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Lisa Brawley
lbrawley@kent.edu

 

Stuart Moulthrop
samoulthrop@UBmail.ubalt.edu

 

Co-editors

 

With this issue, we introduce an interactive annotated bibliography of postmodernism and critical theory. This bibliography began as a graduate student project in John Unsworth’s seminar on postmodern fiction and theory at the University of Virginia in the Fall of 1998. Students in that seminar contributed about 120 annotated entries on critical and theoretical works in the study of postmodernism. This database of annotated bibliograp hic entries has now been migrated to Postmodern Culture: readers of the journal are invited to register with the database and contribute entries of their own. We hope that, over time, this might develop into a valuable resource for students, theorists, a nd critics working in this area.

 

We also wish to draw attention to the return of the PMC prize, announced in our September issue. 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.

 

Jason Evan Camlot

Department of English
Stanford University
gazon@leland.stanford.edu

 

David McGimpsey, Lardcake.Toronto: ECW, 1997.

 

Twenty years ago–when an attempt to critically disassemble television still seemed like a viable project–social critic Jerry Mander pointed out that this “delivery system of co mmodity life” works exclusively in one direction: “These are not metaphors. There is a concentrated passage of energy from machine to you, and none in the reverse. In this sense, the machine is literally dominant, and you are passive” (171). David McG impsey’s recent book of poems entitled Lardcake may stand as an informal rebuttal to Mander’s Four Arguments for the Elimination of Television, or as proof that on at least one occasion the ingestion of artificial light has not f ollowed the dominating process that Mander claims to be unavoidable in TV-viewing. You don’t need a Ph.D. to know not to believe everything you see on television, but McGimpsey’s doctoral work in American literature and popular culture adds an interestin g twist to his collection of poems about our most vapid obsessions. It suggests, in addition to an obvious over-exposure to television light (in McGimpsey’s house the TV must always be on), a perhaps equally “unhealthy” immersion in the institution that, traditionally, most disdains the effects of the mass media, even as it inevitably succumbs to certain elements of the logic of mass culture.

 

As Mark Edmundson has put it in his description of the current use of liberal education “as lite entertainment for bored college students”: “University culture, like American cul ture writ large, is ever more devoted to consumption and entertainment, to the using and using up of goods and images” (40). To a new Ph.D. recipient and veteran TV-watcher like McGimpsey, the manifest ironies that emerge from this relationship between e ducation and television are useful for making insightful poetry about the most unsightly effects of our tabloid technologies. Poems that appear late in the book address the ironies directly, for instance, Master Po’s advice to Little Grasshopper–“Kill a prince & fly to USA, grasshopper / It will appear as incomplete on your transcript” (“Master Po” 72)–or the transcription of the first valedictory address at Oprah State University, in which the top graduate expounds her new learning:

 

Now as we head out into the world
I can look an employer square and say
don't believe the Enquirer, feel 
   good about yourself!

Next fall, I will sit down
in my XXL OSU sweats
and laugh at all the ridiculous headlines.
("Oprah State University" 73)

 

McGimpsey’s work clearly aims at something other than an acquired knowledge of how to laugh at the headlines and the accompanying sense of empowering distance from the “ridiculou s” tabloid world. Rather, these poems reveal the overwhelming ignorance and self-deception of such a “distanced” position, and, further, how this ignorance that we all occasionally share can be emotionally poignant. A recent poetic precedent to McGimpse y’s project might be Lynn Crosbie’s Miss Pamela’s Mercy, which contains the monologue “Love Letter from Gary Coleman” and a piece called “Sabrina” about “the smart one” in Charlie’s Angels. These poems begin to sketch out the p ossibility of a serious language with which to express our experience of the purest television trash. McGimpsey’s book expands upon this possibility and actually realizes it, showing us that it is possible to speak about our lives with television in a la nguage that is crisp, elegant, and often very sad. The sadness I refer to results from the gradual revelation of the depth of our investment in the icons and images of entertainment we so casually dismiss.

 

The book’s first section establishes the parameters of the world of Lardcake. It is a world of black humor, white enriched flour, and especially of the myriad shade s of gray that complicate the space between what we really want and what we know is “bad” for us. To weigh the value and effect of the images we consume is ultimately to put ourselves on the scale, complete with the knowledge that our taste for crap may be one of our most engrossing characteristics. How to write intelligently about our very real desire for brain candy? To begin his exploration of this ethical dilemma, the author develops a voice that provides an immanent account (perhaps a bit too imma nent to function as critique) of the intimate relationships a viewer can cultivate with the “stars” of Marshall McLuhan’s “cool” medium of television. We are given voices that morph the televised and the human in ways that suggest a new species, or, more appropriately phrased, a new brand of media consumer: the couch poet-ato.

 

These initial poetic personae are reminiscent of the pathetic Ratso Rizzo played by Dustin Hoffman in the film Midnight Cowboy. The fantasizing poet becomes king of the Hollywood (Florida) pool-side buffet, seeking the love and recognition of those who have never really deserved to be recognized themselves. This undeserving recognition, “television success,” to use a phrase from the book, fuels McGimpsey’s own deta iled exploration of narcissism, that process by which we privately love ourselves while looking at broadcast light. The narcissism is that of the prime-time viewer and of the prime-time poet at once, and the question of the day, both in terms of why we w rite this and why we watch that, is stated concisely: “If it doesn’t appeal to narcissism / is it appealing at all?” (“Jurassic Dave” 22). In the comfort of television solitude, turned away from the peopled world, the couch poetato revels in affect and f inds a virtual community, a kind of social separation that is akin to the fantasy of canonization that fuels a community of never-to-be-discovered writers:

 

In Aphelia House I lunge at my TV-friends
when they say things that let me down;
I'm less demonstrative with real people,
preferring to avoid their meaningful 
   comparisons.

.........................................

There's no tragedy in Burgerworld tonight
no woebegotten talent undiscovered;
the world has done its work in forgetting
Jennifer Plath, T.P. Eliot and Dave Joyce.
("Roger Clintonesqueria" 16-17)

 

The meaningful comparisons of real people soon fall away even as a context that the resident of Aphelia House would hope to avoid. The second section of the book further collaps es the distance between poet-viewer and TV-friend, providing a series of monologues delivered by the protagonists of “classic” television. Here we find Charlie contemplating life with his Angels, Howard dreaming of happier days with his wife Marion, and Darrin articulating his urge for less witchcraft and more secretarial banality. Compared to the television-monologues that appear later in the volume, which are somewhat more contemporary, this cluster may be called historical or archival, and evokes a k ind of insipid, entropic aura that is perfectly appropriate to the perpetually re-run characters. These characters divulge the deep dissatisfactions that lie behind their shallow manifestations of personality. They are hungry for change, speaking repeat edly from the end of their ropes. As Charlie explains his “Reality” in one of the poems just mentioned:

 

I am a hungry man
I will eat my hand one day
to calm my feelings of failure
("Charlie's Reality" 25)

 

Here McGimpsey develops a thesis that suggests that the poet and his work are analogous to the life of a minor sit-com character after the show has had its first run. These unreal people–“my TV-friends”–must continue to live, no? to do somet hing. Similarly, the writer must continue to watch and attempt to show something for all that time seated and staring at rapid bits of light. He proceeds to prove that he is not impassive to television icons generally deemed meaningless, by ide ntifying the inflected opinions of these icons. The form of the dramatic monologue serves this purpose well, bringing concrete immediacy to what might previously have been approached only as, well, pre-recorded television.

 

In one such monologue, for instance (the second in the section about Charlie’s Angels), Kelley turns to the touchstones of literature in her attempt to compose a let ter of resignation from the notorious detective agency:

 

I've been thumbing through the book of 
   quotations
trying to find the right way to say fuck you
a way to slam the door like a teenaged Zeus

all silver with precious hurt & insight;
the grease of the bards is used and tasty
& made for situations just like this.
("Kelly Leaves the Charles Townsend 
Detective Agency" 33)

 

The poetic irony (concerning poetry) is perfect; the fictional television character flipping through the “poetry listings” for a pre-cooked morsel of “used and tasty” expression, so that she might leave her own inane “situation” (comedy) behind. In Mc Gimpsey’s world, television becomes fodder for poetry, which in turn becomes the pre-fabricated means of escape from the predictability of television. The only element that is truly absent from the cycle played out in these shorter television monologues is an emotional attention span protracted and resilien t enough to tolerate the disturbing intricacies of an actual human confrontation. All of the monologues in this section are organized in three line stanzas, perhaps mimicking the diminutive capacities of the “us” of the book–we who find ourselves thumbi ng through the TV-guide so as to avoid finding “the right way to say fuck you” to our various situations.

 

The longer poems of the third section gravitate away from the clipped stanza toward the linear density of the tightly spun yarn, and the sense of trapped urgency is consequently replaced by a more elaborate field of exploration. Still, even the long poems of the book are lean (“fat free, better for you,” McGimpsey might say), and the line becomes the crucial unit for holding the expanded world together with hard precision–like the toughness of Bukowski, but without the toughness. For although these poems are populated with important figures of white masculinity–Babe Ruth, Hank Williams–their goal is as much to penetrate the heart of white-trash sensitivity and mortality as i t is to canonize the glorious inaccessibility of the interior of such male heroes. For instance, the legend of “Babe Ruth, Yankee slugger extraordinaire, / … just another who didn’t really die,” is advanced by imagining the moment that “Babe Ruth… th roat cancer victim” checked out of the hospital:

 

Friends, he just excused himself from the 
   hospital bed,
too scrawny for pinstripes,
his face drooping, badly ravaged,
& wandered out under the weary stars
& went somewhere altogether Ruthian
& picked himself up a brontosaurus bone.
("Babe Ruth in Love" 51)

 

This passage stands as but one example of how McGimpsey more generally convinces us of the materiality of popular legend and media fluff by bringing it all under a knife. Thus, in addition to Babe Ruth, “throat cancer victim,” we have Dr. Huxtable’s graphic back surgery, “a mysterious virus” in the neck of Bill Stedman (of Hawaii Five-O), and bits of the dying thirtysomething characters being taken by t he river “under the ice to a Delaware beach” (“All the thirtysomething Characters Die” 69). This interest in the deteriorating bodies of the stars is another means of exploring the narcissism of our love for the comfort of h eadline gossip. While tabloids help us to obsess about the gravitational status of Oprah (and ourselves), McGimpsey helps us to recognize the narcissism and the selflessness that exist simultaneously in our concern for a famous stranger’s body. As the b ook’s thirtysomething poem states, “what sells isn’t sex or product performance / but bittersweet emotion” (69). This is the challenge that McGimpsey takes upon himself: to write effectively about the sentimental glue that holds our prime-ti me world together without succumbing to saccharinity, but without denying the sweetness of saccharin, either. Remarkably, he achieves this difficult balance with consistent success.

 

My favorite poem of the book, “In Memoriam: A.H. Jr.,” provides an excellent example of how McGimpsey succeeds in corporealizing the immaterial cliché of sit-com personali ty. While the Tennysonian title and pretense of this homage to the actor Alan Hale, who played the Skipper on Gilligan’s Island, suggest parody, the result is startlingly the opposite, an account of a television personality in his final days of cancer and chemotherapy that integrates motifs from the “show” and “real life” in such a way that the physical reality of what we watch comes through with remarkable effect.

 

He'd say "when I get back to civilization
I'll tell you exactly what I'm going to do:
I'm going to have a tall glass of cold beer
& I won't spill a drop.
I'm going to order a steak, New York cut,
medium rare & two inches thick."
How thick?  "Two inches thick!"
In the plate will rest the slightest residue:
blood, spice & fat
agents of flavor after the meat is gone.
("In Memoriam: A.H. Jr." 50)

 

But what are we to make of all of this graphic bodily decrepitude in a book of poems about television? Even the Lynn Crosbie piece mentioned earlier has Gary Coleman “hooked up to a machine” (probably for treatment of his kidney disorder). Most likely it comes from the natural realization that, in the end, the emotional sustenance we acquire from television–and in this sense we are all hooked up to machines, in palliative care –resides purely in the “agents of flavor” because “the meat” is always already gone. Thus, to give a body to an ephemeron from television, and then to watch it waste away, is ultimately to give the medium the dignity of death, something that, in my pre- Lardcake experience, it had never had. Previously in my mind shows were simply canceled. Now I begin to understand a more significant mourning, one that may be embarrassing to admit. What is so admirable about McGimpsey’s articulation of su ch mourning is that it is completely remorseless. Don’t bother trying to remind me now that television is an inherently “cool” medium:

 

Saying it was only a TV show
is like saying it was only a friend,
only my brother, only my father.
("In Memoriam: A.H. Jr." 49)

Works Cited

 

• Crosbie, Lynn. Miss Pamela’s Mercy. Toronto: Coach House Press, 1992.
• Edmundson, Mark. “On the Uses of a Liberal Education: I. As lite entertainment for bored college students.” Harper’s Magazine 295 (September 1997): 39-49.
• Mander, Jerry. Four Arguments for the Elimination of Television. New York: Morrow, 1978.
• McGimpsey, David. Lardcake. Toronto: ECW, 1997.

 

Adele Parker

Department of Comparative Literature
SUNY Binghamton
74613.1577@compuserve.com

 

Hélène Cixous and Mireille Calle-Gruber, Hélène Cixous, Rootprints: Memory and Life Writing.Trans. Eric Prenowitz. London: Routledge, 1997.

 

Mireille Calle-Gruber laments that Cixous is primarily known in this country for her essays in feminist theory, when many readers who most appreciate her have come to her through her fiction. Rootprints is a look at the roots of Cixous’s writing process and the ways in which her fiction embodies the concerns of her theory: sexual difference, alterity and exchange, the unstable play of signifiers and the multiple subjectivities found within the human body. This book serves as a useful introduction to Cixous, but is also rewarding for those already familiar with her work.

 

A straightforward (auto)biography would never do; instead we have seven sections written by four people, befitting Cixous’s pluralistic project. In addition to interview-like pieces written by Cixous and Calle-Gruber, Derrida has written an essay, and Eric Prenowitz, Cixous’s translator, offers an afterword. While knowledge of French renders the lexical lability more pleasurable to the reader, Prenowitz’s meticulous annotated translation minimizes loss of meaning.

 

The meat of the book is in the first piece, “Inter Views,” a discussion between Calle-Gruber and Cixous that delves into many of her important themes: love, mourning, desire and jouissance, time and writing. Boxes of text placed throughout are windows onto Cixous’s notebooks. Cixous states that her best-known essays were deliberately didactic and meant only to mark a particular ideological moment, to clarify a position; to do that she “left her own ground,” sat down, stopped textual movement. Poetic imagination is her true ethical responsibility.

 

What is most true is poetic because it is not 
   stopped-stoppable.
All that is stopped, grasped, all that is 
   subjugated, easily transmitted,
easily picked up, all that comes under the word 
   concept, which is to say all that is taken, 
   caged, is less true. (4)

 

True reading and writing always move ahead, they do not sit and wait to be appropriated; she suggests this is why people often have difficulty engaging with her work. We desire to use language for closure, for exclusion and repression; to define and contain. This is not to say that Cixous is careless, passive in letting speech speak. One can only write in being “carried away on the back of these funny horses that are metaphor” (28); but she holds the reins. She trains the many shoots of her words to take different paths, like vines. Writing, like loving, is powerful, it dictates, but it is also an action, something that we do, that we risk, that is presence itself and yet never present, never known:

 

...the factor of instability, the factor of uncertainty, or what Derrida calls the undecidable, is indissociable from human life. This ought to oblige us to have an attitude that is at once rigorous and tolerant and doubly so on each side: all the more rigorous than open, all the more demanding since it must lead to openness, leave passage; all the more mobile and rapid as the ground will always give way, always. (52)

 

Writing for Cixous is indissociable from reading, from living, and from her body. She wants to write on her own insides, on her skin as Stendhal wrote on his waistband. Yet she does not write to know herself–although one can come to a re-cognition of self through writing–rather she writes to know a particular instant. Her passion for theater lies in the fact that a staged play is always in the moment. She tries to write the present, which is an impossibility; yet in the trying, writing is transformed.

 

Her writing always reconfigures intersubjectivity, with her “further-than-myself in myself” (56) and “myself as the first other” (90); “the other in all his or her forms gives me I” (13). We live always as various people, in a variety of times; life is lived in multiple registers. As breathing on a mirror blurs one’s own image, so the f/act of living prevents one from seeing oneself clearly. “It is the other who makes my portrait” (13). Yet writing begins not just with thinking closely but looking closely, a metaphor for which is Cixous’s own extreme nearsightedness (which gives her such a dreamy look in photographs): she does not see the world as it is “supposed” to be seen; she must concentrate on details and use her other senses fully.

 

At times in these essays, the remarks of interviewer and interviewee elicit appreciation from the other; at other times disagreement or confusion. The very linguistic opacity they are discussing is illustrated by this seemingly abrupt appearance of language at the moment of misunderstanding. At one point, Calle-Gruber describes the “shock of the other” as a break, a point of rupture, while Cixous experiences it as a membrane or a wound. For Cixous, the shock of the other is not a site of disconnection but an event: “either I die, or a kind of work takes place” (16). The scar is the story that results. Where Calle-Gruber perceives an irreparable breach, Cixous sees a “fruitful mishap.” They play out the encounter with the other. Calle-Gruber is as eloquent as Cixous; they flex and fashion language between them.

 

The section termed “Appendices” consists of two short pieces. The first is by Derrida on the dream of an ant that Cixous recounted to him over the phone, which leads him into a meditation on difference, fable and gift, and movements of separation and reparation, or séparéunion, in her work. Cixous and Derrida grew up near each other in Algeria, although they did not meet until 1962, and there are many similarities in their philosophical projects. As an example of how she uses the idiom to pick language apart Derrida looks at the phrase tous les deux–an idiom that means “both” but that literally translates as “all the twos.” Cixous elsewhere uses this phrase to take issue with the term bisexuality, which she used in the well-known essay “The Laugh of the Medusa.” Why only two, she asks, why not “all the twos”–all the dualities, all the oppositions, as well as the entredeux, the in-betweens. In the second piece in this section, Cixous speaks of her vision of Derrida and his writing with his body, dipping his pen in his own blood, and about Stendhal and growing older (turning 60) while attempting to see the color of one’s own mind with one’s own eyes.

 

There follow three essays by Calle-Gruber, grouped under the title “Portrait of the Writing,” on particular works of fiction and what is at stake in them. The first, “Writing-thinking” discusses FirstDays of the Year (Minnesota, 1997). Calle-Gruber discusses Cixous’s rule of uncertainty, of deferral of meaning, “and this, so that writing should return from afar, from nothing, from before the History of every story… in order that… it should strike us with the surprise of a book” (139). Calle-Gruber suggests that the Cixousian book is “mourning and gift” (140), mourning for all the unwritten books that this written book has displaced. Nothing is ever what we think it is; writing never begins or ends or succeeds in its attempts. Writing is an attempt itself, a matter of “weak force” (141), never mastery; the body and not the head.

 

Calle-Gruber’s essay “Cixous Genre Outlaw” poses the question of genre, which in French refers to gender and genus as well as genre, literary or otherwise. And of course “it’s all genres in Cixous’s works. And then some” (149). The adverbial pronoun “Y,” generally meaning “there,” is the sign her writing “attempts to compose-invent” (149). “Y” is neither one nor two. It has meaning but not in itself; it is a sign of a crossroads, of parting, of growth. Calle-Gruber looks at three works, Neutre, Déluge, and On ne part pas, on ne revient pas, to find the interplay of gender that is so pervasive and important in Cixous’s work. Switching masculine and feminine articles is not simply a game but a systematic opening of doors, of passages between the two. Changing a letter (un to une, la to le) or a colon changes meaning, and opens it up to infinity: “Loving not knowing. Loving: not knowing” (17).

 

The third essay, “Hélène Cixous’s Book of Hours, Book of Fortune,” looks at time and at the making of time by narrative, by the happening of meaning: the instant. It addresses the contradictions of being human, and of living to be a better human: open to, not closed to. It addresses language as un-naming and re-connection; it addresses art and fear and risk. Finally, it addresses love that is “the mainspring of writing… the secret of her art’s vitality” (174). Love is a scale Cixous plays in the constantly changing key of living and writing the moment. “To be in the depths of anguish, ready to die and to say to oneself: and what’s more, tomorrow I’m going to have puffy eyes, this is us” (20). Calle-Gruber seems to watch all this and then offer a view from the margin, wherever the margin is. The impossibility of knowing or speaking the other adds surplus to the already overflowing text.

 

Compelling memories and associations form the piece of lifewriting entitled “Albums and Legends,” wherein Cixous recounts details of her childhood and family, and includes photographs and a family tree that is haunted by many deaths in concentration camps. Speaking of a photo of her grandfather’s grave next to a photo of him in uniform, she tells us to read it as Hebrew, from right to left: first the soldier, then the grave. This passage enriches our knowledge of the very real roots of Cixous’s multiplicitous approach in the plural genealogies of family, neighborhood, city. Born in Oran to a Spanish/Arab father and a German mother (from Osnabrück), she lives with a strong Nordic presence within her Mediterranean body. Her own childhood was “accompanied and illustrated” (181) by the Northern childhood of her mother (a midwife), as well as of her grandmother Omi (anagram of moi). She lived masculine possibility as well, always close to her slightly younger brother, her other: “Hélène-and-Pierre” (208). The double of that relation is found in her own daughter and son. She felt when her father died that she had to become the father, for family survival and honor, a “mutilating mutation of identity”(197). A doctor with tuberculosis–illness inscribed in the healer himself, a “veiled death,”–he kept a physical distance from his beloved children while engaging in Joycean word play that set Cixous down in the midst of language at an early age. Having recounted her experiences of exclusion and exile, as foreign, as Jewish, as female, she states clearly what runs through all of her texts: “I adopted an imaginary nationality which is literary nationality” (204).

 

The chronology begins not with Cixous’s birth (5 June 1937) but with her father’s death (12 February 1948), the moment when she was thrown into writing (not daring actively to write until she was 27). She has explored/imagined a relationship with her father in depth in a recent text Or: les lettres de mon père (des Femmes, 1997), and in a shorter piece, “Job the Dog,” reveals the discrimination her family experienced in Algeria after his death and its terrible effects. Instances of her political activism are here–although she says the political comes last for her–including starting the first doctoral women’s studies program in Europe, which would have been a program in sexual difference if she had had her say. She has worked closely with Lacan–beginning in the early sixties when he wanted to learn about Joyce–and with many of her fellow leading intellectuals.

 

Not only her prolific output is documented in the bibliography, but the impressive range of her reading and knowledge: the dissertation on Joyce; her kinship with the work of Clarice Lispector; articles on Henry James, Iris Murdoch, Genet, Lewis Carroll, and many on theater, as well as those on politics and art. Numerous writers serve as constant reference points throughout her work: Shakespeare, Montaigne, Kleist, Dostoevsky, Tsvetaeva, among others. She has been translated into at least a dozen languages.

 

In “Aftermaths,” Eric Prenowitz approaches Cixous’s approach, follows her following the movement of writing. Her thinking and observation form a science, a “cixouscience,” though the observer and observed will always be called into question, “aware that the unknown is on both sides of the quest to know” (243). And we don’t know which side is which, or where the boundary is, we don’t know where the limits are. That there are limits somewhere is what allows hope: we fill them in with hope. At the limit is exchange itself, what passes continuously between differences, the passage between others, between two impossibilities. Rather than being an epicenter of displaced meaning, translation here is one more movement in the continuous textual activity of deferral and disruption. Prenowitz describes Rootprints as “opening a new trail through a remarkable archive of dated phenomena” (247).

 

Any woman writing “from the body” will be accused of essentialism, no matter that she points out examples of “écriture féminine” in the works of male authors. This is a concern many readers of Cixous have expressed over the years; does she propose a totalizing view of the body, demonstrate a lack of awareness of cultural, historical, economic impact on woman’s relation to her self? Does she over-emphasize the nurturing feminine, the maternal? Perhaps; at the same time she recognizes the body as a cliché like any other. Rootprints does not clear up these questions. What we can take away from it is another perspective from which to view Cixous’s immense capacity for life, as well as her rigorous writing-thinking process.

 

There are many gems to be found here. Cixous’s courage and generosity inform her words, and encourage those who have not yet tried (or have tried unsuccessfully) to tackle her longer texts.

 

Francois Debrix

Department of International Relations
Florida International University
debrixf@fiu.edu

 

Gilles Peress, Farewell to Bosnia. New York: Scalo, 1994; and The Silence. New York: Scalo, 1995.

 

Gilles Peress and Eric Stover, The Graves: Srebrenica and Vukovar. New York: Scalo, 1998.

 

You’re like a living tentacle that’s lifting, reaching around all this death, trying to pull it out.

 

–William Haglund, forensic anthropologist (1998)

 

The postmortem condition describes a situation where even the uncivilized productions of unscheduled catastrophe become perversely elaborated objects of spectatorship.

 

–Gregory Whitehead (1993)

 

Photojournalism has traditionally thrived on the representation of human destruction and death. Since 1855 when Roger Fenton was dispatched to the Crimean War by the British government to “take photographs that would reassure the public,” documentary photography has been a booming industry (Price 1963). Throughout the 20th century, governments, research institutes, and print and/or visual media have perfected this visual practice with the hope that it would not simply “reassure the public,” but also, and more importantly, provide both authentic knowledge and an endless source of spectacularity. Through the years, photojournalistic displays have owed their success to visual curiosity as a mode of inquiry or, simply, as a form of voyeuristic enjoyment.

 

Photographic journalist Gilles Peress has situated his work in this long tradition of visual representation of war and death. His early works on Iran and Northern Ireland were fairly typical photo-journalistic renditions of social life, human struggle, and political conflict in not-so-far-removed lands. Like most documentary photography, Peress’s work (his early reports and his more recent ones) is intended to awaken the curiosity of the Western viewer. For the Western viewer who consumes documentary photography in the safe confines of his/her late-twentieth century domestic comfort, the snapshots of war, drama, and human survival are always about “strangers,” some nameless or otherwise all-too famous “others,” whose reality can be perceived only through the photograph. Not unlike the work of his photojournalistic colleagues in other parts of the world, Peress’s early visions of Iran and Northern Ireland easily found their way to the pages of popular news periodicals such as Time, Newsweek, or Paris-Match where they were treated by the general public as common household items, shocking and yet familiar.

 

Peress’s recent work in Bosnia and Rwanda marks a crucial change both in his aesthetic approach to photojournalism and in the meaning of this visual medium. Starting with Farewell to Bosnia, a visual travel-log of war and its effects in the early years of the Bosnian conflict, and continuing with his latest photographic narratives of death and forensic archeology in both Rwanda and Bosnia, Peress adds to the realism of his images a moral message and a political positioning on the issue of brutal violence, gratuitous death, and genocide. Peress does not simply bombard the viewer with arresting photos. He now embeds his snapshots in written texts: letters he wrote to friends while in Bosnia; a chronology of events and specific UN documents about Rwanda; a text by human rights scholar Eric Stover in the last volume, The Graves. These texts are not intended to offer a deciphering key to the photos displayed in these three volumes. Rather, the texts and the images can be taken as a whole. The aesthetic product is different from typical photojournalistic collections as we now have a dialogue between two modes of communication, a combination of verbal and visual signification which seeks to exacerbate the feeling of moral outrage and intensifies the power of the political message: namely, something must be done to stop genocide. Peress’s new approach to photography seeks to open up the photo-journalistic medium by rendering it less realistically superficial (a moment frozen in time with no story to tell) and making it more emotionally engaged and humanly engaging. For Peress, photography is not an exercise of visual production and/or consumption anymore. It is not simply a technology that potentially gives rise to sensationalistic visions. It is also an instrument which facilitates the deployment of ethico-political positions for the artist involved with this technical medium. As such, photo-journali sm becomes an invitation to share, partake, empathize. By making documentary photography into a more ethically and emotionally involved technique, Peress also seeks to direct the perception of the viewer. In an attempt to contain casual, prurient, or voyeuristic uses of his images of death, Peress’s new photographic genre–his embedding of documentary photos with strategically chosen texts–conditions and constrains the reading that one might perform from his visual records alone. But as I’ll discuss below, his use of text has an ironic effect; it gets no closer to representing death in its horrible finality; it simply installs death in a more complex set of representations equally open to refusal and misrepresentation. The documents that result from this pairing of text with image are no more adequate than classic photojournalism to the task of representing that which defies representation.

 

One may speculate at length on the strategic reasons for this change of aesthetic perspective.¹ It seems more interesting, however, to examine and question the choice of this new photojournalistic method and assess the effects that it seeks to produce on the part of potential viewers/readers. Again, the photography of death is not a new enterprise, but Peress has certainly turned it into a different artistic practice. Peress’s novel approach to war photojournalism (or post-war as the case may be) has important consequences for visual curiosity as both a method of knowledge and a mode of spectacularity. I believe that the signification of this photographic practice is intricately related to what can be called a “visual taxonomy of death.” As literary critic and poet Susan Stewart has explained, taxonomy can be seen as “an antidote to emotion and surplus meaning” (37). The taxonomy of death is what Peress’s post-mortem photography is all about: the carefully staged re-organization of death and its image in a system of meaning that can attempt to account for, if not precisely to comprehend, the forms of dying that most defy comprehension. As a form of taxonomic organization, the photography of death and war (and death in war) is not only reassuring for the general public, but, more revealingly, comforting for the photographer/artist himself and those for whom he operates (governments, research institutes, art galleries and museums, print and visual media).

 

Farewell to Bosnia is a collection of photos to which texts and letters have been added toward the end. Before being turned into a book, Farewell to Bosnia was a touring visual exhibit which was displayed in museums and galleries in Europe and North America.² The photos were taken during the first years of the conflict in Bosnia and they represent scenes of “daily life” under war conditions. As Peress travels inside Bosnia from Tuzla to Sarajevo, he takes devastating, shocking, and heart-rending pictures of what he witnesses: mutilated bodies; endless lines of displaced people; mothers, sisters, and wives crying over the inanimate bodies of their loved ones; urban destruction beyond repair…. Again, these photos, as visual testimonies of destruction and death as it takes place, need to be “read” in conjunction with the written texts that accompany them. In one of these texts, a letter to a friend back home, Peress writes: “I remembered my father, his amputated arm and his pain, his descriptions of addiction to morphine, of World War II, the German occupation and the concentration camps” (161). For Peress, the scenes of death and destruction that he captured with his camera are not proper to Bosnia. They do not tell the story of Bosnia. They are the product of another, larger narrative of death and destruction of which Bosnia is no doubt part. The visions of Bosnia’s human suffering and anguish remind him of the universality of war and death. The images of Bosnia are thus repackaged, reinterpreted. The work of photojournalism is no longer, can no longer be a matter of “objective reality.”³ Bosnia’s visions of death are part of Peress’s memory (that of his father with his World War II stories) and of everyone’s memories too. In fact, Peress suggests, in all its gruesomeness, there is nothing unique about death as it occurs in Bosnia. What Bosnia evokes, rather, is the sound of “distant echoes of a recent past” (161).

 

Peress’s Farewell to Bosnia opens up a narrative of death and destruction to which his subsequent books, The Silence and The Graves, try to bring closure. Yet, taken together, the three produce what I’m calling a taxonomy of death, a taxonomy in which Farewell to Bosnia occupies a central place. Death is introduced, yet disavowed. It is visually depicted, yet reduced to an exercise of memorization, of historical recollection (it is all about the memories of the past, the memories of a past that always returns). Death, as Peress would have it, cannot be recognized as a fateful/fatal natural phenomenon (even when and if it is caused by man-made forces). It has to be tied to and explained by human practices, social struggles, and war. Without these, the anxiety of death would not exist. This work of disavowal, the beginning of the process of visual taxonomy, is what Susan Stewart refers to as a “work of mourning.” Using Freud’s seminal work on the psychological responses to death, Stewart explains that the natural inevitability of death is replaced by a series of mental, rational, or scientific operations that deny death, and thus seek to reactivate life by situating death in a larger historico-temporal process, such as the universality of the human species, the continuity of scientific research which seeks to reduce the causes of death, the eternity of life on another metaphysical plane of existence, and so on. In her reading of early American painter Charles Willson Peale’s life and art, Stewart explains that Peale’s anxiety over death and its occurrence was covered by a visual support (namely painting) which he used as a way of expressing animation, motion, that which survives and endures. As an anecdote, she recounts the fact that the only time Peale painted death (a painting titled “Rachel Weeping” which shows a mother crying over the bed of her dead child), he could never show the painting in the open. He always kept it hidden behind a curtain (37-40). Peress’s photojournalistic exploration of Bosnia is similarly a work of disavowal. While Peress seizes the visions of individuals in distress or actually dying in front of his eyes, there is a sense in which he never actually sees them. What he sees, rather, and hopes to show to the world through his work as a photojournalist, is a story of war and destruction, despair and dramatization larger than any of the individual scenes he depicts. In a sense, Peress replaces the brutal realist rendition of death with a melancholic representation of the violence of human history. At this level of collective abstraction and historical categorization, death becomes paradoxically more palatable. The ironic effect of his new approach to photojournalism is that Peress seems to return to the original intent of documentary photography: to “reassure the public,” to comfort and buffer the media and the public that will consume his work.

 

Peress’s The Silence, the second of the three works I address in this review, takes him to Rwanda where he travelled in the immediate aftermath of the April-May 1994 ethnic conflict between Hutus and Tutsis. There, Peress follows the succession of events that saw the massacre of Tutsis by Hutus in April, and the subsequent counter-offensive of Tutsis that pushed the Hutus into the refugee camps of eastern Zaire in the summer of 1994. Peress, with a touch of cruel irony combined with hope, presents the events in a threefold sequence. He titles the three successive moments “the sin,” “purgatory,” and “the judgment.” “The sin” is loaded with some of the most ghastly photos that Peress has probably ever taken. The shock value is evident. Photos of young children’s faces maimed and deformed by the repeated blows of machetes, a shirt and a pair of mud-covered trousers out of which broken bones with remnants of decaying flesh protrude, an agonizing child thrown next to a slaughtered cow in a pool of blood. Similar photos were shown in the Western media in the summer of 1994, but none of them were as lurid as Peress’s. Peress conveys his overt disgust admirably well and powerfully, with a sense of unbearable density as he multiplies the shots of brutal death and torture page after page. The subsequent sections, “purgatory” and the “judgment,” which cover the escape of the Hutus into Zaire and their battle with epidemics and death in the refugee camps, are just as visually nauseating as the early section.

 

If these disturbing images invoke classical photojournalism at its spectacular best (or worst), the book’s section titles suggest that Peress is after something more here. With titles such as “sin,” “purgatory,” and “judgment,” Peress seeks to install these photographs in a religious narrative of redemption. Yet, precisely because of the multivalence that inheres in the pairing of image and text, this redemption narrative is powerfully multivalent. On the one hand, Peress’s camera seems to make sense of senseless violence by bringing the truthful power of vision to scenes of useless death. In this sense, the photographer himself operates as a messiah in this God-forsaken place, saving death from meaninglessness by installing it in a Judeo-Christian narrative of human sin, of the eternal struggle between Good and Evil, Heaven and Hell. As evil, death is, at least, meaningful. Thus death, even here in its most graphic and violent form, takes its place in a larger system of meaning; it no longer seems quite so ugly and final. A sentence, attached by Peress to the opening and the closing of this volume, seems to speak of the desire to ward off the naturalness of death by bringing it to another, supernatural plane of existence. The sentence reads: “A prisoner, a killer is presented to us, it is a moment of confusion, of fear, of prepared stories. He has a moment to himself… As I look at him he looks at me.” The final shot s hows the “killer” looking up at the camera, as if facing his supreme Judge. It appears, for a moment, that there is some possibility of redemption in Rwanda; that there is a hope, captured by Peress’s camera, that the torturers will be apprehended and that they will repent. Yet, on the other hand, the images themselves, in their speechless, unspeakable horror, resist the very taxonomy the section titles would impose and thus call into question not only whether anything like justice can ever be achieved in Rwanda, but also whether divine justice, the Judeo-Christian concept of redemption itself, is adequate to the scale of human horror and death the book so abundantly registers. To return to the book’s final image: it is a picture of a man not otherwise recognizable as a killer except in the accompanying text that identifies him: a man, not a monster; a man, meeting eye to eye, another man, and through that man, the eye of all who look on. What is pictured then–quite apart from what is written–is, finally, not a moment of judgment, but of silent, inscrutable recognition.

 

In Farewell to Bosnia, Peress combines stark images of death with more accessible narratives of personal memory. In The Silence, he pairs images of mass brutality in Rwanda with multivalent narratives of religious redemption. Finally, in The Graves, Peress turns to science and forensic medicine to find a text to parallel the violence he has encountered and captured as a photojournalist. Ralph Rugoff once wrote about forensic photography that in such a visual/clinical practice “the dead come alive” (183). The theme of re-animation is no doubt predominant throughout this photo-report co-authored by Gilles Peress and Eric Stover. The Graves narrates Peress and Stover’s coverage of the forensic efforts of anthropologists after the war in Bosnia. Specifically, Peress and Stover follow the work of two forensic anthropologists, William Haglund and Andrew Thomson, as they are in charge, in 1996, of excavating mass graves in Vukovar and Srebrenica. Mandated by the UN, and supported by the Boston-based organization Physicians for Human Rights, Haglund and Thomson are to gather scientific evidence for an international war crimes tribunal.

 

While Stover’s essay is a textual diary of the forensic technicians’ activities and discoveries, Peress’s photos serve as a documentary supplement. Stover uses the forensic discoveries to re-imagine and re-create the idiosyncratic stories of each of the bones and pieces of flesh and clothing found in the graves. Here, forensic science is used as hard evidence, proof of a human drama that can be reconstructed piece by piece after the fact. Stover describes the meticulous task of the forensic researchers:

 

During autopsies the forensic experts had removed teeth and sections of bone from the Srebrenica bodies and had sent them to the laboratories of Mary-Claire King, a molecular geneticist at the University of Washington. Michelle Harvey, a geneticist with Physicians for Human Rights, extracts DNA from these samples to compare it with DNA in blood samples taken from relatives. It remained to see whether DNA testing would be able to identify many of the Srebrenica men. The large number of teeth and bone samples, collected under less than optimum conditions, could easily have been contaminated by mishandling or the presence of bacterial DNA on the specimens. (174)

 

The language here is descriptive, technical, rigorous, an exposition on forensic research and its inherent difficulties. But Stover’s account does not stop here. Forensic science has a story to tell. Forensic anthropology only matters to the extent that it makes the dead speak, that it re-evokes life. Stover partakes of this re-animation through forensic science by repeatedly recalling the specific stories of Bosnians during the war, such as the the women of Srebrenica, Drazen Erdemovic, the Croat soldier who joined the Bosnian-Muslim army, and the survivors of the Kravica massacre. This is also where Peress’s photos gather their meaning within this volume. Peress’s pictures of the “make-shift morgue” in Kalesija are no longer showing the victims or what’s left of them. The visual focus is now clearly on the uncovered fragments of life: personal items, old torn-up photos of family members, children’s drawings found with the clothes, et cetera. Life and death are juxtaposed.

 

According to writer and audio artist Gregory Whitehead, the post-mortem condition has its origin in “the corresponding looking place of the forensic theater, built–at least in p rinciple–to pick up the pieces” (230). The forensic theater, as displayed by Stover and Peress, is a spectacle. It is a spectacular event in which death is turned into life, re-animated. Only under this condition, when it re-creates life, can death be accepted, justified. The (very literal) taxonomy of death generated by forensic photography is, to use Stewart’s vocabulary, a spectacle of “de-realization.” This suggests that the forensic theater is a deceptive practice. Forensic photography fools the eye of the viewer and is used “as a means of defense, keeping the irreducible fact of a boundary between life and death at bay” (Stewart 44). Scientifically and clinically re-organized, the naturalness of death is once again fetishized. While the forensic theater replays its scenes of excavation of bones and flesh, death is not seen. Forensic photography covers death by showing the spectacle of a meticulously and scientifically reconstructed life. As Stover intimates,

 

[r]econstructing human behavior from physical evidence is like piecing together a multidimensional puzzle. Pieces may be missing, damaged, or even camouflaged, but each piece has its place. The challenge is to find the fragments, reconstruct them, and chart their placement in an accurate manner. (158; my emphasis)

 

In his essay “The Gift of Death,” Jacques Derrida writes that “[m]ost often we neither know what is coming upon us nor see its origin; it therefore remains a secret. We are afraid of the fear, we anguish over the anguish, we tremble” (54). This statement seems to speak directly to Peress’s treatment of death in these three works. Peress’s overt visual fixation on death is a manner of keeping the myth of death intact, of maintaining death as a forever inscrutable secret. We must fear death because we do not know what it is, or when it arrives, because we cannot come to grips with it. The accounts of death offered by Peress in his photographic essays do not, cannot, represent death in its materiality. Rather, they provide substitute discourses in which death is superseded, ignored, disavowed. The reality of death is replaced by narratives of life that nonetheless keep us anxiously guessing as to what death may be. The discourses of history (past memories), divine salvation (the final judgment), and science (the forensic theater) keep the suspense of death intact as they deflect the attention of the photographer and his public toward other preoccupations. Instead of “realizing” death, it has become much more important to “organize” it. Death is no longer a fatality. It has become a taxonomy.

 

Peress offers an ironic reversal of the initial principle and intent of photojournalism to reassure viewers even while disturbing them. In abandoning a realist approach, Peress’s photos “de-realize” the world captured by his camera, and may well have contributed to the creation of a new aesthetic genre: de-realist documentary photography. This de-realist photojournalism–discovered in his close encounters with death and its post-mortem sublimations–is no longer comfortable with the early photojournalistic requirement of visual curiosity. Yet, it seems clear that no modality of presentation can fully rescue photojournalistic reports from unintended, voyeuristic uses. By grafting layers of signification, organization, and taxonomy onto visual reports, de-realist photography installs images of unfathomable modes of dying within fathomable structures of human meaning. Thus even here, in Peress’s powerful and critical innovation, we are finally reassured; we remain saved from death.

 

Notes

 

1. This change may be explained by the fact that other popular visual media (television, video, Internet) have now supplanted classical documentary photography in the art of producing shock value images (Kirby).

 

2. This photo-exhibit tour stopped in Washington, D.C.’s Corcoran Gallery, the Photomuseum Winterthur in Switzerland, the Museum of Contemporary Photography in Chicago, P.S. 1, Queens, New York, the Rhode Island College Art Center, and New Langton Arts in San Francisco. Farewell to Bosnia has also been made available by the “Picture Projects” group (a showcase for documentary photography) on the Internet. Picture Projects’ curators Alison Cornyn, Sue Johnson, and Chris Vail have embedded the photos into the texts contained in the volume, a technique of immediate materialization of both image and text that Internet technology makes possible.

 

3. A claim often associated with documentary photography. Yet, as Derrick Price rightly observes, the documentary camera provides “not the objective facts that [are] craved by positivism, but accounts of the world in which ‘truth’ [is] achieved through the power of the image-maker” (66).

Works Cited

 

• Derrida, Jacques. The Gift of Death. Trans. David Wills. Chicago: U of Chicago P, 1995.
• Freud, Sigmund. “On Transience.” Freud, Character, and Culture. Ed. Philip Rief. New York: Collier, 1963. 148-151.
• —. “Mourning and Melancholia.” The Standard Edition of the Complete Psychological Works. Vol. 14. London: Hogarth, 1955-74. 237-258.
• Kirby, Lynne. “Death and the Photographic Body.” Fugitive Images: From Photography to Video. Ed. Patrice Petro. Bloomington: Indiana UP, 1995. 72-84.
• Peress, Gilles. Telex Iran. Publisher unknown, 1984. Later reprinted as Telex: Iran, In the Name of Revolution. New York: Scalo, 1998.
• Price, Derrick. “Surveyors and Surveyed: Photography out and about.” Photography: A Critical Introduction. Ed. Liz Wells, New York: Routledge, 1997. 57-102.
• Rugoff, Ralph. Circus Americanus. New York: Verso, 1995.
• Stewart, Susan. “Death and Life, in that Order, in the Works of Charles Willson Peale.” Visual Display: Culture beyond Appearances. Discussions in Contemporary Culture No. 10. Eds. Lynne Cooke and Peter Wollen. Seattle: Bay Press, 1995. 31-53.
• Whitehead, Gregory. “The Forensic Theater: Memory Plays for the Postmortem Condition.” The Politics of Everyday Fear. Ed. Brian Massumi. Minneapolis: U of Minnesota P, 1993. 229-241.

 

Patrick Cook

Department of English
George Washington University
pcook@gwu.edu

 

Janet H. Murray, Hamlet on the Holodeck: The Future of Narrative in Cyberspace.New York: The Free Press, 1997.

 

The finest writing on what some call the current communications revolution more often than not has emerged from the keyboards of scholars who combine training in the humanities with mastery of computers and cyberculture. Janet Murray fits this description as well as anyone, and her Hamlet on the Holodeck is the product of the creative interaction of both aspects of her thinking self. In addition to being a scholar of Victorian literature adept at drawing upon modern literary and cultural theory, she is also Director of the Program in Advanced Interactive Narrative Technology and Senior Research Scientist in the Center for Educational Computing Initiatives at MIT. Her outstanding book, which Library Journal named one of two “best computer books” of 1997, is at once a primer for the uninitiated, a historically and technically informed analysis of recent developments in electronically enabled storytelling, and a visionary prediction of how we may experience narrative in the more fully digitized future.

 

Murray begins with Captain Kathryn Janeway, starship captain in the Star Trek: Voyager series, interacting with the Victorian characters who inhabit her holonovel in the virtual reality of her ship’s holodeck. The episode “marks a milestone in this virtual literature of the twenty-fourth century as the first holodeck story to look more like a nineteenth-century novel than an arcade shoot-’em-up” (16); the latter form has been the preference of stories run by most male crew members. Janeway’s attraction to her story’s brooding romantic hero becomes “an exercise posing psychological and moral questions for her” (16), and the episode thus stands as Murray’s representative anecdote for the artistic and educational potential of the kinds of narrative experience that will soon be available as technology progresses. Murray acknowledges the dystopic potentials of technological advance, conceding, for example, that “the violent gaming culture that now characterizes much of cyberspace is likely to spread as the Internet gains speed and bandwidth” (283). But, as her title suggests, she views our rapidly evolving communications technology as more liberating than dehumanizing, indeed as the opening of vast new artistic possibilities continuous with the great tradition of storytelling stretching from ancient epic poetry, through Renaissance drama and the Victorian novel, to modern cinema.

 

Murray sees a number of innovations that feed a desire for audience participation as harbingers of the holodeck. The shape of future literature is foreshadowed by the multiform story, “the narrative that presents a single situation or plotline in multiple versions, versions that would be mutually exclusive in our ordinary experience” (30). Multiform short stories such as Delmore Schwartz’s “In Dreams Begin Responsibilities” and Borges’s “The Garden of Forking Paths” and multiform films such as It’s a Wonderful Life and Groundhog Day express the modern “perception of life as composed of parallel possibilities” (37). This kind of narrative demands that the reader or audience assume a more active role, a development that Murray sees paralleled in the participatory dynamics of fan culture, most fully in the live-action role-playing (LARP) games in which fans of fantasy literature “assume the roles of characters in the original stories to make up new characters within the same fictional universe” (42). Three-dimensional movies produce a similar urge for audience participation, since the compelling illusion of being in a space awakens instincts to explore it. Amusement park attractions that allow one to “ride the movies” combine a visceral experience with gratifications of our need for story. Computer games are evolving from early versions consisting of simple-minded combat sequences and puzzles toward more narrativized versions featuring dramatic moments, immersive use of sound, and a cinematic point of view. The participatory demands of hypertext fiction reveal that burgeoning genre’s connection to these other forms of participatory storytelling.

 

All these phenomena are prominent in the critical discourse on postmodern culture. Murray’s contribution is to stress that they are related manifestations of a drive to merge performed and written narrative traditions with the rapidly expanding digital environment. Since participation is central to her vision of narrative’s future, some consideration of the relation between the participatory aspects of traditional and such emerging narrative forms would have been welcome. But Murray is less interested in theoretical continuities than in technological developments produced, one assumes, by scientists unburdened by the niceties of modern literary narratology or reader-reception theory. Readers will enter less familiar territory in her discussion of computer scientists as storytellers, where she reviews how researchers in virtual reality and artificial intelligence “have recently turned from modeling battlefields and smart weapons to modeling new entertainment environments and new ways of creating fictional characters” (59). One of the most impressive of proto-holodecks operates on her own turf. The MIT Media Lab contains a twelve-foot “magic mirror,” a computer screen in which viewers see themselves in three-dimensional space with “computer-based characters with complex inner lives who can sense their environment, experience appetites and mood changes, weigh conflicting desires, and choose among different strategies to reach a goal” (61). This kind of project suggests what future equivalents of a movie theater might be, as viewers would enter a story whose plot would be modified as a result of their actions.

 

The narratives we will enter in the electronic theater of the future, Murray argues, will be shaped not only by formats inherited from older media, but also by properties native to the digital environment: its procedural, participatory, spatial, and encyclopedic aspects. The computer’s procedural power for shaping narrative became remarkably evident in 1966 with the creation of ELIZA, the first program to simulate the qualities of human conversation. The creator of ELIZA so successfully mimicked the procedural thought of a psychotherapist interacting with a patient that computers running the program could carry on a conversation persuasively, at least for a while. In the late sixties, the adventure game Zork realized the computer’s participatory powers through its fantasy world that responded to typed commands, allowing players to move through dungeon rooms and and fight off evil trolls. In the 1970s, the first graphic user interface was created at Xerox PARC, the first graphics-based game was produced by Atari, and the first “surrogate travel system” in which a mapped space could be walked through was created at MIT. The computer’s encyclopedic power grew as memory technology expanded geometrically. Its capacity to convey an unprecedented abundance of information “translates into an artist’s potential to offer a wealth of detail, to represent the world with both scope and particularity” (84); in this it recapitulates the representational incentives of the day-long bardic recitation and the multi-volume Victorian novel.

 

After establishing this historical perspective, Murray devotes separate chapters to three “pleasures” that collectively define the aesthetics of emerging digital media: immersion, agency, and transformation. Like older forms of narrative and representation, a computer game or simulation can serve as a Winnicottian “transitional object,” providing us with something onto which we can project our desires and fears, but the fuller sensory matrix the simulation creates allows us to live out our fantasies to an unprecedented degree. The computer’s participatory powers must be calibrated carefully, however, since “the more present the enchanted world, the more we need to be reassured that it is only virtual” (103). Murray outlines various strategies developed in our early or “incunabular” stage of digital technology to establish and test the borders between the real and actual. She explores the realization of the “visit metaphor” in simple joystick games, which create correspondences between user movement and virtual motion; the “active creation of belief”–her revision of Coleridge’s “willing suspension of disbelief”–through the user’s manipulation of virtual objects; and the structuring of participation through “avatars” or representatives within the virtual world. The popularity of MUDs (Multi-User Domains, a form of online role-playing) derives from the computer’s ability to sustain the fiction through continuous characterization of all participants, but also from “the ability to flip back and forth between player and character, to remove the mask in order to adjust the environment and then put it back on again” (116). As the form has evolved, methods for controlling the real/virtual boundary have been refined, regulating such things as the degree of a dialogue’s privacy (one can “whisper” to another or talk publicly) or the consequences of an action (as in life, sex has a variable probability of resulting in pregnancy). “Little by little,” Murray concludes, “we are discovering the conventions of participation that will constitute the fourth wall of this virtual theatre, the expressive gestures that will deepen and preserve the enchantment of immersion” (125).

 

As narrative moves into cyberspace, new opportunities for the pleasures of agency familiar to us from games will become part of any new significant literary form. On this subject again Murray considers first the elementary innovations of our nascent electronic culture, where the simple pleasures of navigation have been been encouraged by two distinct configurations, “the solvable maze and the tangled rhizome” (130). Combat videogames and puzzle dungeons often employ the maze form, and “in the right hands a maze story could be a melodramatic adventure with complex social subtexts” (131). But mazes limit opportunities for agency through their restricted options and their movement toward a single solution. Rhizomic hypertext fictions lack an end point or exit, but Murray finds severe limitations in even the most sophisticated existing versions: “in trying to create texts that do not ‘privilege’ one order of reading or interpretive framework, the postmodernists are privileging confusion itself” (133). She suggests that successful developments will realize some kind of compromise form, with a combination of goal-driven and open-ended potentials. The chapter also considers the relation between games and stories. Unlike those who have argued that computer-based narrative is inherently unsatisfying because it is dependent upon the “win/lose simplicity” of game structure, Murray believes that “the intrinsic symbolic content of gaming” can be developed into more expressive forms. The ability to switch sides in a contest, for example, opens opportunities for complicating perspectives and raising moral questions.

 

The electronic environment promises unprecedented pleasures of transformation because “it offers us a multidimensional kaleidoscope with which to rearrange the fragments over and over again, and it allows us to shift back and forth between alternate patterns of mosaic organization” (157). Stories can be interwoven in new ways and multiple points of view can be experienced in varied sequences, combining cinema’s compelling visual surface with the novel’s richer experience of interiority. The reader or “interactor” can be given the opportunity to construct her own story from formulaic elements in an environment that is less a story than a set of story possibilities. Cyber-narrative’s “vision of retrievable mistakes and open options” (175), its resistance to closure, easily supports the comic side of life, but in one of the book’s most provocative sections Murray argues that the measure of its maturity will be an ability to support tragedy as well. She offers as a possible model various ways that a young man’s suicide could be narrated: experiencing the obsessive return to “associational paths that lead to closed loops of thinking” (176); a kaleidoscopic presentation of the wake, in which the multiple perspectives of the mourners would create “a pervasive sense of an interrelated community with multiple truths” (178); a simulation of the suicide that carefully defined the limits of the interactor’s powers to affect events, thus exploring the problematic of agency and destiny.

 

The third section of Hamlet on the Holodeck attempts to predict how the next century’s cyberbard will realize the potentials of the new media, which will be interactive in a way no other narrative form has been, and which will divide the concept of authorship between the creators of an environment and the users. Murray looks to oral-formulaic composition for a model. She suggests that basic building blocks, called “primitives,” that resemble verbal formulas used in oral verse will be have to be developed, as will the appropriate templates to organize these basic units into more complex structures. Primitives will evolve in the direction of simple actions facilitating interactions of increasing subtlety. Plot events may be based on generic conventions to constitute intermediate levels of organization resembling the oral-formulaic type-scene, and at the highest organizational level resources will be developed to permit the creation of multiform stories, much as oral narrative contains alternative versions within itself that allow each performance to vary significantly. Authors will develop story algorithms like those discovered in Propp’s morphology of the folktale, but with much greater complexity. Coherence will be maintained by “plot controllers capable of making intelligent decisions about narrative syntax on the basis of aesthetic values” (200). Character creation techniques will develop from current technologies such as “intelligent agents” (227) capable of changing priorities and behaviors in response to external changes and from “chatterbot” programs which can engage in convincing conversations with humans and which manifest the kinds of change and growth that seem to signify an inner self. Multicharacter improvisations could build upon techniques of the commedia dell’arte, which relies on a very basic plot scenario, stock characters, and rituals of interaction as the basis for continual improvisation.

 

A short final section of the book includes a chapter on the products that will likely emerge as the television, telephone, and computer industries converge in the next few decades to produce a unified digital communications system. Murray suggests that the TV serial will soon become the hyperserial. Virtual extensions of the fictional world will permit viewer participation between episodes and allow subsidiary narratives to branch out. The viewer will become “mobile,” able to choose from among various points of view how to experience a program. From this glance at popular media, Murray turns in a concluding chapter to a corollary issue: the question of whether emerging technologies will lead to “a cyberdrama that would develop beyond the pleasures of a compelling entertainment to attain the force and originality we associate with art” (273). She admits that “the notion of a procedural medium that provides the satisfactions of art takes some getting used to” (275), and anyone who has witnessed the banalities that vastly outnumber the genuinely creative and insightful productions of cyberspace has good reason for skepticism. She usefully reminds us, however, that “without those repetitive revenge plays that are now only read in graduate school, we would not have Hamlet” (278). Journeyman works establish conventions that can be exploited by the creative artist, and they also create the context for higher demands and aspirations. Can we expect a Hamlet to take shape on the twenty-first century’s rising holodeck? Janet Murray clearly thinks so. I believe that most readers will close Murray’s well-informed and compelling book and agree.

 

Steven Helmling

Department of English
University of Delaware
helmling@odin.english.udel.edu

 

Fredric Jameson, The Cultural Turn: Selected Writings on the Postmodern, 1983-1998.Verso: London and New York, 1998.

 

Perry Anderson, The Origins of Postmodernity. Verso: London and New York, 1998.

 

Fredric Jameson’s new volume offers itself as a compendium of his “key writings” on postmodernism; but let the buyer beware that it does not contain the famous “Postmodernism” essay published in New Left Review (1984) and reprinted as the opening chapter of Postmodernism, or The Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism (1991). Instead it opens with that essay’s earliest, much shorter, first take, “Postmodernism and Consumer Society”–the kernel that grew, at about three and a half times its original length, into the “landmark” essay.¹ Presumably, the decision to reprint the earlier version was about marketing: publishers want to minimize overlap between competing products. But motivation aside, reprinting the earlier version has the effect of highlighting a little-noticed feature of Jameson’s thinking about postmodernism since the big essay, namely that ever since its first appearance and astonishing impact, Jameson has been moderating its grandest claims, qualifying just what had excited its enthusiastic readers most.

 

On the evidence, the enormous success of the 1984 essay was not altogether what Jameson had hoped for. Many read it as a manifesto on behalf of the “postmodern”–modernism was dead, long live postmodernism–despite Jameson’s cautions in the essay itself against any such for-or-against reading. Granted, Jameson here and elsewhere in his ’80s writing allowed himself considerable hope on the score of postmodernism, but even in the essay itself, the culminating theme of “the sublime” was inflected as much with terror as with hope. “The sublime” was “unrepresentable,” and since we can’t understand what we can’t represent, the chronic Jamesonian burden of “Marxist hermeneutic” (“we are condemned to interpret at the same time that we feel an increasing repugnance to do so” [Jameson, Ideologies 6]) was for the nonce “relieved.” Jameson seemed, at last, to have joined the clamor (from Susan Sontag to Deleuze and Guattari) “against interpretation”; and the aesthetes of jouissance delighted to hear him talking the talk of “delirium,” “euphoria,” and “intensity.” This release involved others: like dominoes, all the direr Jamesonian themes seemed to be falling, as Hegelian “time” (History, temporality, the diachronic, narrativity) yielded to the favored pomo category of “space” (the synchronic, the visual, geographies [plural], cognitive mapping).

 

And these were shifts not merely of theme, but of Jameson’s actual writing practice: dense and compact, The Political Unconscious had told a (Hegelian) story; by contrast, the vast and sprawling Postmodernism scanned, from varying altitudes, diverse cultural terrains whose roughly synchronous disjunctions were no small part of the point. These macrolevel gestures were sustained at the microlevel in the very textures of the prose as well: The Political Unconscious had elaborated the premise of revolution’s “inevitable failure” in a “stoic” and “tragic” prose that enacted the “labor and the suffering” of “the dialectic of utopia and ideology”; whereas “Postmodernism” (both essay and book) continuously evoked, in the feel and sound of the writing itself, “the relief of the postmodern generally, a thunderous unblocking of logjams and a release of new productivity that was somehow tensed up and frozen, locked like cramped muscles, at the latter end of the modern period” (Jameson, Postmodernism 313). Throughout Postmodernism, this promising prospect motivated not merely a thematics, but also a stylistics of “the sublime.”

 

But “the sublime,” and everything I’ve just linked it with above, constitutes new material added between the earliest version of the essay, “Postmodernism and Consumer Society” and the now-canonical “Postmodernism, or the Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism.” And it is precisely “the sublime” (etc.) that The Cultural Turn elides by reprinting the former rather than the latter. (Arguably, even the choice among the available “earlier” versions supports this point, since The Cultural Turn reprints the one that substitutes a discussion of the Westin Bonaventure for the earliest version’s pages on the proto-“sublime” theme of “the schizo” [see endnote 1].) In thus reverting, as it were, to this earlier, pre-“sublime” version, and making it the starting point for a new itinerary through Jameson’s “selected writings on the postmodern,” The Cultural Turn could be read as a thoroughly revisionist retrospect, a corrective alternative genealogy to the received understanding of “Jameson on postmodernism.” Whether or not Jameson intended anything like this, there’s no question that readers who rely on The Cultural Turn for their sense of Jameson’s role in the postmodern debate will derive a picture very different from that still governed by memories of the 1984 version’s initial impact.

 

And in any case, such revisionist impulses manifested themselves in Jameson’s work even before Postmodernism came out (and indeed, in Postmodernism itself)–for example, in “Marxism and Postmodernism” (1989), which appeared as a reply-to-critics in Douglas Kellner’s casebook, Postmodernism/Jameson/Critique (1989; parts of this essay were also cannibalized for the “Conclusion” to Postmodernism). And in the work that followed Postmodernism, Jameson returned to the supposedly retro interests (Hegelian, Marxist, phenomenological) that Postmodernism had seemed to downplay or eschew: Signatures of the Visible and The Geopolitical Aesthetic (both 1992) renewed hermeneutic commitments; and The Seeds of Time (1994), as the last word of the title hints, conjured the phenomenological thematics of temporality. The latter book’s first and strongest chapter, the obvious program piece for the whole, is called “The Antinomies of Postmodernism,” a meditation on the contemporary (postmodern) ideology of standoff and standstill, of (Kantian) “antinomy” usurping the analytic/interpretive space where (Hegelian) “dialectic” should be. By now no one should have missed that Jameson was seeing the “postmodern condition” as much less “euphoric” and “joyous” than he had earlier seemed to do.

 

The choice of “Selected Writings” in The Cultural Turn gives this tendency in Jameson’s work the sanction of a volume, and to that extent, The Cultural Turn is less a sequel to Postmodernism than a revision of it–an update, as my title here means to suggest. (After all, the 1991 volume was also a “Selected Writings on the Postmodern”). Besides reprinting the two essays (“Marxism and Postmodernism” and “The Antinomies of Postmodernity”) I’ve just discussed, The Cultural Turn presents four new essays that make Jameson’s dissent from pomo-as-usual almost aggressively insistent. Two of these offer yet another of Jameson’s periodic attempts to rehabilitate the irredeemably out-of-fashion Hegel; the other two extrapolate from the problem of “finance capital” Jameson’s most jaundiced take yet on The Way We Live Now.

 

Of the two latter essays, the first, “Culture and Finance Capital,” takes up Giovanni Arrighi’s The Long Twentieth Century with an eye to the question whether “finance capital” is the distinctive or constitutive feature of late capitalism; the second, “The Brick and the Balloon: Architecture, Idealism, and Land Speculation” treats aesthetic issues: the paradoxes of the artwork’s “symbolic act” (is it “act” at all, or “symbol” merely?–a question for the centrality of which, recall the subtitle of The Political Unconscious: “Narrative as a Socially Symbolic Act”). This problematic prompts the related question of what constitutes, and what is the use of, a critical account of cultural forms. The discussion here interestingly enlarges Jameson’s previous accounts of Manfredo Tafuri, the Marxist architectural historian who, for Jameson, has long instantiated the very problems of “dialectical writing” that Jameson’s own writing chronically raises for itself: how to own the “inevitable failure” of the revolutionary past without making a fatal defeatism the foregone conclusion of its future?

 

But interesting as these issues are, I want to give the space remaining to the two Hegelianizing essays here, “‘End of Art’ or ‘End of History’?” and “Transformations of the Image in Postmodernity.” The first of these urges what can only be called a Hegelian full-court press: Jameson has been rereading the Phenomenology, the Aesthetics, and the Philosophy of History, and this return to Hegel quite contravenes the anti- or un-Hegelian carriage of Postmodernism. Indeed, this essay’s Hegelianizing makes that of The Political Unconscious seem mild; some of the more high-rolling passages leap from one continent of thought to a whole other galaxy, in a single bound and several times per paragraph, in ways actually reminiscent of Hegel himself. (When Jameson adverts to “Hegel’s immense dictée–the compulsive graphomanic lifelong transcription of what some daimon of the absolute muttered to him day-in day-out at the very limits of syntax and language itself,” it is hard not to see his own oeuvre, however momentarily, in similar terms.) In this distinctly Hegelian spirit, both essays pursue distinctly Hegelian themes. One array of these is gathered under the rubric of the “end of” problem, as instanced in “the sublime” and its relation to “the postmodern” (in which “end of” motifs proliferate, including Derrida’s meta-twist, the end of “the end of”). The other principle thematic is that of “theory” itself, whose “end,” in another sign of our accelerating times, we increasingly hear announced.

 

There is considerable overlap between the two essays, because the “transformations in the image” (i.e., in the visual) tracked in the former prove an instance of the transformations (i.e., in part, endings) explored in the latter. For Jameson, the increasing hegemony of “the visual” attests a contemporary “return of the aesthetic”; and to the extent that the latter is a reaction against the self-transcending “anti-aesthetic” of modernism, postmodernism appears as a reversion from “the sublime” back to “the beautiful”–equivalent for Jameson with the merely “culinary” or “decorative” kind of art that Hegel’s prophecy of the triumph of philosophy, and modernism’s “anti-aesthetic” of shock and ugliness, both aimed, in what Jameson projects as their different but related ways, to “end.” Jameson sketches “self-transcendence” as one of the keys to the dialectic of “the sublime,” from Kant’s “sublime,” which transcends “the beautiful,” and Hegel’s “end of art” (in which sensuous figuration [the aesthetic] is sublated in the trans-sensuousness of the Absolute [philosophy]) through modernism to our own day.

 

And here it becomes clear that if Jameson has downplayed sublimity in these recent writings, it is not to discount “the sublime” itself, but rather to deny its continuing potencies to “the postmodern.” This move directly reverses that of the 1984 essay, in which the thwarted energies of a “cramped” and “frozen” modernism were relieved in the “thunderous unblocking” of a postmodern sublime. That was then, this is now: in these two new essays, it is the “anti-aesthetic” of modernism that authentically mobilizes “the sublime”; postmodernism, by contrast, works merely reactively to secure the commodification of all sensuous experience to the “pleasure” of the merely “culinary” or “consumable” (in the “Transformations” essay, to the visual, to the “image” in Guy Debord’s sense, “the final form of commodity reification”):

 

The image is the commodity today, and that is why it is vain to expect a negation of the logic of commodity production from it, that is why, finally, all beauty today is meretricious and the appeal to it by contemporary pseudo-aestheticism is an ideological maneuver and not a creative resource. (Cultural Turn 135)

 

Compare this dour pronouncement with the brighter prospects on “the visual” in Signatures of the Visible, which attest that Jameson himself had once entertained some such hope of “a negation of the logic of commodity production from [the image].”

 

All these moves revisit, and revise, Jameson’s perennially in-process triad of realism/modernism/postmodernism; and in the present discussion, “theory” itself is drastically dichotomized: there is a “heroic” (i.e., still-modernist) founding cohort–“from Lèvi-Strauss to Lacan, from Deleuze and Barthes to Derrida and Baudrillard” (Cultural Turn 85)–followed by more recent (unnamed) epigones whose premature and depoliticized celebrations of utopian jouissance, as in some “theory” avatar of “infantile leftism,” effectively domesticated jouissance itself (along with such other once-subversive themes as deconstruction, negation, dedifferentiation, etc.). Thus do our utopian and revolutionary inventions reify, in our very hands, into clichés: consumables, commodities, staples, fixed relay points in a routinized stimulus-response circuit of a variously libidinal and cerebral, but in any case depoliticized, “desire.” (Jameson has attempted to prevent, to repoliticize, this temptation of theory before, in “Pleasure: A Political Issue” [1983].) Onto this binary of “modern” versus “postmodern” varieties of theory, Jameson projects that of “the [critical, self-transcending or -negating, anti-aesthetic] sublime” versus the “domestic,” “culinary,” neo- or pseudo-aestheticizing of “the beautiful.”

 

But for the Hegelian Jameson, no “end of” thematic can evade the question of its own aftermath, and thereby the question, and the necessity, of continuations–of “the sublime,” of “the modern,” of “theory” in the heroic mode–in however altered a form. In thus “preserving” what (some) theory too hastily (and complacently) “cancels,” Jameson, as usual, opposes the foreclosures of such contemporary ideological inflections as Fukuyama’s “end of history,” whose “end of” refrain Jameson startlingly, and cogently, compares to Turner’s closing of the frontier thesis a century ago. Here the point above–that Jameson aims not to discount “the sublime,” but to align its force rather with “the modern” against postmodernism–unveils its utopian potential:

 

Whether the Sublime, and its successor Theory, have that capacity hinted at by Kant, to... crack open the commodification implicit in the Beautiful, is a question we have not even begun to explore; but it is a question and a problem which is, I hope, a little different from the alternative we have thought we were faced with until now: whether, if you prefer modernism, it is possible to go back to the modern as such, after its dissolution into full postmodernity. And the new question is also a question about theory itself, and whether it can persist and flourish without simply turning back into an older technical philosophy whose limits and obsolescence were already visible in the nineteenth century. (Cultural Turn 87)

 

Vintage Jameson: defying the closure of the postmodern, thus to contrive a fresh opening, to pose a fresh set of questions, to propose a fresh (daunting: impossible?) project, to propose fresh terms with which to assess the success or failure of any “theory” aspiring to be worthy of the name.

 

Alongside The Cultural Turn, a virtual co-publication, comes Perry Anderson’s The Origins of Postmodernity. Verso originally commissioned Anderson to write an introduction to The Cultural Turn, but his effort outgrew that function; the resulting brief book now stands, predictably enough, if you know Anderson’s previous books, as the most economical, elegant, and incisive discussion of Jameson extant. The focus is on postmodernism, so there are vast reaches of Jameson that Anderson doesn’t touch, but within that limitation, Anderson’s is and will doubtless remain the definitive treatment. (In this respect, as a brief book on a single Jamesonian title, Anderson’s text will doubtless do readers a service comparable to that of William Dowling’s 1984 primer on The Political Unconscious.)

 

Anderson’s first chapter, “Prodromes,” briefly surveys diverse and often random coinages of “postmodern” going back to the 1890s and up to the 1960s; this magisterial sketch composes (in just eleven pages) Ortega y Gasset, Arnold Toynbee, Charles Olson, C. Wright Mills, Leslie Fiedler, and others, into an ideogram of an entire cultural milieu. Chapter two, “Crystallization,” focuses the decade between the inaugural issue of boundary 2 and Habermas’s lecture, “Modernity: An Incomplete Project,” the period, Anderson argues, in which the terms of the debate as we have come to know it “crystallized,” largely in the domain of architecture (Graves, Jencks, Venturi), but also in the work of such culture-critics as Ihab Hassan and J.-F. Lyotard. In chapter three, enter Jameson, with an impact registered in the chapter’s title, “Capture”–but if that title seems melodramatic, the chapter itself quite justifies it. Here, in thirty brisk pages, Anderson briefly sketches how Jameson’s thinking developed to the culmination achieved in the “Postmodernism” essay, with reference to “sources” as diverse as Barthes, Baudrillard, and Ernest Mandel; he then goes on to demonstrate with ungainsayable cogency why and how Jameson’s “intervention” (for once that grandiose term is appropriate) made such a difference in the “postmodern debate.”

 

For Jameson’s “capture” of postmodernism effectively transformed what had been an incoherent rash of usages into a set of issues over which debate only then at last became really possible. This “capture” ensued, Anderson argues, from five “moves”: 1) posing pomo as not a “mere aesthetic break or epistemological shift,” but nothing less than “the cultural logic of late capitalism”; 2) an evocation of the new psychic Lebenswelt–the boredom, the “waning of affect”–concomitant with the achieved hegemony of consumerism; 3) a conspectus of the cultural surround embracing specialized discourses on pomo that had theretofore remained discrete (literature, architecture, philosophy, science), and extending further to several in which it had not yet played much of a role (film and media, postcolonial studies); 4) a consideration of the social effects (“dedifferentiation,” bourgeoisification of the proletariat and vice versa, “identity” politics displacing those of class) of the shift from production to service and information economies; and 5) “Jameson’s final move [and] perhaps the most original of all,” a wholesale removal of the discussion from the plane of mere opinion and facile for-and-against “debate” on which even such figures as Habermas had left it: before Jameson, postmodernism was the stuff either of jeremiads or panegyrics; since, it has become a key to all mythologies, an ideology of ideologies, but also the theorization that newly enabled their comprehensive critique as well.

 

Anderson also claims, although without “arguing” the point at any length, that Jameson’s success has much to do with his power as a writer. This is refreshing. Usually, the difficulty of Jameson’s prose is treated as an unfortunate obstacle readers must overcome–justified and necessary, but a sort of test of the reader’s fitness to read, as well as an attestation of the work’s importance: if it’s worth the trouble, and this is the trouble it’s worth, hey, it’s got to be important. Anderson, by contrast, insists that the prose itself is a major part of Jameson’s accomplishment. Anderson deftly evokes what he lacks the space to demonstrate: the suppleness of Jameson’s syntax, the evocativeness of his metaphors, the exhilaration and expansiveness of his encyclopedic allusiveness. Usually, the more a writer tries to embrace, the more the energies of the writing attenuate. In Jameson, the reverse seems true: the wider the focus, the more richly cathected every detail of the scene.

 

So I applaud, and second, Anderson’s insistence that in Jameson, “We are dealing with a great writer” (Origins 72)–but I add that the assertion introduces a slight dissonance: Anderson has written the most penetrating and simultaneously the most sympathetic study of Jameson we have, but he has done so in a style quite the reverse of Jameson’s own. (Thought experiment: compare and contrast Anderson’s Considerations on Western Marxism with Jameson’s Marxism and Form.) To that extent it seems slightly ironic praise to say that Anderson’s tight and lucid prose will make Jameson accessible to many a reader so far baffled by Jameson’s own dauntingly allusive, stratospherically high-flying, self-consciously “dialectical” scriptible. But it will. And for some time to come: neither Jameson’s work, nor postmodernity, is going away anytime soon.

Note

 

1. “Postmodernism and Consumer Society,” originally a 1982 lecture, was first printed in Hal Foster, ed., The Anti-Aesthetic (Seattle: Bay Press, 1983), 111-25. The expansion appeared as “Postmodernism, or, The Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism” in New Left Review 146 (July-August 1984), 59-92, and in substantially the same form as the first chapter of Postmodernism. But it was also “reprinted” in E. Ann Kaplan, ed., Postmodernism and its Discontents (London and New York: Verso, 1988), 13-29, but with a consequential alteration: the section on “schizophrenia” and Language Poetry was cut and a discussion of the Westin Bonaventure Hotel, cannibalized from the “big” essay, put in its place. It is the Kaplan version that The Cultural Turn reprints.

Works Cited

 

• Jameson, Fredric. The Ideologies of Theory. Vol. 1. Minneapolis: U of Minnesota P, 1988.
• —. Postmodernism, or, The Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism. Durham, NC: Duke UP, 1991.

 

Cynthia Hogue

Department of English
Bucknell University
hogue@bucknell.edu

 

Born in Alabama, Harryette Mullen grew up in Texas, the daughter of teachers and the granddaughter and great-granddaughter of Baptist ministers in the still-segregated south. While completing a B.A. in English at the University of Texas at Austin, she began writing seriously, participating in the burgeoning black arts movement in the 1970s. She received a Ph.D. from the History of Consciousness program at the University of California at Santa Cruz, and teaches African American literature and creative writing at the University of California at Los Angeles. Her works include four collections of poetry, most recently Muse & Drudge (Singing Horse Press, 1995), and a critical study, Gender, Subjectivity, and Slave Narratives (Cambridge University Press, 1998).

 

Known for her innovative, “mongrel” lyric poetry (as Mullen puts it in a 1996 interview with Calvin Bedient published in Callaloo: “We are all mongrels” [652]), Mullen is concerned to diversify the predominant aesthetic of “accessibility” that characterizes contemporary African American poetry and criticism. In “‘Ruses of the lunatic muse’: Harryette Mullen and Lyric Hybridity” (Women’s Studies 1998), Elizabeth Frost terms Muse & Drudge a “poetic hybrid” that draws on both Stein and blues, among other influences–a lyric long poem exploring “the diverse influences and languages of a miscegenated culture” (466). The interview that follows was conducted on May 25, 1998 in Los Angeles, where Mullen lives and I had arranged to meet her just prior to the 1998 American Literature Association Conference in San Diego.

 

Cynthia Hogue: I want to start with your origin tale. How did you start writing? Why?

 

Harryette Mullen: You could say there are several origins. There’s the origin of writing which for me goes far back, since I could hold a pencil. I’ve been writing to entertain myself and writing rhymes, stories, and cartoons as gifts to other people… making booklets for friends, and greeting cards for family members with little rhymed verses in them that I would illustrate. I always had a notebook as a child and I would sketch in it and write in it. This started because my mother was always working She was the breadwinner. She taught at an elementary school and she would often have to go to meetings and she had other jobs as well. So we always knew we had to be quiet and entertain ourselves. My sister and I read a lot and we both scribbled and drew a little bit. It was a way of keeping us out of trouble.

 

The first time I had a poem published was in high school and it just happened because the English teacher made everyone write a poem. That was our assignment. She submitted the poems to a local poetry contest and my poem was chosen as the winner. It was published in the local newspaper. So that was my first published poem. As an undergraduate I continued to write for my own amusement and also I went to poetry readings. There were lots of African and African American poets coming to visit the University of Texas and I tried to go to as many readings as possible. Some of my friends were writers too. So I just kept writing. Then one of my friends insisted that I had to do more with my poetry. He was a poet and knew that I was writing, but I wasn’t attempting to publish my work, wasn’t participating in readings. I was at an open reading one night and he asked me, “Are you going to read your work?” I said, “I didn’t bring anything,” and he said, “We’re going to go home. I’m going to sign you up on the list and by the time you go home and get your stuff it’ll be close to your turn.” That was the first time I read in public and after that, I really started to think I could face an audience and see myself as a poet. I had been writing forever but not thinking that what I wrote was poetry or that I was a poet, but writing and drawing and reading all went together. They were all part of the same activity.

 

CH: I want to turn to the evolution of your work. How would you describe that first collection, Tree Tall Woman?

 

HM: The book was influenced by the poets that I was reading and hearing. I was definitely influenced by the Black Arts movement, the idea that there was a black culture and that you could write from the position of being within a black culture. At the time, my idea about black culture was very specific to being Southern, eating certain foods, and having certain religious beliefs. I have a broader sense of what blackness is, what African-ness is, or what a collection of cultures might be, where before, I think my idea of blackness was somewhat provincial. Or definitely, it was regional.

 

CH: “Regional,” meaning monologic?

 

HM: Part of what people were doing with the Black Arts movement was, in a sense, to construct a positive image of black culture, because blackness had signified negation, lack, deprivation, absence of culture. So people took all of the things that had been pejorative and stigmatized, and made them very positive, so that chitterlings, which was the garbage that people threw away from the hog, became the essence of soul food. Words were turned around in their meaning and all the things that were thought of as being pejorative aspects of blackness became the things to be praised. So, that project had created a space for me to write. I didn’t have to carry out that project because it had already been done; I didn’t have to say “I’m black and black is beautiful.” Actually, by the time I was writing, that was getting a little repetitive and almost boring. I wanted to write within the space that had been created without necessarily repeating exactly what those folks had done. At the same time, I now see that I had a kind of restricted idea of what it meant to write within a black culture or with a black voice. The idea of a black voice or black language–black speech–is much more problematic for me today than it was at that time. I felt I knew what it was to write in a black voice and it meant a sort of vernacularized English. I think that it’s much more complicated than that. For instance, my family spoke standard English at home. Educated, middle-class, black speakers are code-switchers, and what we really did was learn to switch from standard English to a black vernacular in certain situations when that was called for. In our case, my sister and I went through people saying, “You talk funny. You talk proper. Where are you from? You don’t sound like you are from here,” just because we were speaking standard English. The idea that there is a black language that is a non-standard English, that standard English, therefore, is white, is very problematic. In the work that I am doing now, I’m actually trying to question those kinds of distinctions that are being made between the standard and the non-standard. I wouldn’t say that standard American English is in any way a white language. It’s a language that is the result of many peoples’ contributions. In fact, if you look in the American Heritage Dictionary, Langston Hughes and Arna Bontemps are among the people consulted for their usage panel. So people really need to think harder about those distinctions that are being made.

 

CH: But it was a journey before you began to experiment with the code-switching poetically?

 

HM: Right. Partly, it had to do with going back to school, going back to graduate school and reading about language. Also, there was, even when I was an undergraduate, a whole movement of sociolinguistics and folklore, partly because there was no African American literature being taught while I was an undergraduate at the University of Texas.

 

CH: You didn’t even read Zora Neale Hurston?

 

HM: Zora Neale Hurston was not in the canon. She was out of print. Alice Walker was one of the people who helped bring Zora Neale Hurston back into print, and that was happening around the time that I was an undergraduate, but it hadn’t yet reached the classroom. I was an English major. I was interested in different kinds of literature. I also took Spanish, so I was reading literature in Spanish. I took courses in classical literature. I didn’t know Greek or Latin, but I read the works in English because I wanted to have the background. There was no African American text, even in American Literature classes that I took. We didn’t read Invisible Man. We didn’t read Richard Wright. We didn’t read any black women. The places where I was able to read any black writers were in African Literature courses because UT Austin had a very strong African and Oriental Languages Department. They were bringing in African poets like Kofi Awoonor and Dennis Brutus and novelists as well, like Chinua Achebe. There were all these African writers around and sometimes Caribbean writers. So I took a course in Caribbean literature. I took courses in Anglophone African literature, and Afro-American folklore, which was offered through Anthropology. Roger Abrahams, who is known for working on black folklore, was teaching at UT Austin at that time and I took two or three courses with him. My understanding of African American culture really had a lot to do with taking these folklore courses. What’s so interesting now, in retrospect, is that I had never heard of most of this Afro-American folklore because a lot of it was based on urban folklore that he had collected from black men on street corners in Philadelphia. He went from there to collecting in prisons because he could get a higher concentration of black men from different parts of the country. He would go to federal prisons and collect twenty different versions of “The Signifying Monkey.” His book Deep Down in the Jungle is a result of that research. I never would have heard such stuff, because my family’s version of black culture was: our household, our church, our school. It wasn’t the street corner and it definitely was not the prison.

 

Here was this white man who was teaching me Afro-American culture, and it was practically all new to me. There were some folk tales that I had heard before, but a lot of it–like the toasting tradition–was completely new to me. Now I see, of course, that it is very much a male-centered performance. You don’t see a lot of women, especially a lot of middle class women, going around reciting these toasts. Now I feel that I understand why I kept having this experience of “Why don’t I know this? Why is this the black culture and I don’t have a real familiarity with it?” This is definitely a black culture that was marked for class and for gender in a way that did not include my own experience, but if you had talked about black people who go to church two or three days a week and who work very hard and are thrifty and try to avoid entanglements with the law, that is the culture that I knew. Partly what was going on was that people were fascinated with those aspects of black culture that were most different from what they saw as white middle class culture. There was a book that I read at the time actually called Black and White Styles in Conflict about people’s use of language and their ideas about how they conduct themselves in any kind of discourse. What is described as the “white style” was my family’s style and we lived totally in the black community. We were segregated in a black community! My parents had gone to a historically black college, Talladega College in Alabama. My mother taught in a segregated black public school in Texas. We lived in a neighborhood that was 99.9% black and it was a black world that we lived in, but according to this book, our style was a “white style” and the “black style” was the style of people my mother considered to be not well-educated. A certain style was a marker of education and class within the black community, but it was a marker of race within the mainstream. This was what was perceived as black.

 

It’s taken me a while to clarify this distinction in my own mind and to realize it bothers me, because I’m not sure that black children today know that blackness and education are not mutually exclusive. It used to be that we were taught, “Yes, you should be a code-switcher because that way, you could talk to everybody.” Now, these kids think, “If I learn Standard English, then I am less black.” When they go to get a job, they are less able to qualify for the job if they can’t switch to Standard English (if that’s the mode of the workplace). Or they have trouble in school, because that is the language of instruction. The idea that Standard English is not just a tool that everyone can use, but is the possession of white people is harmful to black children and anyone else speaking a variant dialect. All of these things bother me now.

 

CH: You grew up in Fort Worth in the sixties and went to college in the early seventies before the Black Studies movement had reached the University of Texas or widely nationally?

 

HM: We were marching, protesting for better representation in the student body and the faculty, recruiting more minority faculty. There was an Ethnic Studies course that was required for education majors. We had a black publication that was folded into the school paper. It was The Daily Texan, the school paper, and then once a month, we folded in our Black Print supplement and I worked on that. I also worked on The Daily Texan as an editorial assistant. I wrote editorials for the paper on race subjects usually, and that’s what they wanted me to do.

 

CH: I wonder why?

 

HM: Yeah, really. I wrote an opinion column and then I worked on the staff for the black publication as well. We had some extremely right-wing Regents at that time. It was difficult, and we were forced to develop our political consciousness of who we were and why we were there. Austin was the place of one of the Supreme Court decisions, Sweatt vs. Painter, and I actually knew the nephew of Heman Sweatt, the man who entered the law school with much resistance to his admission. He was put in this room by himself with law books, and that was their way of complying with the requirement that he be admitted to the law school. He was not allowed to sit in the classroom with the other law students.

 

CH: And this was what year?

 

HM: Sweatt vs. Painter was in the fifties. [The case was decided in 1950.] Around the time of Brown vs. Board of Education. Sweatt’s nephew was going to UT Austin when I was there–that was very much living history for us. There were racial incidents happening. The first day that we moved into the dorm, there was a big brouhaha because some white parents didn’t want their child in a room with a black roommate. Everyone had gotten a form that said, “Do you mind having a roommate of another race?” and this girl had said she didn’t mind, but her parents did mind, so the school moved her out of the room and gave her a white roommate. That set the tone.

 

CH: Let’s talk for a moment about the groups that were bringing in the black artists. There was a group that was publishing The Black Print monthly and a Black Arts movement in Austin. Did the University sponsor the readings?

 

HM: Yes. These were readings on campus that were sponsored by departments. Many of the African writers came because of the strong African Languages Department. Some of them were visiting lecturers and I think that possibly, the English Department sponsored some of the readings even though they weren’t necessarily teaching these people’s work in the classroom. We also connected, through Black Print, with some of the writers. We published, or actually re-printed poems from people like Michael Harper and maybe Nikki Giovanni or Gloria Oden. I remember when Haki Madhubuti came. He was still Don L. Lee at the time. I had come from my English class to the reading with my Shakespeare book. I didn’t have any of his books and I couldn’t buy any because I was too broke, but I got him to sign my collected works of Shakespeare. He laughed; that is how it was. These writers’ work was not in the curriculum but they were there because they were on the circuit and someone had invited them. Feminist poets were coming too. I remember going to see Adrienne Rich read and Audre Lorde. There was also a group in Austin called Women and Their Work, and they did a lot to promote literature and art by women. They were one of the first organizations to sponsor me at a reading. There was also a group called Texas Circuit. I was starting to see that there was a world out there where people were poets and writers and that was their life. I hadn’t really thought about that. I just thought, “Okay, I am going to school and I’m going to be a teacher and that will be my life.” Then this other possibility opened up. It helped to see people who were women and who were black and who were American, who were poets and that was their identity.

 

CH: You talked yesterday about beginning to hear the language poets around San Francisco after you started graduate school and how Nathaniel Mackey, himself influenced by Robert Duncan and Amiri Baraka, was an important mentor for you.

 

HM: He was an important presence.

 

CH: Presence?

 

HM: Yes.

 

CH: And you began to see a different possibility for your poetic voice? Even from your first book, were you already positioning your work, or negotiating your work in dialogue with, rather than in imitation of, what you were hearing?

 

HM: I think so, because I felt it was possible to enter the space that was created. My identity was part of everything that I wrote, so it gave me a freedom to write a poem about a mother braiding her daughter’s hair that was a very black poem, but didn’t have to say, “This is a black woman braiding her black child’s black hair.” There were those poems where blackness had to be asserted and I appreciated what that act of assertion had accomplished. It allowed me to write a simple poem about a mother braiding her child’s hair or a poem about a quilt, just the warmth of the quilt. I realized that I was choosing certain subjects that would allow me to explore aspects of black culture and community and family. I think Tree Tall Woman is really about relations among black people, whether it’s family or intimate relationships or just being in the world as a person who has a particular perspective, but it was not having continually to point out that I was writing from a black perspective. That was just part of the work.

 

CH: And this is the work that you were writing by the time you were in graduate school?

 

HM: No, by graduate school I was responding to the idea that identity is much more complex and much more negotiated and constructed. I didn’t exactly have an essentialist notion of identity and culture, but I did think that I knew what black culture was, especially since as an undergraduate, I had learned about the other side of black culture that I hadn’t really experienced. I felt pretty well-versed. Then, I began to think about the subject as the problem, which was a lot of what graduate school is about, deconstructing the subject. There was resistance on the part of feminists and people of color who were saying, “Just as we are beginning to explore our subjectivity, all of a sudden, we are going to deconstruct the subject and it doesn’t matter who is writing?”

 

CH: Say, “The author is dead.”

 

HM: And it doesn’t matter who wrote it; it is language writing itself. There was resistance to that notion. I was really intrigued by it. On the one hand, we used to joke about how there should be a moratorium on certain kinds of writing because we’ve had enough of that. On the other hand, I thought I should think seriously about how poststructuralism applies to me because I didn’t think it applied to me in the same way it would to, say, a white male writer because a white male writer had a tradition to look back upon that I didn’t have. I had some tradition as a black writer, but it wasn’t regarded in the same way. I had to think about how this discussion of the subject would apply to me. I had to expand my sense of black subjectivity, to see that it is more complicated and dispersed throughout the diaspora. Black people do not necessarily speak the same language or have the same beliefs. There may be some things they have in common, but there is a lot of diversity at the same time. Muse and Drudge is the result of that thinking. Trimmings and S*PeRM**K*T are ways of moving in that direction. Those two books are influenced by Gertrude Stein’s Tender Buttons, and by my reading as a graduate student, reading the theory, particularly feminist theory, and thinking about language not as transparent but constructed. Muse and Drudge in some way allowed me to put together the kind of exploration of black culture that I had been doing in Tree Tall Woman and the kind of playing with language and form that I had been doing with Trimmings and S*PeRM**K*T.

 

It allowed me to put these things together and also, it helped me to put audiences together because I had lost the audience for Tree Tall Woman. I didn’t see them when I would read Trimmings and S*PeRM**K*T because for one thing, I started to get more readings on campuses than in communities. Tree Tall Woman attracted audiences in community venues. Trimmings and S*PeRM**K*T got me a lot of invitations to read at colleges and universities. Part of it might have to do with the fact that I was part of that milieu, as a graduate student and as an assistant professor when I started out at Cornell. I was already known to people. But I would look out at audiences and there would be no people of color. Period. I would be the only person of color in the room–not that there is anything necessarily wrong with that but there is something a little bit odd about it. I would think, “What happened to all the black folks? Why aren’t they able to relate to this?” I made sure that my picture was on Trimmings–not just to see me, but to see that a black person wrote this book. It was a shock to go to reading after reading and there would be no people of color in the room. Muse and Drudge was written partly to bring the audience back together again.

 

CH: Did it work?

 

HM: Yes, it’s happening. It’s still the case that I am reading a lot on college campuses, but I will see black people, I’ll see some Latinos, I’ll see some Asian American students there. Part of it has to do with people of color feeling that they can actually deal with literature. People who are bilingual may feel that they have deficiencies in English. Partly it has to do with people being second and third generation in their family to go to college. When I was a student at UT Austin, most of the people in my cohort were the first in their families to go to college. First generation has to go out and be doctors and lawyers, business people. They have to be able to make back the investment for their families. I think my literary activity is possible because in my family, I was the third generation to attend some type of college. My maternal grandfather was in the Seminary. One of my grandmothers went to normal school and was an elementary school teacher. Since I was third generation, that created a certain tolerance in my family for my wanting to be a liberal arts major. Also, the kinds of jobs that people in my family had all had to do with having a respect for literacy. Being a teacher, being a pastor, a printer, a clerical worker. I never found even one other black student at UT Austin who was majoring in English. I was the only one. In every class that I attended, I was the only black person. And not a single black professor. I took Ethnic Studies to get a black professor. But in the English department, no. We had one person of color, a Japanese American who was teaching Emerson. That’s how it was.

 

CH: No women taught at that time, or very few.

 

HM: The white women professors I had were definitely inspirational to me. There were certain younger women who were my models and they made me feel that I could do that. They were intellectual and serious. They didn’t get tenure. Of the three that I am thinking of, not a one of them got tenure at UT Austin and now one of them is writing Gothic novels. She was a Chaucer scholar.

 

CH: In Trimmings the language becomes more a subject for analysis, rather than a vehicle for expression, or in addition to being a vehicle for expression, and gender becomes a subject that you are really contemplating. Charles Bernstein calls this book “a poetics of cultural modernism.” Sandra Cisneros says of your later book Muse and Drudge that “language and rhetoric always come up.” You are “the queen of hip hyperbole,” as she puts it. What interests me is that you kind of burst into this linguistically innovative and thematically feminist verse. You say at the end of Trimmings that you wanted to think about language as clothing and clothing as language and that you wondered why women’s writing has traditionally been so ephemeral. How you do that in Trimmings?

 

HM: A lot of it had to do with my engagement with Stein’s text, Tender Buttons. I remember my earlier attempts to read Stein and thinking, “I can’t read this! I can’t understand it!” I felt frustrated but it was intriguing. I thought, “She acts like she thinks she knows what she’s doing.”

 

CH: Frustrated by the opaqueness?

 

HM: Right. The language is elusive and there is a secretive quality about Stein’s work. She has her own idiosyncratic approach to language, and you get the sense that she definitely knows what she is doing but I felt I just didn’t get it. I probably first tried to read Stein as an undergraduate, but I got frustrated and left it. Then when I went back as a graduate student, armed with a lot more theory and a lot more critical attitude about language, all of a sudden, Stein was making sense to me. Also, I really appreciated the elegance of what she was doing, elegance in the way that scientists and mathematicians use it, that you use the fewest elements. An elegant solution is not too complicated. By using words and the syntactical structures over and over again–often there’s a series, a list, and the only punctuation is periods and commas–she is boiling down language to the absolute, essential elements. I began to understand that that was a different way to use language, a way of using language that forces the reader either to throw it down, or else if you stick with it, to enter another subjectivity. The language seems to create an alternate subjectivity. I thought, “This is really powerful, what she is doing with language.” I could see how putting items in a series created different ways of reading the sentence. Syntactically, it can be read as items in a series or it can be read as appositives. Are these things contiguous with or equivalent to each other? That is suggested by the way she uses punctuation.

 

Around that time, I must have read Ron Silliman’s The New Sentence and I was very interested in the idea of the paratactic sentence and what that sentence is able to do poetically because in a way, the paratactic sentence, because of the compression, is more poetic than a prose sentence. I mean, you could have a prose sentence that uses the paratactic syntax, but there is something about parataxis itself that acts as a sort of poetic compression. I was interested in the technical, syntactical construction and how to use that to allow more ambiguity in the work, to create different levels of meaning using a prose paragraph, a prose poetry paragraph as the unit. Also, I was interested in Tender Buttons. The units operate separately and collectively. That really helped me with the form of Trimmings because you could read it as separate poems, you could read it as a longer poem that is composed of these units, these paragraphs. In a way, each paragraph is doing the same thing and there is a metonymical construction where the female body is constructed around metonymy.

 

I was analyzing what Stein was doing to figure out what I could use and I found that on a lot of levels, I could use what she was doing: the structure of the book itself, in terms of using a prose-poetry form, and a paratactic sentence that is compressed, that is not really a grammatical sentence but that makes sense in an agrammatical way, in a poetic way. Also, in her use of subject matter, where she is dealing with objects, rooms, and food, the domestic space that is a woman’s space and with the ideas of consumption, our investment in objects, our consumer fetishism. At the same time, I read Marx on commodity fetishism. So, all these things came together for Trimmings.

 

S*PeRM**K*T is really the companion of Trimmings. On the one hand, it’s the woman with the wardrobe and on the other, it’s the woman with her shopping list in the supermarket, because women are still constructed through advertising as the consumers who bring these objects into the household. S*PeRM**K*T was about my recollections of jingles that have embedded themselves in my brain. We used to have to memorize poetry, the nuns made us do that in Catholic school, and we had to do that also for church programs. It’s harder for me to recall some of that poetry than these ads, partly because the ads are just so quick, but twenty-year-old jingles are embedded in my brain and I thought about the power of those jingles, that mnemonic efficiency of poetry, of the quick line that is economical and concise and compressed. Even more than Trimmings S*PeRM**K*T is trying to think about the language in which we are immersed, bombarded with language that is commercial, that is a debased language. Those jingles are based in something that is very traditional, which is the proverb, the aphorism. Those are the models, so I try to think back through the commercial and the advertising jingle, through the political slogan, back to the proverb and the aphorism to that little nugget of collected wisdom, and to think about the language that is so commercialized, debased, and I try to recycle it. The idea of recycling is very much a part of S*PeRM**K*T, to take this detritus and to turn it into art. I was definitely thinking about visual artists who do that, collage artists and environmental artists, and things like the Heidelberg House in Detroit, where people take actual trash and turn it into a work of art.

 

CH: The play, or the pun, on “meat market” is most obviously visual but also linguistic. You open signaling the metapoetic moment to the poem: “Lines assemble gutter and margin.” Maybe I don’t get the poetic lines by that first line, but I certainly do when I get to: “More on line incites the eyes. Bold names label familiar type faces. Her hand scanning, throwaway lines.” You read the lines and you read between the lines.

 

HM: You read as you stand in line.

 

CH: You read as you stand in line, right–holding your “individually wrapped singles, frozen divorced compartments, six-pack widows.” Is it accurate to read this passage as a breakdown of gender relations?

 

HM: Well, people are hailed, as they say. You are ideologically hailed through your race, your class, your gender. You come to identify the ways that you are hailed and so you are identifying with a particular gender, with a particular race or class, or all at the same time. Or sometimes you are divided up into compartments and sometimes you are hailed for your class, but not your race or your gender. I always wanted to use the pun as a lever to create the possibility of multiple readings. Yes, it’s about the lines at the supermarket and about the lines on a page and, well, the supermarket as an environment of language. There is so much writing in a supermarket. There are signs everywhere, labels on products, and I liked the idea of the supermarket as a linguistic realm where there are certain genres of writing. Instructions as a genre of writing. Every trip to the supermarket became research and a possible excursion into language. I wanted to broaden the idea of the supermarket so that it works like clothing in Trimmings. The supermarket becomes the reference point, the metonymic reservoir of ways that we see the world and ourselves in it. We are consumers; that’s how we are constructed as citizens. People consume more than they vote. It’s more important what you buy than what candidates you vote for. That has overtaken our sense of ourselves as citizens in a civic society.

 

CH: In terms of critically thinking about the discourses that we hear, your work suggests that we consume rather than think through language. At the end of Trimmings, you discuss how your identity as a black woman writing about constructions of dominant femininity goes into the book. A word like “Pink,” for example, signifies femininity in the dominant culture, but “pink” and “slit” apply equally to a sewing catalog and girlie magazine. You write that as “a black woman writing in this language, I suppose I already had an ironic relationship to this pink and white femininity. Of course if I regard gender as a set of arbitrary signs, I also think of race–as far as it is difference that is meaningful–as a set of signs. Traces of black dialect and syntax, blues songs and other culturally specific allusions enter the text with linguistic contributions of Afro-Americans to the English language.” So you were already thinking about how to infuse traditionally poetic language, and we might even say, the tradition of poetic innovation–if we look at Gertrude Stein’s Melanctha with its traces of black dialect and syntax.

 

HM: This is another frustrating Gertrude Stein experience! Is she racist or is she just playing with the idea of race?

 

CH: I taught that novella in New Orleans to a fairly diverse class and I had to stop teaching it. We couldn’t get past its representations of race.

 

HM: Too much contention?

 

CH: Well it wasn’t the contention; it was pain. It was an undergraduate class. Black students were very used to the thoughtless expression of racism in New Orleans, but they hadn’t seen it at that level of conscious expression. It was too painful for them to discuss. I ended up just stopping the attempt to discuss and analyze it.

 

HM: Wow. I know that Richard Wright championed this work and actually, if you think about it, there are some similarities between it and Native Son, even though they had very different agendas. The naturalistic mode in which he was working also put blackness into a kind of stark relief in a way that happens in Melanctha as well, although she does it in a seemingly more playful manner. He seems very deadly serious. They both seem to be interested in the cultural significance of blackness and whiteness and the whole set of signifiers that are called into play when you question the whole idea of difference.

 

CH: Before we get into Muse and Drudge, how did that come into play in Trimmings and S*PeRM**K*T?

 

HM: In Trimmings, I actually found myself at a certain point becoming alarmed, because I wanted the book to be about feminist ideas, a feminist exploration of how femininity is constructed using clothing, how the clothing itself speaks to, or is emblematic of, certain kinds of constraints on women’s bodies. That is one of the issues I wanted to deal with: the overlap at that time of pornography and fashion, the kind of photography that was very trendy in fashion magazines. There was a lot of S & M imagery in the eighties. We read The Story of O in a graduate seminar at Santa Cruz. I was horrified and fascinated because all of a sudden, the discourse of pornography and sadomasochism was taking over the feminist conversation in the same way that pornography seemed to be taking over fashion. So I was really wondering, “What does this mean?” The other thing had to do with the critique by black women and other women of color of the very way that feminism was constructed around the needs of white women without always considering the sometimes very different needs of women of color who were not middle-class, or working-class white women who also had problems with academic feminism. I think a lot of us were puzzled by why we were reading The Story of O in a women’s studies class. Does this really make sense? I actually found that book hard to read, it was painful to read. Partly my book was really setting out to be an explication of white feminism, but then I felt kind of uneasy doing that. I was thinking about the dominant color code for femininity. It is pink and white. English literature is full of the “blush.” I felt that I had to include images of black women. Trimmings grew from my response to Stein. One of my poems even cannibalizes Gertrude Stein’s “Petticoat” poem. My reading of Stein’s “Petticoat” poem also brings Manet’s “Olympia” into the picture. I had an insight that she might have also been thinking about that painting, with her “Petticoat” poem.

 

CH: Would you read that passage from your poem?

 

HM:

A light white disgraceful sugar looks pink, 
   wears an air, 
pale compared to shadows standing by. To plump 
   recliner, 
naked truth lies.  Behind her shadow wears her 
   color arms 
full of flowers.  A rosy charm is pink.  And 
   she is ink.  The 
mistress wears no petticoat or leaves.  The 
   other in shadow,
a large, pink dress.

 

I’m using the language of Stein. She has a “light white,” “an inkspot,” “a rosy charm.” So I put those words into my poem. Then I expanded to give the reader an image of Manet’s painting of the white nude with the black woman in the shadows who’s obviously a servant. Manet contrasts the white woman’s body and the black woman’s body with the white woman’s body constructed as beautiful, feminine, seductive, also a little outrageous. The black woman is basically just a part of the decor but her presence seems to enhance the qualities that are attributed to the white nude. In a way, the whole book is really built around this: both my active and my somewhat critical engagement with Stein, my problematic relation to the Western icon of beauty and the black woman’s relationship to that, and my interest in representation itself, whether it is a visual representation or a representation in language. I didn’t think it was enough just to have that, so I put some other things in here that were definitely meant to investigate alternative female images. I put in the Josephine Baker poem and the “bandanna” poem because it was unsettling to me just to investigate this white femininity without some kind of black experience being represented as well. There are also “cool dark lasses” wearing their shades, maybe jazz divas, someone like a Billie Holiday. I have “the veiled woman” at the end. I remember at this time in graduate school, I read a book, Veiled Sentiments,by Lila Abu-Lughod, about the Arabic traditions of veiling women, so that was in my mind as well. It’s a way of taking a woman’s body out of circulation but she’s still being controlled in the culture.

 

CH: But not being specularized?

 

HM: Right. She is outside of the gaze or she is protected from the gaze. Some of the radical Islamic fundamentalists think that they are actually liberated by wearing the veil. I was using this work to explore such questions and problems. This book is connected to Muse and Drudge because Muse and Drudge is a book about the image and representation of black women, and Trimmings has more to do with the representation in the dominant culture of white women, although there are black women here and there. Muse and Drudge is intended to think about folk representations, popular culture representations, self-representations of black women, and to think about how to take what is given. There is a whole set of codes, a whole set of images that we really don’t control as individuals. They are collective and they are cultural. The problem as a writer is: how do you write yourself out of the box that you are in? Muse and Drudge is an attempt to take those representations and fracture them, as I try to do with breaking up the lines and collaging the quatrains together, sometimes from four different sources. It was an attempt to use this language as representation, to use it in a self-conscious way as code, as opposed to taking the code as something that is real. The body exists but there is a way that your body is interpreted based on a historical and social context. I take that and use it as material, as opposed to saying well, that defines you; that’s what makes you who you are. I have a certain faith as a writer that we can use language in a liberatory way to try to free ourselves. But at certain point, I was concerned that I was continuing to be trapped, in the prison house, right? A lot of the strategies had to do with my breaking out. I had to take things and riff on them, as a musician improvises on a melody and really creates a new song. It’s based on the same old traditional standard but sounds new when it is performed in this way.

 

CH: Aldon Nielsen, in his recent book Black Chant, and Elizabeth Frost, in a recent essay in Women’s Studies, have both discussed your work as fundamentally reconfiguring our understanding of black cultural productions. Frost characterizes Muse and Drudge as a hybrid serial-poem, a “heteroglossic series,” structured by the blues quatrain but working with Bahktinian heteroglossia, with a lot of languages, various cultural registers. I will confess to you that when I read Trimmings, I missed many of the references to black identity until I had read some of your criticism, even though I was really thinking about it. For example, in the section that you just read, I noted “shadow” when I first read the passage, but it didn’t signify anything more than the literal meaning. After reading your criticism, the light lit. It’s not possible for a white reader to miss the signifying in Muse and Drudge. You talked the other day about the practice of code-switching, and I wanted you to talk a bit more about how you are working with that in Muse and Drudge, the significance of including black dialect with the simultaneous invocation of Sappho as the poem opens up.

 

HM: With “Sappho and Sapphire”? Because Sapphire has been a pejorative figure for black women ever since the old Amos & Andy television comedy, and before that, a radio program with white men doing their version of black dialect. So it was actually an extension of the minstrel tradition where “black face” was done linguistically instead of in a visual way. Later black actors performed these stereotypes in the television comedy. So the black woman, Sapphire, was a loud-mouth, aggressive, the image of the supposedly emasculating black woman with the husband who is hen-pecked. She was a shrill harpy and she always dressed in grotesque outfits as well, with hideous hats. So in the sixties, when people were reversing the signification of these pejorative terms, black women reclaimed Sapphire as an assertive, vocal black woman who stands up for her own opinions. You know, just take that negative stereotype and make it positive. Sapphire is actually an entry in the Feminist Dictionary with a discussion of this process of inversion. Of course, there is an African American writer who has taken this as her pseudonym as a poet and a novelist also. I definitely wanted to think about Sapphire singing the blues and Sapphire as Sappho, singing the blues. One of the people, my cohort at UC Santa Cruz, Diane Rayor, translates ancient Greek and has published a book called Sappho’s Lyre. I transformed her title in my first line, “Sapphire’s lyre,” to think about a crossroads of ancient lyric poetic tradition. If we think of ancient lyric poetry, we have to think of Sappho. This is a place where a woman is actually one of the forerunners and foremost practitioners of the art. We don’t have too many areas where that is the case, so I’m honoring this woman and I’m also thinking about the blues tradition and Diane Rayor’s translations, really, because she is trying to bring Sappho into a very contemporary American language. It seemed to me that Sappho is singing the blues. Sappho’s like a blues singer, to me, in translation. So, that was the conceit that allowed me to go on with this poem and to investigate my own connections with this tradition, which was actually called into question by people like the language poets who feel that the lyric poem is too much entangled with a subject they want to deconstruct. I have a certain attachment to the lyric subject, but the lyric subject in this poem is multiple, not singular. It is many voices and contradictory voices. It is a heteroglossia or maybe a cacophony of voices.

 

CH: And it’s very playful. You have lines like, “Up from slobbery,” which are very funny and playful, yet at the same time, very critical of a particular voice.

 

HM: Yes. In Up from Slavery, Booker T. Washington talks about learning “the gospel of the toothbrush” and part of what those educators thought they were doing was teaching people how to be decent and clean. In order to qualify for the rights of American citizens, you have to be decent and clean. That’s assuming that blacks weren’t already, but had to be taught how to do this!

 

CH: And also placed. It allowed them to be placed in a perennially subservient position.

 

HM: Yeah, his entrance exam was, in a sense, to sweep the floor. He talks about how he was assigned to sweep a floor when he came to apply for admission to Hampton, implicitly an admission requirement. So even to gain admission at this school, he had to be willing to sweep the floor, which is very appropriate considering what they trained people to do. Each one of those lines is a kind of tag for a whole possible conversation that the poem doesn’t stop to engage in. It just gives the tag and keeps moving.

 

CH: Why?

 

HM: Partly because I wanted the poem to have that quality of quick movement from one thing to another, from one subject or thought to another, from one mood or emotion to another. Partly because I wanted things to be in flux, a state of flux, a state of change. If you stand still too long, they will put chains on you, so you want to keep moving. This is one of the things that is most fascinating to me about the slave narratives I was studying while I was writing my dissertation. The true freedom in the slave narrative is at the point of deciding to escape and the journey north. Once they get to the north, they are, again, part of a hierarchy and they are still at the bottom of that hierarchy. If everyone is free in the North and you are still working as a servant and living in someone else’s house and having to obey the master of the house, you are earning wages, but you are still at the bottom of the hierarchy. The freedom that people experience is actually when they are on the road, in flight. I associate that with writing, for myself. The time that I am free is when I am writing. The poem is running; the poem is flying. There is an expression that is part of African American folklore–when people are telling tall tales they say, “If I’m lyin’, I’m flyin’” because they are pushing the limits of language.

 

CH: We theorize identity as being fluid and that seems very pertinent to your work, through the punning and the word play. A word is never fixed; it’s always bleeding into a new identity by the process of association but in practice, once we fix that theory of identity as fluid, then it solidifies into something more inflexible.

 

HM: Right, it’s a paradox.

 

CH: I’m also fascinated by what seems a new spiritual register in the collection. Maybe I’m missing it in the earlier collections.

 

HM: I think it is more deliberately in use in Muse and Drudge than it had been.

 

CH: I recognized some of the references to Yoruba and Achebe’s “ancestor dances,” references to Orishas and the “deja voodoo queens”–that kind of wonderful word play that you are always engaging in! I wondered how that functioned in the poem as a whole. Would you talk about that a bit?

 

HM: Partly those things are allusions. They work in the poem as allusions to the African Diaspora, cultures, and spiritual traditions. They expand the idea of blackness. They suggest both continuity and discontinuity. That is knowledge that I have acquired through reading, through study. It is not knowledge that I have directly through experience or practice. My family is Baptist. That is the religious or spiritual base that I come from regardless of whether I currently go to church or not.

 

CH: Your grandfather was a Baptist minister?

 

HM: My grandfather and one of my great-grandfathers also. My grandmother was the daughter of a Baptist minister and she married a Baptist minister. My family is very, very deeply religious. I think that I am spiritual; I am not religious in the same way that they are and I am not tied to the church in the same way that they are. I am interested in these African spiritual traditions partly because I think that in some ways, there are continuities for people who call themselves Christians. In my family, there was this other side of spirituality that I now understand to be retentions of African spiritual systems. In my family, because we were always so much involved with the church, there was the sense that those things were dangerous and that we don’t really want to deal with them, but we also don’t dismiss them.

 

CH: These things?

 

HM: Voodoo. Christians didn’t believe this stuff and just dismissed it and also educated people didn’t believe this stuff. My ideas about it have changed, partly because of what I see in my own family. They used to say to us that we should not eat food in other people’s houses because you don’t know who in the community might have a grudge against you or someone in your family. If we were with our family and invited to have dinner with some friends, that was one thing, but as children just wandering around at that time, people would invite you in. You could be playing with some kids and they would have you over to eat or old ladies might invite you in for tea cakes. My mother would warn us not to do that. She said they could harm you that way, through your food. At the time we thought, “Well, what are they going to do, poison us? Or does she think their kitchen isn’t clean enough?” This is what we would think, but now I realize that my mother meant they could harm you through the food. There was also an experience I had with a Nigerian when I was an undergraduate. He was a graduate student in computer engineering. He was completely technologically adept, a totally modern contemporary person who also believed in all sorts of ghosts and spirits and magical practices at the same time. It was perfectly compatible. These are some of the things that made me think in more complicated ways about black identity or just human capacity for holding contradictory thoughts. I began to think about the meaning of the whole world of spirits. What do they actually do for people?

 

As an artist, it’s a whole set of metaphors. It’s a system of metaphors that allows people to think in certain ways. The fact is that people can think in these metaphoric ways and then they can shift into completely scientific ways of thinking. To me, that is fascinating, and it’s one of the things that black people and people of color have to offer, that tolerance of the dichotomy between the material and the spiritual or scientific ways of thinking versus ways of thinking that are thought to be superstitious or primitive. Some of the excesses of the twentieth century have to do with devotion to the scientific or mechanical and actually, in a way, worshipping that. Actually, we are closing off a part of ourselves, the metaphoric, the intuitive, the poetic aspects of our thinking process in order to enhance the other part. For instance, there is a great book by the anthropologist Karen McCarthy Brown. She studied women who practice Haitian voodoo. They have emigrated from Haiti to New York City; they live in Brooklyn and they are keeping their community together through these practices. One of the things that was interesting is that they have many loa or spirits. Everyone can pick the loa with which they are most compatible, and there are certain qualities that respond to human attributes that people want to feed or enhance and when you are feeding the loa, you are feeding these qualities in yourself. By bringing these offerings, you are giving yourself permission to express these qualities, these human qualities that are part of yourself. One of the things that she suggested as a feminist scholar is that there are as many female deities as there are male. This gives many opportunities for expression of female being in the world because there are so many goddesses that you can worship. If you are a woman who is very feminine and coquettish, and very much involved with enhancing your erotic powers, there is a deity for that. If you are really into being a mother, there is a deity for that. If you are out there being a career woman, there is a deity that will support that aspect of your being. That’s one way I understand certain spiritual practices. It was kind of mystifying, to have the sense that it really has to do with your life, here and now, on earth and that these are modes of expression of human aspiration, and that these gods are so humanlike. They have favorite foods, favorite liquor that they prefer. Some of them like beer and some like rum and some like whiskey. Some like cigars and some like a certain brand of perfume and they are very specific in their likes and dislikes and I am fascinated by the idea of indulging the preferences of these spirits. The people probably also feel that it reinforces their sense of themselves as being very particular and having very specific likes and dislikes and that you indulge yourself the way you indulge the loa.

 

CH: You had mentioned that in your forthcoming study Gender, Subjectivity, and Slave Narratives, gender and the subjugated body have influenced your poetry. Can you discuss at a bit more length some of the ways that the two languages were mutually influential, perhaps, or have you found that your critical, theoretical work influenced your poetry?

 

HM: When you go into graduate school and you learn how to do critical writing, in a sense, what you are learning is an alternative aesthetic for writing. I remember when I first thought that a lot of critical writing is awkward and ugly. It is densely compacted. The kind of critical writing that I aspired to seemed to cram a lot of information into a sentence. There were incredibly complicated sentences, and you had to really keep your wits about you, especially when writing on a computer screen. I’d think, “Could I diagram this sentence?” In a way it’s kind of the opposite of the paratactic sentence, the hypotactic sentence. It has many connectors, many clauses, subordinate and coordinate clauses and you have to know where you are in the sentence to keep it all together. Then you have to have many of these sentences adding up and accumulating. The academic training altered my sense of what in writing is pleasurable. The pleasure that I got from writing before I went to graduate school had a lot to do with rhythm, musicality, the usual poetic qualities that we think of when we think of literature. It was an aesthetics of beauty. Critical writing gave me an aesthetics of intellectual engagement, of complexity of thought and a corresponding complexity of syntax and structure, the complexity of argument as opposed to metaphor. Metaphor is complex in its own way; argument has another way of creating complexity. It was significant that I learned to enjoy and to love this writing that at first struck me as so ugly, so lacking in rhythm, so lacking in beauty and harmony, and also, so demanding. You don’t sit down and read critical theory for escape or for the kind of pleasure that people get when they read Wordsworth. You are in a different zone. I think that my poetry after graduate school is drawing on this different connection to writing, this critical connection to writing. In these more recent books, the writing engages both with what I think of as the pleasure centers–those things that really have to do with the heartbeat and with the singing quality of language, the voice, song, the rhythmic speech–and something that is happening from your eye to your brain, where your voice is not even necessarily involved. I try to combine those two qualities together in the poetry. I think it was very important; I could not write the poetry I am now, without having gone through that academic experience.

 

But in some ways I think I’m ruined, because the kind of poetry I was writing before has much more of a mass appeal. Recently, I was reading in the LA Book Festival and because I realized there would be very few people there, since I was reading at nine in the morning, I chose to read from Tree Tall Woman. I talked with one man there who complained, “Poetry is so hard to understand. I feel like they are really trying to trick me and I don’t know what they are talking about.” But he loved those poems and I thought, “Boy, if I had read other stuff, he wouldn’t have felt this way.” My mother used to say, “You can sling that lingo but can you write it so that anybody’s grandma can understand?” To her way of thinking, that was the great writer. The great writer is the person who can write in a language that is accessible to anyone who is literate. So I’m always feeling a certain tension because poetry “should” be accessible, simple in certain ways. Plain speech. An American style really is a plain speech style. That is what we think of as American as opposed to European.

 

CH: As Marianne Moore said, “A language dogs and cats can read.”

 

HM: Yes, but on the other hand, there is the dazzle of the intellect and there is the complexity of the thought or the kinds of connections that can be made when you are working on different levels of signification or different rhetorical levels. I hope that this is a productive tension or conflict. I think that I don’t lose sight of the fact that everyone didn’t go to graduate school and some people just want to read something and feel a very direct and uncomplicated pleasure. I want some aspect of that kind of pleasure in my work and when I am revising my work, I am thinking about the people I am leaving out and I’m thinking about how I can bring them back in. I want the work I do to be intellectually complex, but at some level, the form is open to allow people to enter wherever they are. Especially with Muse and Drudge, I thought a lot about what is going to exclude readers and what is going to include readers. At various times, people will feel very strongly their exclusion and that will trouble them and be uncomfortable. There are other aspects of the book that will allow them to stick with it, to persist through the rough passages. There will be moments of insight and moments of familiarity and connection with the text as opposed to those moments of alienation, estrangement and feeling left out. I wanted there to be enough of those moments of inclusion for everyone so that they can tolerate the moments of feeling their exclusion. In some ways, the experience of the reader parallels my experience in the world and perhaps everyone’s experience in the world. In some conversations, I feel right at home. In other conversations I know I’d better sit quiet and listen for awhile because they are talking about things I really know little of and maybe at some point later, I can speak in this conversation, but at the moment, I’m better off just listening and understanding where they begin. I think more and more, as the world becomes a global village, it doesn’t mean that we have the simplicity of the village. It means that we are interacting with a lot of people we really don’t understand.

 

CH: We may even think we understand and discover later that we missed some key codes.

 

HM: It happens more and more often, but I’ve noticed as black codes are entering the mainstream, they are altered once they get there. The process of entering the mainstream alters them and that is partly what I am thinking about with Muse and Drudge. What happens when you take these codes and use them in a context, in a way that they are actually fractured and collaged with other materials so that they don’t mean what they would mean in a coherent system because they are now in an incoherent system. This book is really about what creates coherence and what is felt as incoherent. The quatrains and the use of rhyme are things that help people, things that make a poem look orderly, make the poem seem familiar, that give it elements of convention that people can deal with while they are reeling from the unfamiliar and incoherent.

 

CH: Who have been your major influences?

 

HM: Definitely Stein is an influence on Trimmings and S*PeRM**K*T. Gwendolyn Brooks is such a deep influence on me that sometimes I don’t even know that it’s there, but it’s there and it has been pointed out by a couple of people, like Stacey Hubbard in her review of Trimmings. I think Langston Hughes as well, for what he was trying to do–you know, the things that we now take for granted about using a culturally marked, black language and bringing this colloquial speech and blues and jazz elements into poetry, and also for being political, trying not just to entertain people with poetry, but also to get them to think. People like Bob Kaufman and Amiri Baraka have been very useful to me. I would say Lucille Clifton. She was at Santa Cruz when I was there. Nate Mackey, Lucille Clifton, and Al Young were all teaching there, at least part of the time that I was there. I think that all three of them were in different ways very important to me. They did different things but in different ways. They all suggested to me that there is a subtlety in the African American contribution to poetry. I came kind of late to reading Melvin Tolson’s work, but Melvin Tolson was a revelation. And Jean Toomer.

 

There is a canon that is constructed now and there are certain people who are marginal to the canon or who get left out of the canon or else they are not taught as often as other writers. There are certain works that are at the center and other works that are more at the periphery and so one of the things I really started to do as a graduate student was to recover this tradition of innovation within African American poetry. The poetic practice that Jean Toomer was doing was very experimental work. I knew of Cane. I had found Cane in a used book store when I was an undergraduate. I used to scour the used book stores looking for those black books that I was otherwise not going to read in the classroom and I had my own library. I was on a mission to find this literature. I can’t understand when my students say, “I’m trying to get into your class. I haven’t been able to take your class yet so I can read this book that you are teaching.” If I waited until a class was offered, there would be a whole bunch of books I never would have gotten around to reading. I was free to form my own opinion about a lot of these works because there was nothing in the classroom about them. Then, as a graduate student, it was a question of recovering those things that were really at the margin of what was considered Black Literature, so I became interested in people like Bob Kaufman. I just taught a course that included Stephen Jonas. I haven’t seen a single black critic discussing his work at all. Bob Kaufman tends to get marginalized. Melvin Tolson tends to get marginalized. There are different stages of the recovery project. We all try to connect to something but because this information is missing, people don’t know that there is a tradition, so each time someone is doing work that is considered innovative, it seems to come out of nowhere or as if all of the interesting innovation comes from the white people that the black writers were hanging around with. Innovative black poets don’t seem to have any black antecedents. I’m constructing retrospectively a tradition that I can say is a black tradition. On the other hand, as Nate Mackey points out, there are actually connections that are made through these boundaries of race. A lot of the poets who really did influence my thinking about my work in a different way were white poets, the language poets. For example, people would say to me, “Oh, do you know Erica [Hunt]? Have you met Erica? You must know Erica.” Erica Hunt had been in California, but she had moved to New York by the time I got to California. So, no, I didn’t know Erica. I later met her, but people assumed that she and I must know each other but we didn’t. We had white friends in common.

 

Eventually we read together in Detroit and I got to know her and I’m writing about her book, Arcade, and about Will Alexander for the first European MELUS conference in Germany. Will is here in Los Angeles and Will and I have a connection because of Nate Mackey and Hambone. It’s as if now there is beginning to be a quorum. Cecil Giscombe, who edited the special issue of American Book Review on so-called black postmodernists, was poetry editor for Epoch magazine at Cornell when I was there. I taught his book in my course this year. It was he and Nate and Erica and Will, plus Bob Kaufman, Stephen Jonas, Ed Roberson. Amiri Baraka and Ntozake Shange, along with Marlene Philip and Kamau Brathwaite. We also have had to ask, What are the qualities that are considered to be “black” in literature? If Erica Hunt is writing in Standard English, about an urban experience and a female experience with very few markers of blackness in the work, then is this not to be read as a black text? Will Alexander is writing in the tradition of Surrealism. There is Jayne Cortez, who also has connections to surrealism, but is seen as being really engaged with a black political consciousness in a way that moves her work in another direction. Those are some issues that we have had to think about now that we have an established canon with the Norton Anthology [of African-American Literature]. Nate Mackey is in it. Baraka is in it, but some other poets I taught just recently at UCLA in my graduate seminar are not in it.

 

CH: In your opinion does that narrow the voices of black writers?

 

HM: The Norton Anthology does not include people who are atypical, although it’s a fairly exhaustive anthology. It’s not just a poetry anthology; it’s got all the genres in it. It is trying very hard to include a lot of things, but the nature of anthologies is that they can’t include everything; they are supposed to be selective and there are particular criteria. Henry Louis Gates, the chief editor of this anthology, has a particular theory that privileges orality in the text, what I call mimesis of orality in the text. So what if a work does not do that and does not allude to African American culture or Diaspora culture? Or does it in ways that seem strange, unfamiliar, or difficult? There are certain things you have to do in order to be visible as a black writer. That necessity does eventually become constraining. I don’t think we have completely run out of things we can do within those constraints but we will find them eventually more constraining and I think that, for the future, I’d want to encourage as wide and as inclusive as possible a view of what black poetry, black literature, black language can be. When I am writing I’m sometimes thinking about that.

 

CH: You mentioned earlier that language and poetry can be liberatory. I wondered how you position your work in terms of a politics of poetics or a poetics of politics. It’s so clear with a poet like June Jordan or Adrienne Rich, for that matter, and it’s that subject-driven element, if you will, that has become very controversial with the poets who are writing with a transformative politics in mind, a very impassioned and committed poetry that engages in formal experiment. How do you position your work? What are you trying to do?

 

HM: These are questions that I think about a lot both as a writer and as a teacher and as a reader also. I think that political discourse and the rhetoric that accompanies it really can be in a productive tension with the aesthetic qualities of poetry and literature. I think that there are different intentions that are political that have to do with political discourse and rhetoric that assume that the audience is in your own time and space, that you are addressing living human beings who are capable of performing a particular action that will change political reality. I think that that is a good thing to do and a necessary thing to do and something that we really are compelled to do about our political circumstance. To my way of thinking, literature can do those things but literature also has other things that it wants to do that go beyond the address to the people who are my contemporaries. Partly I am writing for unborn readers in my most optimistic view that the world will still exist, that we will still have literature, that people will be literate, that people will want to read, and that my work will last beyond my lifetime. These are all very optimistic assumptions but if all of that should come to pass, then I am not just addressing the situation that exists in my lifetime. I’m addressing human beings who don’t exist yet and so, to me, that means that literature has a larger horizon than political discourse. Political discourse is very important, very necessary, and can be compatible with some but not all of the intentions of literature. When I’m writing, I am usually thinking more about the unborn than those people who are my contemporaries, and my approach to writing really is influenced by this belief, this hope, this optimistic aspiration on my part that my work will continue. In a way, for me, that is a spiritual belief and to the extent that literature has a spiritual intention, then the language operates differently. Language is not so instrumental. Language is not so intently focused on reality. Language is not so much a tool of persuasion to move people to think, act, behave, in a particular way, to focus their energy on a problem that exists now.

 

Because I live now and I don’t live in the future, my framework is my own political reality, my social reality, my cultural reality, so that aspect is there already as far as I am concerned. Literature, art, is ideological even when it has no political agenda. There is a certain implicit politics that is inherent in any work that engages with reality in any sense. Who I am is a political question, but who I can be is a question that literature can help me to answer. I think that art involves a struggle between all of the things that engage us now and all of the things that we can’t even imagine because they don’t exist yet. For me, for literature to be powerful beyond its present moment, the conditions of its making, there has to be some space or acknowledgment of the possibility of this future, which politics cannot really encompass. Maybe that is the naive position of someone who is an artist, who would like to believe that literature has this power beyond politics, although a visionary politics can be part of literature just because how we live is determined to some extent by these circumstances that both confine us and allow us expression at the same time.

 

Acknowledgements

 

I wish to thank Myrna Treston and Shannon Doyne for their invaluable help in transcribing and editing the transcript of this interview. I am also grateful to Elizabeth Frost for sharing the manuscript of her then-forthcoming article on Mullen’s poetry, and to Harryette Mullen herself, who generously spent several afternoons with me in preparation for taping this interview.

 

Bruce Robbins

Department of English
Rutgers University
brobbins@interport.net

 

“Scholars Fear ‘Star’ System May Undercut Their Mission.” Appearing on the front page of the New York Times in December, 1997, this headline advertised to the world the perplexity that has surrounded the emergence of so-called academic stars, both inside the academy and beyond it. Does the academy have a “mission” for these celebrities to undercut? If so, what is it? The sources quoted are not forthcoming on these points. Nor can they agree about whether it is brilliance or mere trendiness that gets rewarded, whether teaching suffers or benefits from the stars’ presence, whether they are to be admired as hyper-productive geniuses or despised as fakes and opportunists. This is not merely journalistic balance; it also traces the outline of a more widespread narrative. While worrying conscientiously about the cost of off-scale raises and reduced teaching loads, the Times titillates its readers with success stories like that of historian Alan Taylor, whose prize-winning book won him overnight offers from several prestigious universities. The thrill is familiar, and so is the way its enjoyment is hedged round by scruples about the means, misgivings about the ends. New the academic celebrity may be, but we have all heard stories like this before, from Great Expectations to Hoop Dreams.

 

For the Times, in other words, celebrity is a contemporary variation on the notorious national theme of self-reliance and upward mobility–a point that Jeffrey Decker has recently made at greater length (xiv-xv). And this suggests that academic confusion about the new academic celebrity may reflect a more general confusion about self-reliance itself.

 

Before elaborating on this suggestion, let me try to distinguish between what does and does not deserve complaint. What clearly deserves complaint is the tendency, in an increasingly corporatized university, to institute a two-tiered employment structure and a two-tiered salary scale: that is, to increase the already dramatic divide between fewer and fewer tenured and tenure-track people on the one hand (whether stars or not) and more and more untenured, adjunct, part-time people on the other. This drive to proletarianize the vast majority of university teachers is an abomination, though an abomination with non-academic precedents; one thinks for example of the increasing recourse to cheap and disposable part-time workers that helped precipitate the recent UPS strike. If it is allowed to widen much farther, the divide between part-timers and full-timers will destroy the relatively democratic version of higher education that has arisen since World War II. The two-tier system has to be maligned and mobilized against at every opportunity. Taking it on will require people organizing on the bottom tier, and without much expectation of support from those who have lucked out generationally and now find themselves with job security or reasonable expectations of it. And it will mean academics fighting corporatization in the university as part of a self-conscious struggle against the same corporatization elsewhere–speaking up against all forms of outsourcing, subcontracting, and systematic irresponsibility, making the exploitation of part-timers in the academy into a general case in favor of more accountability. Otherwise, where are our non-academic allies supposed to come from?

 

But vague sentiments about celebrity can only cloud current assessments of the academic job crisis and the shifting conditions of academic work. Celebrity is usually defined by starting from fame and subtracting something: fame minus merit, or fame minus power. The sparest of these definitions by deficiency is Daniel Boorstin’s: being known for being known. Whatever its other deficiencies, however, celebrity cannot be defined as a cause or result of two-tier employment. Arguing that stars “command an ever larger share of shrinking resources,” David Shumway adds, with understandable hesitation, that their salaries “may have encouraged the hiring of more part-time and temporary faculty members” (94). Sharon O’Dair argues with no such hesitation that we have the star system “because [the emphasis is hers] there are so few tenure-track jobs” (609). Are we really supposed to believe that if there were more jobs, there would be none of the inequalities of intellectual visibility, veneration, and influence that celebrity implies? Cary Nelson is surely right to dismiss this argument out of hand. However greedy, self-delusive, and disgusting the behavior of certain academic celebrities may be, he writes, and however “morally corrupt” it is “to reward some categories of people while literally impoverishing others” (43), “the argument that superstar salaries are a significant financial problem for higher education is a sham” (39). Celebrity itself may well be inevitable; what is not inevitable, Nelson declares, is that it will be “quickly converted into a lifetime salary way above the discipline’s campus average” (43). We should certainly try–it won’t be easy–to break the links between reputation and salary. But we should do so for moral and political reasons, not in the illusion that this will make a decisive economic difference to universities that spend the enormous sums they spend on athletics, administration, and so on. “No academic honor is supportable,” Nelson says, “unless all employees are treated fairly” (54). Note that this is a moral argument; it is about jobs and salaries, not about reputation or fan psychology; and it applies as much to tenure and even to the tenure track as it does to stardom.

 

It seems likely that a great deal of complaint about academic celebrities has nothing to do with the parlous condition of academic labor. Much of the resentment is probably, in Jennifer Wicke’s words, “celebrity worship disguised as purgative hatred of celebrity” (775). Given how unjust the allocation of rewards can be, some resentment is natural enough. But I think there is something more interesting going on here than mere resentment.

 

Shumway’s argument shares at least one thing with Sean Wilentz’s denunciation of supposed “celebrity-mongering” on behalf of the new black public intellectuals, and for that matter with the Times article. All three criticize the celebrity-besotted present in the implicit name of a past in which merit was supposedly granted its just reward.¹ For Wilentz, the modern celebrity writer, valued for personality rather than ideas, was born with the Dick Cavett show, or generally with television (294). As a historian, Wilentz should know more about the pre-television lecture circuit of the nineteenth century. From the 1840s on, something like half a million people a week went to public lectures in season. The lecturers, avidly competed for by different towns and avidly written up in the newspapers, were certainly celebrities. Often they were college professors who were supplementing their income. “The importance they attached to their public lecturing,” historian Donald Scott observes, “… appears to have exceeded that which they gave to their classroom activities” (17). If this sounds familiar, and it should, then television is not the root of the problem.

 

For Shumway what’s wrong with the present is the airplane and the conference-circuit rather than TV, and the pre-celebrity past is represented by the profession of literary criticism before the First World War. In that period men with three names like George Lyman Kittredge and John Livingston Lowes were disciplinary heavyweights but not, Shumway says, stars. If “visibility” is the defining value of academic work today, the value for Kittredge and company, he goes on, was “soundness” (94). Shumway apparently accepts this “soundness” at face value; he apparently presumes that in that era, unlike our own, professional judgment somehow measured merit accurately and rewarded it appropriately. In the context of today’s job crisis, let us recall that “soundness” was also the criterion by which the patronage system, otherwise known as the “old boy network,” which is what Shumway is describing, worked to define and allocate jobs. If we do not assume that jobs were justly allocated under that system, is there any reason to think that the old boys did better in objectively judging intellectual merit?² By supplying an alternative method for distributing cultural capital, the celebrity cult has served (among its other functions) to open up what remains of those tight, all-male professional circles.

 

But if this opening up can be called an improvement, as I think it can, it is not because we have now escaped the old boys, or modern counterparts to the old boys. When I suggest that “soundness,” Shumway’s standard of merit, conceals the mediating presence of the patronage system, I don’t mean to imply that there exists a version of pure, genuine, absolute merit that would not depend on patrons or mediators at all.³ On the contrary. This is the mistake that makes critics of celebrity into perhaps unwitting celebrators of self-reliance.

 

Whether or not they are nostalgic for the days when merit supposedly got its just reward, critics of celebrity tend to imply that there can and should be such a thing as merit in a pure form–merit without the external intervention of the media, influential mentors and patrons, prestigious institutions, or whatever. Yet the classic ideal of self-reliance on which they thus rely is less straightforward than it might appear. Consider for example this characteristic throw-away by William Henry III in his In Defense of Elitism: “an entertainer is someone who can actually do something, someone who has a verifiable skill or talent, whereas Vanna White is a celebrity” (181). The interesting ambiguity here resides in what Henry doesn’t mention: Vanna White’s good looks, which stand for her apparent lack of merit. But are good looks so obviously distinct from merit? Like “skill or talent,” they too might be seen as “God-given,” acquired without verifiable sweat and toil. And what counts as being able to “actually do something” is almost as difficult to pin down as the question of where the ability came from. What will count in the case of a woman, for example, may not be quite the same as what will count in the case of a man. “Whereas the traditional self-made man sold his story as an afterthought to the accumulation of riches,” Decker writes, “the celebrity’s primary source of income is her story” (113). For Decker, the upward mobility story has been taken over by women (his examples are Susan Powter and Oprah Winfrey), its female protagonists are celebrities, and these female celebrities no longer do anything, they merely tell a story–even though, as Decker himself notes, the story that both Susan Powter and Oprah Winfrey tell involves laboring on their bodies, working hard to refashion them through dieting, exercise, and will-power. As if in answer to Henry on Vanna White, in other words, both present good looks not as given but as earned by their labor. Yet that does not soften the reflex invocation of celebrity as fame minus merit. This double standard is of course not unprecedented. Recall in Sister Carrie what Dreiser has the authorial Ames say to Carrie about the acting talent that has made her a theatrical star: “It so happens that you have this thing. It is no credit to you–that is, I mean, you might not have had it. You paid nothing to get it” (385). Even if Carrie had paid for it, the questions would not stop. Where did the money come from? Who was her acting coach? Dig deep enough into any instance of merit, and you will discover social determinants, factors like family and friends, lovers and mentors, identities, interests, and institutions that advantaged some and disadvantaged others. Why choose to deconstruct merit here, at the intersection of women, theatricality, and media, and not deconstruct it everywhere?

 

Surprisingly, one does not have to dig very deep in order to catch a glimpse of social determination at work beneath apparent self-reliance. It lies right at the surface, though not precisely at the center, of the most notorious self-reliance stories we have, the tales of Horatio Alger. As many critics have noticed, Alger’s stories are not in fact the tales of triumphant self-reliance they are popularly thought to be. “Alger’s heroes are rarely ‘alone and unaided,’” John Cawelti noted in 1965, “and do not win their success entirely through individual effort and accomplishment. From the very beginning of his career, the Alger boy demonstrates an astounding propensity for chance encounters with benevolent and useful friends, and his success is largely due to their patronage and assistance” (109). Alger’s texts concern themselves largely if paradoxically with mediation by patrons and benefactors, figures who invite the suspicion that (like Alger himself) they are interested in something less innocent than merely rewarding the merit of their young protegés. In Michael Moon’s words, social ascent happens through “a mutual seduction of sorts” between street boys, with their “handsome faces and comely bodies,” and genteel patrons (94). It is about boys and old boys–one might say, dirty old men. But what social determinants do these old boys represent?

 

Aside from the pederasty that led to Alger’s expulsion from his Massachusetts ministry, the most obvious explanation for these patrons is that they represent a throwback to an earlier time, a kinder, small-town America that had not yet discovered cutthroat capitalism–and where family and old boy connections were still decisive, as indeed they were early in Alger’s life. For Cawelti, the patrons demonstrate Alger’s “reassertion of the values of a bygone era in an age of dramatic change and expansion” (120). Yet a case could be made that the social force incarnated in these mediating figures is something newer than residual paternalism or sublimated homoeroticism. Moon’s argument, brilliantly buttressed by an analysis of the double meaning of “saving” in Ragged Dick, is that this homosocial bonding stands for an incipient corporate capitalism. As Moon points out, Dick is not merely interested in rising; he also carries on the “saving” of other boys–a practice learned from his own benefactors–by means of free spending that drastically (if only temporarily) depletes the savings deposited in his own account. Thus, though the “all-boy families” formed around these moments of generosity may represent, as Moon says, a version of capital’s own fantasy of “asexual breeding” (104) and may hide a supplement of erotic interest, they are not founded on a simple computation of self-interest of the kind that the word “corporate” might suggest.

 

In his efforts at “saving” the less fortunate, Dick is also imitating the role of benefactor that Alger himself, only months after leaving his ministry, began to adopt toward the homeless boys of New York City. “Alger’s room, first in St. Mark’s Place and after 1875 in various boarding houses around the city, became a veritable salon for street boys,” his biographer writes. “A generation after he settled in New York, Alger remained a kind and popular benefactor of the street Arabs” (Scharnhorst 77). His work was long commemorated for example by the Children’s Aid Society (80). Scharnhorst suggests that the “stock adult character, the Patron… paralleled the part Alger had begun to assume among the street children of the city. He literally projected himself into his stories” (83). Were Alger’s sustained and well-documented philanthropic efforts only the legitimate margin of a lifetime of illicit erotic activities? Did this life remain secret only because these boys, unlike the children of his congregation, conveniently had no parents to suspect or complain? These are not unreasonable questions, but evidence is lacking. Whatever their motivation, however, the social experiments in which Alger participated were part of a historical process by which the private efforts of parents and philanthropists, who could no longer cope with the proliferation of homeless children generated by industrial capitalism on a massive scale, found an eventual if still insufficient and sometimes sinister substitute in public institutions. This shift from private to public responsibility required a momentous ethical transformation. The resistance this shift elicited at its earliest stages can be surmised from the fear and loathing of state interference that such taxpayer-financed institutions so often continue to elicit.

 

The self-reliance story has of course been read as part of that resistance to public responsibility. But Moon’s astute alignment of Alger with corporate (as opposed to entrepreneurial) capitalism suggests that Alger may be less nostalgic than anticipatory. The “limited liability” that gave the corporation its first English name involved a dispersal of individual responsibility that, however convenient as a device for making and protecting profits, was also about to be put to very different uses. It defended investors against proper demands for accountability, but it also encouraged the threateningly relativistic “no fault” view of poverty, based on a vision of ineluctable social interdependence, that support for the social welfare state would require. After all, the welfare state needed “limited liability” no less than the corporation did.

 

As a recent parallel, consider the film Good Will Hunting, where the climactic encounter between the Therapist (played by Robin Williams) and Heroic Individual (played by Matt Damon) is marked by the repeated phrase “It’s not your fault.” In order for the film to release the latter’s innate talents into the upward mobility they seem to call out for, it must first break down his resistance, compounded of working-class solidarity and anti-authoritarian individualism, and get him to accede to the expert/therapeutic mantra of the social welfare state, here represented by its kindliest and least official voice. The individual must come to believe that what he is and does is neither entirely his fault nor–the corollary is inescapable–entirely his achievement.⁴ Pop psychology aside, this social dispersal of the self is just what society as a whole had to be persuaded of in order to divert its resources into rescuing its less fortunate members from what would otherwise seem the results of their own actions and inactions. The logic of the film’s therapist/mentor is the logic of Alger’s patrons.

 

The fact that Alger, who had only one bestseller in his own lifetime, won his astonishing posthumous celebrity only in the Progressive Era could thus be explained by a different aspect of that era. The “virtue rewarded” narrative was obviously useful in combating the newly interventionist state. But Alger’s benefactor figures also played a less obvious role in undermining popular patriarchal individualism and preparing the ethical metamorphosis presupposed by the welfare state’s increasing replacement of private with public responsibility its establishment of what would look to many individuals like new zones of dangerous irresponsibility. Rather than celebrating the grasping individualists of Alger’s own time, then, Alger’s “instructive narrative” would thus be (in Alan Trachtenberg’s words) “a fictive analogue to campaigns for reform” (106).

 

Adjusting individual ambitions to the obliqueness of an emergent welfare state clearly involved learning a new set of lessons about responsibility, social interdependence, and desire. It should not be shocking to consider that some of these lessons were necessary both to capitalism’s emerging corporate form and to the civil/bureaucratic institutions emerging to constrain and contain it, or save it from its own drive to achieve short-term profit at all cost. Nor should it come as a surprise, given the current fragility of such institutions, that we are still in the process of learning them. Indeed, this is arguably one of the functions of the media-begotten celebrity.

 

According to P. David Marshall’s Celebrity and Power, Oprah Winfrey exemplifies television’s “familiarization function” (131), a term that refers to “intimate” content as well as to the familial context in which so much viewing happens. But what is the “familiarity” that Oprah’s televisual personality produces? Under analysis, it becomes something more like defamiliarization: an opening up of the family to expert knowledge putatively representing a more general and official view of its welfare. In a show on children bullying their parents, Marshall writes, Oprah characteristically “resolves the apparent impasse of attempting to assess blame by concluding that it is a family problem as opposed to a problem contained within any individual family member” (133)–her version of “It’s not your fault.” Here, as in most episodes of The Oprah Winfrey Show, this “form of resolution,” which is “pivotal to the narrative construction of the show,” occurs by means of the intervention of an outside expert (133). “After hearing from the ‘problem guests’ and after the guests are asked a series of questions by the studio audience and Oprah herself, an expert is positioned in the mediating role center stage, among the guests” (135-36). Though the expert expresses “the voice of authority,” offering a solution to the dilemma of the day, his or her authority “does not provide the necessary closure and resolution of the problem raised in the program. Rather, he or she serves as an essential instrument for the way in which Oprah works the program to a resolution…. Oprah positions herself as, once again, the representative of the audience and, by implication, of the ordinary people. She rewords the professional’s advice into language of practicality and usability for the audience” (135-37). Just as the Robin Williams figure in Good Will Hunting must win Matt Damon’s assent to his informed and authoritative viewpoint (in this case, the need to be cured of a neurotic attachment to the conveniently pathologized working class), so Oprah, in Marshall’s words, occupies the role of “therapist” in television’s “public talking cure” (143). She mediates between the expert’s knowledge and a lay audience, in effect putting across that knowledge to a public whose resistance can be assumed.

 

Marshall is not starry-eyed about Oprah’s social function, but he sees it–correctly, I think–as an instance of mass-mediated democracy. Hosts like Winfrey and Donahue, he argues, “try to present… various discourses of the excluded and marginal” so as to reintegrate them “into the social mainstream. Oprah and Phil represent a cast of American liberals whose main approach to social problems is articulated through the slogan ‘Something should be done about this’” (140-41). Especially given the largely female audience for both shows and the political tendencies of female voters, there is reason to speculate that the absent subject implied by the slogan “Something should be done about this” is the social welfare state.

 

“Something should be done about this” is by no means the same message as “Seek to emulate my standard of living.” To see these two messages intertwined in a celebrity like Oprah, as they are intertwined (no less paradoxically) in the tales of Horatio Alger, is to see that both the fantasy of upward mobility generally and celebrity-worship in particular offer something more than a trap for the unwary.⁵ Both celebrity-worship and the more general fantasy of upward mobility try to seduce, yes. But both seduce precisely to the degree that, unlike the critique of celebrity, they do not rely on a fantasmatic self-reliance or a paranoid view of powerful, utterly hostile, morally empty institutions that is the obverse of self-reliance. Rather, the power of celebrity and upward mobility resides in a moderated vision of the relation between individual and institution, one that recognizes that media and state bureaucracies, institutions which incarnate better as well as worse values, also let better and worse values enter into their influence over who rises, how, and why.⁶ What tempts the ambition, according to this view, is not merely spectacular wealth or glory but also the perhaps no less outlandish prospect of legitimacy–the hypothesis that individual desire might be blessed with institutional support precisely because its satisfaction aids and abets some version of the general welfare.

 

I’ve laid out here, briefly and schematically, a way of reading upward mobility stories, along with celebrity as one recent endpoint of such stories, against the background of the emergent welfare state. But this line of thinking also has something to say to academics trying to face the general blockage of upward mobility. Along with “something must be done about this,” it insists “it’s not your fault.” And this reading suggests that “it’s not your fault” is the basis of a political program.

 

Organizing is probably the only way to restore dignity to part-time and temporary work. But organizing will not increase the total number of jobs available for refashioning into stable and dignified ones. And the exhortation to organize can easily start to sound like another version of the exhortation to be self-reliant–a collective version of course, but no less committed to the illusion that the burden of responsibility lies on the self alone.⁷ Foregrounding the intrusion of mediators into the story, whether wishful or sinister or both, is meant to highlight the real historical dispersal of that responsibility, thus pointing out more people to blame but also more people with whom to ally and more venues where alliance can be made to matter. The academic job market depends directly on the willingness of the public to fund higher education, along with other social services. For better or worse, the market for our services is bound up with the legitimacy, power, and good will of the welfare state. Academics share a great many interests with other providers and recipients of social services, from parents worried at the proportion of their children’s classes taught by non-tenure track faculty to secondary school teachers who–like university part-timers–would love some equivalent of the sabbatical. But academics cannot mobilize around the defense and extension of the welfare state if we continue to see ourselves as uniquely and heroically condemned to be mavericks, outsiders, anti-bureaucrats, and celebrity-haters.⁸

 

Those few academics lucky enough to occupy what Stanley Aronowitz calls “the last good job in America” must of course expect the envy and the satire that their privileges attract. They, or rather we, are legitimate targets, for we are a swing vote; it matters a great deal whether we join the fight against the two-tier system or merely continue to enjoy the fruits of that system. This is where something can be accomplished, and not by berating the much tinier and less representative band of academic stars. Nothing can be expected from reliance on the celebrity as scapegoat, for that is merely self-reliance itself, old-fashioned and pre-political, decked out in more fashionable clothes.

 

Notes

 

1. For Régis Debray, writing in 1979, media celebrity already occupied the same slot in the French “fall of the intellectuals” narrative that later American jeremiads tended to assign to universities in the academicization-of-intellectual-life story.

 

2. As one bit of evidence among others, consider soundness in the context of earlier university publishing. “Until the late fifties,” according to Phil Pochoda, “university presses, though publishing many sound scholarly books, could be characterized fairly as academic vanity presses. Behaving more as printers than publishers, they generally produced, without editing or evaluating, books dropped off by their local faculty, or Ph.D, theses written (and the publishing paid for) by their graduate students. Manuscript reviews by outside readers and a wider search for books outside the home institution only began in earnest in the late fifties” (12).

 

3. Charismatic female lecturers whose personal style helps them build intellectual constituencies (by hinting at felicitous answers, for example, to the question of how intellectual work matters to life) may not possess institutional power, like their old boy predecessors. But what they wield is indeed a form of power, and as such will appear equally extraneous and illicit from the perspective of a putatively pure and unmediated intellectual merit–the perspective from which Socrates objected to the gaudily-dressed, honey-throated rhetor Ion. There may well be grounds for complaint, both about Ion and about the celebrity lecturer. But those complaints will get a better hearing if they do not adopt the all-or-nothing mode of complaints about mediation itself. See Langbauer for a complaint about celebrities in cultural studies that takes this point but draws a different conclusion from it.

 

4. On the connection between the therapeutic world-view, the welfare state, and the erosion of individual accountability, see Lasch. For a useful corrective that enables Lasch’s insights to be recoded in a less tragic vein, see Livingston.

 

5. Academics would do well to avoid such traps, Jeffrey Williams writes: “The star model, offering name recognition and public appeal, suggests a kind of intellectual Horatio Alger story for those unemployed and underemployed to strive for, at the same time that the actual institutional conditions make that dream all the more improbable” (29).

 

6. Here a contrast will perhaps be helpful. For Bourdieu, bureaucratic institutions are precisely the truth of upward mobility stories. But according to the “oblate” model in Homo Academicus, upward mobility can only mean selling yourself, or selling out, within the total, absolute, and unconditional terms of all-powerful institutions. Originally an oblate was “a child from a poor family entrusted to a religious foundation to be trained for the priesthood” (291 n. 31). Bourdieu adapts the term to refer to children without social capital whose upward mobility depends entirely on the educational institution to which they were entrusted, and who respond to it with unconditional loyalty. “They offer to the academic institution which they have chosen because it chose them, and vice versa, a support which, being so totally conditioned, has something total, absolute, and unconditional about it” (100-101). See Robbins (1997) for further elaboration.

 

Bourdieu’s argument is representative of French sociology generally, where “sociologies of ‘reproduction’”–that is, investigations of the state educational apparatus–“have taken the place of a theory of social mobility” (Cuin 227). The fact that the state has a major place, perhaps the major place in what amounts to the topic of upward mobility in France, while passing for the very antithesis of that topic in the US, is welcome support for my contention that this antithesis is parochial and misleading, and that state institutions are indeed one place we must look for the secrets of upward mobility.

 

7. This can also be turned around. Anyone who tried to organize teaching assistants and adjuncts by offering them a self-image in which there was nothing but collective interests and collaborative efforts would quickly discover that, for better or worse, this is a profession (it’s not the only one) in which allowance must be made for the excess and incorrectness of individual desire. Only a dreamer would think of trying to eradicate these from professional formation.

 

8. On academics and bureaucracy, see Miller.

Works Cited

 

• Aronowitz, Stanley. “The Last Good Job in America.” Social Text 51 (Summer 1997): 93-108.
• Boorstin, Daniel. The Image. New York: Atheneum, 1962.
• Bourdieu, Pierre. Homo Academicus. Trans. Peter Collier. Stanford: Stanford UP, 1988.
• Cawelti, John. Apostles of the Self-Made Man. Chicago: U of Chicago P, 1965.
• Cuin, Charles-Henry. Les Sociologues et la mobilité sociale. Paris: Presses Universitaires de France, 1993.
• Debray, Régis. Teachers, Writers, Celebrities: The Intellectuals of Modern France. 1979. Trans. David Macey. London: Verso, 1981.
• Decker, Jeffrey. Made in America: Self-Styled Success from Horatio Alger to Oprah Winfrey. Minneapolis: U of Minnesota P, 1997.
• Dreiser, Theodore. Sister Carrie. 1900. New York: Bantam, 1958.
• Henry, William A. III. In Defense of Elitism. New York: Doubleday Anchor, 1994.
• Langbauer, Laurie. “The Celebrity Economy of Cultural Studies.” Victorian Studies 36.4 (1993): 466-72.
• Lasch, Christopher. The Revolt of the Elites and the Betrayal of Democracy. New York: Norton, 1995.
• Livingston, James. Pragmatism and the Political Economy of Cultural Revolution, 1850-1940. Chapel Hill and London: U of North Carolina P, 1994.
• Marshall, P. David. Celebrity and Power: Fame in Contemporary Culture. Minneapolis and London: U of Minnesota P, 1997.
• Miller, Richard E. As If Learning Mattered: Reforming Higher Education. Ithaca: Cornell UP, 1998.
• Moon, Michael. “‘The Gentle Boy from the Dangerous Classes’: Pederasty, Domesticity, and Capitalism in Horatio Alger.” Representations 19 (Summer 1987): 87-110.
• Nelson, Cary. “Superstars.” Academe (Jan/Feb 1997): 38-43, 54.
• O’Dair, Sharon. “Stars, Tenure, and the Death of Ambition.” Michigan Quarterly Review 36.4 (Fall 1997): 607-627.
• Pochoda, Phil. “University Presses On.” The Nation 29 December 1997: 11-16.
• Robbins, Bruce. “Murder and Mentorship: Advancement in The Silence of the Lambs.” boundary 2 23.1 (Spring 1996): 71-90.
• —. “Head Fake: Mentorship and Mobility in Hoop Dreams.” Social Text 50 (1997): 111-120.
• Scharnhorst, Gary, with Jack Bales. The Lost Life of Horatio Alger, Jr. Bloomington: Indiana UP, 1985.
• Scott, Donald M. “The Profession that Vanished: Public Lecturing in Mid-Nineteenth Century America.” Professions and Professional Ideologies in America. Ed. Gerald L. Geison. Chapel Hill: U of North Carolina P, 1983. 12-28.
• Scott, Janny. “Scholars Fear ‘Star’ System May Undermine Their Mission.” The New York Times 20 December 1997: A1, B9.
• Shumway, David R. “The Star System in Literary Studies.” PMLA 112.1 (January 1997): 85-100.
• Trachtenberg, Alan. The Incorporation of America: Culture and Society in the Gilded Age. NY: Hill and Wang, 1982.
• Wicke, Jennifer. “Celebrity Material: Materialist Feminism and the Culture of Celebrity.” South Atlantic Quarterly 93.4 (Fall 1994): 751-778.
• Wilentz, Sean. “Race, Celebrities, and the Intellectuals: Notes on a Donnybrook.” Dissent (Summer 1995): 293-299.
• Williams, Jeffrey. “Spin Doctorates.” Voice Literary Supplement. November 1995: 28-29.

 

Robert Miklitsch

Department of English Language and Literature
Ohio University
miklitsc@oak.cats.ohiou.edu

 

The following essay is structured like a record–a 45, to be exact. While the A side provides an anecdotal and autobiographical take on the origins or “birth” of rock (on the assumption that, as Robert Palmer writes, “the best histories are… personal histories, informed by the author’s own experiences and passions” [Rock & Roll 11]), the B side examines the work of Lawrence Grossberg, in particular his speculations about the “death of rock,” as an example or symptom of the limits of critical theory when it comes into contact with that je ne sais quoi that virtually defines popular music (“It’s only rock ‘n’ roll, but I like it, I like it”). By way of a conclusion, the reprise offers some remarks on the generational implications of the discourse of the body in rock historiography as well as, not so incidentally, some critical, self-reflexive remarks on the limits of the sort of auto-historical “story” that makes up the A side.

 

A Side: The Birth of Rock, or Memory Train

 

“Don’t know much about history”

 

–Sam Cooke

 

In 1954, one year before Bill Haley and the Comets’ “Rock around the Clock,” what Robert Palmer calls the “original white rock ‘n’ roll” song, became number one on the pop charts, marking a “turning point in the history of popular music” (Rolling Stone 12, emphasis mine); and one year before Elvis covered Little Junior Parker’s “Mystery Train” (then signed, under the expert tutelage of Colonel Parker, with RCA); in 1954–the same year the Supreme Court ruled racial segregation unconstitutional–the nineteen-year-old and still very much alive Elvis Presley walked into the Memphis Recording Service and cut Arthur “Big Boy” Crudup’s “That’s All Right.”

 

Elvis recollecting Phillips’s recollection of a phone conversation with him: “You want to make some blues?”

 

Legend has it that Elvis immediately hung up the phone, ran 15 blocks to Sun Records while Phillips was still on the line… and, well, the rest is history: by 1957, one year before Elvis was inducted into the Army, Chuck Berry, Fats Domino, and Little Richard had crossed over to the pop charts, and the “rock ‘n’ roll era had begun” (Palmer, Rolling Stone 12).

 

The irony of the above originary moment–at least for me–is that I somehow missed the Mystery Train. Over the years I’ve come to appreciate Elvis’s music, especially the early Sun recordings (and, truth be told, later kitsch, cocktail-lounge stuff like “Viva Las Vegas”); however, to invoke the storied lore of “family romance,” Elvis is a formative part of my sister Cathy’s life in a way that he’ll never be for me. Though she’s only a year older than me, Elvis for her is it, the Alpha and Omega of rock. For me, Elvis has always been more icon than influence, and a rather tarnished one at that.

 

The seminal musical moments in my life are both later, post-1960, and less inaugural. For instance, I can still remember sitting with a couple of other kids in the next-door neighbor’s backyard, listening to a tinny transistor radio (one of the new technologies that transformed the music industry in the 1950s), and hearing–for the very first, pristine time–“Johnny Angel” [1962]). I’m not sure what it was about this song that caught my attention–the obscure, angelic object of desire does not, for instance, have my name, as in “Bobby’s Girl” (and “girl group rock,” as Greil Marcus calls it, was mostly about “The Boy” [Rolling Stone 160]),¹ but I’m pretty sure sex, however sublimated and pre-pubescent, had something to do with it.

 

I can also distinctly remember watching Shelley Fabares sing “Johnny Angel” on an episode of The Donna Reed Show, a program–like The Patty Duke Show–that was de rigueur, i.e. “Must See TV,” at the time. Though Ricky Nelson performed regularly on The Ozzie and Harriet Show (and even Paul Petersen had his fifteen minutes of fame with the lugubrious “My Dad” (1962)), Fabares’s small-screen version of “Johnny Angel”–sung, if I remember correctly, at a high-school dance–remains a touchstone of sorts for me.

 

Indeed, “if you were looking for rock and roll between Elvis and the Beatles” (as I no doubt was at the time), girl groups were–as Marcus says–the “genuine article” (Rolling Stone 160). Who can forget “hokey,” genuinely hokey, “teen morality plays” like the Shangri Las’ “Leader of the Pack” (1964), which my sisters, all four of them, would listen to over and over again on my cousin Karen’s plastic portable record player? Or the sublime teen romanticism of Lesley Gore, whose songs I still listen to (on my Sony CD player), returning to some fugitive, long-lost source of pleasure, replaying it over and over again like any good arrested adolescent.

 

"Suck--suck your teenage thumb...."

 

In the interregnum–between, that is, Elvis and the Beatles–there were of course other standbys, like the Four Seasons and the Beach Boys (East Coast and West Coast, Italian-American doo-wop and So-Cal surf music respectively), but all this changed–forever, as it were–in 1964 with the British Invasion. In his Rolling Stone contribution on the topic, Lester Bangs contends that the Beatles phenomenon–set off by their first, tumultuous appearance on American television (February 9, 1964!)–was a belated, libidinal response to the national mourning and melancholia that ensued in the wake of JFK’s assassination (169).

 

Indeed, it’s hard to imagine two more dramatic and diametrically opposed moments than the “depressive,” wall-to-wall television coverage of the JFK assassination and the Beatles’ first “manic” appearance on Ed Sullivan. The ’60s, in all its liberatory excess (“sex, drugs, and rock ‘n’ roll”), is born, like some Frankensteinian thing, out of this vertiginous moment.

 

Though Elvis had already appeared on Ed Sullivan–Ed’s now notorious reservations notwithstanding–with a “sneer of the lip” and a “swivel of the hip” (Guralnick 34), the Beatles, with their hook-happy songs and shaggy telegenic appeal, were made, like JFK, for network television. For one thing, unlike Elvis, or later the Stones, you didn’t have to shoot them from the waist up or expurgate their lyrics.

 

But even as the Beatles were producing pop-romantic masterpieces like “Yesterday” (1965), the Stones were making up for lost time fast with songs like “Satisfaction,” their seventh–count ’em, seventh–U.S. single, which not-so-subtly hinted that rock ‘n’ roll was not, in the final analysis, about romance but, as Mick’s snarling voice insinuated, that down-and-dirty thing: sex. If the lyrics of “Satisfaction” mime the slow, painfully pleasurable climb of sexual arousal (“Cause I try, and I try, and I try…”) only to climax with one of the most exhilarating anti-climactic lines in the history of rock (“I can’t get no…”), the rhythm–set by the steady four-in-a-bar beat–totally subverts the negation, aurally delivering what the lyrics ostensibly deny.²

 

Not that the lyrics were superfluous, mind you, since I spent many an hour listening to this song, trying to determine whether the third verse was, in fact, “about a girl who wouldn’t put out during her period” (Christgau 192).

 

Given that they’re still rockin’ (the 1997-98 Bridges to Babylon tour came complete with “tongue,” inflatable girls, and “lewd,” big-screen video cartoons), the Stones would probably be a convenient and appropriate place to conclude this, the auto-anecdotal part of this “record”; however, I would definitely be remiss if I did not at least touch on the third element in the holy trinity of post-’50s “youth culture”: drugs.

 

If the first wave of rock ‘n’ roll ends, according to received wisdom, around 1957, the second period–rock and roll (without the apostrophes fore and aft)–reaches its musical and psychedelic apex in 1967 with Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band. Some thirty years later, I can still remember retreating to the basement of my parents’ home to play Sgt. Pepper’s for the first time. I spent hours gazing at the cover, Elvis one face in a sea of famous faces, but the song that kept haunting me, déjà vu all over again, was “Lucy in the Sky with Diamonds”: with its surreal lyrics and trippy melody, it sounded like nothing I had ever heard before. For some reason, perhaps the color of the back cover, I always associate it with the color red, the color of revolutionaries, and Sgt. Pepper’s, vinyl turning round and round on the turn table, turned me upside down, transporting me–like LSD later–to another, phantasmagoric world.

 

1967 was also the year a next-door neighbor–I can still recall his name, Donnie Glaser, if not his face–turned me on to Jimi Hendrix’s Are You Experienced? in the basement of his parents’ house, basements being the preeminent place of domestic refuge in the late ’60s, pre-mall suburbs. Hendrix was subversive not so much because of his psychedelia (though I certainly registered this aspect of his music) but because Donnie’s parents were racists, albeit the classic sub rosa Northeastern sort. In other words, it was a black and white thing. It was also, needless to say, a sexual thing, since I can vividly remember Donnie telling me about seeing Hendrix live in concert in Buffalo and how he would look at the white girls in the front seats. I wasn’t exactly sure what all this meant (I was thirteen, altar-boy Catholic, and definitely not “experienced”), but like Sgt. Pepper’s, Are You Experienced? spoke of mysteries of race and sexuality elusive as that sky-diamonded girl, Lucy.

 

Since rock, especially punk, is inseparable–as Dick Bradley reminds us–from the culture of amateurism (13, 15-16), I would also definitely be remiss if I did not somehow mention that I spent many hours in the mid-’60s playing drums on an incredibly cheap drum-kit (one snare, one bass drum, one non-Zildjian cymbal–no tom tom, no hi-hat), and that one of the things that the kid behind me in high school endlessly talked about (Miklitsch, Miniccuci… ) was Mitch Mitchell’s drumming on “Fire,” which percussive effects we would try to duplicate, no doubt to the consternation of our long-suffering Franciscan instructors, on our ink-scarred desktops. Given the rapid-fire drumming, it’s not surprising that this song became our standard. The point is: part–a very large part–of the kick of rock music for me was the “beat.” How else can one explain the fact that years earlier, at recess, out on the asphalt playground at St. Pete’s, my grammar school, I wanted to be Ringo: think of it, not John or Paul or even George, but Ringo!

 

I might add by way of a musical-historical peroration (and before I turn to the “B side” and the subject of the “death of rock”), that by 1970, even as Elvis was beginning to make his glittery way in Las Vegas, Hendrix was dead, the Beatles had disbanded, and the Stones–post-Altamont–were all “black and blue.”

 

B Side: Rock in Theory, or Paint It Black

 

Much like rock, [cultural studies] has always been for me empowering and enabling, and like rock, it is always fun.

--Lawrence Grossberg, Dancing in Spite of Myself

 

The Stones aside (though it remains almost impossible, when talking about rock, to set the Stones aside for very long), it would not be until that annus mirabilis, 1977, the year that Elvis finally left the building for good, that the world of popular music would begin to understand what had come to pass in the preceding decade–which is to say, in the 1970s, now freshly immortalized in all its sleazy glory in Boogie Nights (1997). “Sister Christian” anyone?

 

1977 was not only the year that the Sex Pistols celebrated Queen E’s Silver Jubilee with their outré version of “God Save the Queen,” the lyrics of which (“God save the Queen, the fascist regime….”) couldn’t be further from the faux-pastoral sentiment of Elton John’s threnody to Diana, “Candle in the Wind” (“Songs for Dead Blonds,” as Keith Richards put it [31]); it was also the year that Lawrence Grossberg first began teaching classes on rock music. This segue is not, needless to say, a little bathetic (i.e., from the national punk-sublime to the academic pedagogical-pedestrian), but it underscores an important theoretical moment in the discourse of cultural studies, a moment when–as in Resistance through Rituals (1976) and Subculture (1979)–British cultural studies began to examine the impact of popular music on “culture and society.”³

 

More to the point perhaps, while numerous critics associated with the field of cultural studies have written on popular music and, in particular, rock (too many in fact to name), Grossberg–unlike a lot of his American cohorts–not only studied at the Birmingham Centre (with Hall and Hoggart),⁴ he is now arguably the theoretician of rock in Anglophone cultural studies. As Neil Nehring remarks with not a little irony, even disdain, in Popular Music, Gender, and Postmodernism (1997), Grossberg is the “dean of academics writing on popular music” (47), the “CEO of cultural studies” (67). Though Grossberg cannot, of course, stand as some sort of synecdoche for either cultural studies or popular music studies (if the latter has only recently achieved any semblance of disciplinary coherence, the former remains a model of inter-, not to say, anti-disciplinarity), his writings on rock are nonetheless symptomatic, or so I want to argue, of a certain unexamined “death drive” at work in cultural/popular music studies.

 

In Dancing in Spite of Myself (1997), a recent collection that gathers together Grossberg’s work on popular music, he persuasively argues that rock is a necessary object of critical investigation because it has frequently been mobilized, often negatively (as in the neo-conservatism that he critiques in We Gotta Get Out of This Place [1992]),⁵ as a discursive token in the ideological contest over what he calls the “national popular” (9). Thus, in “Another Boring Day in Paradise” (1984), he contends that it is only with Born to Run (1975) and Darkness on the Edge of Town (1978) that Bruce Springsteen emerges as a national popular sign of the body and sexuality as well as motion and mobility, a set of signifiers most economically constellated, according to Grossberg, by the figure of dancing: dancing not only bespeaks the body, it embodies release, from boredom, from ennui and anomie–from, that is to say, the sometimes repressive, imprisoning routines of everyday life. It is not for nothing, then, that the title of Grossberg’s collection on rock invokes the trope of dancing–dancing in spite, or despite, one’s self–since as he says in “I’d Rather Feel Bad Than Not Feel Anything at All” (1984), “someone who does not dance, or at least move with the music, is not prima facie a fan” (87).

 

Still, given Grossberg’s fascination with the body in motion, or what I think of as the “body in dance,”⁶ one of the retrospective ironies of his reading of Springsteen–virtually the only “close reading” in all of his work on rock–is that it somehow neglects to mention the infamous moment when the Boss, live onstage in St. Paul performing his top-ten single, “Dancing in the Dark,” pulled a pre-Friends Courteney Cox out of the audience and, in an MTV moment, became a fully-fledged pop-idol-cum-sex-symbol.⁷ Later, writing in the aftermath of the 1984 presidential election (when “Born in the U.S.A.” was opportunistically appropriated by Ronald Reagan’s campaign handlers), Simon Frith concluded that Springsteen’s Live (1985) was a rock monument, but–and this is the postmodern twist–a monument to the death of the “idea of authenticity” (98, 101).

 

I invoke the above MTV instant not to rehearse the familiar, now-dated critique of Springsteen, but because Grossberg, like Frith, has frequently seized on this national-popular moment in Springsteen’s career to deconstruct the idea of authenticity, replacing it with what Grossberg calls “authentic inauthenticity” (We Gotta Get Out 230). In fact, Frith’s account of the end of authenticity points up, if only by inversion, the privileged place of authenticity in Grossberg’s account of rock–say, the way in which early rock ‘n’ roll, drawing on the liberatory sexual subtext of rhythm & blues (itself a not-so-latent critique of white, “I-like-Ike” America), offered a highly effective cultural compromise formation, a way to both rock against, and roll with, the times.

 

Now, if rock assumed this particular existential function in the 1950s, it consolidated this position in the ’60s, so much so that the proper, analytical object of study for Grossberg is not so much rock music as the culture of rock, or what he calls the “rock formation”: “the entire range of postwar, ‘youth’-oriented, technologically and economically-mediated musical practices and styles” (Dancing 102). Although Grossberg has typically been more concerned, true to the Deleuzian-Foucauldian cast of his project, to chart the spatial element of this formation, I want to focus here on the temporal or historical register of his project because in his most recent work, such as his contribution to Microphone Fiends (1994), “Is Anybody Listening? Does Anybody Care?,” he has been “obsessed” (his word) with the “death of rock.”

 

To be fair, in the revisionary introduction to Dancing in Spite of Myself, Grossberg observes that the proposition “rock is dead” is not so much an evaluative judgment about “particular musical practices or variants of rock culture” as a “discursive haunting within the rock formation” and (a crucial, if somewhat contradictory, afterthought) a “possible eventual reality” (17). Indeed, as Grossberg himself seems to recognize, his speculations about the death of rock are neither especially new nor news (Dancing 103). In 1971, for instance, in The Sound of the City, Charlie Gillett had asserted the death of “rock ‘n’ roll,” if not “rock and roll” or “rock” per se.⁸ And, rather more recently, in “Everything Counts,” the preface to Music for Pleasure (1988), Frith composed the following epitaph:

 

I am now quite sure that the rock era is over. People will go on playing and enjoying rock music... but the music business is no longer organized around the selling of records of a particular sort of musical event to young people. The rock era--born around 1956 with Elvis Presley, peaking around 1967 with Sgt. Pepper's, dying around 1976 with the Sex Pistols--turned out to be a by-way in the development of twentieth-century popular music, rather than, as we thought at the time, any kind of mass cultural revolution. (1)

 

For Frith as for Gillett, rock is now all but dead as a mass-cultural force because for all its revolutionary “energy and excitement,” anger and anarchism, it has finally succumbed to those twin demons: capital and technology.

 

Given that rock has not historically dominated the popular-music market (see, for example, Dave Harker’s analysis of the ’70s which convincingly argues that the “representative” sound of the era was not, say, punk but Elton John), one might counter that Frith’s reading here of the death of rock is predicated on a substantial misreading of the music industry. (Consider, if you will, Garth Brooks, who is not only the third top-selling act of all time but whose most recent CD, Sevens [1997], had the second-highest first week sales in the 1990s.⁹) Frith’s claim about the death of rock also betrays, it seems to me, a not-so-residual romanticism where, as in the ideology of high modernism, the artist-as-rocker steadfastly refuses the Mephistophelian commercial temptations of late capitalism.

 

This said, it might be useful–before I broach a critique of Grossberg’s claims about the “death of rock”–to review his account of the present “state of rock.” As Grossberg sees it, rock’s original historical conditions of possibility have undergone a radical transformation over the last forty years. Not only has the liberal quietism of the fifties, a political consensus that underwrote the affluence and conspicuous consumption of the period, been superseded by a neo-fundamentalist conservatism intent on destroying the last vestiges of the welfare state (one hyper-visible target of which has been rap music: think Ice-T¹⁰), but also youth culture–once the ground of the performative ethos of communitarianism–has been subjected to the micro-differentiation and super-fragmentation of the contemporary media-market. Call it, with appropriate adcult brio, Generation Next.

 

As for the “structure of feeling” (which in the ’50s could be summed up by one word, alienation), postmodernism has arguably gone from being an emergent to the dominant cultural-political formation, so that now everything–including and especially rock–has come under what Grossberg calls, courtesy of Benjamin, the “antiaura of the inauthentic” (117): in other words, not alienation but simulation, not parody but pastiche.

 

Finally, in the industrial-technological sphere, even as the “indies” enjoy a less contentious relation with the majors (to the point in fact where leisure-and-entertainment multinationals have come to view independent labels as their “minor league” [Negus, Popular Music 118]), revenues derive less and less from sales and more and more from merchandising and secondary rights associated with related “synergetic” sources such as film, TV, and advertising.¹¹ Put another way, in an age of digital reproduction (not LPs but CDs, or CD-ROM), rock has become a commodity like any other commodity, at best a depoliticized form of fun and, at worst, Muzak to divert you while you’re home shopping.

 

A number of these transformations–including the paradigm shift from aural-print to cyber-visual culture, not to mention the consequent lack of, for Grossberg, “any compelling images of rebellion” (Dancing 55)–are reflected, albeit with a perverse, “hermeneutic” twist, in the Beavis and Butt-head phenomenon. Beavis and Butt-head not only mirror the politics of neo-conservatism (in reverse, à la Lacan), they arguably embody the enlightened cynicism associated with the ideology of MTV. I mean, what could be more postmodern than a couple of loser, latchkey kids who when they’re not loose in school or on the streets, sit around and crack wise on bad music videos?

 

Still, the irony of this example (which, oddly enough, seems lost on Grossberg) is that Beavis and Butt-head also represent, in however twisted or demented a form, the continuing vitality of rock. That is, if Beavis and Butt-head can be said to dramatize the demise of what Grossberg calls the “ideology of authenticity” (We Gotta Get Out 205), it’s pretty obvious that for all their benumbed, dumb-and-dumber behavior, they can hardly be said to be affectless when it comes to the subject of rock.

 

To be sure, the concept of affect as it is appears in Grossberg’s discourse is not simply a synonym for emotion or feeling, since it is a function of, among other things, cathexis and libidinal quantification (as in Freud and Nietzsche respectively).¹² Moreover, for Grossberg (as for Deleuze and Guattari), affect is a “structured plane of effects.”¹³ Affect in fact is the key to what he calls “mattering maps,” or the maps people fabricate in order to articulate what matters most to them in their everyday lives. Rock is therefore a fundamental “affective articulatory agent,” not least because–to recollect one of his favorite maxims–it “helps us make it through the day” (Dancing 20).

 

While Grossberg’s theorization of everyday life here, together with his neo-Gramscian elaboration of affect and the rock formation, represents, it seems to me, an important contribution to the critical discourse on rock,¹⁴ the irony–in this case, a critical, not to say fatal one–is that his writing on popular music tends to be extraordinarily “abstract and speculative” (Dancing 30). Or, in a word, affectless. Grossberg has freely conceded–too freely, for my money–the limits of his project, observing in the apologetic preface to Bringing It All Back Home (1997) that “almost everything he has written on rock music,” operating as it does on a “particularly high level of abstraction” (16), is “too theoretical” (27); that his work has become a “constant detour deferring the concrete.”¹⁵

 

One manifestation of this pervasive theoreticism is his persistent neglect of issues of race and sex-gender.¹⁶ Although John Gill’s and Angela McRobbie’s critiques of, respectively, “gay” disco and subcultural theory (to adduce only two examples¹⁷) indicate that rock is by no means a function of identity politics, I think it’s fair to say that Grossberg’s preemptive, categorical disregard of gender has also blinded him to recent transformations in rock music. To wit: Beavis and Butt-head may be a “negative,” comic-parodic instance of what sometimes seems like the hard-wired masculinism of rock (though as Robert Walser has shown, even heavy metal is not without its moments of “gender trouble”), but Riot Grrrl music suggests–if, say, Patti Smith or Joan Armatrading hadn’t already–that women can rock too.¹⁸

 

As for race, though Grossberg has summarily discussed the role of “Black music,” in particular R & B, in everyday life (Dancing 151-52), he has had surprisingly little to say about, for instance, rap. I say “surprisingly” because rap has been viewed, rightly or wrongly, as the “new internal site of authenticity” and/or “heir to rock’s vitality and potential as a nascent act of resistance” (Dancing 104). Accordingly, if it is in fact true, as Grossberg himself has claimed, that he is less interested in the death of rock than in “rock’s becoming something else” (Dancing 22), it strikes me that his work, “abstract and speculative” as it is, would benefit from a more thorough consideration of the specific preconditions and continuing longevity of rap and, more generally, hip-hop culture.

 

History is instructive in this regard, since the very first rap records–such as The Fatback Band’s “King Tim III” and the Sugarhill Gang’s “Rapper’s Delight”–appeared in the immediate wake of the so-called punk apocalypse and can therefore be seen as part of the rebirth of post-“rock” popular music. (Significantly, both of the above rap records were released in 1979¹⁹). Though it would not be until well into the next disco-driven decade that Run-D.M.C. would catapult “rap into the crossover mainstream” (Perkins 14) when their Aerosmith-flavored, rap-‘n’-rock “Walk This Way” (1986) became hip-hop’s first MTV hit, thrusting rap “strategies of intertextuality into the commercial spotlight” (and, not so incidentally, rap music “into the hands of white teen consumers” [Rose 51-52]),²⁰ rap, it is clear, has irrevocably altered the rock/pop landscape.

 

The point is, from Afrika Bambaataa, one of the seminal old-school Master of Ceremonies, to Run-D.M.C. and “new school,” pre-“Walk This Way” rap-‘n’-rock tunes such as “Rock Box” (1984) and “King of Rock” (1985) to, most recently, Sean Combs and his Police-inspired ode to the Notorious B.I.G., “I’ll Be Missing You” (1997), rock has been part and parcel of that eclectic mix that is rap, a musical melange forever memorialized in the lyrics of “Payoff Mix”: “Punk rock, new wave and soul/Pop music, salsa, rock & roll/Calypso, reggae, rhythm & blues,/Master, mix those number-one tunes.”²¹

 

A recent exchange between Puff Daddy and Rolling Stone confirms the intimate/extimate relation between rock and rap. Rolling Stone: “What bands do you like now?” Puffy: “Radiohead” (78).

 

"Suck--suck your teenage thumb...."

 

I hasten to add that if the relation between rap and rock is not one of simple exteriority (as the above parenthetical is intended to suggest), this is not to claim, as Grossberg does, that “for practical purposes,” there are “no musical limits on what can or cannot be rock” (We Gotta Get Out 131, emphasis mine). On this particular score, one must, I think, be vulgar: rock is, first and foremost, music–with the critical proviso that, to paraphrase a parody, if a little formalism turns one away from history, a lot brings one back to it.²²

 

I’m not talking about musicology here, useful as it is (especially in the proper hands).²³ Nor am I suggesting that the issue of reception, or even fandom, is negligible, since one of the real virtues of Grossberg’s work is its extensive investigation of the various, extra-musical contexts of rock reception. I am suggesting–as it were, to “bring it all back home”–that it’s difficult to talk about rock or popular music in the 1990s without engaging the issue of genre and production.

 

On the constitutive difference between rock and the pre-“r&r” tradition of popular music, Robert Palmer has, for instance, written:

 

Today's popular music could hardly have evolved out of "Your Hit Parade" and the pre-r&r popular mainstream.... Rap, metal, thrash, grunge, have different attitudes towards the organization of sound and rhythm. Their distance from pre-r&r norms cannot be explained by advances in musical instruments and technology alone. Far more than musical hybrids, these sounds proceed from what amounts to a different tradition, different from the old mainstream pop and different right on down to the most basic musical values. (Rock and Roll 9)

 

Given Palmer’s riff here on rock’s “traditional” difference from the “popular music” that precedes it (e.g., the late, great Frank Sinatra or, before him, Bing “The King of Croon” Crosby), it is clear that although one can speak of rock as a species of popular music, one cannot make the opposite claim (i.e., not all popular music is rock).

 

Such a distinction would seem commonsensical enough, but “rock imperialism,” as Keith Negus has demonstrated, is pervasive in English-language writing on popular music. The problem with this approach–of which Grossberg’s work is a paradigmatic example (as the above assertion about “musical limits” indicates)–is that it ignores, as Negus notes, “vast numbers of generic distinctions made by musicians and audiences across the world” (Popular Music 162, emphasis mine). The net result of this “imperialist” position, paradoxically enough, is a “rockist” methodology that is at once inclusivist and exclusivist, inclusivist because generically-different kinds of music (such as rap) are included as rock, exclusivist because generically-related kinds of music (such as country) are reflexively excluded.

 

This problem is compounded when the universalist category of “rock” is applied to popular music in the global context, so-called “world beat” or “world music.” (Examples of this music are the South African Ladysmith Black Mambazo, who are probably best known for working with Paul Simon on Graceland [1986] or, more recently, the Pakistani Nusrat Fateh Ali Khan, who sang with Eddie Vedder of Pearl Jam on the soundtrack for Dead Man Walking ([1995]). Thus, if it is true, as Negus states, that there is a lot of music “being listened to by the ‘youth market’ that would be described using a label other than rock,” it’s equally true that “for many music fans across the world, there are numerous musics that cannot be rock” (Popular Music 161). One of the negative byproducts of this “methodological strategy”–of, that is to say, the “global” deployment of rock–is that it tends to reproduce the “classic” division between rock and pop, where rock refers to the “musical and lyrical roots that are derived from the classic rock era” and pop to rock’s “status as a commodity produced under pressure to conform by the record industry” (Friedlander 3).

 

The way this particular binary plays out in the context of the “rock/world music” opposition is, alas, all-too-predictable: North American, Western-style rock is “impure” and/or passé (or passé because impure), while virtually all, non-Western popular musics are “authentic” and, therefore, “vital.” Not so surprisingly (especially if one remembers that rock was originally black slang for “having sex”), this sort of racial-ideological thinking is a product of a not-so-residual colonialist mentalité. As Timothy D. Taylor flatly puts it in Global Pop (1997): “rock music, which used to be pure sex, has lost its grinding energy; musics by others (read: people of color) still have something to do with sex” (20).

 

Still, the real political-economic paradox, if you will, is that although world musicians are considered inauthentic if they begin to sound too much like their Western counterparts, they are effectively doomed to a discourse of authenticity, “since the structures of the music industry exclude virtually all world musicians from the venues, visibility, and profits that might make them appear to be sellouts to their fans” (Taylor 23). This, then, is the bottom line of the asymmetrical relations of production that subtends the global music marketplace. Due to the concentration of capital in a handful of multinational corporations (that are located, in turn, in a handful of “core” countries), Western popular music is increasingly available in the traditional peripheries, but the (semi-) peripheries do not have the same access to their own music. Hence the distinctly inequitable system of distribution that currently obtains, where, say, “it is much easier to buy… Madonna in China than Cui Jian, the leading Chinese rock musician, in the US” (Taylor 201).

 

I will return to these issues below in the context of contemporary youth culture, but this might be an appropriate place to mark the limits of the classical-Marxist account of the mode of production and propose, instead, what I take to be a more immanent, constructive model of the music industry. An innovative work in this regard–innovative because it draws equally on both reception and production studies without the theoretical baggage of either approach–is Negus’s Producing Pop (1992) which, in displacing the methodological emphasis from the “production of culture” to the “culture of production” (61-64) retains a role for what Marxists used to call the “primacy of production” even as it demarcates a space for what Negus calls the “cultural practices of personnel” (press officer, A & R person, studio producer, etc.).²⁴ Noting that writing on popular music often works from unexamined predicates about art and commerce, creativity and capitalism, Negus contends that such an approach not only tends to “overlook the temporal dimension which cuts through the production of commercial music,” it also tends to radically underestimate the extent to which the various personnel involved in producing music are actively “contributing to the aesthetic meanings employed to appreciate the music,” thereby defining the contours of what in fact popular music means at any given time (153).

 

The value of this approach is that by concentrating on what Bourdieu calls “cultural intermediaries” (qtd. in Negus, Producing Pop 62), it usefully blurs the typical, hard-and-fast distinction between labor and leisure, production and consumption. Rather more to the point, Negus’s perspective emphatically re-accentuates the music in the “music business,” foregrounding the sorts of music that people in the business actually listen to. To tender such a claim is not, of course, to proffer a covert defense of the music business, since one of the very real strengths of Negus’s work is that it provides an “inside” critique of the way in which the “recording industry has come to favor certain types of music, particular working practices, and quite specific ways of acquiring, marketing, and promoting recording artists” (and here issues of race and sex-gender re-materialize in all their social-institutional force [Producing Pop vii]). Simply put, Negus’s culture-of-production approach–attuned as it is to both the cultural and industrial demands of the music industry–elucidates the intricate, conflictual “web” of relations out of which popular music is wrought.

 

In Grossberg’s anxious swerve away from anything that smacks of Marxism or economism (which sometimes appear to be the same thing for him), he has been intent to develop what he calls a “spatial materialism” (Dancing 10). While this spatial-materialist perspective might conceivably offer a novel way to talk about the production and consumption of popular music, the aggressively theoreticist cast of Grossberg’s approach is evident in his inordinately “thin” description of his project: “to find a radically contextual… vocabulary that can describe the ongoing production of the real as an organization of inequality through an analysis of cultural events” (24). Put another, more critical way: if Grossberg’s analytical focus on space in rock provides a valuable complement to the general underdevelopment of spatiality in the discourse of Marxism,²⁵ this very same valorization also comes at the direct expense of a proper consideration of the dialectical other of spatiality–temporality or, more precisely yet, historicity.

 

Bluntly, it will not do, on one hand, to ruminate about the death of rock and, on the other hand, to confess that one has “given too little attention to the changing shape of the rock formation across space and over time” (Dancing 19). Given this performative contradiction, though, what, one wonders, is driving Grossberg’s “obsession” with the death of rock?

 

Reprise

 

"Drivin' around in my automobile..."
                 
--Chuck Berry

 

The above, not simply rhetorical question about the end or “death of rock” brings me abruptly back full-circle to the beginning of this essay–to, that is, the “birth” of rock and the formative popular-musical influences in my life. My life aside (for the moment), I want to submit that detailed, medium-specific attention to the temporality and spatiality of rock indicates that it has by no means died but has merely become, among other things, “more geographically mobile” (Negus, Popular Music 163).

 

The interest of this “geographical” perspective is that it assumes one of Grossberg’s signature Deleuzian themes, what one might call the mobility of rock (as almost any Chuck Berry song attests, “classic” rock ‘n’ roll is frequently about auto-mobility), and situates it in a particular, national-historical context. In other words, it’s not simply that rock has become part of transnational capitalism (though this proposition is undoubtedly true and has any number of implications for the present “rock formation” [vide supra]).²⁶ Rather, it’s more that a certain form of rock may well be dead, or at least embalmed, in the U.S. or North America but is alive and kickin’ elsewhere–say, in Cuba or China, Argentina or South Africa, Eastern Europe or the former Soviet Union.²⁷

 

As for the U.S. or North America, it seems pretty clear that some form of post-“rock” music is here to stay, at least for the foreseeable future, given that it has become an indispensable part–along wth TV, movies and, most recently, the personal computer–of contemporary “youth culture.” I’ve already suggested that one, flamboyant manifestation of this culture is the Beavis and Butt-head phenomenon, where this particular “franchise” comprises not only an animated series (that comprises, in turn, music videos–mise-en-abîme, as it were) but a profitable feature film, both of which mass-media “texts” have spun off various other commodities such as books, soundtracks, etc. But if Beavis and Butt-head and, more generally, MTV (as opposed to, say, VH1) is “youth-skewed,” what does it mean to invoke the category of youth today, late in the 1990s?

 

I raise this question here because although there is obviously a statistically-determinate audience–“defined by age”–for rock/pop music (say, conservatively speaking, 14-24), the idea of youth, as Donna Gaines comments, is simultaneously a “biological category,” a “distinctive social group,” and a “cultural context” (47). Though there is little doubt that age-driven demographics drive corporate marketing and advertising, it’s also no secret that in an age of Viagra, cosmetic surgery, and hyper-“health & fitness,” the “signifier ‘youth’ has gradually been detached from the age-grade and made available to everyone” (Weinstein 82)–which is to say, to anyone who has the desire and requisite economic resources.

 

One consequence of this process of “democratization” is that the concept of youth today retains only a residual, even vestigial, connection to its “biological” referent. In fact, the rapidly changing cultural construct of the term since World War II–from, say, “youth culture” to “counterculture” to “youth subcultures” (the last with a decidedly post-Parsonian emphasis)–has radically de-differentiated its social distinctiveness. On one hand, the category of childhood–of which youth is the “antithesis” and adulthood the “synthesis”–is “shrinking”: “people as young as eight or nine years old are sharing in the youth life-style in terms of consumption of products such as clothing, leisure activities from video games… to record purchases, and knowledge of the ‘real world’– sexual, political, ecological, etc.” (Weinstein 20).

 

On the other hand, the social idea of youth is rapidly expanding, so much so that it might not be too much to say, as Deanna Weinstein does, that young people “have become marginal to the idea of youth itself” (73). Since the “central feature” of youth culture, at least in the United States since the 1950s, has been music, rock music (Weinstein 69), this trend–what one might call, after Grossberg, the colonization or reterritorialization of youth–has had a profound influence on contemporary music. In an epigram: “Rock, like youthful looks, is no longer the province of the young” (Weinstein 75).

 

As in some grade-B werewolf movie, the rock-around-the-clock teenagers of the ’50s have become the “classic rock” baby-boomers of the ’90s, and the latter “constituency,” in turn, a prime grade-A target for the increasingly competitive music industry. More specifically, since the youth market cannot sustain long-term artistic development (and therefore new artists are no longer simply aimed at youth in the restricted, “biological” sense [Negus, Producing Pop 68]), there are powerful economic imperatives to cross-over and attract the expanding “class” of middle-aged consumers. In fact, data on consumption patterns circa 1993 suggest that while the “purchase of rock music declines with age,” this decline is “gradual across ages 25-44” (Negus, Producing Pop 100). With this in mind, it might not be too much to say–at least if these figures are any indication (and I think they are)–that rock is no longer simply the “music of youth” (Negus, Producing Pop 100).

 

Of course, “young people”–however one defines the term–have also actively resisted the wholesale appropriation of their subcultures. Sometimes this has involved distancing themselves from “adulterated” discourses such as, precisely, rock. (Hence the pejorative epithet “rockist.”) In other cases, it has involved a complex process of re-appropriation of the popular-cultural terrain. (Witness the revival of swing and lounge or “martini” music.) In general, it has involved the formation of subcultures that entail a determinate dialectical relation not only with the dominant “parent” culture (itself in the process of being made over in the eternal image of youth) but with the dominant, corporate-sponsored youth culture.

 

The “good news,” as it were, is that “genuine” youth subcultures have emerged by “marginalizing themselves from the leisure culture’s free-floating definition of ‘youth’” (Weinstein 83). (SNL aside, the new “goth culture” in all its queer mutability is, it seems to me, one instance of this resistance.) The “bad news” (as if the double alienation consequent on the above self-marginalization were not enough) is that young people are now free to choose from among an “array of confrontational youth subcultures” (Weinstein 82). In this overconsumptivist scenario, “free-floating” is not so much a term of liberatory potential, however slim, but a euphemistic signifier for the “forced choice” that is postmodern consumer capitalism. In a nutshell (to sample an Entertainment Weekly cover story): Hanson/Manson.

 

Although one might argue that the current musical culture is merely yet another moment in the ongoing cyclical history of pop/rock (where, to revisit the late ’50s and early ’60s, the choice between the Crystals and Chiffons, Ronettes and Shirelles, or–to adduce the “boy groups”–the Four Seasons and the Beach Boys was, for some, no choice at all), the difference between the immediate post-“rock-‘n’-roll” period and the present moment is the sheer volume of (recorded) music that is now available. For instance, in 1962, before the advent of the British Invasion (which is to say, pre-Beatles and pre-JFK assassination), “total industry sales were under $1 billion” (Goodman 29); now, circa 1998, “they’re almost 40 times that figure” (29).

 

That the impact of this economic and popular-musical “boom” on youth culture has been enormous goes, I think, without saying. Most obviously perhaps, the almost exponential increase in the production of rock/pop music has resulted in an almost infinite “array” of musical (sub-) genres from which people, “young” or otherwise, can “freely” choose. A recent postcard survey distributed by Atlantic Records illustrates the extraordinary range of music that one can now purchase: Children’s / R & B / Pop / Rock / Dance / Singer Songwriters / Traditional Jazz / Contemporary Jazz / New Age / Ambient / Classical / Country / Metal / Alternative / Rap / Theatre Music / World Music.

 

About this list, I would make only two observations. First, rock, it is important to note, is only one genre or category among a host of genres and categories; equally or more importantly, most, if not all, of these genres can be further subdivided. (Thus, to take just one genre, “New Age/Ambient” can–and probably should–be divided into two separate categories, where Ambient or, more properly perhaps, Electronica can then be divided into various subgenres such as Techno, Jungle, Trip Hop, Drum and Bass, or sub-subgenres such as Illbient and Ambient Dub). Second, in an informal survey that I conducted at Ohio University using the above survey (I chose a class composed of “freshmen” since they effectively straddle the teen/college music audiences), the participants answered–almost to a person–that they not only listened to rock but that they felt it remains a “viable form of music.”²⁸ In other words, the combo “youth and rock” may not be as tight as it once was, but “rock”–or what Grossberg calls the “rock formation”–still means something to young people.

 

Although the concept of “youth” is crucial, it is clear, to any future discussion of the “death of rock,” another, perhaps more pointed way to reframe this issue–to return to the larger, historical shifts in the meaning of “youth culture” (as well as the A side of this essay)–is to reconsider the generational axes of rock. Thus, to re-cite Frith, conventional wisdom has it that rock was born around 1956 with Elvis, peaked around 1967 with Sgt. Pepper’s, and died around 1976 with the Sex Pistols. Or, as Negus metaphorically puts it, in the mid-1970s, “the blooms start wilting, the body decays, and rock starts dying” (Popular Music 148).

 

This late-Spenglerian vision–Verfallsgeschichte made flesh–offers a peculiarly seductive image for some of the history of rock, with rock consuming itself, never mind Nirvana, in one final catastrophic conflagration with punk. Indeed, with the late Elvis and Sid Vicious in mind, the one bloated from food and drugs almost beyond recognition, the other an early poster-boy for heroin chic, it would appear, if only in retrospect, that the banks of flowers on the cover of Sgt. Pepper’s were funereal after all, florid intimations of rock’s mortality or, to echo the Sex Pistols, “flowers in the dustbin.”²⁹

 

But could it be, given that Grossberg began teaching rock in 1977 (when, presumably, the corpse was still warm), that the historical claim about the death of rock is, as it were, auto-biological; that, not to put too fine a point on it, the mantra about the death of rock is merely a projection of the white male baby-boomer’s rapidly aging body?

 

To endeavor to be fair to Grossberg, he is by no means unaware of the paradoxes and potential pitfalls of writing about rock if you are old enough, now, to remember seeing Elvis on Ed Sullivan in 1956, or the Beatles on the same venue, as I did, in 1964.³⁰ In “Rock and Roll Is Dead and We Don’t Care,” the Rubinoos-inspired conclusion to “Another Boring Day in Paradise,” he speculates about a baby-boomer imaginary haunting the real of Generation X, remarking that “images of youth and change” have been replaced by images of boomers trying to “deal with responsibility and ‘middle age’” (61). Grossberg’s reading here of the vampiric relation between the generations represents, it seems to me, discursive haunting with a vengeance, the return of the corporeal repressed, where the historiography of rock and roll is infused–like some ghost or specter–with all the ways of the flesh.

 

However, as Negus’s meta-organic metaphor makes clear (“the blooms start wilting, the body decays…”), it is probably inadvisable, critically speaking, to interpret musical genres such as rock “as if they were living bodies which are born, grow, and decay” (Popular Music 139). When it comes to contemplating and composing the history of rock, one would do better to attend, as Barthes advises, to the form of the music, a “turn” that inevitably returns one to history, to the form of history and the history of the form. While the former, “historiographic” locution signifies the various, sometimes radically divergent histories (such as rap) that have generated what Robert Palmer calls the “rock tradition,” the latter “formalism” refers to historicity–say, the “gospel,” blues-based, call-and-response of soul–in all its gross materiality.

 

Grossberg himself declares in the preface to Dancing in Spite of Myself that rock is “material” since it is lived, as he says, in the “body and soul” (15). However, if this is in fact the case, it must also I think be said that his work on rock–studiously attentive as it is to the body and dance, affect and sexuality–is surprisingly soulless.

 

But what’s a body of work without soul? It’s like rhythm without the blues. Rock without the roll. It’s dead, deader than dead Elvis.

 

If writing on rock in cultural studies is to matter today, it seems to me that it must remain alive to a veritable “forcefield” or constellation of factors–to the “culture of production,” at once micro and macro; to the body–raced, sexed, and gendered; to the various histories of rock with all their zigs and zags, swerves and curves; and, of course, to the music itself. As for theory, if it too is to matter, if it is to rock, it must not only continue to move with the times, it must also somehow remember that as in dancing or cruising (and this is the trickiest part), the point is, as Chuck Berry says, that there’s “no particular place to go.”

 

Notes

 

1. However, for the girls’ POV, see Bradby.

 

2. For my sense of this song, see Whitely 88-89.

 

3. For an informative and critical overview of this period of British cultural studies, see Middleton, “Subcultural Theory” 155-66.

 

4. On Grossberg’s intellectual itinerary, see “Another Story,” in Bringing 22-29.

 

5. See, in particular, the second section of We Gotta Get Out of This Place, “Another Boring Day in… Paradise: A Rock Formation” 131-239.

 

6. On the “body in dance,” see the introduction to my From Hegel to Madonna 9-36.

 

7. See Marcus, “Four More Years,” Ranters 269.

 

8. In “The Sound Begins,” Gillett argues that in “tracing the history of rock and roll, it is useful to distinguish rock ‘n’ roll–the particular kind of music to which the term first applied–both from rock and roll–the music that has been classified as such since rock ‘n’ roll petered out around 1958–and from rock, which describes post-1964 derivations of rock ‘n’ roll” (1).

 

9. On Garth Brooks, see Brunner, “By George, He’s Got It” and “Winner of the Week.”

 

10. On Ice-T and Time-Warner, see, for example, Ross on “Cop Killer” (1992) and Madonna’s Sex (1992) in “This Bridge Called My Pussy.” With respect to the rhetoric of the “death of rock,” it’s worth noting that after Ice-T decided to pull “Cop Killer” from Body Count (1992), “it was only a matter of time,” as Ross notes, “before an organ of record [i.e., the Source] announced the death of rap” (Microphone Fiends 3).

 

11. On social consumption and copyright revenue, see Negus, Producing Pop 12-14.

 

12. See, for example, Grossberg, “Affect and the Popular,” in We Gotta Get Out of This Place and “Postmodernity and Affect” in Dancing, 79-87 and 145-65 respectively. As Grossberg comments in the introduction to the former text, “My studies of rock convinced me of the importance of passion (affect) in contemporary life” (2).

 

13. Grossberg provides a concise and popular-cultural gloss on his sense of affect in “Rockin’ in Conservative Times,” the penultimate essay in Dancing: “the affective logic, which I have described… as being at the center of rock culture,… is being reorganized and redeveloped in the service of a specific agenda [i.e., neo-conservatism]. What was… an empowering machine is turned (as in Star Wars’ image of ‘the force’ being turned to the dark side) into the service of a disempowering machine” (257). For a recent restatement of Grossberg’s understanding of affect, see the introduction to Bringing 28.

 

14. For a critique of Grossberg’s notion of affect with respect to rock (albeit one that tends to flatten out the positive, cultural-populist elements of his use of the term), see Nehring, Popular Music 47-52.

 

15. For a more elaborate take on the “detour of theory” (Marx), see Grossberg, “Cultural Studies: What’s in a Name?” (1995), in Bringing 262-64.

 

16. Grossberg is adamant on this point: “In truth, I do have theoretical reservations about theories of identity and difference and strategic concerns about the efficacy of a politics organized around investment in cultural identities. Nevertheless, the mere absence of a topic from a discussion, however important, does not, in my opinion, necessarily constitute a serious weakness” (25). For Grossberg’s sense of identity politics, see, for example, “Identity and Difference” in Bringing 356-63; and “Difference and the Politics of Identity,” in We Gotta Get Out of This Place 364-69.

 

17. See McRobbie, “Settling Accounts with Subcultures,” first published in Screen Education (1980); for the Gill, which is in part a response to Richard Dyer’s “In Defense of Disco” (1979), see, for example, “Nightclubbing.” For a succinct overview of these issues, see Negus, “Identities,” in Popular Music 99-135, esp. 123-30.

 

18. On the Riot Grrrl movement, see White, “Revolution Girl Style Now” (1992), reprinted in Rock She Wrote; and Gottlieb and Wald. More recently, see Nehring, “Riot Grrrls and Carnival,” Popular Music 150-79; and McDonnell.

 

19. On The Fatback Band’s “King Tim III,” see Toop 81-82. For an update on the Sugarhill Gang’s “Rapper’s Delight” (which has recently been re-recorded by Redman, Keith Murray, and Erick Sermon), see Brunner, “Birth of Rap.”

 

20. I might add that in terms of what one might call the semi-autonomy of rap with respect to rock music, Nelson George has pointed out that although Run-D.M.C. “recaptured a piece of the rock audience” with “Walk This Way,” they were able to do so “without dissolving themselves… into white culture” (194).

 

21. Afrika Bambaataa on the Bronx hip-hop scene in ’84: “I used to catch the people who’d say, ‘I don’t like rock….’ I’d throw on Mick Jagger–you’d see the blacks and the Spanish just throwing down, dancing crazy. I’d say, ‘I thought you don’t like rock!’ They’d say, ‘Get out of here!’ I’d say, ‘Well, you just danced to the Rolling Stones’” (cited in Toop 66). On “Payoff Mix,” Double D and Steinski’s mastermix of, inter alia, G.L.O.B.E. and Whiz Kid’s “Play That Beat, Mr. DJ,” see Toop 153-54.

 

22. I am alluding here to Barthes’s “Myth Today,” in Mytholgies 12.

 

23. See, for example, Midddleton, “‘Change Gonna Come’? Popular Music and Musicology,” in Studying Popular Music 103-26; and the section on musicology and semiotics in On Record, in particular McClary and Walser 277-92.

 

24. The seminal text for the “production of culture” perspective is Peterson; for another, more recent example of this approach, see Crane.

 

25. For something of a corrective to this theoretical poverty, see Soja.

 

26. On rock and capitalism, see, most recently, Taylor, “Popular Musics and Globalization,” Global Pop 1-38. For a survey of rock with respect to media and cultural imperialism, see Negus, “Geographies,” Popular Music, in particular “Music and the Modes of Media Imperialism” and “Feeling the Effect: Cultural Imperialism and Globalization,” 168-71 and 171-80 respectively; and, in general, Robinson et al.

 

27. On Cuba, see López; on China, Argentina and South Africa, see, respectively, Brace and Friedlander; Vila; and Martin. On Eastern Europe and the former Soviet Union, see Ramet and Ryback. In general, see Denselow.

 

28. This survey was conducted during the Fall 1998 quarter; the class, titled “American Popular Culture,” was composed of 19 students, 11 of which were “female,” two “African American.” The other questions, in addition to those already mentioned (i.e., “Do you listen to rock?” and “Do you think rock, however one defines it, is still a viable form of music?”), were: “What is your favorite kind of music?,” “What, for you, is an example of rock music?,” and “Is rap a form of rock music?” Typical answers to these questions were, respectively, rock, pop, rap, and alternative; Beatles, Rolling Stones, Aerosmith, and Guns ‘n’ Roses; and “no” (e.g., “I think rap is a whole different genre”). The majority of “negative” responses to the last question confirms Negus’s observation about fans’ sense of generic distinctions; as one student wrote about the difference between rap and rock: “A lot of music that is generalized (or promoted) as rock should fall under other categories.”

 

29. See Nehring, Flowers in the Dustbin.

 

30. In the introduction to Dancing, Grossberg acknowledges that his “faith that rock is at the center of the relevant formations is probably more the result of [his] own position as a fan, and [his] particular generational identity as a baby boomer, heavily invested, in different ways and at different times and places, in rock” (15).

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• Rose, Tricia, and Andrew Ross, eds. Microphone Fiends: Youth Music and Youth Culture. New York: Routledge, 1994.
• Rose, Tricia. Black Noise: Rap Music and Black Culture in Contemporary America. Hanover, NH: Wesleyan/UP of New England, 1994.
• Ross, Andrew. “Introduction.” Rose and Ross 1-8.
• —. “This Bridge Called My Pussy.” Madonnarama. Ed. Lisa Frank and Paul Smith. Pittsburgh, PA: Cleis P, 1993. 47-54.
• Ryback, Timothy W. Rock around the Bloc: A History of Rock Music in Eastern Europe and the Soviet Union. Oxford: Oxford UP, 1990.
• Soja, Edward. Postmodern Geographies: The Reassertion of Space in Critical Social Theory. London: Verso, 1988.
• Taylor, Timothy D. Global Pop: World Music, World Markets. New York: Routledge, 1997.
• Toop, David. Rap Attack 2: African Rap and Global Hip Hop. London: Serpent’s Tail, 1991.
• Vila, Pablo. “Rock Nacional and Dictatorship in Argentina.” Garofalo 209-29.
• Walser, Robert. Running with the Devil: Power, Gender, and Madness in Heavy Metal Music. Hanover, NH: Wesleyan/UP of New England, 1993.
• Weinstein, Deanna. “Expendable Youth: The Rise and Fall of Youth Culture.” Adolescents. 67-85.
• White, Emily. “Revolution Girl Style Now.” Rock She Wrote. Ed. Evelyn McDonnell and Ann Powers. New York: Delta, 1995. 396-408.
• Whitely, Shiela. The Space Between the Notes: Rock and the Counter-Culture. New York: Routledge, 1992.

 

Paula Willoquet-Maricondi

Comparative Literature Department
Indiana University
pwilloqu@indiana.edu

 

Lifting a brush, a burin, a pen, or a stylus is like releasing a bite or lifting a claw.

 

–Gary Snyder

 

Striving to represent the world, we inevitably forfeit its direct presence.

 

–David Abram

 

Peter Greenaway’s incorporation of other art forms in his films has become a well-established trademark of the British artist. The terms “mixed-media” and “multi-media” have been used to describe, respectively, Greenaway’s use of different media within a work and across works and his increasing interest in “high tech” technologies, such as the Internet and CD-ROM.¹ Most film critics and art historians, in commenting on Greenaway’s work, have focused on his exploration of the potentiality of painting for the cinematic, and on his pastiche renderings of paintings by famous artists. Bridget Elliott and Anthony Purdy, for instance, note how Greenaway manipulates historical structures and genres and imitates the style of individual artists, often reproducing their paintings in the mise-en-scène (see also David Pascoe’s work). Angela Dalle Vacche, on the other hand, in her study of films that redefine art history in their composition of the cinematic image, does not discuss Greenaway’s films at all, except to explain why she does not: the particular brand of intertextuality and quotations exhibited in Greenaway’s films, she explains, “is more preoccupied with defining itself than with redefining art history” (8, my emphasis). In other words, for Dalle Vacche, Greenaway’s references to the other arts are at the service of his own self reflections about cinema.² Amy Lawrence, in her recent study of Greenaway’s feature films, shares this view of the British artist as a self-conscious “auteur” who makes art “out of ideas about art” (5).

 

I agree with Dalle Vacche’s and Lawrence’s assessments, but I would also contend that what Greenaway redefines through his “art-about-art” is, more broadly speaking, representationality itself. Greenaway’s references to art history are but particular manifestations of his comprehensive investigation of what it means to represent. Greenaway’s films explore the means through which humanity has sought to represent itself and the world–through images (paintings, drawings, photography, films), objects (architecture, sculpture), words (print, calligraphy), sounds (speech, music), and bodies (dance, sex, death).

 

I will discuss here only two of these representational means, the written word and the body, through an analysis of Greenaway’s most recent film, The Pillow Book (1996). The reading of the film I advance is one that is consonant with what I understand to be some of the fundamental preoccupations of the British artist. My reading will draw from personal conversations with Greenaway, as well as from a selection of theoretical works which I have found stimulating and useful in elucidating my approach to this film. One of the objectives of my reading is an exploration of the Oedipal resonances of the story. Drawing from David Abram’s The Spell of the Sensuous: Human Perception in a More-Than-Human World, I would also like to engage in a discussion of Greenaway’s portrayal of the written word, and of his references to ecology.

 

Abram applies phenomenology, most specifically the work of Maurice Merleau-Ponty, to an investigation of the impact of written language, particularly the phonetic alphabet, on our perception of and relation to our bodies and to the “body” of the world around us. In this study, Abram examines the origins of writing and describes writing’s subsequent gradual divorce from its natural referents–the human body and the land. What I would like to suggest in my analysis of The Pillow Book is that the split between language and body, which, Abram convincingly suggests, was brought about by alphabetic writing, is something analogous to the split, hypothesized by Lacanian theory, of the Subject from the totality of Being brought about by the Subject’s entry into the Symbolic. I further suggest that this split is the central motif of the Oedipus legend, and that this legend operates as a master narrative in our particular patriarchal civilization, a civilization that, in abandoning its roots in the living body of the Earth that nurtures it, has inscribed itself in a deadly narrative of biospheric proportions.³

 

The Pillow Book brings the written word and the body together in what might be called a “deadly embrace,” as Nagiko’s lover’s body is fashioned into a book–a pillow book. This conjunction of body and text is certainly not new in Greenaway’s cinematic corpus, and neither is its association with death. The Cook, The Thief, His Wife, and Her Lover presents us with a rather graphic death by text as Michael, the lover, is made to swallow pages of his favorite book–on the French Revolution. The Belly of An Architect makes both explicit and implicit references to deaths by books as well. Stourley Kracklite, perhaps in an attempt to come to grips with his illness, thrusts the corner of a hard-bound copy of Vesalius’ Anatomy into his stomach. The Anatomy is, of course, a book about the body–most particularly about the dead body. That this scene links the body, the book, and death–specifically Kracklite’s impending death–is made clear by the fact that the Anatomy is opened at a page “showing a half-stripped-down male corpse with the various organs and features of the stomach much in evidence” (Belly 97).⁴ That the corpse is that of a male not only links death with Kracklite but also with masculinity in general, I would argue. It is no coincidence that most of Greenaway’s male protagonists are dead at the end of the films, and this is an aspect of Greenaway’s cinema that deserves to be explored more fully, but to which I can only briefly allude here.⁵

 

The Pillow Book also links sex and text, again, not an unfamiliar coupling for Greenaway. In A Zed and Two Noughts, Greenaway introduces us to Venus de Milo, the prostitute/writer of erotic animal tales who, like Nagiko, trades sex for text. Sex and text are also, of course, linked to authoring and to taking possession, which in turn are linked to the figure of the male patriarch. Amy Lawrence notes that the centrality of the issue of possession in Prospero’s Books is indicated by the title (143), which also functions to fuse the notions of possession, patriarchal authority, and authoring with books and language. The Pillow Book introduces an interesting twist to this linkage by associating sexuality and textuality not only with a male figure–Nagiko’s father–but also with female figures–Sei Shonagon and Nagiko, herself.

 

I have argued elsewhere that Prospero’s scriptural enterprise in Prospero’s Books is, first, one of conquest and colonization, and then one of geographical and historical rewriting.⁶ Walter Ong speaks of the word as a form of action, an event or occurrence whose power to affect thinking processes might be termed magical (31-32), for it fosters abstraction and separation, alienating the knower from the known, and essentially creating these as distinct categories.⁷ Thus, as Lawrence argues, “writing makes possible the categorization of the world into encyclopedia, of people into races and types, of colonization and slavery, Ariel and Caliban” (142).⁸ Similarly, Michel de Certeau has called writing the “fundamental initiatory practice” (135), which posits the existence of a distinct and distant subject and a blank space, or page. Prospero takes the island in which he is exiled to be such a blank page waiting to be scripted by him. Through the written word, he orders the world into being in two senses: he summons it forth and imposes on it a specific structure, which he controls. Indeed, Prospero’s Books opens with a scene that suggests the written word has replaced water as the source of life. “Like God,” remarks Lawrence, “Prospero creates the world not out of a drop of water, but with a word” (140). Prospero’s world is thus a world constituted by language, not an organically evolved world. It is, then, an artifact of language and human subjectivity, and it is ruled by a consciousness. In the case of The Pillow Book, language–in the form of ink–will be substituted not only for water but also for human blood, for life itself.

 

This process of substitution is initiated when Nagiko’s father ritually inscribes a birthday greeting on his daughter’s face and neck. Greenaway calls this ritual an “incantation” (The Pillow Book 90).⁹ It is designed, I would argue, to mold the child in very specific ways, according to a familiar pre-existing script or narrative, one we have come to call the Oedipal narrative. Although the Oedipal resonances of this story are not lost on the viewers, I hope to show the full implications of reading this story as fundamentally Oedipal by linking the Oedipal legend itself to a shift in perception which, as Abrams argues, occurred when alphabetic writing became established and the spoken word began losing its connection to the human body and to the land in which both body and word are rooted.

 

This shift–from the organic connection between speech and body to a connection between speech and alphabetic writing–helped inaugurate what Jacques Derrida refers to as the subordination of writing to spoken language characteristic of Western metaphysics, where the written word is taken to be a mere “supplement to the spoken word” (Of Grammatology 7). While Derrida’s intention is to deconstruct the basis for this subordination of writing to speech, and to return to writing its disruptive potential, my desire here is to suggest that something more fundamental is lost in this process whereby speech and alphabetic writing become linked. What is lost is the sense that a material, organic body is at the source of the production of both speech and writing–whether alphabetic, hieroglyphic, or ideographic. Moreover, what is also lost is the sense that all types of bodies, not just human bodies, are capable of what might be called “speech.”

 

The logic of Derrida’s argument is that Western metaphysics privileges logos because of its proximity to the signified. Since the essence of the signified is presence, the privileging of logos amounts to a privileging of presence. This privileging of presence is, for Derrida, a privileging of univocal meaning and truth. While I agree with Derrida’s project to deconstruct the notion of logos as the carrier of universal truth, I would like to suggest that the equating of logos with universal absolute truth could only have arisen with writing, most particularly with alphabetic writing. The privileging of “speech” by Western metaphysics would then be a retroactive privileging, made possible by the very existence of writing. This privileging amounts to an appropriation of speech by subjects constituted by writing. If speech comes to have the value of truth, it is only because writing has already made possible the dissociation between a “concept” and any particular, local manifestation of what is represented by the concept. Thus, Plato can speak of “virtue” or of “beauty” independently of any particular instance or experience of a “virtuous” or “beautiful” thing or action. There is, perhaps, in Western metaphysics, a fundamental misunderstanding of what speech might have been for pre-scriptural peoples.¹⁰

 

I suggest, then, that neither logos nor grammatos ought to be privileged, for any such privileging relies on the notion of universalizable truths. Quite likely, non-scriptural cultures understand (consciously, unconsciously, or experientially) meaning and truth as only temporally and locally relevant and adequate. By separating “knowledge” from the body of the “knower” and from place, writing makes possible the abstraction of knowledge, its transportability in time and space, and consequently its universalization and permanence.

 

Moreover, alphabetic writing defined the knower as human, and the non-human world was relegated to silence and thought to be incapable of “speech.” Abram, who agrees with Derrida that there is no self-identical author legislating meaning, argues, however, that “Derrida’s critique has bite only if one maintains that the other who writes is an exclusively human Other, only if one assumes that the written text is borne by an exclusively human subjectivity” (282). Abram posits a homology between the act of reading a text and the reading of animal tracks by our indigenous ancestors, that is, a homology between our markings–writing–and those of other animals. “I am suggesting,” says Abram, “that that which lurks behind all the texts that we read is not a human subject but another animal, another shape of awareness (ultimately the otherness of animal nature itself)” (282). Derrida himself has acknowledged that our Western sense of what writing is, is rather limited and limiting. He argues, for instance, that we do not recognize as writing the actions of people who describe their acts of writing as “scratching,” “scraping,” or “drawing lines”: “To say that a people do not know how to write because one can translate the word which they use to designate the act of inscribing as ‘drawing lines,’ is that not as if one should refuse them ‘speech’ by translating the equivalent word by ‘to cry,’ ‘to sing,’ ‘to sigh’?” (Of Grammatology 123). Interestingly, in support of his own argument, Derrida goes on to cite a passage from J. Gernet’s “La Chine, aspects et fonctions psychologiques de l’écriture,” in which Gernet elucidates the multiple meanings of the Chinese word for writing, wen. Not only is wen not limited to designating writing in the narrow sense, as discussed by Derrida, but wen is also used to refer to non-human forms of inscription. Gernet’s observation that wen “applies to the veins in stones and wood, to constellations,” as well as “to the tracks of birds and quadrupeds on the ground,” and “to tattoo and even, for example, to the designs that decorated the turtle’s shell,” supports both Derrida’s and Abram’s positions (qtd. by Derrida in Of Grammatology 123). Genet even suggests that, according to Chinese tradition, the observation of these very markings produced by non-human animals is what might have suggested the invention of writing–pictographic and ideographic writing.¹¹

 

Before resuming my discussion of The Pillow Book, it is also worth noting that Nagiko’s father’s birthday greeting is a kind of gift–the gift of writing, or pharmakon. In his illuminating discussion of Plato’s Phaedrus, in which the Egyptian king Thamus refuses the gift of writing by the god Thoth (or Theuth) on the basis that it will cause people to become forgetful and threaten truth, Derrida argues that the antithetical meanings of pharmakon–poison and cure–must not be resolved in favor of one or the other. “All translations into language that are the heirs and depositaries of Western metaphysics,” explains Derrida, “thus produce on the pharmakon an effect of analysis that violently destroys it, reduces it to one of its simple elements by interpreting it, paradoxically enough, in the light of the ulterior developments it itself has made possible. Such an interpretative translation is thus as violent as it is impotent: it destroys the pharmakon but at the same time forbids itself access to it, leaving it untouched in its reserve” (Dissemination 99). While resolving the ambiguity of a word or text may reduce its richness, its plurivocality, and while I agree that it could be argued that Greenaway’s text, The Pillow Book, manages to retain a certain degree of ambiguity as to the ultimate meaning of this pharmakon, I find that there is enough evidence in the film proper and the intertexts–since, “il n’y a pas de hors-text” (Of Grammatology 158)¹²–to support the contention that writing operates here mostly as poison. Of course, Derrida himself concedes that “there is no such thing as a harmless remedy” (Dissemination 99): what may be the cure in one case is the poison in another; what may be the cure in small dosages is the poison in large dosages–this is the principle of homeopathy. Whether pharmakon is cure or poison in any particular case, and I do not mean here simply in any particular textual case, since writing is the basis for much action in the world–thus depends on the use which is made of writing as pharmakon and on how one perceives its effects. How one perceives these effects is, of course, subjectively motivated.

 

My argument here is that, in The Pillow Book, the living body is literally, not simply metaphorically, sacrificed in the name of the written word. The film allegorizes the process, described by Jean Baudrillard, of “substituting signs of the real for the real itself” (4). If an analogy is drawn between the human body and the body of the world, and between text-making and map-making, Greenaway’s film can be taken as an allegory of the process through which the map comes to replace the territory–through which, in the film, Jerome’s skin is literally fashioned into a book. Jerome’s flesh is removed, separated from the skin, and discarded as garbage.¹³ What de Certeau has said about the establishment and imposition of a national language is equally applicable here: the written language, particularly one which has been imported, “implies a distancing of the living body (both traditional and individual) and thus also of everything which remains, among the people, linked to the earth, to the place, to orality or to non-verbal tasks” (138-39). The Pillow Book can thus be taken to support Abram’s contention that written language, particularly the phonetic alphabet, has permitted a timeless and disembodied kind of “knowledge” that estranges us and alienates us from the living, sensuous world, and that ultimately becomes fatal to us and to the world. Abram uses the term “storied” (109) knowledge to refer to a way of understanding that differs from our current abstracted way of knowing, an understanding that is not dependent on a textual practice and that reflects the complex ways in which we relate to the living sensuous world around us. I will conclude this study by examining the ending of The Pillow Book and the extent to which Greenaway might be offering us some insight into this “storied” type of understanding.

 

Greenaway’s The Pillow Book is inspired by the classic 10th-century Japanese text, The Pillow Book of Sei Shonagon, a diary written by a lady-in-waiting at the court of the Heian empress, Sadako. In this diary, Sei Shonagon recounts her amorous adventures, offers aesthetic observations, and indulges in one of Greenaway’s own favorite activities: list-making. What also drew Greenaway to Sei Shonagon’s text was the Japanese author’s enthusiasm for literature and the natural world, an enthusiasm which Greenaway clearly shares.

 

Greenaway’s heroine, Nagiko Kiohara, was herself, as a child, inspired by Sei Shonagon’s Pillow Book, which her aunt read to her as part of a yearly ritual that took place on her birthday and lasted until Nagiko was 17 years old and engaged to be married. The film opens with this birthday ritual. We see Nagiko’s father gently painting a birthday greeting on her forehead, cheeks, lips, and neck, while a gramophone plays a record popular at the time Nagiko’s parents met. Nagiko’s mother, grandmother, and aunt are present as well, but mostly as witnesses (audience, readers). The father’s action is described in the filmscript as ritualized and affectionate, but also as odd and disturbing: “the child is no more, for a moment, than something to write on. And the father’s signing is a little too Godlike” (The Pillow Book 31). The father’s drawing of the letters on the girl’s face is accompanied by his recitation of an oral incantation, a spell of sorts, which works to establish the child’s identity and role within a filial narrative, one she is destined to pass on to her own child.

 

Click here to view the film clip

 

Indeed, following her father’s tradition–therefore, the patriarchal tradition–Nagiko writes a birthday greeting on her one-year old daughter’s face at the end of the film, thus bringing the story “full circle” (The Pillow Book 101).

 

My use of the word “spell” is deliberate and intended to evoke the word’s multiple meanings: to spell a word is, in a sense, to cast a magical spell. David Abram notes that the meanings of “spell” were not always as distinct as they are today for, he explains, “to assemble the letters that make up the name of a thing, in the correct order, was precisely to effect a magic, to establish a new kind of influence over that entity, to summon it forth” (133). This is precisely what Walter Ong means, I believe, when he suggests that words are events, and that they have magical powers.¹⁴ So, when Nagiko’s father writes on her face, he literally casts a spell on her:

 

When God made the first clay model of a human being, he painted the eyes, the lips, and the sex.

 

And then He painted in each person’s name lest the person should ever forget it.

 

If God approved of His creation, he breathed the painted clay-model into life by signing His own name. (The Pillow Book 31)

 

It is here, in a scene that suggests an Oedipal situation, that Nagiko is initiated into language, the Symbolic, the Law of the Father–and, consequently, into ego consciousness. Her Oedipal trajectory is linked to language in two ways: first, through her father’s writing on her face, and then, through her aunt’s reading of Sei Shonagon’s diary. From this point on, Nagiko’s life-story, the narrative of her life, will be controlled by the text which her father has written on her face. The father, as we will see, is only an intermediary, however; he is simply a messenger for the real and higher authority which is the text. As Lawrence notes in her discussion of Prospero’s Books, not only is the text a higher authority, but it will outlast the teller or writer, and even render him/her superfluous (143).

 

Subjectivity and narrative are further linked when Nagiko sees her own written-upon reflection in a mirror. Her specular experience thus takes place from within the Symbolic realm, through language. Kaja Silverman has argued that the Lacanian mirror stage, which I believe this scene is also designed to evoke, “is always mediated through language, and can only be understood in terms of organized cultural representations” (85). To dramatize the importance of this moment of self-recognition, of Nagiko’s own recognition and acceptance of herself as a Self, as an Other, as an authored subjectivity, the image reflected in the mirror is colorized, while the rest of the frame remains in black and white. Greenaway has suggested that the mixing of black and white with color photography plays with the notion that the truth is in black and white while fantasy is in color.¹⁵ One implication of this is that the colored reflection of Nagiko in the mirror is a fantasy of egocentric subjectivity which will become the reality of modern man’s and woman’s emergence into the Symbolic.

 

Nagiko is initiated into a particular role: to live out her destiny as a Subject of language and patriarchy. Furthermore, she will fulfill her role as model for other women–a “clay model” says the incantation–by becoming a fashion-model in Hong Kong, a city which is a paradigmatic symbol–a model–of modernity and progress, but also of death, as suggested by the mirroring of the city-scape in the cemetery where Jerome’s body is buried.

 

Click here to view the film clip

 

Nagiko is also duly marked by the Name of the Father, who breathes the model into being by signing His name. Through this ritual, Nagiko is constituted as a cultural Subject by means of two representational systems: the word and the image. According to Jacques Lacan’s formulation, self-recognition through representationality amounts to mis-recognition, for Subject and Being become radically split, as split as the body becomes from language with the advent of alphabetic writing. Nagiko is also quite literally framed by and within her own reflection. This framing amounts to a form of imprisonment, as the Subject is trapped in a culturally constructed image, entangled in the links of a signifying chain, perhaps the very linguistic chains that open the film and accompany the credits.

 

Click here to view the film clip

 

Greenaway’s avowed disillusionment with cinema centers on what he identifies as the double tyranny of Text and Frame, and on the loss of corporeality and physicality.¹⁶ Increasingly, in all his artistic productions, Greenaway has tried to bring the human body to the foreground. Perhaps, more than we have imagined, the cinema is a perfect reflection of our own civilization’s demand that we abide by certain scripts, that we trim ourselves as needed to fit the frame, to paraphrase Alba Bewick in A Zed and Two Noughts.¹⁷ Like any other civilization, ours is shaped by our means of expressing and representing ourselves, by our myths and legends–in short, by our narratives, be they religious, as in Genesis; scientific, as in Darwin; or mythological as in Oedipus. The difference between our civilization and primal or tribal cultures is simply that by confusing–or rather, fusing–our narratives of the world with the textual word, we have come very close to fully replacing the world with its representation. By virute of being visible, only the written word, as opposed to the spoken word, could be mistaken for a body and/or a world.

 

Although it may be true that our sense of having access to, or making contact with, what might be called “reality” is dependent on our means of “representing” reality–whether in images, mathematical formulas, or words–and, although it may also be true that thinking itself is representational, quantum physics has taught even the natural sciences that representations are never a transparent disclosure of reality. Narrative, as an instance of representation, when temporally and locally contingent, has proven useful in helping societies cope with the unknowability of the world surrounding them. I am, thus, not suggesting that we do away with narrative once and for all–even if that were possible–but that we continue reminding ourselves that our narratives never fully align with our experience of the world, and that our experience of the world never fully aligns with the world. This simply means we must be careful which narratives we construct, and which narratives we allow to become the basis for our real actions in the world.¹⁸

 

I would like to return to the Oedipus legend and to its manifestation in The Pillow Book to show that this myth has not only marked a shift in perception with the emergence of modern man and ego consciousness, as Erich Fromm, Alexander Lowen, and others have argued, but that this shift in consciousness is analogous to the one identified by Abram in his study of the evolution of alphabetic language. Lowen describes this shift as a move from the subjective to the objective position, when the human animal no longer sees itself as part of a greater whole, but as separate and thus able to view and control both inner and outer nature. Abram argues that alphabetic language made possible the development of a new sensibility which can operate in a more autonomous and isolated way–solipsistically, and independently from the body and the land. I believe all of Greenaway’s films investigate this same set of issues but that The Pillow Book, by showing the fusion of textual language and the body through the Oedipal structure, is Greenaway’s clearest but also most allegorical cinematic expression of humanity’s alienation from its own body and the body of the world. As Greenaway recently stated, “in an overall strategy which would also be a continuing characteristic of much of my cinema, I believe the body must be up there earnestly and vigorously rooting for its supremacy, text or no text” (“Body and Text”).¹⁹

 

Erich Fromm, in The Forgotten Language, suggests that the Oedipus trilogy’s dramatization of the struggle against the paternal figure had its roots in a much older struggle between the patriarchal and the matriarchal systems–a struggle which was resolved in favor of patriarchy. Similarly, Erich Neumann, in The Origin of History and Consciousness, interprets the legend as being about the ego’s rise to power and its victory over the unconscious, represented by Oedipus’ victory over the Sphinx through his use of reason, analysis, and language. Neumann takes the Sphinx to be the original Earth Mother Goddess, imported from Egypt, the giver and taker of life. He also links the figure of the Sphinx with the unconscious, the body, the earth, and nature–with the feminine–while Oedipus is linked to consciousness, the ego, language, rationality, progress, and even salvation–with masculinity. For Neumann, then, patriarchy refers to “the predominantly masculine world of spirit, sun, consciousness,” and matriarchy to “a preconscious, prelogical, and preindividual way of thinking and feeling” (168).

 

Oedipus’ patricide and incest are not, according to this reading, his real crime. In fact, Alexander Lowen argues that the “crime” for which Oedipus must be punished by blinding himself is not the transgression against the patriarchal order, but the destruction of the Sphinx, that is, the destruction of the female goddess of the matriarchal order who rules over life and death. By solving the riddle, Lowen goes on to argue, Oedipus takes control over the mysteries of the processes of life and death on which the power of the Sphinx depended. His real crime, then, is the Promethean arrogance of knowledge and power (213).

 

Oedipus thus represents the values of language, power, knowledge, possession, and progress–the very patriarchal values by which we still live today, in the East and in the West. The implication here is that an escape from the Oedipal legacy necessitates not a simple reconsideration and reassignment of gender definitions and functions, but a devaluation of the dominant traits of our culture which are associated with masculinity–that is, linearity, action, progress, and the domination of nature. Thus, Nagiko’s taking up of writing should be regarded with some skepticism, as should Georgina’s taking up of the gun in The Cook, The Thief, His Wife, and Her Lover. Pen and gun are intended to symbolize the phallus, and Greenaway explicitly links the writing instrument to the signifier of power by describing it as “a sensuous object inevitably likened to a penis” (The Pillow Book 15). The Cook and The Pillow Book seem to suggest that, if given the opportunity, women too can wield the phallus, but that mere role-reversal, in “real” life or in representational practices, contributes very little to any significant change in our civilization’s patterns of opposition and domination.

 

Let me now turn to Greenaway’s rendition of the Oedipus legend, for there is an important aspect of Nagiko’s birthday ritual which has not yet been accounted for: that is, the presence of Nagiko’s father’s publisher, the very same publisher whom Nagiko will seek when she herself, as an adult, becomes a writer like her father. On each of Nagiko’s birthdays, after the father has performed the ritual inscription on her body, he meets with his publisher for another ritual, a primal scene of sorts: the exchange of money and sex for the acceptance and publication of his latest manuscript. These sexual encounters, where the father is sodomized by the publisher, are, I believe, meant to be taken metaphorically, as an expression of the father’s acquiescence to a greater power, a power on which hinges his ability to support his family, to maintain intact the structure represented by the Oedipal trajectory. They also can be taken as a repetition of Oedipus’ real crime since they ritualize the exclusion of the mother/Mother. Allegorically, then, the publisher is the patriarchal function, as illustrated in the scene where the publisher himself takes up the brush to play God, and signs his own name on Nagiko’s neck, as her father used to do: “If God approved of His creation, he breathed the painted clay-model into life by signing His own name” (39). This occurs the year Nagiko’s father is sick and her mother is summoned to perform the birthday celebration in his place–her only action in the film–but is prevented from completing the ritual by the arrival of the publisher.

 

The first time we witness Nagiko’s birthday ritual is also the first time that Nagiko sees her father’s sexual ritual with the publisher–a primal scene of sorts which she witnesses through a sliding screen. This screen both reveals the action and hides its significance for the child. The film thus links Nagiko’s birthday celebration not only to language and specularity, but to sexuality and power. More importantly, the film also visually links all these elements to paper money by means of the superimposition of the images of the two men, a page from Sei Shonagon’s diary, and a bank note, the latter deliberately placed at the base of the image.

 

Click here to view the film clip

 

A further link between money and writing will be made, later, when Nagiko remembers enjoying the smell of paper as she enjoyed the smell of the banknote her father once gave her after a visit to the publisher’s.²⁰

 

On her sixth birthday, following the annual ritual, Nagiko is taught how to write and vows to become a writer like her father, and like Sei Shonagon. As an adult, she begins to keep her own diaries, or pillow books. After her marriage to the publisher’s nephew fails, she flees to Hong Kong, where she becomes a fashion model. She also begins to seek out lover-calligraphers, offering her body to them in exchange for their writing on it. Her body continues to serve as a page as she trades sex for text, until she meets Jerome, an English translator, who becomes her lover and who, we later learn, is also, like her father, the publisher’s lover.

 

The introduction of the character of Jerome is of great significance, both to Nagiko’s life and to my argument. It is after meeting Jerome that Nagiko takes up the pen and trades her position as a writing surface to become the writing instrument, or as Greenaway puts it, she becomes the pen and not the paper. The significance of Jerome to the present argument is that it is through him that the issue of oral languages is explicitly introduced into the film, which has up until now dealt with language mostly as writing and image. Although Greenaway goes to great lengths to draw our attention to the spoken word–to its rhythms and cadences–by leaving much of the spoken dialogue untranslated, and by introducing multiple languages and dialects, he also dramatizes the death of oral languages by drawing our attention to those languages that only exist today in written form.

 

When we first meet Jerome, we learn that he speaks four languages, including Yiddish. Later in the sequence, Nagiko asks Jerome to write on her breast, in Yiddish. She asks, “What’s Yiddish for breast?” Jerome then proceeds to write BRUSTEN, the Yiddish for breast, in capital roman letters just above her breast. The significance of this episode is four-fold.

 

First, the episode immediately follows a sequence in which Nagiko had been written on with invisible ink by a young calligrapher. In response to Nagiko’s dismay at not being able to read the writing on her body, the calligrapher points out that “some cultures permit no images, perhaps some cultures ought to permit no visible text” (57). This commentary is further emphasized in the filmscript by the fact that the calligrapher is said to be pointing to a television showing a documentary on Islamic calligraphy, as he makes this remark. There are other indications in the film that Greenaway is aware of the implications, the effects, perhaps even the dangers, of the rise and predominance of written language. The film goes to great lengths, for instance, to dramatize the fact that none of the writing is permanent–that is, until the very last scene, when we are briefly shown that a permanent tattoo now covers Nagiko’s entire chest area. In fact, up until that point, the writing on bodies is shown to be water-soluble: the rain, a bath, or even the lick of a tongue dissolves it. In this context, it is interesting to note that the script calls for a scene which was shot but not included in the commercially released film. In the script, the calligrapher hands Nakigo’s maid an onion before he leaves. Surmising that perhaps the onion juice will reveal the invisible writing on Nagiko’s body, the maid rubs the onion over the body of the young model. Although the juice from the onion fails to reveal the writing on the body, it causes Nagiko to shed tears which, as they splash on her body, magically expose the letters. Once again, the body itself–its fluids–is shown to be the agent of language. The agents of language here are tears, however. Thus, the emergence of written language is associated with the shedding of tears–with grief, pain, and loss.

 

Since the release of The Pillow Book, Greenaway has often emphasized in discussions and interviews that the writing on bodies is non-permanent: “We have been at pains in the film,” he explains, “to insist on writing in a non-abusive, non penetrative way with brush and ink, infinitely washable, as is made evident several times in the plot of the film” (“Body and Text”). One of Nagiko’s lovers, an “elderly talkative calligrapher,” says the script (54, my emphasis), is shown to be an advocate for the impermanence of writing by arguing that “you should be allowed to rub out and start again, it means that you are human. The purists are tedious, they tell you a mistake is like an enduring black mark. Nonsense–better to be human than some infernal machine never going wrong” (54). As if further to assure us of the impermanence of script, Nagiko walks out onto the verandah, after the calligrapher is finished with his task, and allows the rain to wash away the writing, “whilst the elderly calligrapher watches his literary efforts trickle away down her body. He shakes his head in acceptance, all the while taking gulps of cold green tea” (54). Another way to put this notion across is simply to say, as Greenaway did in relation to The Belly of An Architect, that “man-made art is denied the immortality status” (qtd. in Woods 253).

 

Second, BRUSTEN is significant also because it is the first non-oriental word inscribed on Nagiko’s body, and thus signals a break with oriental calligraphy. The significance of this shift can be better understood if we remember that oriental calligraphy is not only a form of writing which fuses the pictorial and the linguistic, but is one of the few scripts that, albeit abstracted and stylized, still retains some ties to the phenomenal world. Greenaway’s use of oriental ideograms in this film is an expression of his ongoing efforts to find a suitable union of image and text in his elaboration of a non-narrative cinema. The ideogram embodies this fusion, for, as Greenaway explains, “when you read text, you see image, when you view the image you read text. Would not this be an exciting module, a template, a basis on which to reconsider some cinema practice?” (“Body and Text”).

 

By dramatizing this shift from an ideographic to an alphabetic–and, thus, completely abstract system of writing–and simultaneously calling our attention to the body, could Greenaway be urging us to reconsider something more than our cinematic practices? In effect, might he not be suggesting that we reconsider all of our representational practices, and, more specifically, our own use of language to represent ourselves and the world? Might he not be inviting us to rediscover the roots of our language in the organic world and in our bodies? Such a notion is certainly echoed by the “talkative calligrapher” discussed above, for he also insists that the word’s relation to the thing it names not be arbitrary, but mimetic: “The word for smoke should look like smoke–the word for rain should look like rain” (54). As Abram and others have argued, the oriental ideographic script retains some ties to the phenomenal world of sensory perception. The Chinese ideograph for “red,” for instance, is composed of abbreviated forms of the pictographs for things that are red–a rose, a cherry, or rust, for example (111).

 

The progressive movement from a pictographic model of writing to the ideogram, and later to the rebus, to the Semitic alephbeth, and finally to the Greek alphabet, carries with it an analogous movement toward abstraction and distancing, and, as articulated by Saussurian linguistics, toward arbitrariness. Drawing on Maurice Merleau-Ponty’s theories of perception as participatory, and of human language as carnal and rooted in sensorial experience, Abram goes on to show how the linguistic model adopted by the West encourages, even promotes, “a massive distrust of sensorial experience while valorizing an abstract realm of ideas hidden behind or beyond the sensory appearances” (72). With these shifts in what might be called “technologies of expression” come shifts in consciousness. It is precisely this technologically produced consciousness which, I believe, Greenaway’s film invites us to investigate. Greenaway’s interest in other forms of technologically produced expressions and representations–the Internet, CD-ROM, electronically produced layering of images–seems a natural extension of his fascination with the effects of writing on being and on the body.

 

In Technopoly: The Surrender of Culture to Technology, Neil Postman argues that any new technology does not simply add or subtract something from the culture, but changes everything. Technologies–and Postman sees written language as one of our most fundamental technologies–contain their particular ideological bias and, thus, have an effect on the structure of our interests, on the character of our symbols, and on the nature of our communities. That is, technologies alter what we think about, what we think with, and the environment in which our thinking takes place. In other words, technologies alter the ways we perceive and construct reality (13-22). Abram contends that “today we are simply unable to discern with any clarity the manner in which our own perceptions and thoughts are being shifted by our sensory involvement with electronic technologies, since any thinking that seeks to discern such a shift is itself subject to the very effect that it strive to thematize” (115). I would agree with both positions insofar as we maintain our commitment to an ideological predisposition against questioning what we regard as the fundamental capacity that distinguishes the human from the non-human animal–language. As Postman notes, language appears to us to be a natural expression emanating from within us so “we believe it to be a direct, unedited, unbiased, apolitical expression of how the world really is.” He further adds that a sentence functions much like a machine, in so far as it “re-creates the world in its own image” (125).

 

The radical distinction between humans and non-humans on the basis of the former’s unique capacity for language is challenged by current research on the linguistic capacity of chimpanzees, for instance. Under experimental conditions, chimpanzees have been shown to have more linguistic capacities than they actually use in the wild. The effects that such findings will have on the way we think about ourselves, on our uses of language, and therefore, on how we imagine and live out our relationship to the world and to other beings is, however, uncertain.²¹ Abram’s intention is to propose an alternative to seeing language as a mere code, as having an arbitrary connection to the world–and, thus, as being truly separable from it–and as being detached from the act of speaking, that is, from the body. To think of human language in that way, argues Abram, is to justify our seeing humans as significantly different from other beings. This, he argues, has in turn justified “the increasing manipulation and exploitation of nonhuman nature by, and for, (civilized) humankind” (77). I believe Greenaway is thinking along analogous lines:

 

Darwin's evolutionary theories have dramatically obliged us to look at our animal origins and our physical selves with new eyes. Our ideas of corporeality and sexuality have to be adjusted with new sympathies [...] In the light of this fact, we have been obliged to re-examine notions of the greatest sensitivity, to reconsider such dearly-held concepts as conscience, spirit and the soul, concepts which we pride ourselves on possessing to make us a superior animal, capable of communicating with even greater forms of intelligence, mortal or immortal [...] By the final use of his thinking, Darwin was sure that despite any heartfelt wish for the contrary, man was not the sum and end of the evolutionary process, and that, in every likelihood, homo sapiens was, in evolutionary terms, no more than a link that would continue after him, and probably without relationship to him, since evolutionary progress had seen so many dead ends, cul de sacs, and abortive developments, especially in the highly developed species. (qtd. in Woods 64)

 

Like Darwin before him, Greenaway applies thought to the critical investigation of thinking. Greenaway is also deploying multiple representational means to ask critical and crucial questions about representationality itself. Above all, he invites “new sympathies” with the non-human world by recasting man’s position in that world. He reconnects language to the body by showing that oral and written expression emanate from the body. Finally, Greenaway reveals the dangers to the body of substituting an abstracted and arbitrary body of language for the expressive sensorial body.

 

A third way in which the word BRUSTEN contributes to our understanding of Greenaway’s meditations on language and representationality is that, as Greenaway has pointed out in a personal conversation, Yiddish was mostly an oral language. When first committed to paper, it was written in Hebrew. The speakers of Yiddish were also, apparently, forbidden to use the language to describe body parts. Jerome subverts these interdictions associated with spoken Yiddish by writing the name of a body part on a body part, and by using the phonetic alphabet. Like Prospero at the beginning of Prospero’s Books, Jerome commits to writing a word which was meant to be spoken, and thus helps establish a gap, or disconnection, between language and the body. This disjuncture is further intensified with the advent of mechanical writing, which puts the body at one further remove from the written word by introducing the keyboard as mediating device between the gesture of the hand and the word on the page (and on the screen). Until print, even alphabetic writing, after all, retains a vestigial connection to the body by literally leaving visible traces of the body’s presence. As Abram notes, “we may be sure that the shapes of our consciousness are shifting in tandem with the technologies that engage our senses–much as we can now begin to discern, in retrospect, how the distinctive shape of Western philosophy was born of the meeting between the human senses and the alphabet in ancient Greece” (115). This is precisely Postman’s point that “language is pure ideology” (123).

 

Lastly, BRUSTEN also suggests breath, for it is the word for the part of the body that houses the human breath–the very breath that animates both the body and the spoken word. The Semitic text, before the introduction of vowel indicators in the 7th century A.D., had to be read aloud, the reader’s breath being necessary to animate the written text. Vowels are but sounded breath, and the Hebrew interdiction against the representation of vowels has been explained by the fact that the ancient Semites regarded breath as sacred and mysterious, and thus inseparable from the holy breath. Abram suggests that Hebrew scribes may have avoided creating letters to represent the sounded breath so as not to make a visible representation of an invisible and sacred force (241).

 

Greenaway has compressed the evolution of language from its spoken origins to its alphabetical form in this one word, BRUSTEN. He has also traced the development of language as something emanating from, or produced by, the body to something which now produces the body, scripts it, and envelops it as a second layer of skin. Brody Neuenschwander, Greenaway’s calligrapher for Prospero’s Books and The Pillow Book, explains that the particular script style chosen for the writing on the bodies in The Pillow Book was gridded and typographic in quality, so as to contrast more dramatically with “the irregular curves of the body, becoming like a second layer over the skin” (quoted in Owen 29). As Jerome’s fate ultimately demonstrates, however, this superimposition of text over body introduced into the film with Nagiko’s birthday rituals becomes a fatal substitution of text for body–as the black ink Jerome drinks in a quasi-suicidal gesture is substituted for his own blood. Here, pharmakon, in the form of ink, works quite literally as the poison that kills Jerome.

 

Each linguistic development–from the early ideograms, to rebuses, to the Semitic aleph-beth, to the Greek alphabet–introduces a new level of abstraction and separation, or distance, between language and the body, and between human culture and the rest of nature. Our understanding of and engagement with the world has been radically altered as we have displaced our sensory participation in its three-dimentionality with a two-dimensional surface–a wall, a clay tablet, a sheet of paper, a computer screen, or a movie screen. Our semiotic system, which was once intimately linked to our bodies and to the more-than-human-life-world, is now a mere abstract code, having an arbitrary connection to the world, and is, therefore, detachable from both the act of speaking and the geographical location which once gave rise to the stories our ancestors told. For primal cultures, storytelling serves to wed the human community to the land, which itself works as a mnemonic trigger. Before the invention of writing, says Abram, language was quite literally not only rooted in the body of the speaker, but in a particular soil: “in the absence of any written analogue to speech, the sensible, natural environment remains the primary visual counterpart of spoken utterance, the visible accompaniment of all spoken meaning” (139-40). Writing for us has replaced the land as referent and as the visual counterpart of speech. Whereas the landscape operates as a mnemonic trigger for oral peoples and weds them to the land, the written text makes possible the preservation of cultural stories independently of the land. Abram talks about the written stories of the Hebrew tribes as a kind of “portable homeland for the Hebrew people” (195), who found themselves in the difficult position of trying to preserve their stories while being cut off from the land for many generations. It is thus understandable that one of the central motifs of the Hebrew Bible is exile or displacement. It is also understandable that what makes Judeo-Christian religions so universalizable is their transportability in the form of a book.

 

Moreover, once a written tradition becomes established, the reasons for remaining bound to a particular place are weakened. The devastating effects this has had on the land and on our relationship to the land is a topic of great concern for us today, and one that needs to be explored more fully in relation to Greenaway, I believe. It is no accident that The Pillow Book makes more explicit references to ecological questions than any other film by Greenaway, and that it links these references to writing. Although a fuller development of ecological themes in Greenaway is the focus of another, longer project, a few examples of its connection to writing in The Pillow Book can be offered here.

 

Nagiko is often linked to natural elements, such as gardens, water, and even whales. These elements are often depicted as constrained, framed, or enclosed. Gardens, but particularly the Japanese garden, are obvious examples of a manicured, molded nature–a nature shaped by human hands, according to a “model-in-thought,” to use Merleau-Ponty’s expression (169). Water, when not contained in the form of pools or lakes, flows freely from the sky as rain, and, as we have noted, is often associated by the film with cleansing rituals–such as baths–and with the washing away of writing. Nagiko is also associated with whales by means of the two sculptures of the tail flukes of whales that adorn her and her husband’s home. In one of the publicity stills for the film, reprinted in the script, these flukes are clearly linked to imprisonment and death: the room is lit in such a way as to cast multiple horizontal shadows against the back wall, suggesting prison bars. Superimposed on these shadows are the shadows of Nagiko’s husband’s phallic arrows (he has pretensions to archery), which are reminiscent of harpoons–particularly when juxtaposed with the image of the whales.

 

Another reference to whales–and to their real and symbolic importance in the film and to environmental activism–appears in the dialogue. The “talkative” calligrapher, advocate for the impermanence of writing, explains that his brother works for the forestry commission and would like to make green ink “a standard colour for all forestry business” (54). He then goes on to link writing, vision, and whales through the following remark: “I asked him what colour ink he would use if he gave up eating whale meat and worked for a whaling company. He said whales were colour blind” (54). However ironical and playful the reference, its political weight cannot be denied–the Japanese whaling industry and Greenpeace would, without a doubt, be sensitive to it, but for different reasons, naturally.²² Shortly after this scene, Nagiko is kidnapped by a gang of nihilist youth clad in black (they are described as “anti-Japanese, anti-American, anti-Ecology,” in the script, 61), while she is at home having breakfast with Bara, one of her lover-calligraphers and an advocate of “clean living ecological purity” (59) who writes ecological slogans on her body.

 

Since she was a young child, Nagiko herself has been linked to writing in multiple and opposed ways. As an adult, she is linked to both its production and its destruction. At one point in the film, she attempts to drown her typewriter; twice, her writings are destroyed by fire, the second time through her own action. In his films, Greenaway has subjected books to every conceivable form of destruction: by water, earth, wind, fire, and ingestion. The Pillow Book also connects Nagiko’s destruction of her own writings with the destruction of forests: the fire that consumes her books also burns down the wooden columns in her house, columns that are deliberately made to look like tree trunks. At other points in the film, the print industry itself, represented by Nagiko’s father’s publisher, is associated with deforestation and ecological holocaust.

 

The ending of The Pillow Book suggests that language is now fully rooted in books, and that its connection to the body is, at best, superficial, skin deep. It also suggest that the body has been fully scripted by our civilization’s narrative, an Oedipal narrative, as demonstrated by the permanent tattoo we see on Nagiko’s chest as she breast-feeds her child. This is disconcerting, given that the film has gone to great lengths to convince us that the writing on bodies is impermanent and soluble. Moreover, the human body, as represented by Jerome’s body, and the body of nature, as represented by the Bonsai tree adorning Nagiko’s living room, have been thoroughly bound–Jerome’s into a book, and the tree into a root-bound potted plant. That these two bodies have succumbed to the same fate, that both have been texted, is indicated by Nagiko’s placing–burying–of Jerome’s Pillow Book in the soil of the Bonsai tree. Having broken the connection between language and the body, says Greenaway, “we have set up for ourselves a bundle of trouble. It intimates a yet further denial of the physical self to the conveniences of the non-corporeal world, and even greater reliance on the machine ” (“Body and Text”).

 

That the film ends with the flowering of the Bonsai tree, and that this flowering takes place outside the diegesis of the film, may be taken, allegorically, as a reminder that human expression remains linked to, and dependent on, the human and more-than-human body of the world and its eternal cycles of death and rebirth. While the flowering of the tree takes place outside the narrative proper of the film, some ambiguity remains as to the fate of the tree, since, as the tree begins to flower, the credits begin to roll. Interestingly, the credits seem to “make room” for the tree, at least for awhile, by being pushed to the margins of the image, the edges of the frame.

 

If there is a hopeful message at the end of this film, it lies in our recognition that, to quote Greenaway once again, “the body must be up there earnestly and vigorously rooting for its supremacy, text or no text.” As the Thirteenth Book, “the book to end all books” (The Pillow Book 112), inscribed on the body of the sumo-wrestler sent to kill the publisher, says: “‘I am old,’ said the book. ‘I am older,’ said the body” (The Pillow Book 112).

 

The book to end all books.

The final book.

After this, there is no more writing

no more publishing.

The publisher should retire

The eyes grow weak, the light dims.

The eyes squint. They blink.

The world is prey to a failing of focus.

The ink grows fainter but the print grows
larger.

In the end, the pages only whisper in deference.

Desire lessens.

Although dreams of love still linger,

The hopes of consummation grow less,

What could be the end of all these hopes and
desires?

Here comes the end.

("The Thirteenth Book," The Pillow Book 112)

 

Notes

 

This is an expanded version of a paper delivered at the Modern Language Association’s 1997 Conference. I would like to thank PMC for expressing interest in having me expand the essay, and its anonymous readers for their suggestions.

 

1. See, for instance, a call for papers for a 1998 MLA session on the roles of mixed and multi-media in Peter Greenaway’s works. Greenaway has produced, so far, three mixed-media operas (Rosa: A Horse Drama, 100 Objects to Represent the World: A Prop-Opera, and Christopher Columbus) that make extensive use of cinematic projection. He is currently working on a mega-cinematic project, The Tulse Luper Suitcases, which will include an eight-hour long film, a television series, a CD-ROM component, and an Internet site to be updated daily. Unless otherwise specified, all comments by Greenaway and information regarding his future projects were obtained during conversations with the artist.

 

2. In keeping with this focus, Greenaway’s new film, 8 1/2 Women, to be released at Cannes in 1999, proclaims itself to be an homage to both Federico Fellini and Jean-Luc Godard, and is about the making of a film (interview with the author, Rio de Janeiro, Brazil, September 1998).

 

3. For a related treatment of this question, see my “God, Art, and the Gospel: The Construction of the Heterosexual Couple According to Godard,” forthcoming in Film/Literature Quarterly.

 

4. For an interesting discussion of books and bodies in Greenaway, see Bridget Elliott’s and Anthony Purdy’s “Artificial Eye/Artificial You: Getting Greenaway or Mything the Point?”

 

5. The most significant exception to this is Prospero. Although Prospero does not die, he does drown his books and relinquish control over the island and its inhabitants. In a conversation, Greenaway explained his attitude toward his male protagonists as follows: “And film after film after film, my distrust, I suppose, of the male hero, the macho behavior, the vulgarity, the philistinism… I suppose you could take these theories a lot further. Basically, I would support the notion of the female over the male; I always find females far more exciting and entertaining. Females are on the cusp now of the greatest revolution that is happening in the world; it’s not political, it’s not capitalistic, it has to do finally with some sense of emancipation of the female which has never been present before in our civilisation” (Interview with the author, Indianapolis, April 28, 1997). In light of this comment, we can only await with much anticipation Greenaway’s treatment in his next film, 8 1/2 Women, of the protagonists’ obsessions with the women in Fellini’s and Godard’s films.

 

6. See my “Aimé Césaire’s A Tempest and Peter Greenaway’s Prospero’s Books as Ecological Rereadings and Rewritings of Shakespeare’s The Tempest,” forthcoming in Reading the Earth: New Directions in the Study of Literature and Environment.

 

7.Jacques Derrida too has referred to the word, to writing, as an “event,” rather than merely a “program”–although his conclusions regarding the impact of the word-as-event on Being are quite different from those of Ong. Geoffrey Bennington’s “biography” of Derrida, like many of Derrida’s own texts (Margins of Philosophy and Dissemination, for example) is meant to be an “event” that offers surprises, and remains indeterminate and unpredictable. In the running commentary by Derrida that parallels the progression of Bennington’s text, Derrida writes: ” […] for it is true that if I succeed in surprising him [Bennington] and surprising his reader, this success, success itself, will be valid not only for the future but also for the past for by showing that every writing to come cannot be engendered, anticipated, preconstructed from this matrix, I would signify to him in return that something in the past might have been withdrawn, if not in its content at least in the sap of the idiom, from the effusion of the signature […]” (32).

 

8. Derrida, once again, would argue that the prison house of language, of writing, is the book, not writing itself. Derrida’s challenge to the authority of the book is offered as a challenge to what he perceives to be Western metaphysics’ prioritizing of speech over writing, of presence over absence. The book represents a totality of the signifier that relies on the notion that a “totality constituted by the signified preexists it, supervises its inscriptions and its signs and is independent of it in its ideality” (Of Grammatology 18). A Derridian reading of Greenaway’s Prospero’s Books, for instance, would see Prospero’s books as quasi-living organisms, or as events–always in process, always multiple, unfixable, without origin, and without end. The encyclopedic nature of Prospero’s books, as portrayed by Greenaway, would, from this perspective, serve to challenge this notion of the book as a fixed, unchanging, totality. While I am all in favor of challenging the notion of the book as a fixed totality, the Derridian reading of Prospero’s Books which I am suggesting here poses a grave danger: it regards the island on which Prospero is exiled–the island which he remakes and populates with mythological figures out of his books–as the product of textual inscriptions, as itself a text, in effect. We are uncannily close here to a conception of the world as the product of discourse, and of consciousness. While this might be in keeping with the Judeo-Christian notion that “in the beginning was the Word,” the ethical and ecological implications of conceiving the world as the product of discourse, in effect, as a representation, are tremendous.

 

9. For “incantation,” hear also inkcantation. I have to thank Larry W. Riggs for pointing out this double-entendre following my reading aloud of an earlier version of this paper at the 1997 MLA Conference.

 

10. While Derrida is not suggesting that writing preceded speech in the evolution of language, he is making a case for a conception of writing as something that exceeds phonetic notations, that is, as “arche-writing.” “If writing is no longer understood in the narrow sense of linear and phonetic notation, it should be possible to say that all societies capable of producing, that is to say of obliterating, their proper names, and of bringing classificatory difference into play, practice writing in general. No reality or concept would therefore correspond to the expression ‘society without writing’” (Of Grammatology 109). The notion of a “society without writing,” Derrida goes on to argue, arises out of an “ethnocentric, misconception of writing” (109). The point could also be made, however, that to expand the notion of writing so as to include all forms of classificatory differences is an instance of ethnocentric projection. According to this logic, there is nothing that is not a text (“il n’y a pas de hors-text,” see note 12). The danger of this kind of thinking, to my mind, is that it authorizes seeing the world as a text: “the Book of Nature”–as an authored, readable, rearrangeable construct, awaiting the intervention of a reading Subject who will give it life, so to speak. While, for Derrida, a text’s meaning is not fixed nor univocal, text itself–and particularly the printed text, that is, one which no longer even evokes the presence of a body behind the script–appears to us as visible, tangible, fixed marks on a page. I cannot help but wonder what would be the most effective way of minimizing our civilization’s destructive impact on the environment: whether to adopt Derrida’s view of text as plurivocal–which I agree it is–and continue regarding the world as a text, or to dispense altogether with the analogy between text and world.

 

11. This is not the same as to say that the world is a text. To attribute “writing” to non-human beings may also be an instance of anthropomorphic projection. It need not be an instance of anthropocentrism, however. Abram would content that this might, in fact, help break down the rigid boundaries between the human and the non-human worlds, and foster a more empathetic rapport with our fellow creatures. To a certain extent, however, the same caveat brought up above in relation to Derrida applies here.

 

12. I am playing with the plurivocality of the expression. In note 10 above I used the expression to suggest that if there is nothing outside text, then all is text. Here I am suggesting that the text which I am discussing, The Pillow Book, is not limited to the film in a narrow sense: it includes both the filmed and the printed versions of the story (and the film version would also include footage shot but not used in the final released version), as well as all the imaginable intertexts.

 

13. The subtexts for Greenaway’s thematic treatment of the body as texted, as representation, and of death by text, are multiple: they range from Kafka’s “In the Penal Colony,” where the penalty for disobedience takes the form of death by a machine, the “Harrow,” that writes on the body of the accused, slowly but eventually killing him, to Lewis Carroll, one of Greenaway’s favorite writers along with Jorge Luis Borges. Of note are Carroll’s stories Sylvie and Bruno Concluded and The Hunting of the Snark, both of which are allegories of the implications of substituting maps for territories, representations for organic “reality.” The former has to do with an astonishing map drawn up on a scale of one mile to the mile which covers the entire territory of a farm, thus shading the crops from the life-giving sun. The latter is a blank map, which, in covering the territory, erases its features and renders it blank, like an empty page. In both cases, the body of the land is rendered barren.

 

A subtext for Greenaway’s treatment of the flaying of Jerome’s body might be Titian’s The Flaying of Marsyas (c. 1570), depicting the Phrygian satyr Marsyas being flayed alive as a consequence of having lost a musical duel with the god Apollo. David Richard’s reading of this painting is consonant with my reading of the transformation of Jerome’s body into a textual representation: “the painting is paradigmatic of a recurrent ‘crisis’ of representation which lies deep in the platonic tradition of European art and interpretation. Western art is constructed upon this problem of representing that which it cannot, while effectively dismissing the actual body as an inconsequential means to the end of an impossible representation” (13).

 

14. “Oral peoples commonly think of names (one kind of words) as conveying power over things. […] First of all, names do give human beings power over what they name: without learning a vast store of names, one is simply powerless to understand, for example, chemistry and to practice chemical engineering. And so with all other intellectual knowledge. Secondly, chirographic and typographic folk tend to think of names as labels, written or printed tags imaginatively affixed to an object named. Oral folk have no sense of a name as a tag, for they have no idea of a name as something that can be seen. Written or printed representations of words can be labels; real, spoken words cannot be” (Ong 33).

 

15. Greenaway has made this point several times in lectures given while touring the U.S. to promote the film. For more on this point and for a discussion of other technical aspects of The Pillow Book, see William Owen, “Bodies, Text and Motion.”

 

16. In 1996, Greenaway staged an exhibition at the Gallery Fortlaan, in Belgium, entitled “The Tyranny of the Frame.” See also his The Stairs/Geneva: The Location.

 

17. “A fine epitaph: here lies a body cut down to fit the picture,” says Alba, after having her second leg amputated by Van Meegeren, the Zoo surgeon with aspirations to being a Dutch painter (A Zed and Two Noughts 107). Earlier in the film, after being fitted with a mechanical–fake–leg and asked to wear a replica of the dress–another fake–which appears in Vermeer’s “The Music-lesson,” Alba protests: “I’m an excuse for medical experiments and art history” (A Zed and Two Noughts 77).

 

Greenaway has also produced a series of paintings, The Framed Life (1989), which feature “frames” as their primary content and organizing principle. The text accompanying the exhibition of some of these paintings at the SESC Vila Mariana in São Paulo, Brazil (15 July – 17 August, 1998) suggests that life events and social roles–social narratives and myths like the Oedipus legend, for example–might be regarded as framing devices: “Since all pictorial art, all performance disciplines, and the moving images are restricted to the frame, we can say this is also the case with reality. The series The Framed Life was to do just that; squeeze a life into a frame. Conception, birth, childhood, puberty, sex, love, marriage, adultery, maturity, illness, senility, death–all held together in a fixed rectangle.” For reproductions of some of these paintings, see Peter Greenaway, Papers, Editions Dis Voir, 1990; Leon Steinmetz and Peter Greenaway, The World of Peter Greenaway, Journey Editions, 1995; and the 1998 catalogue to accompany the opera 100 Objects to Represent the World: A Prop-Opera (São Paulo and Rio de Janeiro, Brazil, August 6-9 and August 14-17).

 

18. Quantum physics has reminded us of something which, according to Catherine Wilson, microscopists in the early 17th century were forced to confront, even as they strove to find means of describing the subvisible world of nature. According to Wilson, these early scientists were disappointed with the contributions made by the microscope, for they had to recognize that the images that it revealed were fundamentally different from the reality under scrutiny.

 

19. All quotations from “Body and Text” refer to a lecture by Greenaway. I would like to thank Peter Greenaway for making the text of this lecture available to me.

 

20. The script reads: “Nagiko’s father takes out a bank-note (1,000 yen) and gives it to his daughter, who rubs it between her fingers and then looks at it closely. Bringing it up to her nose, she sniffs it. Her glance is absent for a few moments as she concentrates on catching the scent of the new bank-note. Its smell makes a strong impression on her” (38). Printed paper money is, of course, the universal proxy and the ultimate abstraction.

 

21. Jim Nollman, director of Interspecies Communication, Inc., and author of The Charged Border: Where Whales and Humans Meet, argues that “interspecies communication is far more common in nature than biology warrants. Whether it occurs at any given moment has less to do with intelligence than with timing and sensitivity. It depends on how willing we are, as individuals and as a culture, to seek out the unknown, push beyond the quantifiable, and adopt new, ethically based ways for studying the possibilities. Orthodox scientists say this view of interspecies communication reeks of anthropomorphism. But perhaps this criticism is handy obfuscation that serves to uphold the dogma that keeps humans above and separate from the rest of nature” (“Secret Language” 100).

 

22. David Ehrenfeld notes that quick profits from the commercial exploitation of whales, to the point of extinction can be turned into greater profits than if the whales were captured at a rate commensurate with their ability to survive as a species (202). Ehrenfeld also recounts a conversation he had with a fellow scientist who was deeply concerned about the survival of a species of great whale he was studying. Ehrenfeld asked this scientist why, if he was so concerned with protecting this whale population from whalers, he was publishing maps and descriptions of its exact location. The man replied that “he couldn’t withhold scientific truth, even if it meant that the whales could suffer for it” (248). This seems to me another instance of prioritizing the map over the territory, the representation of life in the form of scientific “knowledge” about life, over life itself.

Works Cited

 

• Abram, David. The Spell Of the Sensuous: Perception and Language in a More-Than-Human World. New York: Vintage Books, 1997.
• Baudrillard, Jean. Simulations. New York: Semiotext(e) Inc., 1983.
• Bennington, Geoffrey and Jacques Derrida. Jacques Derrida. Trans. Geoffrey Bennington. Chicago and London: U of Chicago P, 1991.
• Dalle Vacche, Angela. Cinema and Painting: How Art is Used In Film. Austin: U of Texas P, 1996.
• Derrida, Jacques. Of Grammatology. Trans. Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak. 1967. Baltimore, London: The Johns Hopkins UP, 1976.
• —. Dissemination. Trans. Barbara Johnson. 1972. Chicago: U of Chicago P, 1981.
• Elliott, Bridget, and Anthony Purdy. “Artificial Eye/Artificial You: Getting Greenaway or Mything the Point?” Literature and the Body. Ed. Anthony Purdy. Amsterdam and Atlanta, GA: Rodopi, 1992. 178-211.
• —. Peter Greenaway: Architecture and Allegory. London: Academy Editions, 1997.
• Ehrenfeld, David. The Arrogance of Humanism. Oxford: Oxford UP, 1978.
• Fromm, Erich. The Forgotten Language. New York: Rinehart & Co., 1951.
• Greenaway, Peter. The Pillow Book. Paris: Dis Voir, 1996.
• —. “Peter Greenaway on The Pillow Book.” Sight and Sound (Nov. 1996): 14-17.
• —. The Stairs/Geneva: Location. London: Merrell Holberton, 1994.
• —. The Belly Of An Architect. London: Faber and Faber, 1988.
• —. A Zed & Two Noughts. London: Faber and Faber, 1986.
• Lawrence, Amy. The Films of Peter Greenaway. Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 1997.
• Lowen, Alexander. Fear of Life. New York: Collier Books, 1980.
• Merleau-Ponty, Maurice. The Primacy of Perception And Other Essays on Phenomenological Psychology, the Philosophy of Art, History and Politics. Evanston: Northwestern UP, 1964.
• Neumann, Erich. The Origin and History of Consciousness. New York: Pantheon Books, 1954.
• Nollman, Jim. The Charged Border: Where Whales and Humans Meet. New York: Henry Holt and Company, Inc., forthcoming April 1999. —. “The Secret Language of the Wild: What Animals Could Tell Us if We’d Only Listen.” Utne Reader 86 (March-April 1998): 40-45, 100.
• Ong, Walter. Orality and Literacy. The Technologizing of the Word. London, New York: Routledge, 1996 [1982].
• Owen, William. “Bodies, Text and Motion.” Eye 6 (1996): 24-31.
• Pascoe, David. Peter Greenaway: Museums and Moving Images. London: Reaktion Books, 1997.
• Postman, Neil. Technopoly: The Surrender of Culture to Technology. New York: Vintage Books, 1992.
• Richards, David. Masks of Difference: Cultural Representations in Literature, Anthropology and Art. Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 1994.
• Silverman, Kaja. “Kaspar Hauser’s ‘Terrible Fall’ into Narrative.” New German Critique 24-25 (1981-82): 73-93.
• Steinmetz, Leon, and Peter Greenaway. The World of Peter Greenaway. Boston: Journey Editions, 1995.
• Willoquet-Maricondi, Paula. “Aimé Césaire’s A Tempest and Peter Greenaway’s Prospero’s Books as Ecological Rereadings and Rewritings of Shakespeare’s The Tempest.” Reading the Earth: New Directions in the Study of Literature and the Environment. Ed. Michael P. Branch et al. Moscow, ID: U of Idaho P, 1998. 247-69.
• —. “God, Art, and the Gospel: The Construction of the Heterosexual Couple According to Godard.” Film/Literature Quarterly. Forthcoming.
• Wilson, Catherine. The Invisible World: Early Modern Philosophy and the Invention of the Microscope. Princeton, N.J.: Princeton UP, 1995.
• Woods, Alan. Being Naked, Playing Dead: The Art of Peter Greenaway. Manchester: Manchester UP, 1996.

 

Lee Morrissey

Department of English
Clemson University
lmorris@CLEMSON.EDU

 

More than thirty years after Jacques Derrida first read his essay “Structure, Sign, and Play in the Discourse of the Human Sciences” at the Johns Hopkins Conference on “The Language of Criticism and the Sciences of Man,” it may seem redundant to return to the “originary” moment of its spectacularly successful–and simultaneously remarkably simplified–American reception. However, now that, reportedly, “deconstruction… is dead in literature departments today”–as Jeffrey Nealon writes in Double Reading: Postmodernism after Deconstruction–it may be possible to reconsider its “birth,” particularly the commonly accepted notion that Derrida’s work avoids, overlooks, or prevents a relationship with history and/or politics (22). While the historicizing approach of this essay is made possible in part by the increasingly explicit treatment of historical and political questions in Derrida’s recent work, such as Spectres of Marx and Jacques Derrida, it is also made possible by a second “interpretation of interpretation” put forward by “Structure, Sign, and Play,” that which “affirms play” (“Structure, Sign, and Play” 292). If, as “Structure, Sign, and Play” contends, “[b]eing must be conceived as presence or absence on the basis of the possibility of play and not the other way around,” I am revisiting this early essay to “play” with the possibility that the recent focus on politics, (presence), neglected though it was (absence), is part of its being (play), having been there from the “beginning.” Specifically, I consider Derrida’s “Structure, Sign, and Play” (1966), in terms of the relationship between Paris and Algeria or Francophone North Africa, what the recent History of Structuralismcalls “the continental divide of structuralism” (Dosse 264). By “playing” with Derrida’s essay in terms of the “liberation” of Algeria (c. 1962), what emerges is a Derridean argument much more politically and historically aware than his work is generally thought to be, especially in the earlier essays.

 

During the initial discussion after his reading of “Structure, Sign, and Play,” Derrida stated, “I don’t destroy the subject; I situate it…. It is a question of knowing where it comes from” (Macksey and Donato 271). As he has discussed more frequently in his recent work, Derrida happens to come from Algeria, where he lived until he was 19 years old. He has recently described his experience of Algeria in part in terms of “Vichy, official anti-semitism, the Allied landing at the end of 1942, the terrible colonial repression of Algerian resistance in 1945 at the time of the first serious outbursts heralding the Algerian war” (Derrida and Attridge 38-9). The war in Algeria, which lasted eight years, “toppled six French prime ministers and the Fourth Republic itself,” with casualties of “an estimated one million Muslim Algerians and the expulsion from their homes of approximately the same number of European settlers” (Horne 14). Derrida returned to and lived in Algeria for two years during the war. Where “Structure, Sign, and Play” tentatively claims that “perhaps something has occurred in the history of the concept of structure that could be called an event,” and answers the obvious question–“what would this event be then?”–with the cryptic claim that “its exterior form would be that of a rupture” (278), this essay, on the one hand, treats the Algerian liberation as that rupture, while on the other, considering the cryptic, tentative tone of “Structure, Sign, and Play” as symptomatic.

 

The fact that this context has not informed the typical response to “Structure, Sign, and Play” over the past thirty years probably has more to with American unfamiliarity with Francophone North Africa than with the famous opacity of Derrida’s writing. When, for example, the editors of the influential anthology Yale Critics: Deconstruction in America (1983) set out “to stimulate serious, careful assessment of [deconstruction] in relation to recent American criticism and to the critical tradition,” they argue that in order “to achieve this initial location, [they] had to refrain from pursuing other important current concerns, such as feminism, semiotics, and ethnic and regional studies” (Martin ix). It is not clear what remains when one excludes so many fields which address so many issues. This rather comprehensive list of exclusions turns out to have included issues that the recent work of Derrida, the key figure in the approach the editors of Yale Critics were trying to survey, indicates have been of central importance. Overlooking what they call “regional studies” means that they might have missed precisely the trans-Mediterranean context that Derrida’s recent work so directly discusses.

 

Jean Hyppolite, the first person to ask a question regarding “Structure, Sign, and Play” when it was first read, asked what remains the “central” question; recognizing that the “technical point of departure of the presentation” is Derrida’s discussion of the center, Hyppolite asked “what a center might mean” (Macksey and Donato 265). Hyppolite wondered, “is the center the knowledge of the general rules which, after a fashion, allow us to understand the interplay of the elements? Or is the center certain elements which enjoy a particular privilege with the ensemble?” (265). Derrida’s answer, “I don’t mean to say that I thought of approaching an idea of the center would be an affirmation,” echoes his essay’s claim that “this affirmation then determines the non-center otherwise than as loss of the center” (“Structure, Sign, and Play” 292). However, by doing to the word “center” what Derrida says the center does–making a “substitution of center for center” so that “the center receives different forms or names”–“Structure, Sign, and Play” can describe the complexity of Algeria’s decolonization (292).

 

For Derrida’s definitions of “the center” constitute abstracted definitions of a political center: “The center, which is by definition unique, constituted that very thing within a structure which while governing that structure escapes structurality” (279). The center “governs” and is “constituted”; the political implications of Derrida’s terms here are very important. We are all familiar with how centers manage to escape structurality: consider, for example, the South African National Party’s 1997 contention before the Truth and Reconciliation Committee that its leaders had no knowledge of what members of the army (“the structure”) were doing to black South Africans. When pressed, the center says that power was always elsewhere. In this sense, then, “the center is not the center” (279). Or, as Derrida also says, “the center is, paradoxically, within the structure and outside it” (279). Like a governmental center, the “center of a structure permits the freeplay of its elements inside the total form” (278-279), even as it also “closes off the freeplay it opens up and makes possible” (279). Some possibilities cannot be considered even by the freest of centers.

 

According to “Structure, Sign, and Play,” this comparative narrowness of possibilities is the result of centering: “The structurality of structure… has always been neutralized or reduced, and this by a process of giving it a center or referring it to a point of presence, a fixed origin” (278). The center thus controls, in the sense of “containing,” the structurality of the structure, reducing it; the extremes are neutralized by the center. For many people (although “Structure, Sign, and Play” might say, for “the structure”), this containment is a good thing: “the concept of centered structure is in fact the concept of play based on a fundamental ground, a play constituted on the basis of a fundamental immobility and a reassuring certitude” (279). Limiting freeplay is reassuring, “and on the basis of this certitude anxiety can be mastered” (279). The center, which governs, allows certain freedoms, and even if allowing these closes off others, it is considered preferable to the absence of centering because with it a reassuring certitude, through which anxiety can be reduced, is implied.

 

“Structure, Sign, and Play” emphasizes that the center is “not a fixed locus but a function” (280). In one sense, then, the governmental function need not be put in one place; the function can be distributed throughout the structure. This is another way of understanding that the center is not the center; the center of power need not be at the central place. Even decentralized power functions as power. Moreover, if the center is a function, not a place, then it is highly variable; not only can the function be fulfilled from different places, but different centers can fulfill the same function. “If this is so,” according to “Structure, Sign, and Play,” “the entire history of the concept of structure, before the rupture of which we are speaking, must be thought of as a series of substitutions of center for center” (278). In governmental terms, whatever fulfills the function of the center is itself just a substitute for a (previous) center; the function remains the same even if the center has moved, i.e., is not a fixed locus.

 

“Structural” conditions in Algeria made these issues all the more complicated and important. The Crémieux Decrees of 1870 automatically made Algerian Jews French citizens and left Algerian Muslims French “subjects,” with the option to apply for citizenship. However, legislation which permitted Algerian Muslims to be subjected to Islamic, rather than French, law “became in effect a prison, because Muslims wishing to adopt French citizenship had to renounce these [Islamic] rights, thereby virtually committing an act of apostasy,” according to Alistair Horne (35). Moreover, French was simultaneously made the official language of the land, Arabic being considered foreign, and with Koranic schools shut down, individuals who wanted an education would need to attend a French school, where they would learn about “their” French culture. As a consequence, “by 1946,” write David and Marina Ottaway, “about forty-six thousand Algerians out of a total population of seven and a half million had full French citizenship” (30). This, it seems to me, is an instance of the structurality of the structure.

 

According to Jacques Derrida, in 1942, when Derrida was 12 years old, the French government in Algeria, which had not been occupied by Germany, revoked the Crémieux Decrees; consequently, as it is put in one of the three accounts of it in Jacques Derrida, “they expelled from the Lycée de Ben Aknoun in 1942 a little black and very Arab Jew who understood nothing about it” (Bennington 58). In addition to being expelled from school, Derrida also lost his French citizenship. Overnight he was a Jew and was not French. Being both was seemingly no longer possible. A teacher said that day that “French culture is not made for little Jews” (326). In the terms of “Structure, Sign, and Play,” Algeria had undergone a substitution of center for center, and in 1942, this new center neutralized a possibility for freeplay, mastering a certain anxiety; but the center, the structure, had repositioned Derrida: “thus expelled, I became the outside” (289). From the point of view of Algeria (perhaps especially the point of view of a schoolboy expelled for being Jewish), it could be said that Paris governs while escaping what is applied to the rest of the structure, the governed.

 

From 1870 on, whether one were “Muslim” or “Jewish” had a significant impact on one’s relationship with the center; but whereas “Muslim” could include a variety of origins–Kabyle, Chaoui, M’zabite, Mauretanian, Turkish, and Arab, for example–to simply refer to all these peoples as “Muslim” was itself a distortion that says something about the structural possibilities for freeplay at the center. The marker of difference was Islam, to which all other differences were relegated. Even the phrase “pieds noirs” could refer to French, Spanish, Italian, and Maltese immigrants. As for how these questions worked in practice, consider the following transaction from the Algerian Assembly in 1947, seven years before the War:

 

M. Boukaboum–“Don’t forget that I’m an Algerian, first and foremost!”

 

M. Louvel–“That’s an admission!”

 

From several benches, in the center–“You are French, first and foremost!”

 

M. Boukaboum–“I am a Muslim Algerian, first and foremost!”

 

M. Musmeaux–“If you consider the Muslim Algerians as French, give them all the rights of the French!”

 

M. Louvel--"Then let them declare they're French." (Horne 70)

 

From this example, we can see that it was understood that the structure demands/asks people to “be” one thing, and then treats them in different ways if/once they “are.”

 

This argument can be read in relation to a famous passage from “Structure, Sign, and Play,” according to which “the history of metaphysics, like the history of the West, is the history of these metaphors and metonymies” (282). Although “Structure, Sign, and Play” is usually read in terms of “the history of metaphysics,” this analogy between metaphysics and the history of the West works both ways, relating to the history of the West as much as it does to the history of metaphysics. After all, as “Structure, Sign, and Play” points out, “we have no language–no syntax and no lexicon–which is foreign to this history” of metaphysics (280). In claims such as “I am an Algerian,” and “I am a Muslim,” it is metaphors and metonymies that posit existence, or, in the terms of “Structure, Sign, and Play” would seem to be the “determination of Being as presence in all the senses of this word” (279). Although metaphors claim to state that this is that, or while metonymies, as the root indicates, make possible changes of names, in fact, they are nothing but descriptions with reference to some center. Their power is rhetorical, and, granted, such power is substantial and real. But words do not necessarily establish what the object is; they instead participate in “a history of meanings” (279). Moreover, because saying that you are somebody, or something, takes the form of both a metaphor (x=y) and a metonymy (a name change, “I” am “something else”), what you are may still be different from what either the metaphor or the metonymy can suggest. “We live in and of difference,” according to Derrida (“Violence and Metaphysics” 153). We are not who we say (we are). In fact, we cannot be, because when we say who we are we are only using metaphors and metonymies.

 

Insofar as there is a difference between Being and a metaphor, we live in difference. Those metaphors and metonymies only have meaning in relation to some center which contains the freeplay of the structure so as to master a certain anxiety, probably the anxiety of difference, which is also the anxiety of similarity. The “rupture,” with which “Structure, Sign, and Play” begins, “comes about when the structurality of the structure had to begin to be thought” (278). Once people begin to recognize that the structure is a structure, and nothing else, a rupture can occur; prior to that, when people believe that the structure is something other than a structure (e.g., “the way things are”), they have instead fallen for metaphor. Once people become conscious of how the structure structures them, then there can be an event, which, when considered externally, could be called a rupture. To some extent, by the mid-1960s this thinking the structurality of the structure had begun to be thought in Algeria, temporarily suspending the usual substitution of center for center, resulting in what is called a “rupture.” “Structure, Sign, and Play’s” word “rupture” is used by others to describe the results of the Algerian civil war: Jacques Soustelle, for example, refers to the “rupture between the Sahara and France” (126), and the entry “Algerie: Les Intellectuels Avant La Decolonization,” in Dictionaire des intellectuels français: Les Personnes, Les Lieux, Les Moments, refers several times to “les ruptures” (Yacine 51-2). While both examples suggest an “Algerian,” and 1960s, usage of the word “rupture,” “Structure, Sign, and Play” claims that it is only “before the rupture of which we are speaking” that the entire history of the concept of structure must be thought of as a series of substitutions of center for center (278). The rupture, which might “be called an ‘event,’ if this loaded word did not entail a meaning which it is precisely the function of structural–or structuralist–thought to reduce or to suspect” (278), has changed that pattern of substitution.

 

According to “Structure, Sign, and Play,” “this affirmation then determines the non-center otherwise than as loss of the center” (292). On the one hand, the non-center (either the “margins,” or “the rupture”) is not necessarily a loss; perhaps in the case of Algeria the decolonizing rupture is not a loss. But of course, on the other hand, the extraordinarily qualified, tentative tone of this affirmation clearly mitigates against celebrating the rupture that “Structure, Sign, and Play” suggests has occurred. There are several reasons for such reserved appreciation of the rupture. First, it is not clear that there is ever such a thing as a “rupture,” a total break. For example, as Said explains, “imperialism did not end, did not suddenly become ‘past,’ once decolonization had set in motion the dismantling of the classical empires” (Culture and Imperialism 282). Describing change as a rupture, as a break, suggests that all that came before has stopped, that there has been an ending, or a new beginning, a claim which must, of course, overlook continuities, or traces. Lyotard’s claim–made as early as 1958–that “there is already no longer an Algerie française, in that ‘France’ is no longer present in any form in Algeria” (Lyotard 202), for example, replays the dichotomizing logic of the center, by overlooking what persists (including, most obviously, the French language, although that too has recently become an issue). Or as “Structure, Sign, and Play” puts it, “one can describe what is peculiar to the structural organization only by not taking into account… the problem of the transition from one structure to another, by putting history between brackets” (“Structure, Sign, and Play” 291).

 

With reference to his own experience in Algeria, Derrida has recently spoken about what persists despite (or through) change, about what survives the brackets. Although Derrida “always (at least since 1947) condemned the colonial policy of France in Algeria,” during the emigration of Jews from Algeria “he even put pressure on his parents not to leave Algeria in 1962. Soon afterwards recognized his illusions on this matter” (Bennington 330). Although he describes these “illusions” as “his ‘nostalgeria’” (Bennington 330), to see how nostalgeric Derrida was, and/or how controversial it is to claim that the rupture was not a rupture, it is important to note that of an estimated 140,000 Jews in Algeria before the outbreak of the war in 1954, only 10,000 remained by 1962, and by 1970, that number had dropped to 1,000 with only one talmus torah in the entire country. And this drop, in most cases, was precipitous as Independence approached: “whereas in 1961 as many as 22,000 Jews lived in Oran, during the summer of 1962 only 1,000-5,000 remained” (Laskier 334, 344, 338). Moreover, the social circumstances in “the Algerian Jewish scene [were] totally different from that in either Morocco or Tunisia,” according to Michael Laskier’s study of North African Jewry (40). Algerian Jews were more Francophilic; only 10,000 emigrated to Israel between 1954 and 1962; most of the rest went to France. Of course, in his ambivalence over how to respond to decolonization, Derrida is not alone: Francine Camus, for example, admitted, “I feel divided… half-French and half-Algerian, and, in truth, dispossessed in both countries which I no longer recognize, since I never imagined them separated” (Horne 542).

 

If it is possible to understand Derrida’s “Structure, Sign, and Play” in terms of this historical “event,” it is nonetheless still a question as to

 

why, despite the revolutionary rhetoric of his circa 1968 writings, and despite the widespread, taken-for-granted assumption that he is "of the left," Derrida so consistently, deliberately and dexterously avoided the subject of politics. Why, for example, has he danced so nimbly around the tenacious efforts of interviewers to pin him down on where he stands vis-a-vis Marxism? (Fraser 127)

 

Precisely because this hesitant relationship with Communism is thought to represent Derrida’s hesitancy with the left in general, it is important to remember how the Algerian and French Communist Parties responded to the Algerian War. In Algeria, the Communist Party, “which tended to support petits blancs rather than the Muslims,” “strongly condemned the Sétif Uprising, and was actually reported to have taken part in the reprisals” (Horne 136). The French Communist Party, “by granting the Guy Mollet-Lacoste government full power for its North African policy, the vote of the French Communist Party not only resulted in the escalation of the colonial war, but also caused a schism in the traditional Left” (Marx-Scouras 34). “Knowing where it comes from” makes Derrida’s mistrust of the Communist Party in Algeria seem politically progressive (Macksey 271).

 

Regardless, Thomas McCarthy is not alone in believing that “Derrida’s discourse, it seems to me, lives from the enormous elasticity, not to say vagueness and ambiguity, of his key terms” (McCarthy 118). But that elasticity moves his writing beyond the categorical imperative that might be placed on it by a “metaphysics of presence” (“Structure, Sign, and Play” 281). Derrida has recently said, “I’d like to escape my own stereotypes,” meaning, in a sense, he’d like to substitute an absence for a presence (Derrida and Attridge 34). With its “elasticity,” “Structure, Sign, and Play” can be as hybrid, as multiple, as his work suggests identity is. “I absolutely refuse,” writes Derrida, “a discourse that would assign me a single code, a single language game, a single context, a single situation; and I claim this right not simply out of caprice or because it is to my taste, but for ethical and political reasons” (Derrida, “Remarks” 81). Readers have long wondered how it could be “ethical,” not to mention “political,” to refuse a single code. Ernesto Laclau recently pointed out “this does not sound much like an ethical injunction but ethical nihilism” (Laclau 78).

 

However, the point is not that no position will be taken, but rather that the code that marks positions will be refused, precisely because of how it has been centered, a point that may make more sense when considered in the post-colonial situation represented by Algeria. For example, in his influential article and subsequent book, Samuel P. Huntington contends that “culture and cultural identities… are shaping the patterns of cohesion, disintegration, and conflict in the post-Cold War world” (20). Huntington’s claim, that “world civilizations” predating Cold War alignments are reshaping the world, is the type of assumption that “Structure, Sign, and Play” challenges, for ethical reasons. Huntington, and others, would, on one level, reduce the complexity of identity to a single code, a single language game, etc., and, on another level, would perform the same centering operation on the structure that Derrida’s essay describes. They would be, as even Huntington admits, “groping for groupings” (125). “Structure, Sign, and Play” asks us to examine how those “groupings” are claims to identity, rather than identity itself.¹ (With “Structure, Sign, and Play,” it can be seen that recent arguments over the so-called “third way” also run the risk of simply recentering within a new structure.)

 

“As an adolescent,” Derrida has recently said, “I no doubt had the feeling that I was living in conditions where it was both difficult and therefore necessary, urgent, to say things that are not allowed” (Derrida and Attridge 38). In its “elasticity,” or its “refusal of a single code,” “Structure, Sign, and Play” entails both of those perceptions: the difficult conditions, and the interdiction against speaking. The essay could be understood as part of what Hal Foster describes as “a shift in conception” “from reality as an effect of representation to the real as a thing of trauma,” as a traumatic response to an event (Foster 146). In Unclaimed Experience: Trauma, Narrative, and History, Cathy Caruth describes trauma “in terms of its indirect relation to reference” (7), according to which both the violent event and the violence of that event cannot be fully known. This traumatic indirect relation to reference may account for the oft-noted elasticity, obscurity, generalization, a-historicism of Derrida’s work; it could be the result of a traumatic incomprehension or of the incomprehensibility of the traumatic event. For the problem of reference that haunts the reception of Derrida’s work is in fact the problem of reference that is indicative of a response to trauma, i.e., having the feeling of living in conditions where it was both difficult and therefore necessary, urgent, to say things that are not allowed. Derrida’s recent discussion of wanting “to render both accessible and inaccessible” could thus be read as the traumatized wish to speak, but not speak too much or too directly, about the trauma (Derrida and Attridge 35).

 

Recently, Derrida has stated that “what interests me… is not strictly called either literature or philosophy,” but something for which “‘autobiography’ is perhaps the least inadequate name” (Derrida and Attridge 34). And there is a way in which, by trying “to read philosophers in a certain way” (as “Structure, Sign, and Play” describes it), “Structure, Sign, and Play” could be considered an autobiography (288). But “autobiography” is the least inadequate name because there is more to the essay than what it says about Derrida’s biography. When read with “play,” “Structure, Sign, and Play” is like Derrida’s recent definition of literature: “in principle [it] allows one to say everything” (Derrida and Attridge 36). As that rhetorical strategy whereby one says more than one has said, literature (and, perhaps more specifically, metaphor) allows one to say one thing and mean many things. Like literature, “Structure, Sign, and Play” need not, and does not, say everything in order to convey more than it actually does say–about metaphysics, about the history of the West, or, perhaps, about nostalgeria.

 

In La Mésentente, Jacques Ranciere provides a name for the paradox of saying more than one has said: “a determinate type of speaking situation: where one of the speakers at the same time intends and does not intend” (12). Neither a “misreading” nor a “misunderstanding”–for “the concept of misunderstanding assumes that one or the other of the speakers, or both of them… may not know what one or other says” (12)–in la mésentente conversants know what is being said, even if it strikes them as a contradiction. For Ranciere, this knowing the contradiction makes la mésentente the image of politics: la mésentente “concerns, in the highest degree, politics” (14), which he also describes as “the art of the local and singular construction of the universal case” (188). Although “Structure, Sign, and Play” could describe a decolonizing experience in Algeria, that word, “Algeria,” is but a metonymy for a confluence of factors, larger than, and also visible elsewhere besides, Algeria. Like literature or la mésentente, more is said here than just references to metaphysics or the history of the West. What Derrida says in Spectres of Marx concerning Apartheid could also apply to his own experience in Algeria: “one can decipher through its singularity so many other kinds of violence going on in the world” (Spectres of Marx xv). Algeria, like Apartheid, is an example of what is going on in many places; it is a local and singular example of the universal case.

 

Although Derrida has claimed that if “one has an interest in this, it is very easy to know where my choices and my allegiances are, without the least ambiguity” (“Almost Nothing” 84), the ambiguity, the traumatic elasticity of terms give “Structure, Sign, and Play” its political charge. As a “mésentente,” “Structure, Sign, and Play” is intrinsically political, although not in the narrow sense of liberal or conservative, but rather in the much more significant sense of what Slavoj Zizek calls “the struggle for one’s voice to be heard and recognized” (“Leftist Plea” 999). The fact that in this literary-political struggle for recognition every injustice could potentially represent a universal wrong means that “Structure, Sign, and Play” is applicable without reference to the context of its origin. This “playful” universality has been taken to mean that Derrida’s work is not political, or, in Eagleton’s memorable phrase, “is as injurious as blank ammunition” (Literary Theory 145).

 

At the same time, however, with a universalizing reading, or with what Zizek describes as “the possibility of the metaphoric elevation of her specific wrong,” the uniqueness and singularity may be overlooked (“Leftist Plea” 1002). It may simply be recentered within a new structure, rather than being recognized in itself. If, as Zizek contends, “politics proper designates the moment at which a particular demand is not simply part of the negotiation of interests but aims at something more” (1006), then the elasticity of the terms of “Structure, Sign, and Play” aims at something more. The consequent play, by facilitating “the movement of signification,” “excludes totalization” (Structure, Sign, and Play” 289). As “Structure, Sign, and Play” points out, “there is always more” (289). This “something more” represents the uniqueness of the situation which would be lost in re-structuring it as universal. Instead of such a polarized, universal–and then “recentered” structure–“Structure, Sign, and Play” can be seen as part of Derrida’s on-going argument that “in order to recast, if not rigorously refound a discourse on the ‘subject’… one has to go through the experience of deconstruction” (Derrida and Attridge 34).

 

Notes

 

1. Homi K. Bhabha makes a similar point in The Location of Culture: “The taking up of any one position, within a specific discursive form, in a particular historical conjuncture, is thus always problematic–the site of both fixity and fantasy. It provides a colonial ‘identity’ that is played out–like all fantasies of originality and origination–in the face and space of the disruption and threat from the heterogeneity of other positions” (77).

Works Cited

 

• Bhabha, Homi K. The Location of Culture. New York: Routledge, 1994.
• Caruth, Cathy. Unclaimed Experience: Trauma, Narrative, and History. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins UP, 1996.
• Derrida, Jacques, and Derek Attridge. “‘This Strange Institution Called Literature’: An Interview with Jacques Derrida.” Acts of Literature/Jacques Derrida. Ed. Derek Attridge. Trans. Geoffrey Bennington and Rachel Bowlby. New York: Routledge, 1992. 33-75.
• Derrida, Jacques, and Geoffrey Bennington. Jacques Derrida. Trans. Geoffrey Bennington. Chicago: U of Chicago P, 1991.
• —. “The Almost Nothing of the Unrepresentable.” Points: Interviews, 1974-1994. Ed. Elizabeth Weber. Trans. Peggy Kamuf, et al. Stanford: Stanford UP, 1995.
• —. “Remarks on Deconstruction and Pragmatism,” Deconstruction and Pragmatism: Simon Critchley, Jacques Derrida, Ernesto Laclau and Richard Rorty. Ed. Chantal Mouffe. New York: Routledge, 1996. 77-88.
• —. Specters of Marx: The State of the Debt, the Work of Mourning, & the New International. Trans. Peggy Kamuf. New York: Routledge, 1994.
• —. “Structure, Sign, and Play in the Discourse of the Human Sciences.” Writing and Difference. Trans. Alan Bass. Chicago: U of Chicago P, 1978. 278-293.
• —. “Violence and Metaphysics: An Essay on The Thought of Emmanuel Levinas.” Writing and Difference. Trans. Alan Bass. Chicago: U of Chicago P, 1978. 79-153.
• Derrida, Jacques and Jean-Luc Nancy, “Eating Well.” Who Comes After the Subject? Eds. Eduardo Cadava, Peter Connor, and Jean-Luc Nancy. New York: Routledge, 1991.
• Dosse, François. History of Structuralism, Vol. I: The Rising Sign, 1945-1966. Minneapolis: U of Minnesota P, 1997.
• Eagleton, Terry. Literary Theory: A Critical Introduction. Minneapolis: U of Minnesota P, 1983.
• Foster, Hal. Return of the Real: The Avant-Garde at the End of the Century. Cambridge: MIT P, 1996.
• Fraser, Nancy. “The French Derrideans: Politicizing Deconstruction or Deconstructing the Political?” New German Critique 33 (1984): 127-154.
• Horne, Alistair. A Savage War of Peace: Algeria, 1954-1962. New York: Viking Press, 1977.
• Huntington, Samuel P. The Clash of Civilizations and the Remaking of World Order. New York: Simon and Schuster, 1996.
• Laclau, Ernesto. Emancipations. New York: Verso, 1996.
• Laskier, Michael M. North African Jewry in the Twentieth Century: The Jews of Morocco, Tunisia, and Algeria. New York: New York UP, 1994.
• Lyotard, Jean-François. “Algerian Contradictions Exposed 1958.” Political Writings. Trans. Kevin Paul. Minneapolis: U of Minnesota P, 1993. 197-213.
• Macksey, Richard, and Eugenio Donato, eds. The Structuralist Controversy: The Languages of Criticism and the Sciences of Man. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins UP, 1972.
• Martin, Wallace. “Introduction.” The Yale Critics: Deconstruction in America. Eds. Jonathan Arac, Wlad Godzich, and Wallace Martin. Minneapolis: U of Minnesota P, 1983. ix-xiii.
• Marx-Scouras, Danielle. The Cultural Politics of Tel Quel: Literature and the Left in the Wake of Engagement. University Park, PA: Pennsylvania State UP, 1996.
• McCarthy, Thomas. Ideals and Illusions: On Reconstruction and Deconstruction in Contemporary Critical Theory. Cambridge: MIT P, 1991.
• Nealon, Jeffrey T. Double Reading: Postmodernism after Deconstruction. Ithaca: Cornell UP, 1993.
• Ottaway, David and Marina. Algeria: The Politics of a Socialist Revolution. Berkeley: U of California P, 1970.
• Ranciere, Jacques. La Mésentente: Politique et Philosophie. Paris: Galilée, 1995.
• Ross, Kristin. Fast Cars, Clean Bodies: Decolonization and the Reordering of French Culture. Cambridge: MIT P, 1995.
• Said, Edward. Culture and Imperialism. New York: Vintage, 1994.
• Yacine, Tassadit. “Algerie: Les Intellectuels Avant La Decolonization.” Dictionaire des intellectuels français: Les Personnes, Les Lieux, Les Moments. Eds. Jacques Julliard and Michel Winock. Paris: Editions du Seuil, 1996. 51-52.
• Zizek, Slavoj. “A Leftist Plea for ‘Eurocentrism.’” Critical Inquiry 24 (Summer 1998): 988-1009.

 

Terry Harpold

School of Literature, Communication & Culture
Georgia Institute of Technology
terry.harpold@lcc.gatech.edu

“The Blankest of Blank Spaces”¹

 

Figure 1. “Map of Africa, Showing
Its Most Recent Discoveries.”
W. Williams, Philadelphia, 1859. [Click on image to see enlarged view]

 

Figure 2. Detail of Figure 1.
Note the blank field straddling the
equator, labeled “UNKNOWN INTERIOR.”

 

It was in 1868, when nine years old or thereabouts, that while looking at a map of Africa of the time and putting my finger on the blank space then representing the unsolved mystery of that continent, I said to myself, with absolute assurance and an amazing audacity which are no longer in my character now:

 

“When I grow up, I shall go there.”

 

And of course I thought no more about it till after a quarter century or so an opportunity offered to go there–as if the sin of childish audacity were to be visited on my mature head. Yes. I did go there: there being the region of Stanley Falls, which in ’68 was the blankest of blank spaces on the earth’s figured surface.

 

--Joseph Conrad, A Personal Record

 

Joseph Conrad’s account of his discovery of a map of Africa in his grandfather’s library is among the most famous anecdotes of modern literary biography. (Which map he found is unknown; it must have resembled one published by W. Williams of Philadelphia about nine years earlier [Figures 1 and 2].) Marlow, Conrad’s narrator, will repeat the memory as his own in the opening chapter of Heart of Darkness; Conrad will describe the event again near the end of his career, in a sympathetic essay on the British Empire’s great explorers. As Christopher GoGwilt has shown, the seductions of the map’s “unsolved mystery” are central to Conrad’s authorial project; they bind the physical and imaginary geographies of his fictions to one of the defining visual tropes of high colonialism (126).² The period of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries was the most active of the modern partitioning of Africa, with a half-dozen European powers scrambling for position on the continent through territorial exploration and appropriation, armed conflict, and diplomatic negotiation. This activity depended on the accuracy and completeness of the maps used by the Europeans to describe their African possessions (McIlwaine 59-62).

 

Now, maps, in the narrow sense of the word–pictorial representations of a physical terrain, commonly in the form of planar (2D) projections–are never merely descriptive; they are also heuristic, suasive, and hegemonic. (My reasons for stipulating this narrow definition of “map” will become clear shortly.) Individuals, communities, and nations rely on them to manage spatial and political complexity that would otherwise exceed human perception and memory, and to adjudicate claims of ownership and jurisdiction. Mapping appears to be fundamental to human consciousness of space and time. All cultures record their experience in artifacts which are consumed in plainly maplike ways, though these artifacts may little resemble the brightly-colored wall hangings that most Americans (for example) recall from grade-school geography classes.² This universality of mapping practices may account for the persuasiveness of a broader, more metaphorical sense of the term “map” used in many disciplines and technical practices to describe any intentional structuring of space, time, or knowledge–thus we speak of “maps” of a text, “map” views of data, “cognitive maps,” and so on.

 

Because they are fundamentally cultural things, maps (again, in the narrow sense) are embedded in the epistemological and ideological structures that Roland Barthes calls the “my thologies” of semiological systems (111). The “unsolved mystery” Conrad discovers in the map of the Congolese interior names one such mythologizing structure. We may safely assume that the mapmaker did not believe there were no topographically significa nt features in the region left blank, only that no European had witnessed and described those features. (This is precisely the sense of the observation encoded in the label “UNKNOWN INTERIOR” in Figure 2.) The blank region is “empty” only in relation to the comparable fullness of the rest of the map. The blank represents the essence of late nineteenth century Africa as an absence: as the negative of the evidentiary transparency of the European landscape (in this discourse, “European” always connotes fullness, completeness, transparency). To fill the blank is what colonial exploration and territorial appropriation are, in a sense, all about. One may be tempted here to cite childhood curiosity regarding the taboo or the invisible, and to invoke the language of screen memories and primal scenes, but that is not necessary to demonstrate the significance of the unfinished region of the map for Conrad and his contemporaries. Tie the epistemological puzzles of the blank to the opportunistic interests of ca pital and the evangelical fervor of the Christian missionary (neither of which operated in isolation from the other), and you have a sufficiently broad practical foundation upon which to sustain multiple desires to transect symbolically and materially the empty field of this imaginary terrain: with rivers, lakes, trade routes, roads, railways, and territorial boundaries.³

 

Consider now two examples from a series of more recent maps. Figure 3 shows one of several widely-reproduced images created by Kenneth Cox, Stephen G. Eick, and Taosong He, and described in their influential 1996 paper on 3D network visualization techniques.⁴

 

Figure 3. “Arc map” showing worldwide Internet traffic
during a two-hour period, February 1-7, 1993.
(Image © 1996 Stephen G. Eick, Visual Insights.
Used by permission.) [Click on image to see enlarged view]

 

Shown here is one frame of an animation of Internet traffic between fifty countries via the NFSNET/ANSnet backbone during a two-hour period of the week of February 1-7, 1993. Each country with active nodes on the network is represented by a box-shaped glyph, positioned at the location of the country’s capital, and scaled and colored to encode the total packet count for all links emanating from the country. The arcs between the countries indicate the flow of network traffic, with the higher and redder arcs indicating the larger flows. One of the most striking traits of this image is its dissymmetry: the greater part of the arcs and glyphs are traced on the upper-left field (rou ghly North and West, in relation to the equator and Greenwich meridian). Pinning the origins of the arcs to the capitals of countries underrepresents the actual geographical distribution of traffic, but it’s clear that, apart from a few arcs converging in Pretoria, there is nothing much going in or coming out of the Africa in early 1993.

 

Figure 4 shows another projection from the series by Cox, Eick, and He. This “arc map” traces the same traffic flows and uses a similar color-coding scheme, applying it to a 2D projection, viewed on a variable vertical axis.⁵

 

Figure 4. “Arc map” showing worldwide Internet traffic
during a two-hour period, February 1-7, 1993.
(Image © 1996 Stephen G. Eick, Visual Insights.
Used by permission.) [Click on image to see enlarged view]

 

Like the image in Figure 3, this image encodes Internet traffic statistics in arc height, color, and thickness. Cox, Eick, and He’s stated aim in producing these maps was to improve the usability of network visualizations based on cartographic techniques. Shifting the traffic arcs into a third dimension, they propose, and encoding them with height and color to indicate relative bandwidth and flow, eliminates the complex line crossings that would make 2D maps of the same data difficult to read.

 

These are arresting images. Their play of light (the neon hues of the arcs) and dark (the black background) must have been dictated to some degree by technical considerations. They were created for viewing on computer terminals, and the techniques available to the researchers were those best suited to the cathode ray and the binary logic of computing: one/zero, on/off, traffic/no traffic. One consequence of that (probably automatic) choice of representational schemes is, however, problematic: the binarisms of data flow are recast in an analogous but distinct tropology of fullness and emptiness: a light “on” (brighter still when exceptionally “on”); a light “off” (entirely absent when truly “off”: darkness visible). The lines of Internet traffic look more like beacons in the night than, say, undersea cables, satellite relays, or fiber-optic cables. Moreover, the decision to include national borders in Figure 4, and to fill them in with solid hues representing the intensity of traffic to and from each nation, binds the viewer’s visual identification of those nations to the valences of the network. Even at this oblique angle, it is easy to identify the outlines of Australia, India, Western Europe, Alaska, etc. The identities of the networked regions are in turn reified by their apparent internal uniformity–all spaces within their borders are of a single color representing the national level of traffic, thus eliminating any suggestion that the diffusion of network signals may vary locally. The unnetworked nations seem equally uniform, but in an opposite sense: framed voids, they would merge with the empty background, were it not for their faint borders. Thus, the fusion in these images of a tropology of presence/absence and fullness/emptiness with conventional signifiers of regional and nation encodes the traces of network activity with meanings beyond the mere visual registering of place-names. Viewed with an eye to their unacknowledged political valences, these images of the wired world (that is, of the mostly unwired world) draw, I will argue, on visual discourses of identity and negated identity that echo those of the European maps of colonized and colonizable space of nearly a century ago.⁶

 

This essay is based on research in progress which interrogates these and similar cartographic representations of the Internet as a first step in a critique of the complicity of techniques of scientific visualization with the contrasting invisibility of political and economic formations. I propose that these depictions of network activity are embedded in unacknowledged and pernicious metageographies–sign systems that organize geographical knowledge into visual schemes that seem straightforward (how else to illustrate global Internet traffic if not on images of… the globe?), but which depend on historically- and politically-inflected misrepresentation of underlying material conditions.

 

I borrow the word “metageographies” from Martin Lewis and Kären Wigen’s recent study of mapping discourses, The Myth of Continents. Lewis and Wigen’s analysis of the genealogy of Eurocentric constructions of continental geography and East/West, Europe/Asia/Africa/American divisions of the human world is an invaluable model for deciphering the conventions of Internet cartography. Their call for new, politically-progressive articulations of the relations of material and social human spaces to political power suggests that an analogous reworking of visualizations of emerging virtual realms is needed at this time. “It is simply no longer tenable,” they write,

 

to assume that all significant high-order spatial units will take the form of discrete, contiguous blocks; analyzing contemporary human geography requires a different vocabulary. Instead of assuming contiguity, we need a way to visualize discontinuous "regions" that might take the spatial form of lattices, archipelagos, hollow rings, or patchworks. Such patterns certainly have not displaced the older cultural realms, which continue to be important for the multiple legacies they have left behind. But in the late twentieth century the friction of distance is much less than it used to be; capital flows as much as human migrations can rapidly create and re-create profound connections between distant places. As a result, some of the most powerful socios patial aggregations of our day simply cannot be mapped as single, bounded territories. To grasp these new realities will demand an imaginative approach to regional definition; to map them effectively will demand an innovative approach to cartography. (200)

 

The lines of force defining information flow in the networked and unnetworked spheres are not merely geographical or technological; they are also–and irreducibly–political.

 

The Blind Spot of Cartography

 

Figure 5. The Bellman’s chart,
from Henry Holiday’s 1876 illustrations to
The Hunting of the Snark.

 

He had brought a large map representing the sea,
Without the least vestige of land:
And the crew were much pleased when they found 
  it to be
A map they could all understand.

What's the good of Mercator's North Poles and 
  Equators,
Tropics, Zones and Meridian lines?"
So the Bellman would cry: and the crew would 
  reply,
"They are merely conventional signs!

"Other maps are such shapes, with their islands 
  and capes!
But we've got our brave captain to thank"
(So the crew would protest) "that he's brought 
  us the best--
perfect and absolute blank!"

--Lewis Carroll, The Hunting of the Snark

⁷

 

Few readers of maps are so canny as the Bellman’s happy crew in Carroll’s mock epic. Late twentieth-century postindustrial culture is saturated with maps; we rely on them daily in myriad ways, without taking much notice of their specificity or conventionality. Denis Wood has argued that this near ubiquity of maps and mapping technologies contributes to map-users’ general inattention to the cultural and historical props of maps (34). In this section, I offer two general observations regarding the form and effects of cartographic representations of real and virtual spaces.

 

First observation. Maps depict a selective distortion of the information available to those who design them. Mark Monmonier has famously observed that maps must as a matter of course mislead their users, if (1) the maps are to be legible at all, and if (2) the maps are to address the specific purposes for which they were designed. The first of these conditions is based in the physical limitations of paper, print, and video technologies, and the capabilities of the human eye. Everything that is noteworthy about a place will not fit on the page or screen; some levels of detail will have to be excluded (and the shapes and placement of some landmarks altered) to avoid filling the map with illegible, overlapping blots. The second condition is an extension of this common-sense constraint on graphic design, and a consequence of the semiological and cultural work of maps: which cartographic details are to be shown in a given map will be determined by technical or strategic forces that bear no necessary relation to the map’s general “accuracy”; details are commonly eliminated, falsified, or distorted so as to improve a map’s efficacy toward a particular end, resulting in the misrepresentation or exclusion of information which may serve other ends or reveal inconsistencies.⁸

 

Figure 6. Mercator’s projection.

 

For example, the Mercator projection (Figure 6) is helpful if you need to plot a constant navigational bearing between two points at sea (you just draw a straight line–a rhumb line–on the map), but its gross distortion of regions near the poles makes it a poor device for understanding the relative sizes of Greenland and South America. Use of the Mercator projection as a general-reference map (still common in the U.S.) is a cause for frequent complaint by cartographers, who insist that the projection was designed to facilitate ocean navigation in the 16th century, and is thus ill-suited to modern applications where the plotting of rhumb lines is not relevant.⁹

 

Figure 7. Goode’s homolosine equal-area projection,
with interruptions to preserve landmasses.

 

Goode’s homolosine equal-area projection (Figure 7), considered by many to be the best general-purpose modern projection, preserves relative areal sizes, but it does so at the cost of interrupting the oceans and splitting Antarctica into four pieces (Snyder 196-98).

 

Figure 8. The Gall-Peters projection.

 

The acrimonious debates provoked by the popularity in the 1970s and early ’80s of the Peters orthographic equal-area projection (Figure 8, also known as the Gall-Peters projection) suggest the disciplinary and political stakes at play in the choice of projections.¹⁰ Advocates of the Peters projection claimed that it corrected Mercator’s failings as a general-purpose map by, in effect, recentering the viewer’s eye. They complained that the Mercator projection distorts the relative sizes of the continents, favoring the Northern hemisphere and underrepresenting the sizes of landforms in the Southern hemisphere. (For example, in Figure 6, North America appears substantially larger than Africa–it is in fact only about 80% as large; Greenland appears to be four or five times the size of Australia, though it is about one-third its actual size.) Peters’s projection, it was claimed, represents a more realistic and “equitable” view of the world, as it depicts the relative areas of the major landmasses more accurately than Mercator, at the expense of vertical distortion of familiar (that is, Mercator-like) continental outlines. Critics of the Peters projection found its claims of originality misleading, its goals propagandistic, and its appearance just plain ugly (cartographer Arthur Robinson famously compared its appearance to “wet, ragged, long winter underwear” [Wood 60]). As Wood wryly observes, however, no one questioned the claim of Peters’s improved overall areal accuracy in comparison to Mercator. The objections were, essentially, that the Peters projection looks funny–but only “to those who have been confusing the map and the globe” (210 n46). Criticism of the projection’s aesthetic qualities, Wood argues, were little more than a smokescreen to cover the anxiety of mapmakers and users elicited by the projection’s evidence of the political interestedness of every cartographic projection.

 

Distortion is simply a mathematical consequence of how maps do what they do. Two-dimensional (planar) projections of a three-dimensional (spherical or ellipsoidal) terrain, no matter their scale or detail, must depict that terrain inaccurately, and the inaccuracy will increase as the scope of the terrain shown increases. This built-in error of 2D projections accounts for their enormous number and variety, each representing a different compromise of areal accuracy to angles, shapes, and directions.¹¹ It accounts as well for the many recent efforts to produce stereoptic or pseudo-3D maps (that is, maps that are not planar projections, but instead purport to show the Earth in a form more nearly corresponding to its “actual” shape), through the use of composite satellite imagery, and interactive video and animation techniques.¹² Most proje ctions of large regions are not created to serve as general-purpose maps; their distortions are deemed acceptable because some other attribute of the projection meets a specific need or fits a clearly-defined context of use.

 

Identifying a map’s possible misreadings, however, is not so simple as legislating appropriate or inappropriate uses for that projection. The inevitable inaccuracies of planar projections have historically provided cover for unacknowledged or unconscious motives of the advocates of a particular projection.¹³ That maps distort is a fact of mathematics and human perception; which distortions are favored over others, which map is selected as the “best” fit for a given context, is determined by institutional and political forces. Thus the objection to Mercator raised by the advocates of Gall-Peters: Mercator was created to simplify navigation within a specific region of the planet that corresponded to the principal foreign territories of the European colonial powers. That the projection also made Northern and European nations appear equal to or larger in area than the ir African and Asian territories–when they were in fact substantially smaller–was not, these critics claimed, merely an accidental attribute of the projection’s geometric technique. The specific distortions of the map, they argued, contributed to its lasting popularity in the West: Mercator visually reinforced Eurocentric assumptions about the spatial, political, and economic priority of the colonizing powers, and helped to prop up European paradigms of nation-state boundaries and identities that had little or no historical basis among the indigenous peoples of the colonized regions.¹⁴

 

Second observation. The bounded shapes of cartographic representation are conventional, historically-determined signs, rather than visual analogues of real terrains. Maps are noteworthy examples of the treachery of images. A closed, irregular geometric form whose contours are said to approximate those of a bounded region of space is not a priori a more suitable sign for that region than some other shape that would seem to resemble it less, because the vast majority of users of the map will never encounter an object that is not defined by this or another map, to which they might compare it.¹⁵ This assertion is, of course, trivial in the case of political, ethnic, or linguistic divisions of territories otherwise unbroken by “natural” boundaries (rivers, mountain ranges, shorelines, etc.). But the fact that these soft boundaries often traverse the harder formations of the geophysical terrain demonstrates that distinctions between natural and cultural demarcations of landspace are at best provisional. Dry land may stop at river banks and seashores, but human definitions of city, nation, and continent do not. “Natural” barriers dividing land regions are fixed or erased by political strategy, technological intervention, or military conquest, not by the innate properties of soil and water.

 

We’ve learned to recognize and to internalize iconic representations of nations and continents in much the same way we’ve learned to accept the verisimilitude of other images of things we’ve never actually seen: from a cultural toolkit of forms, patterns, and strategies for making sense of them in relation to other signs, and from frequent exposure to stereotyped depictions that have become a part of that toolkit. Colored mosaics hanging from schoolroom walls, bound within road atlases, or framed by the edges of a computer monitor look like maps because… that’s what maps look like. And continents and nations look like, well, shapes on maps. Users of maps depend on them to discover unities and identities across space and time that are meaningful first of all because they are mapped that way. (This is why the Peters projection is odd-looking to those schooled in projections that depict very different shapes of the major landforms.) Signifying artifacts that don’t much resemble the geometries of land and water that we know from our maps, but which are used by their authors for similar sorts of navigation and recognizance as we use our maps, are interpretable by us as maplike because they are founded on this steady creep of the map from metaphor to metonymy.¹⁶ In an important sense, Turnbull observes (contradicting Korzybski’s famous dictum), the map is the territory in the minds of its users, because the cultural force of specific maps and shared vocabularies of cartographic elements and techniques overdetermines every perception of the “real” spaces they figure (61).

 

Dark Continents

 

Here, in its simplest terms, is my claim regarding cartographic representations of Internet diffusion and traffic: the blind spot of cartography–the matrix of cartographic selectivity and convention–is commonly bound in these images to an unrepresented structure of established and emergent political economies that is mistaken for the given, natural background of any discussion of the past, present, and future of the networked realms.

 

Figure 9. “International Connectivity, 9/91.”
© 1991 Larry Landweber and The Internet Society.
http://info.isoc.org/internet/infrastructure/connectivity/ [Click on image to see enlarged view]

 

Figure 9 shows an image created by Larry Landweber, representing the state of Internet connectivity worldwide in September, 1991. The color scheme of the map distinguishes between four levels of connectivity: “No connectivity,” “email only,” “Bitnet but no Internet,” and “Internet.” The map includes no indications of the speed or bandwidth of the connections. Though it includes national boundaries, it gives no information regarding the distribution or state of networks within those boundaries.

 

Figure 10. International Connectivity, 6/97.”
© 1997 Larry Landweber and The Internet Society.
http://info.isoc.org/internet/infrastructure/connectivity/ [Click on image to see enlarged view]

 

Figure 10 shows a similar map created by Landweber, showing Internet connectivity worldwide in June, 1997. The later map suggests that a great deal has changed in the intervening six years. Whereas only a few countries had full Internet access in 1991, there appear to be even fewer countries without full access in 1997.¹⁷

 

Figure 11 shows a map created by Mike Jensen representing the total bandwidth linking African nations to international Internet hubs in May, 1996. Figure 12 shows a similar map representing bandwidth in October, 1998.¹⁸ Once again, the differences between the maps suggests a dramatic expansion of Internet diffusion: a total of 64 kilobits per second (Kbs) or greater bandwidth is now available in most African nations, whereas that level of bandwidth was previously available in only a handful of countries. (Keep in mind that the T1 connections common in most of the wired world are capable of transmitting up to 1,544 Kbs–not quite enough for full-screen, full-motion video. T3 connections are capable of transmitting up to 44,736 Kbs.)

 

Figure 11. “International Links by Country.”
Mike Jensen, May 1996.
http://www3.sn.apc.org/africa/afstat.htm [Click on image to see enlarged view]

 

Figure 12. “International Links by Country.”
Mike Jensen, October 1998.
http://www3.sn.apc.org/africa/afstat.htm [Click on image to see enlarged view]

 

All four of these maps suffer classic problems of areal aggregation common in choropleth maps.¹⁹ As was the case of the Internet maps shown in Figures 3 and 4, the use of a single metric to identify the kinds of connectivity or levels of bandwidth within an entire nation gives no indication of the distribution of network resources inside the borders of that nation. Moreover, the limited palette of the map’s key encourages misleading equivalencies between nations, obscuring dramatically different conditions of access. (For example, the total bandwidth of international connections for most of the nations shown in Figure 12 is near 64 Kbs. The total bandwidth in Egypt is, however, about 2000 Kbs; in South Africa, it is about 37,000 Kbs. [Spangler 46].) The fundamental problem with these representations of Internet diffusion is that they measure levels of diffusion within a (cartographic) discourse of discrete national-political identity which is arguably irrelevant to the global structure of that diffusion, and which eliminates much of the variance in material conditions upon which that structure depends. None of these images is able to account for the extreme local obstacles which must be overcome before anything like a viable African Internet is possible, at least as netizens of digitally-saturated, liberal-democratic nations understand the Internet.

 

The economic, technological, and institutional legacies of colonial occupation are discernible in every aspect of the African networks. Of an estimated 151 million online users worldwide in December, 1998, fewer than 1%–somewhat less than a million–live on the African continent.²⁰ Approximately 800,000 of those live in one country, South Africa. Internet node density in Africa–the ratio of active nodes to overall population–ranges from a low of 1 to 65 in South Africa, to a high of 1 to 440,000 in The Democratic Republic of the Congo (which nation includes the region of Conrad’s “blankest of blanks” [Jensen]). By way of comparison, the average Internet density worldwide is about 1 to 40; in the U.S., it is nearly 1 to 6. Excluding South Africa, Sub-Saharan Africa as a whole has fewer Internet nodes than the nation of Latvia (Jensen).

 

In October, 1998, approximately forty-nine African nations and territories had some level of Internet access in their capital cities. The greatest part of the available network bandwidth in these locations is reserved for multinational firms with regional headquarters in the cities, or for university and government employees. Eighty percent of Africans live in rural areas. Network nodes outside of the largest cities–and there are very, very few of these–are punishingly slow and expensive, making them ill-suited for anything besides FidoNet-style store-and-forward email.²¹ Local PTT and power infrastructures are notoriously unreliable and weighed down with bloated, inefficient state bureaucracies held over from the colonial era. In many regions, these infrastructures are at risk of sabotage and pillage from warfare between and within states, political corruption, or outright thie very. Outside of the wealthiest commercial concerns and the largest universities, much of the computer hardware and software in sub-Saharan Africa is antiquated, unevenly distributed, and costly to maintain and update. Repairs usually require hard or fore ign currency badly needed for other social services. The lack of a well-developed cadre of computer scientists and technologists (only a few African nations offer advanced degrees in computer science and telecommunications) and of a skilled mid-level managerial class poses enormous barriers to efficient network implementation and support (Odedra 26).

 

These constraints on network development reflect a more general lack in Africa of the basic telecommunications resources upon which digital networks in most of the wired world depend.

 

Africa, with over 12 percent of the world's population, has only 2 percent of the telephone lines. By comparison, Latin America has 8% of the population and 6% of the lines.... The teledensity... in sub-Saharan Africa... equates to approximately one phone line for every 200 people. By comparison, the teledensity in the United States is 65 (equivalent to one phone line for every two people), and 45 in Europe.... There are, in fact, more telephone lines in New York or Tokyo than in the whole of Africa. (Butterly)²²

 

The poor state of telecommunications infrastructure in most of the continent prevents expansion of existing network services, and virtually insures that large portions of Africa will remain far behind much of the wired world with regard to digital communication technologies, which seem to require firm foundations in analog technologies before they are able to take hold.²³

 

Some companies and political institutions looking to accelerate network diffusion in Africa have proposed increased reliance on “wireless” telecommunication systems, connected by Low Earth Orbit (LEO) satellites, which would not depend on legacy systems of fiber or copper.²⁴ But these networks depend no less than wired networks on a reliable power grid; maintaining the infamous “last mile” of wire or fiber between the downlink station and the desktop will likely prove even more troublesome in Africa than it has in the developed world. The underlying technologies of wireless communications are more complex, technically fragile, and costly to set up and administer than those of traditional wired networks. LEO systems require many more satellites than the Geosynchronous Earth Orbit (GEO) systems now in use for most international voice and television traffic, and rely on extremely sophisticated networking schemes to manage signal “handoff” between satellites. LEO satellites have shorter life-spans than do their GEO counterparts, adding to the costs of long-term maintenance of these systems. The LEO networks now under development will support paging services and voice transmissions–comparable in quality to land-based cellular phone systems–but only very slow data transmissions (on the order of 2.4 Kbs).²⁵ Implementation of LEO satellite systems capable of handling the bandwidth required for multimedia and high-speed data exchanges faces substantial technical and financial obstacles; none of these systems is much beyond the drawing board (Evans 78).²⁶ Moreover, the economic restructuring resulting from increased reliance on wireless networks could prove catastrophic for the African nations which currently depend on the export of minerals widely used in wired infrastructures.²⁷

 

These are hardly numbers to sustain fantasies of interactive distance education, e-commerce, real-time collaboration, or even sporadic text-only Web browsing. They suggest that utopian visions of a world network culture that includes Africa (with a population roughly equal to those of North America and Europe combined) must be tempered by pragmatism concerning the sophistication and scope of the technological, economic, and organizational infrastructures that would be required to develop and maintain such a culture.

 

They must be tempered as well by some critical thinking about the nature of disparities that divide the unnetworked from the networked spheres. Public and academic discussions of “access” in the West tend to be dominated by language of privacy, censorship, and freedom of speech, framed in idioms having meaning only for netizens of wealthy liberal democracies. The two-page spread shown in Figure 13 is from an article in a 1997 issue of WIRED, entitled “Freedom to Connect.” “Freedom” in this case means “freedom of content” and “freedom to access any and all material online” (106)–in other words, the freedom of the user to read, see, and hear anything she wishes to read, see, and hear on the Internet, without the interference or surveillance of a government or law-enforcement agent.

 

Figure 13. Leila Conners, “Freedom to Connect.”
WIRED 5.08 (1997): 106-7.
(Image © Michael Crumpton.
Reproduced with permission.) [Click on image to see enlarged view]

 

“This map does not reflect the reality,” notes the author, “that this freedom is often locally restricted without formal legislation” (106). The ambiguous phrase “restricted with out formal legislation” fronts in this context for a host of material and political barriers to access that have no necessary relation to the spread’s narrow definition of “freedom.” Indeed, it would appear that, apart from a few liberal Western democracies (notably excluding the U.S.), “freedom to connect” as defined by this map is primarily a function of a government’s inability to regulate the behavior of those citizens who have Internet access, rather than its tolerance of what they choose to do with that access. The crudeness of the map’s visual scale–distinguishing free from unfree connections in only five steps that must represent differences across all political-legal, economic, and technological contexts–begs the question: how meaningful is it to compare the “freedom to connect” in Mexico City, Paris, Brisbane, and Algiers, and come up with the same result? One answer is suggested by Figure 14, which shows a world map from Michael Kidron and Ronald Segal’s State of the World Atlas, depicting international differences in state-sponsored censorship and political and religious oppression. The Kidron and Segal map uses fewer discrete metrics for oppression than does the WIRED map (four, instead of five), but its assumptions regarding the nature of “freedom” result in a very different picture of the world. Citizens of nations who are “free to connect” to the Internet, according to WIRED, may be unable, according to Kidron and Segal, to connect on more human registers.

 

Figure 14. “The Three Monkeys.”
World map showing “states’ infringement of freedoms
of belief, expression, communication, and movement.”
(Reproduced with permission from Michael Kidron
and Ronald Segal, The State of the World Atlas,
5th edition, Penguin, 1995.
© 1995 Myriad Editions, Limited.) [Click on image to see enlarged view]

 

In equating “freedom to connect” with “freedom to surf,” the WIRED map confuses possible movements of data with the actual movements of information and the free practice of thought and belief. It thus excludes evidence of historical and political structures that have restricted access to information technologies, their presumed benefits, and their economic and social costs, in the unwired world. “Some unfortunate nations,” the legend of the map comments, “have no physical means of connection” (106). Given the obvious bases of this misfortune in the continuing legacies of colonial exploitation, the patronizing character of this comment should scandalize the thoughtful reader. Note the concentration of most of the unconnected nations–colored dark purple in Figure 13–near the center of the map: an unknown interior, a lack that seems to explain much… by saying nothing at all.

 

The View from Above

 

What are the semiological functions of the political borders traced on these maps of Internet infrastructure and traffic? The borders are on the one hand heuristic conveniences: they frame visualizations of Internet traffic within well-established cartographic conventions, rendering abstractions of Internet “space” and “density” easier to interpret for those who are familiar with those conventions.

 

But cartographic schemes of representation are not necessary to the depiction of virtual networks; the networks traverse political borders and render problematic concepts of local, national identity that these schemes reinforce. Borders are anything but merely descriptive–they are, rather, among the most coercive of instruments for naturalizing, reifying, and depoliticizing cultural-historical formations. They are in that regard hallmarks of the map’s selective distortions of space and time, signifiers of political hegemony which overdetermine their depiction of roads, fences, rivers, coastlines, etc. The tracing of political borders in these maps of putatively virtual domains (their hegemonic effects unremarked by the authors, assumed to be both essential to the interpretation of the maps and accidental to their representations of the network) naturalizes specific relations between nation-state and network identities–and, as a result, obscures the global political forms of the Internet with a mosaic of individual national forms. The borders thus provide a scheme for naming only selected particulars of network diffusion, and excluding representation of structural forces which take effect across or outside the network: a kind of can’t-see-the-forest-for-the-trees cover for larger, metanational systems of information flow.²⁸

 

Figure 15 shows a map of the Internet in July, 1998, created by MIDS (Matrix Information Directory Services, Inc.), a research firm specializing in print and online reports of activity on the Internet and other telecommunications networks. Though the map’s legend is ambiguous, the overlapping colored circles appear to mark the distribution of active Internet domains worldwide.²⁹

 

Figure 15. MIDS. “The Internet, July 1998.”
http://www.mids.org/ [Click on image to see enlarged view]

 

This visualization scheme avoids the misleading national aggregations characteristic of many of the maps discussed earlier in this essay: it’s clear that domains figured on the map are scattered unevenly within most nations. (Domains in Australia, for example, are shown to be clustered around the country’s perimeter, near the major urban centers.) But the visibility of some of the national borders in this image signals this map’s different encoding of access in terms of national-political affiliation. The visual saturation of domains in the U.S. and Western Europe obscures virtually all borders within those regions. Political borders within Africa, on the other hand, are easily discerned. One is given the impression of a nearly-monolithic presence of the Internet in two or three regions of the globe–and of equally monolithic absences most everywhere else. National-political identity is significant, this image suggests, exactly where the Internet is not.

 

Figure 16 shows a map of active Internet hosts per capita (that is, within nations) as of January, 1998, created by Martin Dodge (“Geographies”). Nations with similar distributions of active hosts are colored the same, and the most active nations are distinguished from one another by their positions on a vertical axis calibrated to the absolute number of hosts. Thus, only those nations with distributions much higher or lower than those of their neighbors are discernible as nations. Geographically contiguous nations at the same level of distribution merge into one another, supporting the impression of vast politically unmarked terrains free of significant activity, and others, politically-differentiated but also uniformly towering over the rest of the world.

 

Figure 16. Martin Dodge, “Internet Hosts Per Capita, January 1998.”
http://www.geog.ucl.ac.uk/casa/martin/aag/aag.html [Click on image to see enlarged view]

 

Figures 15 and 16 would seem at first view to invert each other’s schemes for showing the relation of network diffusion to national-political identity, but I would counter that they thus share a common economy that should be by now very familiar: on/off, traffic/no traffic/, wired/unwired. Think of Figure 16 as a sort of topographical map. Across its peaks and valleys emerges an archipelagic, virtual landmass that traverses the conventional boundaries of continents and nations. Viewed from on high, the vast, flat surface of the network’s digital plains seem far removed, alien and obscure.

 

Between Borders

 

The border is all we share / La frontera es lo unico que compartimos.

 

-- Guillermo Gómez-Peña, Warrior for Gringostroika

 

 

The peaks and valleys of this virtual continent are evidence of forces unmarked on these maps: the plate tectonics, if you will, of a process of technological and cultural change that is nearly invisible, unthinkable, expressly because it covers its forms with counterfeit ubiquity and technological reasonableness. Obscurantism of the spectacle; masquerade of the border in the place of other, multiple and heterogenous, identities: these maps support triumphalist fantasies of the potential (and desirable) saturability of the Internet, expressly by excising representation of the varied historical conditions that have generated the binarisms on which they depend. Recasting the fractiousness of material culture in the tidy efficiencies of the digital sample, they hide nascent lines of force that thread through and across those stark divides.

 

These lines of force are discernible, I propose, only by a contrarian reading of these images which does not take their forms for granted: a decentered regard by which the maps (and the very logic of mapping itself) may be seen to describe, not the light and dark continents of high colonialism but rather–though only indirectly–an emerging, virtual “dark continent” specific to our historical moment. This new political-symbolic structure traverses and fragments prior political entities, even as it makes use of fantasies of national identity to cover its advances.³⁰ In a deeply ironic way, the networked instauration of the dark continent reverses the extractive logic of classic colonialism: instead of raw materials (ore, precious stones, humans) freighted out of the heart of darkness for consumption by the wired-colonial metropole, the information order, to the extent that it penetrates the unwired world, will be largely devoted to freighting information in its motley forms into the benighted realms. In this context, “information” has the sense of both a commodity–a thing for sale over the networks–and a coercive force: the networks are able to inform the unwired realms; the new dark continent reproduces itself over the wires without regard for the prior conventional definitions of nation, region, or continent.³¹

 

What does this emergent telegeographic entity look like? How might we figure its contours? The problem with those questions is that the new digital information order doesn’t look like much of anything, at least not anything that may be named by the metageographical idioms on which the most common representations of the global networks rely. It may be possible to produce images of the virtual terrains that adapt techniques of scientific visualization to those of classical cartography, while unbinding the former from its most positivist and politically naive biases, and the latter from its reliance on outdated and pernicious representations of the lived places of the human world. But that’s not what the idioms of the dominant cartographic conventions do; they instead tend to unname, to render unremarkable (literally unseeable) the political economy shaping the new information orders.

 

As I’ve suggested throughout this essay, the selective distortions of the map, though mathematically and culturally irreducible, render it a problematic construct for describing the heterogenous conditions and practices of the emerging global telecommunications networks. Maps must mislead if they are to be usable; that much is clear. What matters most in any appeal to a tropology of maps and mapping is whether or not we understand the uses that may be concealed in our reception of maps as a privileged way of figuring human spaces, be they material or virtual.³² A provisional strategy for fostering consciousness of the prejudices of the map might be simply to multiply in a disorderly way the instances of Internet mapping practice: to read maps of the wired and unwired domains against representations that interpret human spaces in terms for which wiring may be irrelevant, or which eschew conventional cartographic signs in favor of formations which entirely detach the network from its national-political borders. (The metaphor of the “dark continent” I’ve proposed here should be conceived as operative only within contested and multiple contexts such as these.)³³

 

A more salient question with regard to these and similar images may be, why should it matter? So what if the maps are inaccurate? Calling for more “accurate” visualizations of Internet diffusion–for example, challenging fantasies about the uniformity of the diffusion and growth of telecommunications access (MOSAIC)–may not in the end be different from calling for new maps, without questioning the method of the map: that is, attempting to increase the sample size, criss-crossing the blanks with additional lines of force, finding a more efficient scheme for measuring shades of light and dark. We should be cautious of strategies that seek to repair a lack of data with more, “better” data, while still relying on the epistemological and visual figure of the border-as-national-boundary. As the map has been a primary tool for commodifying physical space, it may serve equally well as a tool for commodifying information; replacing a Mercator with a Gall-Peters does not eliminate the epistemic coercion of the map.³⁴

 

On the other hand, misrepresentations of conditions of access and identity in the wired and unwired realms do certainly matter in one sense: the imaginary orders they produce and sustain are likely to return to the real as consequences of economic policy, military intervention, and technological and symbolic exclusion. Those who will plan the network infrastructures of the next century are likely, however we may characterize their conscious motives, to rely on maps of one sort of another. Sustained, progressive critique of the metageographies of Internet diffusion and traffic must look beyond the limited (and limiting) visual vocabularies of national-political identity, and base its investigations on new schemes for representing the archipelagic landscapes of the emerging political and technological world orders.

 

If we analyze techniques for figuring the formations of the Internet with an awareness of the historical and ideological constitution and effects of those techniques–if we look for traces of the excluded matter they cannot show–we will perhaps be better able to make sense of a studied neglect of fractious material realities characteristic of the predictions of both the cyberspace utopians dreaming of “one world, one network,” and the economic opportunists looking for new unknown interiors ripe for exploitation. This will require a careful and comprehensive examination of the emerging class and semiological domains of the post-colonialist world (Alkalimat 278-85), and a better understanding than we now have of the broad reach of networks of all kinds, and of the changes they are effecting in regional and global systems of cultural and economic exchange.³⁵ The accelerating development and expansion of the virtual archipelagoes call for this kind of work, because the new structures of information and movements of virtualized capital will be among the most powerful forces redefining human geographies and semiological systems of the next century. Established definitions of national and economic identity and relation are being recast by the heterogenous and often contradictory material and political facts of the cyber-ecumene, where bands of light and dark, access and no access, are knotted in unprecedented ways within the “same” city, nation, or continent.³⁶ In the networked era, the heart of darkness is an interstitial formation–which is to say, its borders are drawn around and between us. The maps we now have obscure this emerging terrain.

 

Notes

 

An early version of this essay was presented at the 1998 Conference on Science, Technology, and Race (STAR ’98), Georgia Institute of Technology, April 2, 1998. I thank Deepika Petraglia-Bahri, Jeanne Ewert, and Kavita Philip for their invaluable comments on the manuscript of this version. I thank also Mark Monmonier for his kind assistance in creating the maps shown in Figures 6, 7, and 8.

 

1. GoGwilt’s subtle and evocative reading of the “double-mapping” of Europe and the African colonies in Conrad’s work links the political and epistemological functions of maps in the late nineteenth century with Conrad’s equivocal reconstructions of his Polish childhood.

 

2 See Wood (32-47), Turnbull (28-36), and Sack (ch. 1).

 

3. A synonym for “blankness” in this discourse is “darkness.” The late nineteenth-century journalist-explorer Henry M. Stanley popularized the description of Africa as “The Dark Continent” in several best-selling memoirs of his journeys in Equatorial Africa. In Stanley’s books, “darkness” is an unfortunate state opposed to the light of Reason: Africa’s spiritually and politically benighted interior is badly in need of European science, religion, and civilization–in short, of the stabilizing, epistemological ordering that only a finished map can signify.

 

4. These and similar images are included in Martin Dodge’s “An Atlas of Cyberspaces” (http://www.cybergeography.org/atlas/). Dodge categorizes the visualizations on this site into twelve different categories: Conceptual, Geographic, Traceroutes, Census, Topology, Info Maps, Info Landscapes, Info Spaces, ISP Maps, Web Site Maps, Historical, and 3D Gallery.

 

5. “Although the geographic map is drawn on a 2D plane, it can be arbitrarily positioned and oriented in the space. Therefore the user can interactively navigate the display by translating, rotating, scaling, and visualizing the network from different perspectives under different rendering conditions” (Cox, Eick, and He 52).

 

6. This repetition of the structural functions of the blanks of high colonial maps is evident in a series of Internet maps created by Batty and Barr for their 1994 article on “The Electronic Frontier” (707-708). The six maps in the series illustrate the growth of the Internet between July, 1991 and January, 1994, in the form of a global grid on which countries with active nodes are shown in outline form, and those without active nodes are invisible. Over the course of the series, small landmasses (more properly, political masses) seem to appear over time out of a cartographic void. Much of the lived human world remains unseen–literally not present–in the topography of the wired world. The maps are reprinted in Kitchin (40-41).

 

7. Turnbull also uses this illustration of the Bellman’s chart in the introduction to his discussion of the conventionality of maps (3).

 

8. See Monmonier (ch. 3) for a discussion of “generalization” techniques to improve map legibility and Monmonier (chs. 7-8) for a survey of classic cartographic distortions in the service of political and military ends. Wood (ch. 5) critiques these techniques more aggressively than Monmonier, emphasizing their support of ideological ends.

 

9. See Monmonier (ch. 1), Snyder, and Wood, for typical critiques of the modern misapplications of this projection.

 

10. Arno Peters created his 1967 projection apparently unaware that similar techniques had been used by James Gall to produce a nearly-identical map more than 80 years previously. See Monmonier (11-19) and Snyder (165-66). The Gall-Peters projection was adopted by UNESCO, the World Council of Churches, and several other international organizations, expressly because of the claims of political equity made for it. For detailed discussions of the debates concerning the Peters projection, see Wood (ch. 3) and Monmonier (ch. 1).

 

11. Snyder lists more than 150 projections and variants developed in the 20th century alone (277-86). See Misra and Ramesh (93-152) for an overview of the mathematical limitations of planar projections, including discussion of the Mercator, Goode Homolosine, and Gall-Peters projections.

 

12. The advantages of animated 3D projections over 2D schemes are promoted in one influential paper on geographical mapping of traffic through a single WWW server: “by providing true three-dimensional views, stereopsis and virtual reality allow us to avoid the distortion problems that have plagued cartographers and planar projections” (Lamm, Reed, and Scullin). Most projections of this kind are properly 2.5D views, as they must be displayed on two-dimensional fields (computer screens), with the illusion of depth suggested by movement or shading, as in the Cox, Eick, and He “arc maps.”

 

13. Wood is a good example of this line of argument.

 

14. The projective “corrections” of Gall-Peters did not, of course, eliminate its dependence on conventions closely tied to European and Northern hegemonies, a point that Turnbull demonstrates by recentering the projection on the Pacific, and turning it upside-down (with the Southern pole at the top of the map). See Turnbull (7).

 

15. What does the state of Georgia look like? The nation of France? The continent of Africa? These questions depend on–indeed, are meaningless outside of–a cartocentric worldview that confuses being, visibility, and mappability.

 

16. Turnbull (ch. 5) includes a discussion of Aboriginal Australian dhulanj (“the footprints of the Ancestors”), depictions of clan territories in the form of elaborate animal shapes and geometric patterns. Though the patterns of the dhulanj look nothing like the contours of Western cartographic projections, these “maps” of the Aboriginal homelands are, Turnbull demonstrates, no less specific nor less accurate for their intended uses.

 

17. Attentive readers will notice that the level and distribution of Internet access depicted in Figures 9 and following are not consistent. Reliable information regarding Internet use, even in countries with relatively long histories of use, is notoriously hard to come by. Moreover, the authors of these maps appear to have drawn their information from different sources. Nonetheless, I would argue, the maps are consistent in two regards: 1) their demonstration of broad trends of changes in Internet access and use, and 2) a tendency of these and similar visualizations to obscure the particularities of access and use.

 

18. These images are included in an animated .gif created by Jensen, showing the change in link distribution and bandwidth between 1996 and 1998. See http://www3.sn.apc.org/africa/afranim.gif.

 

19. A choropleth map uses graduated tones and discrete areal units to depict variations in some condition over a geographical area. Changes in the selection of breaks between categories of a choropleth map can result in dramatically different interpretations of the same data. For example, the total international bandwidth available in South Africa is so much larger than that of any other African nation that it arguably deserves its own measure on Jensen’s maps. If that were the case, Figures 11 and 12 would tell a different story about recent changes in African Internet diffusion: South Africa continues to be the exception to nearly every general rule of the African Internet, for historical and economic reasons which are easily guessed. For a discussion of the ways in which areal aggregation may influence interpretation of choropleth maps, see Monmonier (ch. 10).

 

20. See Nua Internet Surveys (http://www.nua.ie/surveys/how_many_online/index.html). Other estimates of active Internet users worldwide vary somewhat from this figure. 150 million, plus or minus 10%, appears to be a reasonable estimate. See also “Headcount.com” (http://www.headcount.com/), and Staple (79).

 

21. In some countries, a 9.6 Kbps international leased line can cost the equivalent of US$130,000 annually; dialup access charges often exceed US$10.00 hourly (Spangler 46). (Average annual income in all but a handful of African nations is less than $2000 annually, with the majority of nations averaging at less than $1000 annually [Kidron 36-37].) It is difficult to ascertain the number of persons that make regular use of the African networks. This is especially true of modem-based, store-and-forward email systems, which do not use the same network structure as true Internet systems. In the developed world, it is not uncommon for a single Internet node to serve dozens of users. An informal review of one online list of Sub-Saharan networks (“AAAS User’s Guide to Electronic Networks in Africa” [http://www.aaas.org/international/africa-guide/bynation.htm]) suggests that the number of users supported by African networks varies widely. In the most networked African nations (South Africa, for example), use of computers probably resembles the multiple-user model common in more developed countries. In many nations, however, the total number of users for a network may run no higher than single digits.

 

22. In this regard, most of the world is more like Africa than the U.S., Western Europe, or Japan. Average teledensity worldwide is roughly 10 lines per 100 inhabitants. About 80% of the current world population has never used a telephone (Goldstein 339, 365n4).

 

23. The myth of network culture’s essential virtuality tends to obscure the dependance of digital networks on other, more material–one might say, mundane–networks. Arnum and Conti have identified a close historical correlation between the deployment of non-Internet wire (telephony, television, electrical grids), paved roads and railways, and gross national product. The wealthiest, most widely-paved or -railed, and most heavily-wired nations are in general, those in which diffusion and use of the Internet has been greatest, and is growing at the greatest rate. See also Hargittai’s conclusion that the unwired nations are unlikely to ever catch up with their wired counterparts in the distribution of digital technologies.

 

24. “LEO satellites can provide relatively inexpensive communications between simple earth receivers and satellites from any where in the world (even Africa!). Africa may actually be at an advantage in implementing these new technologies as it does not have an extensive investment in existing infrastructure” (Butterly). Such a system is an important component of the “USAID Leland Initiative: African GII Gateway Project” (http://www.info.usaid.gov/regions/afr/leland/).

 

25. The first of these, Motorola’s Iridium (http://www.iridium.com/), will go online near the end of 1998. A recent cover story about Iridium in WIRED magazine breathlessly endorsed the idea that the service will “leap geopolitical barriers in a single bound” (“Anyware! Iridium launches the global phone”) (Bennahum 134) with an image that combined metageographic tropes with erotically-valenced clichés of the cyber-denizen. The cover showed the naked scalp, nape, and back of a young woman of uncertain ethnicity. Projected on her skin: a brightly-colored map of Russia, Asia, and the Indian Ocean, presumably important markets which will be newly opened to subscribers to the service. Iridium will face steep competition from expanding cellular phone networks, and is expected to have no more than 11 million subscribers by 2007 (http://www.ovum.com/).

 

26. Though he is cautious with regard to the technical scale and cost of large, satellite-based systems, Goldstein is sanguine about the potential of these systems to accelerate the growth of telecommunication infrastructure in the unwired world.

 

Of course, we cannot expect that most developing countries will reach teledensity levels that rival those of developed countries in just 10 years. Nevertheless, millions of individuals and businesses in heretofore unconnected or underconnected towns and villages will gain at least some access to essential national and even international narrowband voice, data, and Internet services--leapfrogging the traditional wait for wired services. This will be one of the most significant developments in communications over the next decade, although the true impact of these new entrants into the electronic marketplace may only begin to be felt by 2008. (340)

 

Goldstein is more careful than many evangelists of the wireless realms to unpack the multiple technical, economic, and political obstacles to the development of these systems. But the devil is in the details: the capabilities of “narrowband” versus those of “broadband” services; the practical sense of “at least some” level of access, etc.

 

27. The Democratic Republic of the Congo and Zambia depend on copper exports for over 50% and 95% of export earnings, respectively (Alkalimat 279).

 

28. My reading of the signification of political borders in these images is in a sense the reverse of Edward Tufte’s complaint against a series of thematic maps illustrating cancer deaths by U.S. county: “They wrongly equate the visual importance of each geographic area rather than with the number of people living in the county (or the number of cancer deaths.) Our visual impression of the data is entangled with the circumstances of geographic boundaries, shapes, and areas” (20). Yes and no. “Geographic boundaries” are social and political structures applied to and enforced over physical terrains. Events that occur within them may be impossible to disentangle from those structures. The lines only get in the way–obscure the “real” purpose of the image–if one assumes that the things represented by the data (cancer deaths, Internet access) may be abstracted away from all political interests.

 

29. MIDS produces a similar animated map, projecting daily Internet traffic latency and congestion on a spinning globe. The globe can be viewed online, at http://www.mids.org/weather/world/index.html.

 

30. The inverted form of that fantasy is the McLuhaneque “global village,” spanning prior national borders via the wonders of new communication technologies. McLuhan’s mediascape is, of course, no less selective in its misrepresentations of conditions at the local level of communication practice than the misleading areal aggregations in the images I’ve discussed in this essay. (For a brief but decisive critique of McLuhan in this regard, see Jarvis [24-29].) The “global village” is, perhaps, another name for the structure I’m calling the new “dark continent.”

 

31. Shadowing the voids in virtual space is another kind of absence: the lack of any articulated alternative to the boosterism for privatization and free market forces as the only and the inevitable fix for the backwardness and decrepitude of the telegeography of the developing world. In the language of the cyberlibertarians, this enthusiasm for technological “progress” is recast in the uplifting terms of information emancipation and an ethos of unrestrained individualism. Given the apparently–the unimaginably–unstoppable expansion of network culture at this moment in history, the private and the personal seem perilously close to losing any vital particularity they may have once had, and to being obscured by the penumbra of larger, unthinkable political formations that are quite able to maintain for themselves a different sort of invisibility.

 

32. This caveat will apply whether the discourse of mapping is conceived of in terms sustaining or critiquing established political economies. Brian Jarvis’s recent Postmodern Cartographies brilliantly demonstrates that selective abstractions of economic materiality via the trope of the map are common in the writings of many critics on the Left.

 

33. In a simple way, my comparison of the “freedoms” figured in Figures 13 and 14 is an example of this. Kidron and Segal’s atlas is an excellent model of multiple mapping: it includes fifty maps, cartograms, and charts depicting political, economic, and social indicators. Taken as a whole, the atlas figures profoundly heterogenous and, at times contradictory, assertions about the conditions of life for most of the planet. Examples of visualizations of the Internet and other networked formations that do not rely on the cartographic conventions informing most of the images in this essay may be found at Dodge’s “Atlas of Cyberspaces” site (http://www.cybergeography.org/atlas/). See also a new project to map thematically-related sites on the WWW, based at the Guggenheim Museum, http://www.cybergeography.org/atlas/ (Ippolito 17).

 

34. Nor does the preference for more “accurate” mapping address the deeply intertwined and mutually-constitutive roles of modern mapping techniques, scientific positivism, visual subjectivity, and market economies. See Avery for a brief but evocative foray into the relation of maps to capital, colonial exploitation, and modern conceptions of the subject.

 

35. The Internet is only one form of the accelerating spread of networked formations of power and representation at the close of the 20th century. A comprehensive account of the emerging networked realms–ignoring for the sake of clarity the many questions that the word “comprehensive” raises in that description–would need to take into account the massive and heterogenous material networks that support the diffusion of formations like the Internet as their “infrastructure,” including such systems as copper and fiber wiring for both information and power, microwave and satellite communication systems, cellular phone and beeper systems, the manufacturing and distribution systems tied to these systems, etc. In his recent typology of virtual geographies, Michael Batty identifies a realm he calls “cyberplace” that roughly corresponds to this broader sort of network:

 

[Cyberplace is...] the substitution, complementation, and elaboration of physical infrastructures based on manual and analogue technologies by digital... [It] consists of all the wires that comprise the networks that are being embedded into man-made [sic] structures such as roads, and buildings. It extends to the material objects that are used to support this infrastructure such as machines for production, consumption and movement that are now quickly becoming a mix of the digital and the analogue. (346)

 

Batty’s distinction between “cyberplace” (the material realm reshaped by the demands of the digital) and “cyberspace” (the virtual realm that is being created to represent the digital for its users) unironically reverses Michel de Certeau’s distinction between place and space. For de Certeau, place is the static, rationalized–the mapped–form of space, which is multiple, heterogenous, and contingent (117). Approached with de Certeau’s distinction in mind, Batty’s “cyberplace” takes on the appearance of a vectorized, rationalized material order whose possibilities are determined by the reductive binarisms of the digital order.

 

36. The cyberspatial blank that divides my office at Georgia Tech from crumbling, technologically-antiquated public schoolrooms within city of Atlanta–one of the most networked cites in the U.S.–is, in practical terms, as yawning and irreducible as the blank separating my office from classrooms in many cities in the developing world. See Moss and Townsend; McConnaughey, Nila, and Sloan; and McConnaughey and Lader. McConnaughey and Lader’s research suggests that the “digital divide” in the U.S. (most often drawn along racial, economic, and regional lines), between Internet-connected and -unconnected households, is in fact growing.

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