zizek’s theories of ideology and political subjecthood, Colás goes on to demonstrate a different understanding of the term postcolonial in its function of a “self-styled” illusion (392).

 

I categorize these critical narratives as useful cautionary tales because they all draw attention to the easy commodification of the postcolonial or the non-western, often neatly packaged into anthologies that stretch liberal arms toward a post-statist consciousness. The classroom should be a place where the implications of market operations on knowledges and skills acquired can be argued, contested, and understood on different terms by students belonging to varying imagined communities.

 

What are some of these implications that can be addressed in the classroom? Transnational capital, as it transcends nation-states and permeates local corners, generates a perceived intellectual need to comprehend and cognitively “manage” the plenitude of a global culture’s politics and history. Cultural artifacts become commodities that facilitate such comprehension. University programs such as Ethnic Studies, Cultural Studies, English and Comparative Literature departments with multicultural, world, and commonwealth literature courses struggle to contain and represent the “other” within and the “other” outside of the United States. The question posed in the classroom may well be: What purchase does the postcolonial have with these other courses and programs?

 

The most common and dangerous inclusion of the postcolonial into the academy has been its ghettoization in one department (and often a single course). Sometimes one course fills in several needs: for example, a course in postcolonial literature focusing on South Asian female diaspora may fulfill student requirements for courses in Women’s Studies, Ethnic Studies, Commonwealth, World, and Multicultural literature requirements. This overdetermination of texts give students a token glimpse of the “other,” quickly and deftly managed within the curriculum. Commenting on “minority discourse,” Sylvia Wynter offers an insight that further exposes the issue of crisis-management tied in with curricular structures:

 

[if] the category of minority includes the sub-category "women," then we are here confronted with the anomaly that it is we who constitute the numerical majority. Yet such is the force of the shared semantic charter through which we interdepend, that we all know what we mean when we use the category minority to apply to an empirical majority. (433)

 

The dizzying concept of “special interest” groups who must share one segment of the pie–more concretely thought of as teaching the non-western world’s literature in ten weeks–is seen by Gayatri Spivak as a political strategy of crisis-management in the global economy (“Practical Politics” 111).

 

While efforts such as re-designing requirements on a course-by-course or institutional basis and the emphasis on transmitting discussions of the postcolonial across the curriculum unquestionably comprise the most integral parts of larger ongoing struggles, in the current ghettoized situation, one of the options for postcolonial studies courses is simply to teach the market. To teach the market in such a scenario would be to highlight the “semantic” character of the category under which a particular text is taught, and then to make visible the parameters of the disciplines that govern the inclusion of such as text in the course; one could teach only two or three novels in a semester, but the students would learn about the relationship of, for example, a critical multiculturalism to women’s studies and how these relationships carve out institutional space and the assignment of value.

 

In describing the World Literature and Cultural Studies Program at the University of California at Santa Cruz, Kristin Ross suggests that we make available our acts of worlding in the course, by identifying the negative or empty spaces around the texts that we teach–“world” should be most of all a “refusal” of a naturalized category (671); she therefore insists on the need to teach the motors of our curricular choices alongside the representative cultures and societies under perusal. I would imagine that this would entail making available to one’s students the political, pragmatic, and personal decisions behind course designs and the choice of texts. In the interview alluded to above, Viswanathan suggests that the “curriculum battle is less about what books to read than how to reflect an increasingly complicated society with different class and ethnic compositions. The language of contemporary curricular restructuring has not changed all that much from the discourse of empire through which English literature was universalized” (60). Ross’s emphasis on revealing the world as absence rather than presence changes the universalizing gestures Viswanathan sees as dangerous; furthermore, such an act refocuses attention wasted on divvying up the pie to the impossibility of full representation in an increasingly complex set of domestic and international relationships.

 

In the same essay, Ross points to another effect of institutional ghettos: the severe disjuncture between domestic (American) and international “multicultural” courses. “Melting-pot” classes in American pluralism encourage a kind of “provincial nesting” that blocks connections between the students’ own particular experiences and those of other people. This leaves “disadvantaged groups eddying in self-referential circles on the periphery of academic life” (669), disconnected from counterpart cultures in world literature courses. The parochialism of American Studies has much to do with this divorce in the sharing of resources and programs. Such institutional divorces further lead to an epistemological gap between philosophically-based courses with a political edge (“postcolonial literature” courses or Ethnic studies) and other programs in the university geared to study other cultures (such as Asian Studies). Referring to marginalizations within Asian studies and Asian literatures, Rey Chow explores how Asian classicists often see culture as a general literacy that comes before periodization and specialization; the farther one is removed from centralized or canonical Asian texts, the more “dubious” one’s claim to the culture. Chow recounts one occasion on which she “told a senior Chinese classicist that [she] was going to a conference on contemporary Hong Kong literature, for instance, [and] the response… was: ‘Oh, is there such a thing?’” (125). It is unlikely that Chow is alone in her experience of being marginalized in Asian Studies programs, often Orientalist in their lack of attention to the historical production of the object of study as an object of study. Asian Studies programs fulfill a requirement of preparing students for participation in a global economy; resistance to this effort calls into question the balances and resources in the university. Certainly, one could hope for more interdisciplinary transmissions of postcolonial debates, not only across English, History, and Anthropology departments, but in disciplines that participate vigorously in the global economy (economics, the languages, and political science) and parley in culture (Folklore programs, Asian Studies, Art History, Music, Language departments, etc.).

 

Besides the structure and resources of American universities, the pedagogies of the postcolonial leave much to be desired. One seldom comes across a sustained reading of the postcolonial in most courses in British and American literature, in the way do we do nowadays with gender. What Said has done with Jane Austen is precisely what Gauri Viswanathan, in her interview with Mary Vasudeva and Deepika Bahri, suggests that we should do with several other canonical texts. In her words:

 

Dickens' Barnaby Rudge, for instance, which is about mass mobilization and the horrific effects of militant Protestantism, shocks someone into the recognition that what seem to be exclusively problems of Third World society are, in fact, problems you could find in English society. That makes us rethink the problems of the Third World and consider that these difficulties have become a part of an international, global history. (59)

 

It is understandable that we choose English and European texts written or translated into English when teaching in the Euro-American academy, but need we be obsessed with texts that refer only to other English texts? One only needs to look at the immense attention paid to writers such as Jean Rhys (revising Brontë), Derek Walcott (rewriting Homer), Coetzee (redoing Defoe), and so forth, in postcolonial studies conferences and seminars, to become aware of this attachment to colonial texts. As a character in Upamanyu Chatterjee’s parodic English, August (1988), puts it with a great deal of irony: “Dr.Prem Krishen of Meerut University has written a book on E.M. Forster, India’s darling Englishman–most of us seem so grateful that he wrote a novel about India. Dr. Prem Krishen holds a Ph.D. on Jane Austen from Meerut University. Have you ever been to Meerut? A vile place, but comfortably Indian. What is Jane Austen doing in Meerut?” (170). The epistemological parameters of the Anglo-American canon seem to have been reexamined, but not sufficiently.

 

Therefore critics such as Hodge and Mishra talk about the need to pay equal importance to vernacular and supplemental knowledges that were also a part of postcolonial resistances. Situated knowledges of the sort that Salman Rushdie’s work demands–Mishra and Hodge unpack the density and importance of the Shri 420 citation in The Satanic Verses to make their point–are essential to prevent complete commodification of the postcolonial into European cultural rubrics.⁸ So instead of simply teaching a canonical nationalist text such as Tagore’s Ghare Baire (with the added convenience of a film version for our visually-inclined generation) with his lectures on “Nationalism” or “Personality,”⁹ which were published in English by Macmillian, one could supplement the novel with the Bengali nationalistic popular verse, folk rhymes, songs, slogans, letters, and so forth, written in the first decades of the 1900s, which fill out the context of production.¹⁰ While there are enough people who have access to Tagore and are interested in translating him, much of this other material will be lost unless postcolonial critics pay attention to small acts of research and translation as everyday pedagogic practice. This everyday practice is perhaps best characterized as the “tactics” that Rey Chow demarcates as the postcolonial gesture of resistance; while a “strategy” involves sustaining and demarcating one’s place or “field” of power, “tactical interventions” are calculated actions that “are determined by the absence of a proper locus”–they are transitory, contingent, and fragmented, but they take over the field by eroding it “slowly” and “tactically (17). This seems to me a particularly good description of what I am suggesting here: the inclusion of vernacular and supplemental materials that are not tied to European colonial texts or frameworks or rubrics, but whose translated presence will “rethink the parameters” (Viswanathan 58) of those fields.

 

The interaction of postcolonial texts written in English with vernacular and popular cultural texts also circumvents the critical aporia that seems to enter any conversation on world literatures in English–the old question of authenticity versus hybridity; a question that leads to part-defensive pompous claims of the sort Rushdie made in his much vilified New Yorker essay–that Indian writing in English far surpasses the vibrancy and innovation of writing in the other eighteen Indian vernaculars (Rushdie 38). His insistence of the importance of Indian writing in English can be seen as a reaction to the modernist polemics in the critical discourses on the Indian novel in English, always pitted against its vernacular–and more authentic–other. As Meenakshi Mukherjee (1993), a veteran critic of the Indian novel in English, observes: there seems to always be an “anxiety of Indianess” in the novel in English, a sensibility not integral to prose fiction in the Indian vernaculars (the bhasha novels). Writers in English always create a unified imaginative topos out of Indian heterogeneity, while bhasha writers are more tuned to local and regional specificities. Perhaps, she concludes, English has fewer registers than the vernaculars which draw on folk tales, films, riddles, nonsense verse, nursery rhymes, slogans, and street corner culture (2608). While it is certainly true that English continues to be the language of power and privilege in India, I would argue that the cultural anxiety that Mukherjee locates in the Indian novel in English, and the essentializing and homogenizing gestures she reads there, describe the genre between 1930-1980–a span that corresponds to the Nehruvian vision of a modern progressive India when there was a dire need to establish common national registers and field of communication. R.K.Narayan, Mulk Raj Anand, Raja Rao, Kamala Markandaya, and Anita Desai all fit Mukherjee’s paradigm. In post-Emergency postmodern India, the new novelists do not even attempt to capture the whole Indian reality. Arundhati Roy, whose recent novel God of Small Things (1997) has received international critical acclaim, claims to dream in English, and her novel intersperses English with untranslated Malayalam, an idiomatic mix that has–to return to Mukherjee–a very specific regional location in India.¹¹ My point here is that new Englishes are increasingly inextricable from their cultural contexts, and a postcolonial praxis must include adequate attention to the kinds of vernacular and supplemental knowledges that Mishra and Hodge theorize in their essay.

 

Of course, this idea of opening up the postcolonial to contextual and supplemental knowledges dovetails into the politics of translation in academia and in the publishing industry. Whenever possible we should address the politics and economics of the translations taught in class insofar as they determine the “literary” worth and “marketability” of a piece; but the concern most central to my project is the way in which the star-system within the academy regulates who gets translated and, therefore, taught. The example that comes most readily to mind is Mahasweta Devi, who has been translated by Gayatri Spivak. Spivak, of course, is eminently aware of such politics, particularly when she cautions us against producing “translatese” in Outside in the Teaching Machine:¹²

 

In the act of wholesale translation into English there can be a betrayal of the democratic ideal into the law of the strongest. This happens when all the literatures of the Third World get translated into a sort of with-it translatese, so that the literature by a woman in Palestine begins to resemble, in the feel of its prose, something by a man in Taiwan. (182)

 

But while the awareness of the “law of the strongest” is necessary, critics such as Rey Chow have cautioned against not translating Third World texts, with special reference to Asian literature:

 

Unlike the teacher of French and German, the Asian literature teacher would almost guarantee her inaudibility if she were to insist on using the original language in a public setting. The problem she faces can be stated in this way: Does she sacrifice the specificities of language in order to generalize, so that she can put Asian literatures in a "cross-cultural" framework, or does she continue to teach untranslated texts with expertise--and remain ghettoized? (128)

 

There are, of course, no easy answers; but a way to address both Spivak’s epistemological problem and Rey Chow’s institutional concerns is to translate performatively, so that a single text may have different variants in different acts of translation. In such a scenario, one could teach “cross culturally” (not that this is not fraught with problems!) and avoid the specialized space of Asian literature or postcolonial literature. Of course, this performative translation presupposes vernacular knowledge, a severe difficulty in teaching national literatures in several vernaculars. The radical step here would be to resist national labels such as “a specialist in Indian literature,” and to begin to understand oneself as–and train oneself to be–a teacher of more local vernaculars. The other option would be to use the translations that are readily available, in which case the translator’s position in the academy or in literary circles (whenever possible), should also be a part of the course. Students then become aware of the market that imparts literary value to a text: thus, Devi’s work is not simply treated as a “window” into the world of Indian subalterns.

 

These issues of pedagogy, then, lead inevitably to the broader questions of ascribing literary value to a text, as well as the value of the literary itself. Rey Chow draws our attention to the status of literature in the age of cultural studies: she argues that one of the most “devastating aspects” of new technological organizations of knowledge is the “marginalization” of literature within cultural studies (132). Literature becomes “information,” and literatures from other cultures stand in the greatest danger of being commodified as reflections of other worlds. Placing literature in context of the discourses that characterize literariness, and also alongside all other cultural transmissions that relativize its value as information or great art, can circumvent some of the problems that Chow alludes to in her analysis.

 

In Conclusion

 

Teaching the politics of the academy, pedagogy, and the publishing industry, the relationship of academia to international public spheres, and the intersections of all kinds of cultural work with critical theory, along with our choice of postcolonial texts, offers ways to recuperate the postcolonial as cultural and political resistance. While as critics we take on an immense task of cultural imagination that charts, analyzes, critiques, and catalogs, as teachers we must hunker down to a set of strategies that combat institutional and market constraints. For instance, one option would be to conceptualize a “deep structure” to a course in which only one or two literary texts are taught, and more attention is paid to the various nodes (vernacular and supplemental knowledges, the position of writer, critic, translator, contrasting reception-contexts, and so forth) that I have outlined above. “Survey” course structures tend to hide acts of worlding. In this information age, rather than be disseminators of information, we need to teach modes of organizing that information by offering a range of tools that students can deploy to map their world. The classroom can remain a local counterpoint to global hegemonies only if we can create a place where students can debate over the cognitive matrices that will regulate their participation in a global economy.

Notes

 

1. See Appiah, “Is the Post- in Postmodernism the Post- in Postcolonial?”

 

2. See Mishra and Hodge, “What is Post(-)Colonialism?”

 

3. See Dirlik, “The Postcolonial Aura: Third World Criticism in the Age of Global Capitalism.”

 

4. Of course, there may be an infinite number of alternative sites of cultural resistance to globalizing economies; furthermore, the classroom may be “used” in many ways other than those suggested here–e.g., outreach programs, performative self-expression, etc.–in order to become a site of resistance. My project here, however, is limited to the exploration of pedagogic imperatives as they govern the choice and inclusion of postcolonial objects and practices.

 

5. In an address to a conference, “Writing and Thinking at the End of an Epoch,” Elke Schmitter makes a similar point in drawing our attention to the postmodern global production of literary publicity; she argues that the worlds that the authors mediate have become less relevant than the author-as-text.

 

6. Others in this collection, Jasbar Puar, Amarpal Dhaliwal, and Anuradha Dingwaney Needham, add to the surge of critical commentary on the politics of location, diaspora, and displacement in the 1990s.

 

7. See George Yúdice, “Postmodernity and Transnational Capitalism in Latin America”; Kumkum Sangari, “The Politics of the Possible”; and Meenakshi Mukherjee, “The Anxiety of Indianess: Our Novels in English.” For a further analysis of global interpenetration in the Indian context see Bishnupriya Ghosh and Bhaskar Sarkar, “Diaspora and Postmodern Fecundity.”

 

8. Mishra and Hodge cite S. Aravamudan’s analysis of the 420 motif in The Satanic Verses to show how Rushdie deploys that reference to effect a critique of Islam.

 

9. See, for example, material drawn from these lectures in Michael Sprinker’s analysis of the text, “Homeboys: Nationalism, Colonialism, and Gender in Rabindranath Tagore’s The Home and the World.”

 

10. See Sugata Bose, “Nation as Mother: Representations and Contestations of ‘India’ in Bengali Literature and Culture.” Bose presents an account of nationalist aspirations in Bengali literature–the dominant symbols, myths, motifs, and tropes. He records how Bankimchandra Chattapadhyay’s hymn to the motherland, Bande Mataram, originally written as a filler for his journal Bangadarshan and later inserted into his nationalistic novel Anandamath (1882), was set to music by Tagore and sung at the Calcutta session of the Indian National Congress in 1896. Such vernacular cultural material fleshes out the nationalist aspirations of the Tagore text.

 

11. For a further development of the vernacular-English debate see my essay, “An Invitation to Indian Postmodernity: Salman Rushdie’s Situated Cultural Hybridity,” forthcoming in Keith Booker, ed., Critical Essays on Salman Rushdie.

 

12. For more on translation and postcolonial cultures see Gordon Collier, Us/Them: Translation, Transcription, and Identity in Post-Colonial Literary Cultures.

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• Bahri, Deepika. “Coming to Terms with the ‘Postcolonial.’” Between the Lines: South Asians and Postcoloniality Eds. Deepika Bahri and Mary Vasudeva. Philadelphia: Temple UP, 1996. 137-166.
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• Breckenridge, Carol A., and Peter van der Veer. “Orientalism and the Postcolonial Predicament.” Orientalism and the Postcolonial Predicament: Perspectives on South Asia. Eds. Breckenridge & van der Veer. Philadelphia: U of Pennsylvania P, 1993. 1-19.
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• Huggan, Graham. “Prizing “Otherness”: A Short History of the Booker” Studies in the Novel XXIX.3 (Fall 1997): 412-433.
• John, Binoo K. “The New Deity of Prose.” India Today 27 Oct. 1997: 23-25.
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• Mazrui, Ali. A. “The “Other” as the “Self” under Cultural Dependency: the Impact of the Postcolonial University.” Encountering the Other(s). Ed. Gisela Brinker-Gabler. Albany: SUNY P, 1995. 333-362.
• McClintock, Anne. “The Angel of Progress: The Pitfalls of the term ‘Post-Colonial.’” Social Text 31-32 (1992) 84-98.
• Mishra, Vijay and Bob Hodge. “Salman Rushdie’s The Satanic Verses.” Diacritics 19.2 (Summer 1989): 3-20.
• —. “What is Post(-)Colonialism?” Textual Practice 5.3 (1991): 399-414.
• Mukherjee, Meenakshi. “The Anxiety of Indianess: Our Novels in English.” The Economic and Political Weekly 27 Nov. 1993: 2607-2611.
• Nelson, Emmanuel S. Introduction. Bharati Mukherjee: Critical Perspectives. New York: Garland Publishing, 1993. ix-xvii.
• Ross, Kristin. “The World Literature and Cultural Studies Program.” Critical Inquiry (Summer 1993): 666-676.
• Roy, Arundhati. God of Small Things. New Delhi: India Ink, 1997.
• Rushdie, Salman. “Damme, this is the Oriental scene for you!” The New Yorker 23 June 1997: 50.
• Sangari, Kumkum. “The Politics of the Possible.” Cultural Critique. (Fall 1987): 157-186.
• Schmitter, Elke. “Boycott Lufthansa: literature and publicity today–a few ruminations and a suggestion.” Trans. Wilhem Werthern. TriQuarterly 94 (Fall 1995): 155-60.
• Schwarz, Henry, and Richard Dienst. “Introduction: Warning! Cautious Readers!” Schwarz and Dienst 1-14.
• —, eds. Reading the Shape of the World: Towards an International Cultural Studies. Oxford: Westview P, 1996.
• Shohat, Ella. “Notes on the Post-Colonial.” Social Text 31-32 (1992): 93-11.
• Spivak, Gayatri. Outside in the Teaching Machine. New York: Routledge, 1993.
• —. “Practical Politics of The Open End.” The Post-Colonial Critic: Interviews, Strategies, Dialogues. Ed. Sarah Harasym. New York: Routledge, 1990. 95-112.
• Sprinker, Michael. “Homeboys: Nationalism, Colonialism, and Gender in Rabindranath Tagore’s The Home and the World.” Schwarz and Dienst 202-223.
• Viswanathan, Gauri. Masks of Conquest: Literary Study and British Rule in India. New York: Columbia UP, 1989.
• —. “Pedagogical Alternatives: Issues in Postcolonial Studies.” Interview. Between the Lines. Eds. Bahri and Vasudeva. 54-63.
• “Woman in the News: Safe from Screams of Intolerance.” The Financial Times 14 August 1994.
• Wynter, Sylvia. “On Disenchanting Discourse: ‘Minority’ Literary Criticism And Beyond.” The Nature and Context of Minority Discourse. Eds. Abdul JanMohamed and David Lloyd. London: Oxford UP, 1990. 432-469.
• Yúdice, George. “Cultural Studies and Civil Society.” Schwarz and Dienst 50-66.
• —. “Postmodernity and Transnational Capitalism in Latin America.” On Edge: The Crisis of Contemporary Latin American Culture. Eds. George Yúdice et al. Minneapolis: U of Minnesota P, 1992. 1-22.

 

Lisa Brawley
Stuart Moulthrop
Co-editors

 

With this first issue of volume nine, we introduce a new section of Postmodern Culture expressly addressed to the relay between new media technologies and cultural practice. We’ve called this section “Traffic.” To be sure, the intersection of technology, media, and cultural theory remains a central concern of the journal as a whole, but this section is reserved for work that does not conform to the conventional structure of a critical essay. Something like field notes in global information culture, Traffic will make use of the multimedia capacities of the journal to comment on technoculture in its own idiom. We invite interviews, illustrations, brief commentary, collaborative web projects, interactive syllabi, animation, and video scripts. We are especially interested in work that queries the force of new media technologies on the practices of scholarship and teaching.

 

Also with this issue we announce the return of the PMC prize. Each June, the editorial board of Postmodern Culture will choose an outstanding critical and/or creative work published in the journal during the previous volume year. The author of this work will receive $500 and special billing on our main page.